We’re halfway through the production notes that led to the second draft of making a Saturday morning Transformers for CBS in the 1980s, after the same parties minus CBS already made a syndicated three episode miniseries for weekend airing. I still don’t get why, with everyone still there, they had to start from scratch. The work was already made. They had the backstory. They had the previous stories, meaning they had the cast and the history. I have my theories–infighting for various reasons, as I’ve stated–but it feels like a lot of work that could have gone into just making the stories, which they ended up doing with a syndicated series.
So far we’ve seen what went into the first draft, but now it’s time for Hasbro and for CBS to add their own notes. Sunbow and Marvel Productions weren’t doing this alone. The network has to deal with parent groups, hence some version of the Bureau Of Standards & Practices, and what they could and couldn’t get away with, as well as what marketing “genius” thought would sell the show to the kids versus whatever show it was put up against, or in some cases dump something into the slot that’s going against a juggernaut show and hope to get some of the stragglers who weren’t into that show. That’s usually the death knell for a show, especially in Prime Time but also in the SatAM slot. Plus they’re going up against sports, parents who make their kids play outside instead of watching TV (so the parents can watch TV), family parties, and other activities with the weekend off from work and school. Why make a tough battle worse?
Then there’s Hasbro. Their main goal is to sell toys to kids (or was back then–it’s up for debate now with the adult collector market and kids getting the shaft and blaming it on video games and tablets). Confusing kids isn’t a good idea, and they already paid Marvel a bunch of money to create lore, characters, and ideas that were all over the toys and other merchandise. The picture and coloring books were already telling the story of the Transformers (sorry, Rad) and what we saw in the first draft matched none of that. So we’re starting with Hasbro’s notes on what they didn’t like So what were Hasbro’s concerns?
To find out, we have a typed up document (which is easier for me to copy/paste from while fixing glitches Acrobat Reader causes when the page is smudged) dated February 25th, going over their thoughts on the presentation.
Pages 2/3. Get rid of the idea that Transformers are actually some kind of “energy beings” who “take over” robotic forms. Transformers are actually machines. You can turn them off and on like a light switch.
And now we have sparks. Even then, sparks have certain rules they operate under that still lead to a Transformer’s death. Transferring to a new body is something we have seen. Inferno in Energon was transferred to a new body with a similar body type and a new alternate mode. Optimus Primal in Beast Wars was brought back from the Transformer afterlife and placed in a body that never got to be activated because the spark it came with sadly went out…which makes Primal a kind of zombie? Starscream also possessed other robots in G1, though the idea of sparks had yet to exist. However, all of that still followed the previously established rules, building on them because in Beast Wars sparks were still a new concept.
Remember, we have established ideas about Transformer life, leaning closer to the mechanical until Simon Furman started adding supernatural elements like gods and some of the Beast Wars creators, including one of the showrunners, trying to add more of Furman’s comic stories into what should have been the cartoon continuity. It’s a mess, but it’s a mess with actual thought behind it. What the first draft did is toss everything out of the window; the bath water, the baby, and the tub. Hasbro didn’t pay for all the other media and packaging to confuse their potential customers with something completely new. A new show on network TV instead of syndicated could act like a different show, but the concepts, the “multiversal continuity”, can’t be tossed out so easily. Otherwise you get today’s Marvel Studios.
General. On their home world, both Autobots and Decepticons “transform” into different objects. They are always robots — but on Earth they transform themselves into VW bugs and Porches. On another planet it would be something else entirely, something we don’t need to address.
A possible robot mode for Starscream had he kept his Cybertronian vehicle mode.
At least at the time. Eventually we would end up getting “Cybertronian” modes, though we haven’t seen any alternate modes from other worlds outside of Botanica in Beast Machines and maybe Blackarachnia in Transformers Animated. I guess a vehicle on another planet would just look like a Cybertronian vehicle to use, unless you get into crossover stuff like the Star Wars crossover toys or Star Trek crossover comics. Otherwise, the franchise is usually set on Earth or Cybertron, and Nebulos or the planets from Japanese-exclusive shows never required disguises. Now this next one is information about the toy lore I wasn’t aware of.
The Autobots get some guidance from a non-mobile computer named “Teletron,” who or which is located at their crash site (presumably
it is not mobile, or does not need to be mobile.) Hasbro thinks that both the Autobots and Decepticons crashed into a volcano. Marvel
prefers to base the Decepticons under the Bermuda Triangle.
