Concurrent with the writing and production of George Arthur Bloom’s syndicated miniseries, Marvel Productions commissioned Jeffrey Scott to hurriedly write a development bible and pilot script, looking to pitch a Transformers main series to CBS network for Saturday morning broadcast. Hasbro, Griffin-Bacal, Marvel Productions and CBS executives were all involved in shaping the ultimately unsuccessful pitch. Reference materials provided to Scott included copies of the Toyfair 1984 catalogue pages, Hasbro product list and Bob Budiansky character profiles, storyboards for the animated commercial promoting Marvel Comics issue 1 and the script for Act I of More Than Meets The Eye, Part 1
That’s from The Sunbow Marvel Archive, where I got the documents I’ve been using for this series. You can also watch Chris McFeely’s video compiling the events we know currently. I’ve just finished a deep dive of all of this information. Now we get to take a trip into an alternate reality, one where this is what we got instead of a proper first season in syndication. I may end up repeating things I said when discussing the first draft while discussing the second and the concept as a whole.
For reasons we’re not aware of, either CBS or Hasbro or both passed on this. Marvel Productions, getting a new head that worked better with the comic side of Marvel, went back to the concepts and style of “More Than Meets The Eye”. Everyone was aware of the Autobots but for whatever reason the Autobots didn’t return to Cybertron. Instead, they stayed around to learn the Decepticons weren’t destroyed and the battle continued, despite the story ending with everyone getting ready to return to the Autobots’ home planet. In the show itself the Autobots couldn’t do so easily while the Decepticons had a “space bridge” they could use almost whenever they wanted. No energy beings until sparks were created in Beast Wars and refined in later continuities. No merging with Earth vehicles. No Decepticons taking over the Earth for more than a couple episodes. What kids saw in the miniseries was there when the show returned to syndication.
So could either of the CBS shows have been any good? More importantly, could they have created the legacy for the toyline that the syndicated series gave us? There would definitely be some changes, but would they be cultural icons?
Saturday morning did give us characters that remained in public consciousness and culture. The Flintstones started as a primetime show, paving the way for shows like The Simpsons, but it continued on in Saturday morning lineups. We know what Scooby-Doo and the Smurfs are because of their success on Saturday morning television. When it comes to action shows, however, first run syndication seems to dominate what remained. First-run syndication didn’t start until the 1980s, having been rerun and movie homes for stations that didn’t have networks to give them sports and news. Syndication had less restrictive rules because they went to local stations. Networks, pressured by the FCC who were themselves pressured by parent groups who think kids can’t handle anything, had some kind of “bureau of standards and practices”, and there was stuff you couldn’t do on a Saturday morning lineup. Even Fox Kids, who took more “risks” in their daytime lineup, toned things down for the Saturday morning lineup.
Parent approved?
Strangely enough, though, the CBS pitches were able to take more risks because they were robots. Parent groups think it’s okay to blow up robots because they tend to have a surface level view of everything. They don’t actually watch and they don’t think highly of “stupid” kids entertainment. They just don’t think kids should see violence against humans. Meanwhile, in both versions we still had the living robots we’ve come to expect from the franchise in spite of their alternate origins. So characters kids really liked could be near death or killed off. Look at how kids reacted to Optimus Prime, and you can see that kids see things differently.
These robots were “people” to us growing up. So in these synopses we have Decepticons dropping like flydroids. They’re all ghosts in the first draft and in the script based on the second draft we have heads exploding from laser fire. If BS&P had a problem with this stuff, one assumes Jeffrey Scott, who wrote both drafts and the pilot “A Robot’s Best Friend Is His Dog”, would have been aware at both backstories and the steel mill scenes in the pilot. I know some writers tried to put in harder stuff than they wanted in hopes of negotiating to the levels of violence and humor they actually wanted, but this is trying to sell the show to the network and the licensee. It’s a different situation.
