CBS Transformers prologue: Many Years Ago

Now that things are finally calming down (I hope), I can finally get the latest story bible/pitch review series going.

Recently the fine people at the Sunbow/Marvel Archive, a website dedicated to finding information from the alliance between Sunbow Productions and Marvel Productions, recently found and posted a series of pitches and concepts for the Transformers cartoon as they tried to put together for CBS’s Saturday Morning lineup in the 1980s. This was after More Than Meets The Eye, the three episode miniseries, aired in syndication. Hasbro had hoped that this would help boost knowledge of the Japanese toyline hodgepodge they had put together with Marvel Comics and boost sales of the toys.

This production did not happen.

The whys and wherefores were already chronicled by Christ McFeely of Transformers: The Basics. Back when I had more important things to concentrate on, I did post his video on the show that would have been quite different from what we ended up getting. You can see it here if you’re interested. I’ll be going over the highlights as I set up this article series.

Just like I did with Star Trek and Doctor Who, I’m going to go over this material with the goal of seeing if this is something we were better off without in favor of what we got or if we missed out on something good. Spoilers: after McFeely’s video I’m not convinced we aren’t better off with the three season plus three episodes we got. Still, it’s fun to think about what could have been and see what let up to the cartoon we all know and love. Welcome to CBS Transformers, my new article series.

By now we all know where this came from. Hasbro went to a toy fair in Japan and discovered their transforming robot craze, about the same time as Tonka. While Tonka only used one toyline, Machine Robo, to create the GoBots, Hasbro took a few different toylines, most prominently the Microman subline Micro Change and the Diaclone line, and created Transformers. After the success of the previous partnership with Marvel Comics to create G.I. Joe’s “A Real American Hero” backstory, complete with monthly comic and a set of miniseries at the time, Hasbro went to them again to create a backstory for their robots in disguise, which ultimately gave them the advantage over Tonka’s mighty robots/mighty vehicles (who were actually cyborgs in the story they came up with and Hanna-Barbera expanded from) Jim Shooter came up with the concept of alien robots who crashed on Earth four million years ago, give or take a month, and Bob Budiansky not only came up with most if not all of the first line’s “tech spec” character bios but edited the first four issues of the comic, taking over as writer for the majority of the original comic’s run.

However, they also wanted to take advantage of laxed rules about not allowing a toy line to be made into a TV show, though the reverse has been available for the longest time. (Megatron’s “Micro Change” counterpart is even based on the toy gun from Japan’s The Man From UNCLE toyline, an American show that was apparently huge in the Land Of The Rising Sun.) Still working with Marvel, the animation arm Marvel Productions worked with Japanese animation studio Toei, who release the series in Japan in partnership with Marvel’s partner company Takara, now Takara Tomy after absorbing the formerly rival toy company as Hasbro later would Tonka. So a three episode miniseries, “More Than Meets The Eye“, aired in syndication. First run syndication was still relatively new. If you weren’t on a network you probably showed reruns when the networks were done for the day or local programming. I think. I came to TV just as first-run syndication was getting grooving.

So because it wouldn’t gather as much attention as being on Saturday mornings for kids TV, Hasbro, Sunbow, and Marvel Productions went to CBS to help bring their show to potential buyers…parents. I mean kids. By this point Marvel Productions had purchased DePatie–Freleng Enterprises and rebranded it Marvel Productions. Marvel’s parent company at the time, Cadence Industries Corporation, wanted their own studio mostly to push shows based on their comics (of which we only got three and a failed pilot). Unfortunately, that’s where this project’s failure began.

I kind of wish they stuck to the toy designs. I wonder how that would have changed how Transformers look today?

Watch the video, as McFeely explains it better than I will, but essentially there were two things working against this project: DFE’s existing dislike of their new owners and the rules of Saturday morning versus syndication thanks to parent groups and their own standards and practices rules that existed in hopes of keeping the parents from weaponizing the FCC against kids TV. So much for that plan, and it’s one of the reasons we no longer have Saturday morning shows as we once knew them. (Local channels still show that E/I stuff nobody watches but all the broadcast networks got out of SatAM.) Believing the TV people knew better than comic people because the media pecking order is ages long, the cartoon writers decided to try to toss everything out, which didn’t sit well with Hasbro as Marvel knew what the toy people wanted, and the toys are the source material no matter what Floro Dery’s redesigns have made you think. (Marvel comics would even shift their character models over to Dery’s rather than the toy designs they were using even though it didn’t exist in the same continuity as the cartoon outside of the movie adaptation and one episode adaptation used for filler.)

What followed were three different concepts for what the CBS version of the show would have been. One would ignore the original miniseries while another attempt took place after the miniseries, with the Decepticons winning and the Autobots as part of a rebel team. It sounds odd while describing it, especially since I haven’t actually read the darn things yet as I write this, but that will change as we go on. Again, watch the video.

Starting possibly next week I’ll be starting my look at the four documents the Archive has up: two different bible drafts, notes from CBS and Hasbro, and a first for the larger story bible/pitch series, a scripted episode of “Car And Cable”, one of the production names for this show. I could have worked it into this article series title if I wanted to, but I don’t. It’s not a very good name, and while an earlier dive into Sunbow’s records mentioned the show, it’s not got to be as well known as The Transformers and I wanted to focus on how this was almost a CBS show alongside other licenced shows like Dungeons & Dragons, another Marvel/Sunbow co-production before Hasbro bought and messed with that license.

So join me next time as we dive into the first production bible for a potential Saturday morning version of Transformers. You can get all of these documents from this link and start reading along or before me. And with all the info on that site, I may return to it in the future for more story bibles and pitches. For now, though, we’ll stick with the robots.