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There’s also a version of the GoBots continuity where Leader-1 is just head of the GoBot Security Force and Cy-Kill just a criminal. The original introduction to the GoBot characters came in “Escape From Planet Earth”, an illustrated booklet given away with the Zod figure and en masse at K-Mart, where I got my copy. The GSF make friends with two Earth children who accidentally hacked the enemy GoBots (the toy packaging called them “friendly” and “enemy”) and now worked with Leader-1’s team to keep their secret (somehow) and teach them about Earth…as soon as they learned it in school since they didn’t look to be out of middle school yet at most. It was my second video review, after seeing it’s potential where writing wasn’t enough.
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I don’t know if these two are even proper timelines, but they are weird sidelights that I wish could’ve had deeper ties to the franchise.
-The 2002 Playskool GoBots revival. At a blissful age 12, I had no idea the ’80s Gobots had even been a thing, so this felt quite original to me. Hence my confusion when the “Armada” trilogy went with Mini-Cons to give the main characters enhanced power sets instead of the similar line of small assistant type bots left orphaned by corporate indifference. At least “Rescue Bots” had extensive ties to the “Prime” continuity and some of its exclusive characters even made cameos in IDW comics down the line.
-The 2022 BotBots line, aka “We have Shopkins at home, and they’ve got Sparks!” The premise of a stray Cybertronian vessel crashing into a suburban mall, the Sparks disgusing themselves as everyday objects instead of cars (which feels weird to me, since my local mall is within spitting distance of a bunch of dealerships) is just plain fun, and easily lends itself to years’ worth of wild character ideas, which the line thankfully got over a four-year stretch. Only ten episodes of a Netflix cartoon and at least one IDW miniseries makes it seem like like the “Hasbroverlords” got cold feet about the concept as soon as they thought of it, which is a bit sad for those of us wanting to play with more than just vehicles, space guns, and actual working handguns that stay in Japan for obvious reasons. (I have a recurring nightmare where Dave Hester from “Storage Wars” comes across a Japanese Megatron toy in a locker, learns the backstory of it being a functioning Walther PPK, has it test-fired by a reputable police marksman, and then destroys it for the same reason he melted those Japanese swords in episode 1; it’s illegal in the US to even possess them. I technically agree with this mindset, but I’d likely still be sobbing uncontrollably while the destruction took place.)
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Funny thing is Rescue Bots wasn’t intended to be part of the Aligned Continuity, and really didn’t interact outside of the occasional Optimus and Bumbelbee cameo, until Prime’s sequel, Robots In Disguise (v2) moved to Cartoon Network. It was the show runners or the Hub who decided it was tied to Prime, but Prime’s writers neve seemed to acknowledge the island of superhightech testing. (Imagine if MECH had learned about Griffin Rock.)
Dave Hester IS a nightmare.
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