Here’s something I wasn’t expecting to say: the pitch is about to break the fourth wall.
So far the second attempt at bringing Transformers to CBS Saturday Mornings, where we just finished looking at the cast, has used the format of someone in-universe looking into the current situation of the Decepticons taking over the planet, with the Autobots as a rebel group with a trio of human allies who aren’t the ones we saw them make in “More Than Meets The Eye”, with no explanation of what happened to Sparkplug and Spike. Instead we have a trucker, a teenager, the kid who keeps trying to earn the Darwin Award because he wants to see the cool fighting (some characters even I can’t defend, and I’ll back Scrappy-Doo, Godzooki, and Snarf), and a dog. It just feels like a step down.
However, now we’re getting into the format for the show and despite continuing to play to the bit there is no way to explain the show in universe. Considering the whole point of a pitch is explaining the show to the network, and in this case the licensee, it’s more important to have the right information than play up being in the story. We’re also somewhere closer to the original series idea. No glowy orbs possessing machines. No dead Decepticons (not en masse anyway), and everybody’s personalities and genders are in line with the tech specs, getting two new female Transformers long before the actual series would end up picking them up.
So what could we have looked forward to format-wise had CBS and Hasbro signed off on this?
SUBJECT: DECEPTICON HEADQUARTERS
THE DECEPTICONS HAVE BUILT THEMSELVES A HUGE FORTRESS, HEWN OUT OF THE GRANITE MOUNTAINS ABOVE BOULDER, COLORADO- THEIR TOWERING STONE AND STEEL BASE IS FILLED WITH SOPHISTICATED COMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT, ALLOWING NEGATOR TO KEEP WATCH ON HIS GLOBAL ROBOT OPERATIONS.
You know, we actually had something close to this in other productions. In the Marvel comics, Megatron and company had built a mountain fortress out of parts of a nuclear plant, and it kept everybody out except for Gears and obligatory issue #3 guest-appearing Spider-Man. The show would give us a hidden mountain fortress, but I don’t know if it was in the Granite Mountains. Transformers Prime went for a huge tower at one point but usually it was their starship hidden in the clouds while the Autobots had the mountain fortress, which they also had previous in Transformers Armada. It’s kind of funny that they dropped the Bermuda Triangle base given arguably their most famous headquarters in the franchise (when they get one) is a crashed spaceship underwater in the original series.
Sunstreaker’s not looking so good today.
SUBJECT: ROBOT REPAIR
THE AUTOBOTS AND DECEPTICONS ARE NOT INDESTRUCTIBLE. THEY ARE MADE OF METAL AND AS SUCH CAN BE DENTED, BASHED, BURNED, BROKEN, ETC. THEY NEED REPAIR LIKE CARS OR ANY OTHER MACHINERY. THEY ARE ONLY AS STRONG AS THEIR SIZE, WEIGHT, AND HYDRAULICS WILL ALLOW.
And yet look how long it took for the Decepticons to get a dedicated medic type character…and he was still a mad scientist. They usually relied on the Constructicons. Plus you have internal damage, limbs being destroyed because they’re just robots who can be fixed up, and just generally being bashed around. We need some stakes in these stories or the kids wouldn’t stay interested.
SUBJECT: AUTOBOT & DECEPTICON VOICES
THE AUTOBOTS AND DECEPTICONS WILL HAVE SYNTHESIZED ELECTRONIC VOICES. THE AUTOBOTS’ VOICES, HOWEVER, WILL BE LESS SYNTHESIZED AND SINISTER THAN THE MORE EVIL, ELECTRONIC SOUNDING DECEPTICONS.
That’s one thing that actually made it to the show. None of the Autobots talked like Soundwave, though making a voice sound “good” or “evil” seemed to be more up to the voice actors and director Wally Burr than in the synthesized audio overlay.
SUBJECT: ENERGY
BOTH AUTOBOTS AND DECEPTICONS GROW “TIRED” WHEN THEIR NUCLEAR POWER CELLS RUN DOWN. LIKE ALL MACHINES, THEY CANNOT RUN FOREVER WITHOUT A RECHARGE, AND, DUE TO THEIR HEAVY USE OF FIREPOWER, THEY ARE OFTEN CONFRONTED WITH SHORTAGES OF FUEL. IF THEY RUN OUT—THAT’S IT. THEY CANNOT MOVE UNTIL REPLACEMENT POWER CELLS ARRIVE. EMERGENCY BATTERIES WILL STILL KEEP THEIR MINDS GOING, BUT THEY ARE OTHERWISE POWERLESS. “WE’RE RUNNING ON EMPTY,” WILL BE A COMMON PHRASE HEARD BY THE AUTOBOTS WHEN THEY’RE CRANKING THEMSELVES TO THEIR LIMITS.
