CBS Transformers> The Production Notes part 2

Last time we began looking at the various production notes the Sunbow Marvel Archive collected into a single file, which I didn’t know would be as long as it is. Some were typed notes but many of them were handwritten brainstorming ideas.

There’s a lot more typed notes in this next set of pages. This section, dated 2/23/84, is labeled as “Misc. Format Notes”. This section includes hand-written notes, presumably written during a discussion on them, but I don’t know the full history of that. We’ll conclude with a series of notes from Hasbro that came two days later, and we’ll hold the rest for a third installment. Like I said, I didn’t know it was going to be this long.

Whether or not we’ll get more hints as to why Hasbro rejected this first version this round I don’t know. I just skimmed to see where a good place to stop is before this article gets too long. So in the interest of not being too long and getting some interesting conversation going, I’m just going to cut the article intro short and get right on to it.

Format References:
INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS
THE INVADERS

Start with Close Encounter lights in sky.
Keep rockets and airplanes and anything like RIGHT STUFF off the list of items the Decepticons will take over.
Communicate with electronic code, over radio.

Note that the two all caps sentences are circled in red. I don’t know if the colors used have any significance but for those of you who didn’t download it, I’m bring them up just in case. I wonder what they mean by “RIGHT STUFF”. Since the other two are using caps instead of italics (and all the typewriters I know of can do italics) for the titles of the two movies we already know was inspirations for this new story. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers are about aliens taking over humans while The Invaders is also about replacing humanity with themselves. Not having seen either that’s all I really know about them. I supposed it could be referring to The Right Stuff a 1983 novel adaptation about the Mercury astronauts, which would mean no space stuff, nothing with NASA. That would have been harder when Astrotrain and Blastoff were introduced to the toyline.

And I just realized: among the Transformers the space shuttles were both Decepticons while with the GoBots the two space shuttles, Spay-C and the Wendy’s/Kool-Aid Warehouse exclusive Guide Star, were both with the Friendly/Guardian team. Strange how that turned out. Spay-C also got her own model kit, a Super GoBot variant, and was male outside of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon and tie-ins. So Spay-C suffered gender confusion long before any Transformer. Guide Star is male in every incarnation, most of which I didn’t know existed. Sorry, off track. Back to the notes.

NO MINI-CARS (all cars are normal size)

Not sure what that refers to. No compacts, or whatever name they went with in the 1980s? Nobody transforms into an RC or bumper car? In the old toy scale Bumblebee was a Mini-Car.

MAIN TITLE: Autobots entities have tracked their arch rivals to earth, actual base not known, but know it’s earth because of certain happenings over past 50 years. They enter truck, VW etc. Take up the search for Decepticons.

Starscream letting the company know his thoughts on being genderswapped.

Was this supposed to be part of the credits? Saturday morning rarely if ever (for that matter, the syndicated stuff only did it slightly more) started their show with the origin story. Maybe in a later season you’d finally get a flashback or something but they usually let the intro handle the backstory so they could get right into the action. It’s possible they were planning the intro with a voice over. This whole page is a whole lot of guesswork on my part.

VOICES – In robot form they have deeper and more dramatic synthesized voices. When they are in car forms (talking through radio speaker) their synthesized voices are more normal.

Okay, that explains what they were thinking. They talked through their radios in vehicle mode. I guess that makes a certain amount of sense, though I didn’t miss it in the show. And they would be synthesized (that minor effect they added to Transformers besides Soundwave) still in robot mode to make them sound different from the organics. That we did get. Next is the cast list. The Autobots and Decepticons were put side by side but that didn’t format from the PDF to here, and I had to fix a few errors that came up in the transition.

AUTOBOTS

Optimus Prime (Semi-trailer)

Bumblebee (VW)

Jazz (Porsche)

Trailbreaker (4×4 camper)

Sideswipe (Countach)

Mirage (Formula One)

Wait, so you had Bumblebee’s name in the notes already, and you changed it to “Toad”?

-secondary-

lronhide (van)

Hound (jeep)

Prowl (Z police)

Ratchet (ambulance van)

Nothing we didn’t know before. Sideswipe has a blue text and line pointing to the name, marked simply “female”.

DECEPTICONS

Megatron (laser pistol)

Soundwave (cassette recorder)Buzzsaw – Golden Condor (cassette)

Starscream (jet)

Thundercracker (jet)

Skywarp (jet)

-secondary-

Laserbeak (cassette)

Ravage (cassette)

Starscream also have a “female” mark in blue. At the end is another handwritten notation in blue pencil or marker:

The format may be too one-note and too “dreary”- Perhaps the “car club” format would make it more fun and easier for kids to enjoy.

The car club made none of the submitted drafts so I guess someone decided it wasn’t necessary. I’m not sure what different the club would have added besides more characters to flesh out. By necessity Transformers shows tend to have a larger cast when budget limits don’t get in the way like Beast Wars. It might be a good thing they were avoided.

The next set of added notes is odd. I’m going to use the WordPress formatting to show  you which was which, but while the next four paragraphs have the handwritten notation “char(acter) descript(ion)” with a box around the first two and the second two, one is highlighted red and the rest blue.

