The original draft for the first attempt at a Saturday morning version of the Transformers took three days to write, but before that was more brainstorming and coming up with ideas. One early idea was having the Autobots team with an auto club, and another had Wendy as the daughter of a senator who got dragged into one of Toad’s spy missions and ended up part of the team. Neither idea, and probably a bunch of others, did not make the final draft. And of course none of this ended up in the syndicated series we eventually got in any of the three seasons and two miniseries. Eventually, Hasbro and Marvel Productions went with the first-run syndication idea, a still new concept in TV and one lost in our current streaming entertainment culture.
Before that a second draft would be produced after Hasbro rejected the first one. I’ll go more into it as we go on, but I do believe it was the right decision given they had a perfectly good series plot already. Why was Jeffrey Scott not allowed to see all the existing background material? Was it some legal issue? Was Jim Shooter right about the two Marvels competing with each other? We can only guess and I’ve made my case that I believe Shooter, but the point is they already had the miniseries to go by, and they didn’t. In the second draft they would come closer to what we already knew…but what about this draft?
I already said Hasbro rejecting this was the right move, but why? Could the show have been good? Could it have been retooled into something original and would it have worked for at least a season? We can only speculate, and that’s what I’m going to.
image from the Marvel/Sunbow archive, a sample of what they wanted CBS’s Transformers to look like.
Why did Hasbro reject this? For one thing they already had a story in place. Not only was there already a miniseries that followed the original gameplan, but comic books, storybooks, an audio drama on cassette came out, and of course the back of the packaging and material packed with the boxed Transformers already followed the story of the Autobots and Decepticons crashing to Earth millions of years ago so they could wake up in the 1980s and resume their war using Earth machines as their new alternate modes. The idea of the Autobots and Decepticons essentially possessing Earth machines and Megatron trying to find new bodies for his dead troops was a total rejection of the premise Hasbro had already gone with. They went to Marvel Comics after Larry Hama successfully retooled a rejected Nick Fury comic idea into the new direction for the G.I. Joe franchise after the stigma of the Vietnam War allowed the military fighting terrorists to be a cool idea again. Lightning struck twice as Marvel came up with a Transformers story, from scratch this time, that turned out to be a great way to get kids invested beyond the transforming robot idea. Tossing it out now in what they hoped would be the biggest seller for their toys would have been a marketing mistake.
Look at their competition. I’ve reviewed both the original GoBots illustrated booklet “Escape To Planet Earth” and the first miniseries for Challenge Of The GoBots in video form. The two stories only share the idea that the GoBots were cybernetic beings from the planet GoBotron and the names of the characters. Tonka didn’t give the characters personalities like Hasbro did with Marvel’s Bob Budiansky. In the booklet the Friendly GoBots are after criminal Enemy GoBots, while in the show the military Guardians fight the terrorist Renegades. A recent IDW comic and the UK comics followed neither backstory. There was no unity of the concept, and that’s one of the things that hurt the GoBots in their toy store battle with the Transformers.
The Autobots meet their new neighbors in the first issue of Marvel’s The Transformers.
Hasbro, on the other hand, and speaking of Marvel they should be taking notes Kevin Feige!!!!, kept the basic premise the same throughout all the media, though none of them really shared a continuity. The idea of the Autobots and Decepticons staying on Earth in sleep mode for 4,000,000 years (give or take a week) isn’t really part of more recent iterations, the closest being the Mini-Cons of Armada and the Rescue Bots of…Rescue Bots being in stasis and missing the whole war of the Aligned continuity, having to restart their group on Earth during Megatron’s last attempts to achieve victory in Prime and the escaped criminals of Robots In Disguise2, plus their version of Mini-Cons. Still, the basic ideas of the franchise remains within the confines of multiversal continuity more often than not, and that’s just good branding and good marketing. It helped keep the toyline strong enough in the public mindset that the name became synonymous with shape-changing robots and the franchise managed to survive numerous hiatuses with the highs and lows, maintaining a presence somewhere in the world at any point in our history. There hasn’t been a year that at least one country didn’t have Transformers on store shelves.
There were also the changes to the characters, another reason for Hasbro to reject this. Bob Budiansky had crafted names and personalities already for the toys. CBS, insisting on more girl characters than the Autobots’ new ally Wendy, forced Marvel Productions to gender swap Sideswipe and Starscream (insert reference to Slipstream in Transformers Animated and the gay jokes Starscream had tossed his way for years). In the second draft we’ll see two new characters instead, but changing these two and their weapons was not sitting well with Hasbro, and replacing Bumblebee with Toad was also not accepted. On this one they apparently didn’t learn their lesson, but we’ll get to that in due course. Hasbro was perfectly happy with everyone the way they were and the new characters being girls was probably the better way to go.
All of that said, could the show have worked if this was the only storyline the toys had? Maybe. I can’t see this being as serious as the show we got, the story of Wendy’s date being messed up by a mission or Duke (a name Hasbro also rejected to avoid confusion with the G.I. Joe field commander) complaining about his truck being the ideas that affect how I see this story going. Arthur Knoll, the traitor, would be seen in other characters in other media, like Doctor Braxis of Challenge Of The GoBots or even Dr. Archeville in the show we got, though he only lasted four episodes, three of which were a multipart story. Sean Berger was a dupe easily tricked due to his desire to be reelected as a hero and other one-shot helpers of the Decepticons vary. The ideas of Starscream wanting revenge on Jazz for destroying her original body or the love triangle between Optimus, girl Sideswipe, and Mirage might have been interesting character bits given Optimus’ reasons to reject her advances or it could of been laughing at Mirage’s failed wooing attempts, coming off more like Speedbreaker/Sideburn in Car Robots/Robots In Disguise1. Marvel Productions could make good serious shows like Dungeons & Dragons, lighter fare like Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends, or more straight up comedies like Muppet Babies. History says they could have pulled it off, but I don’t know that it would hit the same way the original concept did.
From The Transformers #1, the only thing from the actual backstory that made it into the first CBS pitch.
Okay, so maybe not the best direction for Transformers. What about as an original property? I’d say odds were better. A mechanical spin on Invasion Of The Body Snatchers with a villain of the week might have worked, but I don’t know that they would need as large a cast. Maybe one villain in this Megatron’s position and a couple of minions versus a handful of good bots and their human allies. There wouldn’t be a need as many guest characters for the no-longer-Autobots like Prown and Ratchet would have on this show. That would have been another issue with this as Transformers. There are already toys that never had a moment to shine on the show we got. Windcharger died in the movie having only made one major contribution to the team, and that was mostly his superpowers allowing the Autobots to form a combiner while pretending to be the Stunticons. I don’t know that the show would have had a long life or be as remembered, but I could see it retooled into a story without the Transformers. Make them robots formed from the machines they take over without actually turning back into them. Worked for Lord Zedd in his fights with the Power Rangers outside of the losing streak.
However, that’s what might have been. Next time we shift to…the other thing that might have been. Hasbro, Marvel Productions, and CBS weren’t ready to give up on this idea, to their credit. Next time we’re going to look at the second draft, which went closer to the original idea and brought the syndicated miniseries back into the story, but still very different from what we got. Hit up the Marvel/Sunbow archive and wait on the second draft if you didn’t last time. Instead, we start looking at the notes they had between shows, which is going to take longer than I thought. Next time we go over those notes for a deeper look at what they wanted to see before diving into the second draft CBS Saturday Morning Transformers cartoon.
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