Despite the show we got still primarily being about the Decepticons’ search for energy that’s not something we saw in the show. Even Cliffjumper, who in one audio drama exhausted his energy reserves mid-battle, never did that in the show. It was actually rare when someone did run out of energy, if they ever did. And yet we have this show where energy resources aren’t as huge a factor doing what the show where it was doing what they should have done. I guess since the Autobots had all the energy they needed to fight the Decepticons and outside of that one third season episode where they were desperate for fuel, plus the one where Omega Supreme needed new energy so they could keep him out of the story, it wasn’t going to come up as much. The Decepticons need to be a serious threat.
SUBJECT: TRANSFORMATIONS
NEITHER THE AUTOBOTS NOR DECEPTICONS CAN TRANSFORM FROM MACHINE TO ROBOT WHEN THEY ARE DAMAGED. THIS WILL SERVE TO COMPLICATE STORIES AND HEIGHTEN JEOPARDY. PERHAPS, AFTER A DRAMATIC BATTLE SEQUENCE, AN AUTOBOT IS WOUNDED AND ONLY PART OF HIM CAN TRANSFORM BACK TO A CAR, THUS ENABLING THE DECEPTICONS TO HUNT HIM DOWN.
There’s an episode where the Autobots were trapped in vehicle mode during a race, and one of my favorite comic stories where Bumblebee was too damaged to transform easily. Of course there’s also that Beast Wars episode where the Maximals were forced to stay in beast mode so long that their animal instincts started taking over. I’m surprised it wasn’t used more often in the franchise.
“A perfect disguise. Nobody will suspect a thing.”
SUBJECT: CAMOLFLAGE
WHEN THE AUTOBOTS OR DECEPTICONS ARE IN THEIR VEHICLE FORMS, THEY ARE VIRTUALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM ORDINARY CARS AND JETS. THUS, THE AUTOBOTS CAN HIDE FROM THEIR ADVERSARIES BY MINGLING WITH CARS ON A FREEWAY. SIMILARLY, THE DECEPTICONS CAN LAND AT A MILITARY AIRSTRIP AND VANISH INTO ANONYMITY, OR POSE AS WHATEVER MECHANICAL FORM THEY MIGHT HAVE, EFFECTIVELY EAVESDROPPING ON HUMANS OR AUTOBOTS.
Oddly, the original cartoon only used this once as a gag. Despite being the show that had “Robots In Disguise” as part of there theme song (reused in Transformers Animated despite being even less interested in disguise), the idea of disguise and camouflage was only used in the Unicron and Aligned continuities on television, while used most often in the comics.
SUBJECT: FURTHER DECEPTICON GOALS
ALONG WITH FORCING THE INDUSTRIALIZED NATIONS OF EARTH TO BUILD NEW ROBOT WARRIORS, THE DECEPTICONS WILL TAKE OVER EXISTING MECHANICAL FORMS, TRANSFORMING THEM INTO STILL MORE ROBOTS. THE DECEPTICONS WILL SEEK OUT LOCATIONS SUCH AS THE TRAIN YARDS OF , TOKYO, WHERE HUNDREDS OF BULLET TRAIN CARS MAKE A
POTENTIAL ARMY OF DECEPTICONS … OR THE NAVAL AIR STATION AT SAN DIEGO, WHERE DOZENS OF JETS AND SHIPS NEED ONLY BE ELECTRO-MECHANICALLY TRANSFORMED TO BECOME DECEPTICON WARRIORS. A COMPUTER FACTORY IN UPSTATE NEW YORK, PACKED WITH THE WORLD’S MOST SOPHISTICATED COMPUTERS, CAN BE TURNED INTO AN ARMY OF VERITABLE DECEPTICON GENIUSES. OIL PLATFORMS IN THE GULF OF MEXICO, SUBWAYS IN NEW YORK CITY, AIRPORTS, BUS STATIONS, EXPERIMENTAL LABORATORIES, UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES, ALL ARE POTENTIAL TARGETS FOR DECEPTICON TAKEOVER. ALL MUST BE WATCHED AND DEFENDED BY THE AUTOBOTS.
I thought the Decepticons already took over the world? The idea of turning Earth tech into Decepticons or drone soldiers did pop up a few times in season two, and somehow the Constructions soundlessly turned a city into Trypticon overnight. Cy-Kill even turned six drones into his Puzzler “Combiner” by hiding them as rental cars for some reason. (Cy-kill might have been better at his job than Megatron on Challenge Of The GoBots but he still had some odd ideas Megatron would be jealous of unless he did them himself.)