MEGATRON and SOUNDWAVE can change size. Pistol and Cassette Player (and cassettes) can grow from normal size into full-size robots.
SOUNDWAVE wants to take over as ruler of Decepticons. Constantly at odd with Megatron.
DECEPTICON COMMUNICATORS act as spies to go out and identify Autobots, report back to Megatron.
DECEPTICONS possess container of GLOWING ENERGY ORBS = electronic mind entities.

Why these are highlighted I couldn’t say. Not knowing who had this first (possibly Jeffrey Scott, who wrote the drafts and was just reminding himself of stuff) I don’t know why these notations are here beyond a guess. The paragraph on the human ally is also in blue while the rest of the section gets blue highlights.

EVIL HUMAN traitor on earth. Helps Decepticons understand humans, get in where they can’t, spy, etc. He does it for the promise of power over the humans when the Decepticons take over. This human, ala Lex Luthor, carries the particle beam pistol so that Megatron can get around more easily.

I wonder if Megatron would have messed with Arthur like this?

I have to wonder about this “particle beam pistol” mode. Would it still look like a German made handgun? Hasbro wasn’t going to redesign the toy. They all came from Japan and we wouldn’t get original figures (not coming from another Japanese toyline, including a few Takara didn’t own) for a while. We didn’t get a “space” gun for Megatron until Transformers Classics, where they gave him a gun mode that looked like it came from their Nerf toyline. By then the US government started slowly banning all toy guns that could fool anyone for half a second. Debate that on your own, and toy reviewer TJ Omega is sick of hearing about all the way it could totally be done when Hasbro won’t bother going through the hassle, but we aren’t getting a Megatron gun again, and I don’t mind. Still seems like a weak mode for the leader of the Decepticons. Nostalgia only goes so far.

DECEPTICONS GOAL: Take over all cars, ships, trains, planes, mothball fleet, carrier, mining equipment, power stations, cape kennedy, computer centers, weapons arsenals, computers, bulldozers, machinery, etc. so they can launch their takeover of the universe. They want to enslave the Autobots. They are electronic life force (criminals) that can take over mechanical things and grow a network of nerves through them (like a rapidly growing cancer). Hinges appear, metal bends, lights turn on, engines roar to life … comes to life. They came to earth because it has more mechanical stuff than other planets. Their previous mechanical bodies were destroyed in the last Autobot wars. Unending source of potential life forms. Decepticons are attracted to large concentrations of mechanical things.

That conversion from machine to Transformer might have been interesting to see. Yes, I’m noting the highlighted parts, done in a box shape for some reason. There’s also a handwritten note in blue: “female F16”. They really wanted to make Starscream a girl really bad for some reason.

DECEPTICONS are like UFOs. People might see them, hear about them; military might spot them, battle with them; might be article in paper with photograph. But must people don’t believe they exist. (ala INVADERS they keep in the background).

They really seem to be playing into the “robots in disguise” angle better than most of the shows did, closer to what most of the comic did and movies tried to do but were so ridiculously unbelievable given how many climactic battles took place in major cities around large groups of people.

DECEPTICONS shoot glowing energy orbs into mechanical things. They transform (in dramatic stages) from mecho to living robots. They use their human cohort to find them, lead them to, the biggest machines, manufacturing companies, naval bases, etc. When energy orbs shot into something it turns the metal into living stuff, “arcs” to next vehicle (ala Raiders) and brings them to life. Aircraft Carrier could turn into mecha-dinosaur. Crew trapped inside.

Imagine Trypticon being introduced this way instead of the Constructicons somehow building it out of a city overnight with no people inside or waking up to the sounds of building a giant transforming city/battlestation/dinosaur in one night. Having to rescue the humans would also be a challenge, but how many captured humans would you need before the public was convinced the giant robots weren’t someone’s idea of a joke? That’s getting close to Bay territory.

There are also three handwritten notes in blue: “warp ray”, “time-space”, and “tractor beam”. No context. Probably referring to Decepticon weapons seen in the first draft.

DECEPTICON HEADQUARTERS is underwater in the Bermuda Triangle. This explains where all the ships and planes have gone in the triangle, and says that the Transformers have been on earth for a while (50 years).

DECEPTICONS have a constantly growing number of “men.” When they crash into an irreparable state the gloiwng energy orb comes out of them, returns to Megatron.

That’s not my typo or a screw up in the copy/paste. “gloiwng” is their typo. And it’s all in red. I thought each episode would end with the Decepticon of the week, which it says there. However, it also says Megatron has a growing number of soldiers. You can’t have both.

When the DECEPTICONS lose a battle they fly off and disappear. They have a secret runway in the ocean that opens up in a magnetic whirlpool allowing them to fly under the water. Underwater is magnetic bubble headquarters where water magically stays in a domed cover around them.

That would be the only thing that made it into the syndicated series, except they just stayed in their ship with a few complexes around it. No runway, as they just had a big tower pop up and they just went in, my guess being the jets transformed in the tower.

According to my word count this is the right place to stop, In the next section this continues with the Autobots, the good humans, and different highlight color choices.