Why Do They Keep Putting MASK Into The Transformers?
MASK was one of my must-watch shows as a kid. Based on the Kenner toyline, the series followed the Mobile Armored Strike Kommand (had to make that acronym work, even if they had to misspell a word) as they battled the Vicious Evil Network Of Mayhem (VENOM, who had it easier I guess). Both sides had vehicles that converted into battle modes which had extra weaponry and even acted like whole other vehicles, like the motorcycle/helicopter or the helicopter/jet. The narrative gimmick also included each mask offering a particular power or weapon to the wearer. Spectrum had enhanced sight on various electromagnetic spectrums and could create energy glide wings…somehow. Lifter had antigravity rings or a beam depending on the media. And so on. I have a few of the toys and an incomplete set of DC Comics both from the shelves and the minicomics that came with the first wave of MASK toys. I reviewed those comics here at the Spotlight.
Kenner would later be bought by Hasbro long after the MASK line ended. Once in a blue moon Hasbro might drop an homage Matt Trakker into the GI Joe figures, or currently let another toy company do the resurrecting for them, and that was it. Meanwhile they made a spiritual successor called Vor-Tech, which included a TV show that wasn’t as good, and no comics I’m aware of. It didn’t last very long and was kind of uninteresting. Other toylines used a similar gimmick over the years, like Switch Force, but nobody quite lived up the MASK’s success, a success that happened during the rise of G.I. Joe’s “A Real American Hero” period and the debut of the Transformers. You might have heard of those lines. Kenner was probably inspired by both. Transformers even played with MASK’s ideas with the mailaway “Omnibots” and later the Triggerbots/Triggercons in the stores. Even Tracks kind of steals the MASK vehicle gimmick with a flight mode, and the gimmick was part of the Beast Wars Transmetals. It’s a neat gimmick. That doesn’t mean the stories behind them mesh as well.
Recently, during IDW’s “1.0” period, Hasbro made the questionable decision to combine many of their toylines into a shared universe. Now MASK, the acquired Rom: Spaceknight, and Micronauts, all lines Hasbro has done little to nothing with since the 1980s, would exist in a shared universe with G.I. Joe and the Transformers despite never sharing their universe(s) until then, even in the comics. Retcons came into play and by that point I had dropped out of IDW’s take on the Transformers so outside of some previews I wasn’t interested, and the previews showed me something that was so altered from MASK’s lore it might as well have been Vor-Tech.
Now Skybound is set to do it again. While their “Energon Universe” was built from the ground up as a sort of “Hasbro Cinematic Universe” with G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Skybound original Void Rivals starting together from the start, I still wasn’t a fan. Admittedly, the darker, adult content (graphic violence, including KILLING MY MAIN BOT BUMBLEBEE TO SHOW THEY WERE “MORE MATURE” NOW SCREW YOU, KIDS!!!) already turned me off but while I can at least understand putting the Joes and Autobots together since it’s been done more than once, I like them better as separate universes. Their concepts are quite different even though companies tend to licence them both. Yes, there were nods in the cartoon and I know all about Hector Montoya of 20 Questions and his ties to numerous Marvel/Sunbow/Hasbro shows. I don’t care. They were just nods, not constantly interacting but doing their own thing. Jem never fought the Inhumanoids. Surprisingly. Well, despite MASK getting new toys, made NOT by Hasbro but a company called Loyal Subject, Hasbro wants to work them in again. I’d rather they didn’t.
The original minicomics told the origin story. Matt Trakker, his brother Andy, and Miles Mayhem were all part of an organization dedicated to peace. (I think the cartoon made this canon to their universe during the “racing season” but that could be the Mandela effect going on.) Andy had created vehicles with hidden weaponry that could also imitate other vehicles and masks (more like helmets) that could launch projectiles, lasers, or acid as well as essentially grant superpowers. Miles saw a way to get power from himself and stole some of the plans to form VENOM, with Andy being killed during the robbery, but not before he could tell Matt who the culprit was. Using the remaining plans and being rather wealthy in the show, Matt formed MASK and joined forces with the Peaceful Nations Alliance, while Matt’s other investments or agents stumbling across things alerted them to a new VENOM plan to steal some weapon or powerful ancient artifact, a combination of terrorist and crook.
