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In 2010, screenwriter Ron Friedman consigned many scripts and reference material from his days writing for Sunbow Productions in the mid-80s, to be sold by Heritage Auctions. A group effort by fans, coordinated by Jim Sorenson, saw 31 Transformers TV scripts, briefing binders and the second script for The Transformers The Movie bought up, scanned and made available online.

One item that eluded this endeavour was Friedman's first script for the Movie. Completed in February 1985 and rejected by Griffin-Bacal, who supplied a new outline for Friedman to make a second attempt, before Flint Dille was called in to make heavy re-writes as production commenced.

In Autumn 2020, former Sunbow producer Flint Dille was in the process of clearing out his storage, finding many items from his decades-long writing career. One such item displayed online on October 9th was a second copy of that first Movie script. Most likely in Flint's possession as reference for his and Creative Director Jay Bacal's own unsuccessful attempt at writing a Transformers movie: The Secret Of Cybertron.
The following month, Jim Sorenson flew out to LA in order to scan as many of Flint's written works from his Sunbow days before they were auctioned off. On November 2nd, he scanned this script and sent the digital files to me for merging and OCR.

The script was used as the basis for a panel presentation at TFNation 2022, hosted by Jim Sorenson and Chris McFeely, that summarised the plot and featured fanart intepretations from a quartet of artists.

Now, fourteen years since it was first seen, nearly three years since a second chance emerged and a full year since the story was revealed to the world, the Sunbow Marvel Archive is proud to present the very first script for The Transformers The Movie: https://sunbowmarvelarchive.blogspot.com/p/mp-4034-transformers-movie-sunbow.html

I would love to see Studio Series do a sub line of lost characters that never made it into the movie. Stripes (whatever he was supposed to look like), that big snake train, that Ultra Magnus design that would become Orion Pax, but as an original mold for once, all of that stuff.

Emerje

Emerje wrote:I would love to see Studio Series do a sub line of lost characters that never made it into the movie. Stripes (whatever he was supposed to look like), that big snake train, that Ultra Magnus design that would become Orion Pax, but as an original mold for once, all of that stuff.

Emerje

The tfwiki twitter recently dug up Takara's patents for the first version of cassettes

Gauntlet101010 wrote:https://www.seibertron.com/transformers/news/rare-hand-made-transformers-prototypes-shown-in-figure-king-magazine/42990/

Stripes and Stinger made it to the prototype stage too. Feel like TF wiki should have these images. But am too lazy to add them.

HOLY F@#$*! I have literally had dreams about being at some garage sale and finding those sort of lost cassettes, though usually it's more like they're from a scuttled hypothetical 1989 lineup that wasn't completely brushed aside by Pretenders and Micromasters; i.e. if Victory had produced some new cassettes, though getting mail away Squawkbox had to be roughly that awesome for Japanese kids.

So there were also plans for a cassette anteater that could trudge through heavy snow? And a cassette horse, possibly to be sidekick to an official TF Dropshot release? And were the prototypes for the W group also fleshed out during TF:TM pre-production, and advanced far enough that they ended up coming into being, unlike the others?

And the irony of how AWESOME all the prototypes of smaller TFs both realized and unrealized look contrasting with how the protos of larger toys we know and love like Metroplex look weird and creepy in hindsight, like voodoo dolls. Well, to me anyway.

I know what I'll be reading this week, but has The Secret of Cybertron still not surfaced? You'd think Flint Dille would have a copy of that in storage too, but of course no creator knows which of their dozens of rejected pitches fans are going to care about 4 decades later.

Greebtron wrote:

Emerje wrote:I would love to see Studio Series do a sub line of lost characters that never made it into the movie. Stripes (whatever he was supposed to look like), that big snake train, that Ultra Magnus design that would become Orion Pax, but as an original mold for once, all of that stuff.

Emerje

The tfwiki twitter recently dug up Takara's patents for the first version of cassettes

I'm aware of those (I'm the one that posted the rough prototypes to the news), and I don't think I worded it well, but I think Stripes and Stinger would have been further refined the same way Steeljaw was. Stinger would have definitely have had to had his parts count reduced by a lot (replace all those tiny double hinges with a single one connecting all the legs from end to end) and I'm curious how all of that would have turned out.

Here's what the tapes represent, this ranges from Microman up to 1987:

1. Jaguar (this is a pre-Ravage prototype according to the article)
2. Scorpion
3. Unicorn
4. Pteranodon
5. Sabretooth Tiger
6. Praying Mantis
7. Stag Beetle
8. Rhino Beetle
9. Scorpion (a different one)
10. Combination of 6 and 8
11. Combination of 7 and 9

So yeah, we almost got a bunch of insect combiner tapes at the end of the line but they went with more dinosaur tapes instead. I'm not so sure they made the right decision.

Emerje

[Reading through]

Rusty Steel - why did no one paint it?

General Blaze - someone put it out!

Fire snow - seems to resemble white phosphorous, in how it burns through everything.

Empty laser gun - needs more bullets!

Springer goes 'sproong!'.

Starscream - 'Silence you twit'.

Sucking the 'juice' out of Earth, like it's fruit.

The original script is interesting to look at in retrospect, but I can see why they were told to broom it and start over.

DeathReviews wrote:The original script is interesting to look at in retrospect, but I can see why they were told to broom it and start over.

Should have told its writer to broom it and get somebody better, but unfortunately Griffin-Bacal agreed to give him exclusive rights to the movies well in advance.

No wonder I couldn't find this thread. It was put in General instead of the Cartoon forum.

I still hold out hope that the outline for this will become available to read some day. Because I figure there has to be something present in one and absent in the other that led to the outline being approved but the full script rejected:

Gauntlet101010 wrote:Oh, so that's not Stripes, but pre-Ravage? So when they did Steeljaw they must have went back to it a bit since it looks a lot like how Steeljaw turned out. Maybe in some alternate reality it may have been left alone and still have been made Stripes, though, if they really had went back. Or maybe Stripes would have just been a repainted Steeljaw even though I can't help but read his neck piece as a mane.

Still, if it wasn't originally conceived as Stripes it makes me feel better about the versions we've gotten.

Stripes would have been the sabretooth tiger alongside Steeljaw before being replaced by Ramhorn. The Ravage prototype is the crude looking one on the right.

Emerje

Yeah, after reading the first draft I am thankful for what we got.

Chris McFeely of Transformers The Basics has posted a very special video outlining the complete production history of 1986's The Transformers: The Movie, from its original first-draft script to the final product we know today: