There is no set act placement for the final act in the sample scrip for the second attempt at bringing Transformers to CBS’s Saturday morning lineup, but Soundwave making off with Burt the dog, who ruined their sneak attack on the Autobots, seemed like the right place to stop. It just screamed “commercial break”.
Meanwhile, Jazz with three “z”s (because they somehow had an older name spelling despite, again, they made “More Than Meets The Eye” BEFORE this story), was still injured and near death in the attack. Given that in the first draft the Autobots had a body count of the entirety of the Decepticons, essentially making “Starscream’s Ghost” into a series plot before the movie even killed him off, it’s not unlikely that he could die. Nameless Decepticons have dropped like flies so far. Apparently even in Saturday morning it’s okay to kill robots, even living ones, even when you can’t with humans.
So now we have the question of will Prime Jazzz die? Can they rescue the dog? Will Eddie ever get the egg smell out of his jacket? The answer to two of those questions come up in the final act of “A Robot’s Best Friend Is His Dog”.
Jazzz lives! Optimus Prime gives him a “plasma infusion” in the same manner as humans would donate blood. Firecycle tries to tell him that Optimus would die, Matt tells him that would leave the Autobots leaderless (and Matt without a truck…I hope the voice director would have coached his VA to make that sound like gallows humor or he could come off as a real jerk) but Optimus is a true hero even in this version. Besides, Optimus Prime has died and come back so many times in this franchise he’s just showing off at this point.
Wendy and Eddie arrive in Muffler and tell the Autobots about Burt’s capture. Optimus asks for a description and Eddie calls him a big red robot. According to the Transformers fan wiki on the CBS pitches, Scott was given black and white images of Soundwave and nobody told him he was blue. This could easily have been fixed long before the recording session but it’s still dumb that he wasn’t given all the descriptive info from the miniseries. Negator and the two girlbot additions are the only thing different besides kicking out the original human cast. You’d think he would need all the important information. Part of the reason for a second draft was Hasbro insisting on toy fealty, which is why Starscream stayed male, Sideswipe was kicked out entirely, and Firecycle replaced Ratchet while Whirlpool has…been in the story at one point. It’s surprising there aren’t MORE errors, like the first draft.
Matt wants to go save his dog right now, but Optimus tells him that they wouldn’t get past the security sensors, something the Autobots never seemed to bother using for their own base on the show. Trailbreaker has a plan, but in all smart stories the audience isn’t told the full plan. By dramatic law something has to go horribly wrong, even if things turn out good in the end. Think of nearly every Freddy created trap in the Scooby-Doo franchise. We do learn that the plan involves taking the steel mill again, hopefully actually successfully this time.
Back with the Decepticons, Soundwave is ready to just squash poor Burt, which sounds more like a Skybound Transformers story, or maybe the first Dreamwave miniseries. You know, the only bad one Dreamwave produced. Negator instead wants to know how Burt can detect them (so would I), but since bad guys never think to go to the public library and get a book on things like doggy anatomy he wants to dissect him like a frog. Fitting they nabbed him from a school.
At the steel mill, Wendy, Eddie and Muffler trick the guard (with Eddie making an American Express card reference for those of you reading along too young or not American and thus never seeing those ads) in the rare example of Muffler actually being completely functional. Apparently he works by Dynomutt or Inspector Gadget rules. The mechanics only works when it isn’t funny. This time they do free the plant, declaring they’ll make Autobots from now on (things like “sparks” and “Vector Sigma” haven’t been invented yet and the cartoons didn’t have the Creation Matrix) but Optimus wants them to keep making Decepticons. It’s all part of the Autobots’ plan…which Matt should have heard so why is he surprised?
Scott makes note that a steel girder needs to be in the shot at a certain time, because he wants it to fall on the Decepticon later in the fight. It’s good forward thinking. I wonder how many drafts were done to make the final draft? Meanwhile we get a really dark moment as Burt is dragged into the “electro-surgery room”. Really creepy for the usually more lighthearted SatAM crowd. Was Dungeons & Dragons like this?
After a montage of the mill making robots we cut to Decepticon HQ as the shipment is brought in. Out jumps Matt to blast one Decepticon while the other robots are revealed to be disguises for Optimus, Jazz, Firecycle, and…Thundercracker? I didn’t realize he was a traitor, even blasting another Decepticon to add to the Saturday morning body count. Did he mean Trailbreaker or was the reluctant Thundercracker supposed to switch sides in one of the earlier episodes? I guess not because later in the battle Thundercracker arrives with Starscream. Again, could be fixed in post but unlike Soundwave’s new color scheme that’s a big mistake.
Eddie, who shouldn’t even be here and neither should Wendy, is disappointed Muffler decides to stick to “guarding the jet”. This kid’s just asking to be the first human body in this show, isn’t he? Also, Soundwave has a “confusion blaster”, which is inaccurate for a host of reasons. Maybe getting to shoot Starscream with another Decepticon’s gun so Matt and Burt can get to them will make him feel better. Or make him more of a menace to himself and others. I’m opting for that one, given what we’ve seen this story. Look, I like the kid characters, but not when they’re written this stupid. Kids are not this stupid.
Negator transforms and tries to shoot down the escaping jet with his particle cannon mode, but Optimus transforms his arm separately from his cab and fires, Scott accidentally writing something that the toy could technically do. It has to be accidental because he clearly wasn’t given the toys for models. We never really see Autobots or Decepticons partly transform unless it’s a malfunction whether the toy can do that or not. It’s kind of neat to see even if he just got lucky.
The story ends as you’d expect. The workers return to deciding to only make Autobots from now on (maybe this could be used to introduce the rest of the toys?), Burt licks Optimus to say thank you even though he’s still in truck form, everyone has a laugh, cue credits with voiceover for the next show coming up. We also get this note from Scott, suggesting one change to his own story:
Suggestion: Perhaps we should not see Wendy and Eddie’s parents, and have the two of them on a quest to find their parents, thus they are always insisting on going on missions with the Autobots in hopes of finding the factory where their parents are working.
If you don’t remember from Act 1, he actually had the parents being taken away to a factor that specializes in Decepticon eyes, which in a different order would actually put this episode before one earlier on the list. It would at least explain why a teenager and her younger Darwin award winning brother would be here, in case there were human prisoners as well. They needed one of the human workers to fly the plane.
And with that we aren’t just out of the Second draft, we’re out of documents (for now) involving CBS’s failed Transformers pitch. That means next time we have the very final installment of the CBS Transformers article series as I go over this attempt, compare it to the first, and decide if ultimately we were better off with the syndicated series, or if this could have worked. (Spoilers: I kind of doubt it.)
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