DIC Entertainment, who made the cartoon, and DC Comics, who made the comics, each had their own take on the operation. In the show, MASK only occasionally got marching orders from Dwayne Kennedy, their connection at the PNA, and usually just learned of a VENOM operation. In the show, the PNA sent them on their missions, and likewise Mayhem from a terrorist funding group called Contra-World, who was never in the show. Unlike the show, VENOM knew who the MASK agents were in the comics. The show kept their identities secret from VENOM until the aforementioned “racing season”, where DIC and/or Kenner thought having them compete in races around the world where Mayhem and his cronies would play deadly or use it to commit crimes was a good idea. It wasn’t and both the toyine and show sadly faded away.
In IDW’s version none of that happened. The government, working with the Autobots (long story I only know bits of), used Cybertronian tech to make the vehicles that didn’t turn into robots and instead of giving them to G.I. Joe, who they had already started to join forces with, started a new group to use them to….fight Decepticons, maybe? Now it was just MASK with updated vehicle designs and none of the characterization we knew from the show. They also decided to change Matt Trakker from a white man to a young black kid forced to take up leadership of a team on the run, as Mayhem managed to frame them as the real bad guys. They were basically doing the same plot line as G.I. Joe: Renegades, and I didn’t care much for that show’s idea, either. Oddly enough as I never mentioned it there, Facebook decided as I was preparing this to point me to a post from IDW’s writer, Brandon Easton, defending the move:
At least they got the costumes and vehicles right. Plus MOST of the characters. He goes on to say that Hasbro were the ones who wanted to turn Matt from white to black. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt because I wasn’t there at the time and I don’t remember it being brought up in a news story.
With that said, let me make this abundantly clear: HASBRO asked for Matt Trakker to be a person of color.
HASBRO.
Not IDW.
Not me.
Not some liberal cabal hidden in the bottom of an abandoned rocket base.
HASBRO.
They had their reasons. I’m guessing to expand the demographic reach of the property because they likely conducted market research to determine that the original Matt Trakker needed to be updated to reflect the modern world.
That’s my speculation.
Fine. He was hired to do a job and did what the bosses told him. I’m not holding that against him and I don’t know what his prior attachment to the toys and stories were, if any. First of all, no matter who was responsible, someone was. Someone decided to replace the blond man with a black kid. That’s not the worst part and would probably just get an eyeroll at best. I wanted to comment and politely ask him something but his comments were off, so let me ask it here: who was responsible for deciding the rich white man trying to be a good single father to his son and lead a peacekeeping crimefighting task force should now be about a kid who probably didn’t know his father on the run from the law when they turned him black? I’m not trying to attack Easton. I’m honestly asking, because that sounds kind of racist to me. Leave him rich. Leave him caring for his son (who could still be white or not since some reports have said Scott Trakker was adopted) while also fighting crime alongside law enforcement, which in this case were the Joes and Autobots. Plus, if they needed a black character, and they only had the one in their cast anyway…
…WHERE WAS HONDO MACLEAN?
One of my favorite characters in the show has gone the way of James Rhodes, even in images for the new Skybound series. Hondo was the weapons specialist, field strategist, and his cover job as a history teacher (which every school kid would have wanted for their history teacher, knowing at some point he’d just run off to secretly save the world…and more importantly cancel class for the day) offered something to the team on their missions. He wouldn’t be the last historian as archeologist Julio Lopez, an expert in Egyptology, joined the team later on. Apparently having the sole black character wasn’t enough. Said sole black character had to be the guy in charge because status is more important than accuracy. At least have Hondo there, then you have two black characters. Did they not want to upstage their race swap with the existing and already great character with the one not in charge?
Like I said, they Rhodeyd Hondo and his “blaster” mask, which “pretends” (that’s how the toy packaging framed it) to fire huge laser blasts. He even had the cool Firecracker pickup and later the Hurricane 57 Chevy, though I’m not a fan of his new costume and “Blaster II” mask. I found a video from the IDW days asking what happened to him because the host liked the character, and now Skybound is doing the same thing. If it’s the decision of someone at Hasbro, it’s still someone’s fault for making the rich white man into a poor black kid (and why is he flying Switchblade, Mayhem’s vehicle, attacking a military base in one of the few preview images that’s a comic page and not one of the stupid butt ton of variant covers?) and it just feels like they’re doing social pandering instead of adaptation accuracy.
Heck, I wouldn’t mind if this was the next generation of MASK. Matt’s in retirement, maybe Scott became the liaison (Dwayne Kennedy’s role) instead of an actual agent for some reason, and you can have the NEW leader be black. It’s not quite what fans would want when they’d want a return of the original cast, but it would be somewhat more accepted if the stories were good…and NOT tied to the Transformers. Or have Scott take his dad’s place, which makes more narrative sense but the people who would buy into Black Matt don’t care about things like that, and make a black scientist lady, since begging black women to get into STEM even if they’d rather be a stage play set designer or something is so in vogue right now.
All of that only comes up because I was pointed to the post. My main sticking point remains that I don’t need MASK tied to the Transformers. The former were a team of crimefighters with secret weapons fighting a terrorist crime gang and the latter is an intergalactic civil war story between two factions of shapeshifting alien robots. Their stories just don’t mesh well. Then again, outside of the Devil’s Due crossovers, Transformers and G.I. Joe coming together did nothing for me. In the original Marvel run the only impact it has was Bumblebee becoming Goldbug because Bob Budiansky ignored all the changes that miniseries should have made to the story, the only thing I’ll credit Simon Furman for above him. The crossover itself only happened because Marvel held both licenses and helped formed both series’ lore, but they already pulled the Transformers out of the Marvel universe because the two didn’t fit right besides Spider-Man’s obligatory issue #3 appearance and using the Savage Land to explain the Dinobots. Circuit Breaker appears in Secret Wars II as a cameo so Marvel could take ownership of the character and do jack all with her since the comic ended, and that was the last connection between the two.
I don’t need a shared universe. Marvel themselves forgot how to do it right. It used to be a big thing in comics that initially translated to the MCU until Disney came along and Bob Iger got greedy. Now so many people do it wrong and have killed the idea that comics and even many TV franchises understood. MASK and VENOM exist in their own story, in their own bubble, and to me that’s how it works best. I don’t like to use the word “should” because it’s often so restrictive, but we seem to more and more live in a time where it’s actually positively restrictive. My nostalgia for MASK the narrative is cool battles with superpowered helmet and vehicles that turn into other vehicles, apart from what I love about Transformers and enjoyed back then from G.I. Joe. I can have multiple interests in multiple continuities that do their own thing. Shoving Matt Trakker, race swapped and fortune swiped or not, into a world that weakens their gimmick in the name of the others doesn’t sit well with me. Once again, I’ll stick to the original series. I already loved what they did.
The Clutter Reports (my other site)
BW Media Spotlight 
MASK was one of my must-watch shows as a kid. Based on the Kenner toyline, the series followed the Mobile Armored Strike Kommand (had to make that acronym work, even if they had to misspell a word) as they battled the Vicious Evil Network Of Mayhem (VENOM, who had it easier I guess). Both sides had vehicles that converted into battle modes which had extra weaponry and even acted like whole other vehicles, like the motorcycle/helicopter or the helicopter/jet. The narrative gimmick also included each mask offering a particular power or weapon to the wearer. Spectrum had enhanced sight on various electromagnetic spectrums and could create energy glide wings…somehow. Lifter had antigravity rings or a beam depending on the media. And so on. I have a few of the toys and an incomplete set of DC Comics both from the shelves and the minicomics that came with the first wave of MASK toys. I reviewed those comics here at the Spotlight.
Kenner would later be bought by Hasbro long after the MASK line ended. Once in a blue moon Hasbro might drop an homage Matt Trakker into the GI Joe figures, or currently let another toy company do the resurrecting for them, and that was it. Meanwhile they made a spiritual successor called Vor-Tech, which included a TV show that wasn’t as good, and no comics I’m aware of. It didn’t last very long and was kind of uninteresting. Other toylines used a similar gimmick over the years, like Switch Force, but nobody quite lived up the MASK’s success, a success that happened during the rise of G.I. Joe’s “A Real American Hero” period and the debut of the Transformers. You might have heard of those lines. Kenner was probably inspired by both. Transformers even played with MASK’s ideas with the mailaway “Omnibots” and later the Triggerbots/Triggercons in the stores. Even Tracks kind of steals the MASK vehicle gimmick with a flight mode, and the gimmick was part of the Beast Wars Transmetals. It’s a neat gimmick. That doesn’t mean the stories behind them mesh as well.
Recently, during IDW’s “1.0” period, Hasbro made the questionable decision to combine many of their toylines into a shared universe. Now MASK, the acquired Rom: Spaceknight, and Micronauts, all lines Hasbro has done little to nothing with since the 1980s, would exist in a shared universe with G.I. Joe and the Transformers despite never sharing their universe(s) until then, even in the comics. Retcons came into play and by that point I had dropped out of IDW’s take on the Transformers so outside of some previews I wasn’t interested, and the previews showed me something that was so altered from MASK’s lore it might as well have been Vor-Tech.