SUBJECT: HUMAN SUBPLOTS
ALTHOUGH THE DECEPTICONS AND AUTOBOTS WILL BE THE CENTER OF INTEREST IN EACH EPISODE, SUBPLOTS WHICH INCLUDE OUR HUMAN CHARACTERS AND OTHER ISOLATED HUMAN CHARACTERS WILL WE INTERWOVEN THROUGHOUT THE PLOTS TO BRING THE STORIES “DOWN TO EARTH,” GIVING US PEOPLE WE CAN CARE ABOUT, AND PEOPLE THE AUTOBOTS MUST HELP IN SOME WAY, THROUGH CONTACT WITH THE AUTOBOTS, MATT, WENDY AND EDDIE
WILL LEARN MUCH ABOUT THESE “ALIENS” AND HOW DIFFERENT AND YET SIMILAR THEY ARE. THE HUMAN CHARACTERS WE RUN INTO DURING A STORY WILL BE CHANGED IN SOME POSITIVE WAY BY THEIR CONTRACT WITH THE AUTOBOTS, PERHAPS LEARNING TO GIVE UP A PREJUDICE OR OPENING THEIR MINDS TO WORLDS BEYOND THEIR OWN.
I feel like this was a CBS request, as I don’t think Hasbro would care. It’s not something we missed in the show as usually it was the Autobots who had to learn some valuable lesson, not the humans. We did get times when Autobots and even the Decepticons on occasion would remember the “good old days” before the war, but they were rare. Human subplots rarely come up in most of the franchise, with a few exceptions. Even many of the Transformers Animated human subplots were tied to the Autobots somehow. Maybe you could make a case for a couple Rescue Bots episodes, as humans and Autobots working together was part of the concept, but it still tied to the Autobots most of the time.
SUBJECT: BACKSTORY
AS BACKSTORY, UNDER THE CREDITS, WE WILL SEE A NORMAL EARTH. THEN THE SIRENS WILL SOUND AND, LIKE “THE WAR OF THE WORLDS,” THE GIANT DECEPTICON ROBOTS WILL THUNDER INTO THE CITIES, DESTROYING ALL RESISTANCE WITH THEIR LASERS AND HI-TECH WEAPONRY. WE WILL SEE THE OPPRESSED PEOPLES OF EARTH FORCED TO BUILD MORE OF THESE HUGE ROBOTS. WE WILL ALSO SEE THE AUTOBOTS, AND THEIR FEW HUMAN COMPATRIOTS, PUTTING UP A FIGHT AGAINST NEGATOR’S DOMINATION.
That…actually sounds like a really cool intro. It’s too bad they didn’t at least animate that. I wonder how they’d tie that into the theme song or if they’d have to write a new one.
Poor Mini-Spies never had names. Bumper had two or three, maybe four. Advantage: Bumper?
SUBJECT: DECEPTICON SPIES
THE TRANSFORMERS SERIES WILL ALSO CAPTURE THE FEEL OF GEORGE ORWELL’S “1984” WITH ITS EVER-WATCHING BIG BROTHER. ONL Y IN THIS CASE, IT WON’T BE TELEVISION EYES WATCHING FROM BEHIND TWO-WAY MIRRORS. HERE WE WILL HAVE DECEPTICONS, IN THEIR DISGUISED FORMS, WATCHING THE HUMANS FROM EVERYWHERE. WE MIGHT SEE A GROUP OF PEOPLE TALKING OF A REBELLION AGAINST THE DECEPTICONS, ONLY TO REALIZE TOO LATE THAT THE STREET CLEANER PARKED AT THE CURB BESIDE THEM IS A DECEPTICON SPY. IN A MATTER OF SECONDS IT WILL TRANSFORM INTO ITS ROBOT MODE AND TAKE THEM AWAY.
What if the Decepticon was hiding as a television? I’ve honestly been neutral through most of this pitch but this and the intro both sound like really cool ideas, especially for Saturday morning. And finally….
SUBJECT: EPISODE LENGTH
TRANSFORMERS WILL BE FULL HALF-HOUR EPISODES, EACH A COMPLETE STORY IN ITSELF. THE SERIES, UNLIKE THE SPECIALS, WILL NOT BE SERIALIZED.
Makes sense for the time slot. Ask Filmation about how much of a pain it was to do serialized when the programmers don’t think kids are smart enough to go with it. Meanwhile, that’s why I loved the first season of NBC’s Flash Gordon more than the second, the best part of CBS’s The New Adventures Of Mighty Mouse was the “Great Space Chase serial”, and between the two it’s how I became interested in old movie serials. It’s more like the programmer doesn’t want to put the effort into maintaining continuity while marketing loves their little gimmicks, which doesn’t work as well serialized.
Next time we’ll start finish or almost finish this second draft (though we still have at least one more document after this unless Sunbow Marvel Archive finds more documents related to this project) by starting our look at planned episodes for the show. That final document, by the way, is a full script of one of these episode ideas. This should be fun.
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