There’s more to unpack here than I would have thought. For example, the computer Teletron, or as we know it, Teletraan-1. I guess that explains some of the name confusion over the years. Some fans thought it was Teletron, a gag ending up in Beast Wars to that end…well, maybe it was at some point. The computer was indeed immobile in the original series. In time since the Ark toy from Haslab included a transforming Teletraan-1 while Cyberverse introduced Teletraan-X, a sort of fusion of Teletraan and Sky Spy. (Fun fact: my first PC was named Teletran X. Yes, that’s the spelling if memory serves.) Also, the US version of the first Robots In Disguise reworked Car Robots‘s holographic AI into T-Ai, the “daughter” of Teletraan-1, which didn’t go anywhere and had a young girl in a Japanese dispatcher uniform as an interactive hologram with no physical form.
As for the location of the bases, “Hasbro thinks that both the Autobots and Decepticons crashed into a volcano” is a new one on me. While stories outside the shows never showed the Decepticon ship surviving, or at least not crashing on Earth in the case of the comics, the cartoons have established the Decepticons’ old ship, often referred to by fans as the Nemesis, did end up buried on Earth in a mountain, not necessarily a volcano. In Beast Wars we also saw the old ship get moved to the location Megatron finds it in “Microbots”. The Predacons made more use out of it than the Decepticons. The Bermuda Triangle being the resting place of the ship in “More Than Meets The Eye” was the new ship the Decepticons tried to return to Cybertron in, but that wasn’t near Bermuda when it crashed thanks to Mirage. Kind of makes me wonder why the Autobots never tried to break into their base for a change. The comics placed the Autobots in Oregon, but where the ship crashed in the show was never explicitly mentioned.
If we’re going to have female robots, Hasbro would prefer that we develop some originals, (which could later be turned into toys, if so desired). They don’t like the idea of their/boy-robots /existing acting like girls.
That time Cloudburst learned about women the hard way.
That’s a clean copy/paste. I’m guessing these are notes from the meeting (there’s a repeat of some of these in handwritten notes also included in the Sunbow Marvel Archive collected PDF file) and not an official Hasbro document. We have one of those as well later. I think it’s more accurate to say that Hasbro didn’t think boys would want girl characters in their toys, and being robots gave them an easy out, which the Marvel Comics stressed by outright stating Cybertronians technically didn’t have genders…while the show would give us female Autobots in season two with a prominent one in season three and the Japanese manga introducing spouses and families in Victory for the Decepticons. The robots they had were already given male pronouns and personas, and gender swapping wasn’t in vogue back then. So Starscream and Sideswipe got their bolts back. Well, Sideswipe anyway. Some days the verdict’s still waiting on Starscream.
Optimus Prime met our human hero Duke in the desert, where Optimus had been severely damaged. Duke repaired him.
“Wendy Fairchild” name needs to be changed, I guess.
Again we see the note to change Wendy’s name but I don’t see evidence of that from official Hasbro stuff. It was Duke, already a name for G.I. Joe, that wasn’t approved. Changing how Duke met Optimus makes more sense in this version than Optimus possessing his truck. I guess the Witwickys were still shut out.
The next page in this file is “Notes from conference call w/ H. Saroyan, J. Bacall, T. Griffin, Pres. of Hasbro”. A lot of what we just saw above is here, too, so I’m just going to go over the new parts:
TOAD name is no good. DUKE name is no good.
See, Duke, not Wendy. Also, renaming Bumblebee into Toad is bad. Apparently Sunbow was still determined not to call him Bumblebee or get his accurate, as we’ll see with Muffler.
Buildings put back together at end of show.
Yeah, I don’t remember that in any version of Transformers outside of maybe Rescue Bots. They did rust proof the Statue Of Liberty once.
VW is a nerd, not a bad car.
Bumblebee isn’t a nerd. He’s a scout. Also, we get that Teletraan/Teletron confusion again.
Teletran, Optimus Prime’s computer. Prime injured as robot, transforms into truck as disguise. Guy comes by, tries to fix truck (needs a truck). Then truck turns back into Prime robot. They strike up a relationship ala KNIGHT RIDER.
Teletran deciedes that their cover should be road vehicles.
The typo is theirs, by the way. “Guy” is not the name change they went with, although it isn’t terrible. Just kind of bland. Having a Michael Knight/KITT dynamic could have been fun. Yes, I know Optimus Prime voiced KARR. There’s no proof Peter Cullen would or wouldn’t have been Optimus in this incarnation, though he did voice Venger in Dungeons & Dragons. The hand-written note section after this, again in blue pen, is just repeating all of this, probably there for prosperity.
I was going to jump into the CBS notes but they’re longer than I thought and we’re already nearing the 2000 word count. (I started including them and we were already over that before I realized how many notes they had.) So next time we’ll see what the network had to say, and that could be the last of the notes we’ll look at before looking at the final attempt to bring the Transformers to the Saturday morning line-up.
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