Now Skybound is set to do it again. While their “Energon Universe” was built from the ground up as a sort of “Hasbro Cinematic Universe” with G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Skybound original Void Rivals starting together from the start, I still wasn’t a fan. Admittedly, the darker, adult content (graphic violence, including KILLING MY MAIN BOT BUMBLEBEE TO SHOW THEY WERE “MORE MATURE” NOW SCREW YOU, KIDS!!!) already turned me off but while I can at least understand putting the Joes and Autobots together since it’s been done more than once, I like them better as separate universes. Their concepts are quite different even though companies tend to licence them both. Yes, there were nods in the cartoon and I know all about Hector Montoya of 20 Questions and his ties to numerous Marvel/Sunbow/Hasbro shows. I don’t care. They were just nods, not constantly interacting but doing their own thing. Jem never fought the Inhumanoids. Surprisingly. Well, despite MASK getting new toys, made NOT by Hasbro but a company called Loyal Subject, Hasbro wants to work them in again. I’d rather they didn’t.
The original minicomics told the origin story. Matt Trakker, his brother Andy, and Miles Mayhem were all part of an organization dedicated to peace. (I think the cartoon made this canon to their universe during the “racing season” but that could be the Mandela effect going on.) Andy had created vehicles with hidden weaponry that could also imitate other vehicles and masks (more like helmets) that could launch projectiles, lasers, or acid as well as essentially grant superpowers. Miles saw a way to get power from himself and stole some of the plans to form VENOM, with Andy being killed during the robbery, but not before he could tell Matt who the culprit was. Using the remaining plans and being rather wealthy in the show, Matt formed MASK and joined forces with the Peaceful Nations Alliance, while Matt’s other investments or agents stumbling across things alerted them to a new VENOM plan to steal some weapon or powerful ancient artifact, a combination of terrorist and crook.
DIC Entertainment, who made the cartoon, and DC Comics, who made the comics, each had their own take on the operation. In the show, MASK only occasionally got marching orders from Dwayne Kennedy, their connection at the PNA, and usually just learned of a VENOM operation. In the show, the PNA sent them on their missions, and likewise Mayhem from a terrorist funding group called Contra-World, who was never in the show. Unlike the show, VENOM knew who the MASK agents were in the comics. The show kept their identities secret from VENOM until the aforementioned “racing season”, where DIC and/or Kenner thought having them compete in races around the world where Mayhem and his cronies would play deadly or use it to commit crimes was a good idea. It wasn’t and both the toyine and show sadly faded away.
In IDW’s version none of that happened. The government, working with the Autobots (long story I only know bits of), used Cybertronian tech to make the vehicles that didn’t turn into robots and instead of giving them to G.I. Joe, who they had already started to join forces with, started a new group to use them to….fight Decepticons, maybe? Now it was just MASK with updated vehicle designs and none of the characterization we knew from the show. They also decided to change Matt Trakker from a white man to a young black kid forced to take up leadership of a team on the run, as Mayhem managed to frame them as the real bad guys. They were basically doing the same plot line as G.I. Joe: Renegades, and I didn’t care much for that show’s idea, either. Oddly enough as I never mentioned it there, Facebook decided as I was preparing this to point me to a post from IDW’s writer, Brandon Easton, defending the move:
At least they got the costumes and vehicles right. Plus MOST of the characters. He goes on to say that Hasbro were the ones who wanted to turn Matt from white to black. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt because I wasn’t there at the time and I don’t remember it being brought up in a news story.
Fine. He was hired to do a job and did what the bosses told him. I’m not holding that against him and I don’t know what his prior attachment to the toys and stories were, if any. First of all, no matter who was responsible, someone was. Someone decided to replace the blond man with a black kid. That’s not the worst part and would probably just get an eyeroll at best. I wanted to comment and politely ask him something but his comments were off, so let me ask it here: who was responsible for deciding the rich white man trying to be a good single father to his son and lead a peacekeeping crimefighting task force should now be about a kid who probably didn’t know his father on the run from the law when they turned him black? I’m not trying to attack Easton. I’m honestly asking, because that sounds kind of racist to me. Leave him rich. Leave him caring for his son (who could still be white or not since some reports have said Scott Trakker was adopted) while also fighting crime alongside law enforcement, which in this case were the Joes and Autobots. Plus, if they needed a black character, and they only had the one in their cast anyway…
…WHERE WAS HONDO MACLEAN?
One of my favorite characters in the show has gone the way of James Rhodes, even in images for the new Skybound series. Hondo was the weapons specialist, field strategist, and his cover job as a history teacher (which every school kid would have wanted for their history teacher, knowing at some point he’d just run off to secretly save the world…and more importantly cancel class for the day) offered something to the team on their missions. He wouldn’t be the last historian as archeologist Julio Lopez, an expert in Egyptology, joined the team later on. Apparently having the sole black character wasn’t enough. Said sole black character had to be the guy in charge because status is more important than accuracy. At least have Hondo there, then you have two black characters. Did they not want to upstage their race swap with the existing and already great character with the one not in charge?
Like I said, they Rhodeyd Hondo and his “blaster” mask, which “pretends” (that’s how the toy packaging framed it) to fire huge laser blasts. He even had the cool Firecracker pickup and later the Hurricane 57 Chevy, though I’m not a fan of his new costume and “Blaster II” mask. I found a video from the IDW days asking what happened to him because the host liked the character, and now Skybound is doing the same thing. If it’s the decision of someone at Hasbro, it’s still someone’s fault for making the rich white man into a poor black kid (and why is he flying Switchblade, Mayhem’s vehicle, attacking a military base in one of the few preview images that’s a comic page and not one of the stupid butt ton of variant covers?) and it just feels like they’re doing social pandering instead of adaptation accuracy.
Heck, I wouldn’t mind if this was the next generation of MASK. Matt’s in retirement, maybe Scott became the liaison (Dwayne Kennedy’s role) instead of an actual agent for some reason, and you can have the NEW leader be black. It’s not quite what fans would want when they’d want a return of the original cast, but it would be somewhat more accepted if the stories were good…and NOT tied to the Transformers. Or have Scott take his dad’s place, which makes more narrative sense but the people who would buy into Black Matt don’t care about things like that, and make a black scientist lady, since begging black women to get into STEM even if they’d rather be a stage play set designer or something is so in vogue right now.
All of that only comes up because I was pointed to the post. My main sticking point remains that I don’t need MASK tied to the Transformers. The former were a team of crimefighters with secret weapons fighting a terrorist crime gang and the latter is an intergalactic civil war story between two factions of shapeshifting alien robots. Their stories just don’t mesh well. Then again, outside of the Devil’s Due crossovers, Transformers and G.I. Joe coming together did nothing for me. In the original Marvel run the only impact it has was Bumblebee becoming Goldbug because Bob Budiansky ignored all the changes that miniseries should have made to the story, the only thing I’ll credit Simon Furman for above him. The crossover itself only happened because Marvel held both licenses and helped formed both series’ lore, but they already pulled the Transformers out of the Marvel universe because the two didn’t fit right besides Spider-Man’s obligatory issue #3 appearance and using the Savage Land to explain the Dinobots. Circuit Breaker appears in Secret Wars II as a cameo so Marvel could take ownership of the character and do jack all with her since the comic ended, and that was the last connection between the two.
I don’t need a shared universe. Marvel themselves forgot how to do it right. It used to be a big thing in comics that initially translated to the MCU until Disney came along and Bob Iger got greedy. Now so many people do it wrong and have killed the idea that comics and even many TV franchises understood. MASK and VENOM exist in their own story, in their own bubble, and to me that’s how it works best. I don’t like to use the word “should” because it’s often so restrictive, but we seem to more and more live in a time where it’s actually positively restrictive. My nostalgia for MASK the narrative is cool battles with superpowered helmet and vehicles that turn into other vehicles, apart from what I love about Transformers and enjoyed back then from G.I. Joe. I can have multiple interests in multiple continuities that do their own thing. Shoving Matt Trakker, race swapped and fortune swiped or not, into a world that weakens their gimmick in the name of the others doesn’t sit well with me. Once again, I’ll stick to the original series. I already loved what they did.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on February 25, 2026 in Animation Spotlight, Comic Spotlight, Television Spotlight and tagged commentary, IDW Publishing, Marvel Comics, MASK (Mobile Armored Strike Kommand), Skybound Entertainment, Transformers, VENOM (Vicious Evil Network Of Mayhem).
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About ShadowWing Tronix
A would be comic writer looking to organize his living space as well as his thoughts. So I have a blog for each goal. :)