Since I already covered the mistakes of the first draft as an adaptation, how did the second one fair? Better, but I still have notes. There have been changes between takes. Look at the original Pound Puppies versus the ABC series, both produced by Hanna-Barbera. The pilot movie from syndication was closer to something like The Great Escape or Hogan’s Heroes, as Cooler and his team tried to sneak puppies out of the dog pound and find them homes with loving kids, the original “backstory” of the plush toys. ABC’s series was a more loving dog adoption center and introducing some magical “Puppy Power” (not the Scrappy kind, it’s a link between dogs and the right owner) until season two, where for some reason they made a dramatic switch closer to the original concept but with the same dog and human characters. The more recent cartoon from the Hub/Discovery Family was by a different animation studio and is a mix of both but with an entirely new cast and centered more on the dogs’ antics. Those dogs also aren’t clothing wearing bipeds (when the guest puppies finding hap-hap-happy homes still walked on four legs and buck naked) like the heroes of the HB cartoons.
It would have been a shame to toss out what “More Than Meets The Eye” did right. There were elements that was good in the new concepts, especially playing up the “robots in disguise” concept and having Optimus Prime’s trailer be an active part of the story. On the other hand we would have lost The Ark, the Witwickys, and humans allying with the Autobots without sneaking around. The Autobots were mostly welcomed as heroes. Now they’d have to be liberators. Admittedly there is some bias. We did get the show we got and getting something else just would feel weird somehow. So take what I say here with the knowledge of that bias.
No computer expert for you!
Let’s start with the humans. Would Matt Conroy and the Fairchilds (be sure to catch them on tour) have been a good replacement for The Witwickys, Chip Chase, Carly, Raoul, and the season three additions of Daniel and Marissa Fairborne? I don’t think so. While Sparkplug wasn’t established as a war veteran like in the comics, he was still a skilled mechanic, which the team needed with only two medics and a mechanics guy to fix them by the end of season two. The father/son bond was always nice to see. Spike was a good ally to the team, while his comic counterparts (Buster and later Spike after Hasbro added him to Fortress Maximus) kept dropping out after a while. Spike’s romance with Carly was as sweet as you could get away with in a boys show. Chip’s computer skills were often an asset to the Autobots. Raoul could have potentially showed up, but would his appearances be any fun without Tracks to play off of? Marissa and her potential ties to Flint of G.I. Joe were a great addition to season three and a good female heroine, good enough that she’s the only one besides the Witwickys to ever show up in future incarnations. Daniel…depends on who you ask, but somehow he was still smarter than Eddie Fairchild.
Where Daniel meant well but only got in trouble by accident, Eddie was one of those kids writers like to use to show why kids shouldn’t get involved in things, only for them to learn nothing without upsetting the status quo. Eddie would easily have been the type of kid insert character that gives kid insert characters a bad name, and a nominee for the Fictional Darwin Award. Pushing the Autobots (like he did with Muffler in the pilot or his own egg tossing at the Decepticon school guards) to ignore caution and just beat them up would have gotten everyone killed. Wendy would really not work in a boys show, not on her own as the lone teen. She wanted a normal life dating boys, a story harder to pull off in the occupation story of the second draft where I don’t understand how you can have “slave race” and “normal life” in the same concept, and the only reason she was here was because her car was part of the resistance movement. Even following Jeffrey Scott’s idea of having Wendy and Eddie there to find their parents still makes them less useful than Spike, Chip, and Carly.
Matt could have worked but he’s no Sparkplug. Even Ginrai eventually accepted his place with the Godmasters of Masterforce while Matt or Duke or whatever they named him also sufferent the status quo issue Eddie has. “I need my truck back, I don’t care that he’s actually a robot leader of soldiers.” In the second draft, Burt the dog was more interesting because he was a living Decepticon detector than for anything else they would have done with him outside of the “downtime” parts of the story. Arthur Knoll would have come off as a knockoff of Braxis from Challenge Of The GoBots and been even less useful in the second draft than he was in the first. There’s a reason Dr. Archeville disappeared in a few episodes and Shawn Burger only lasted two episode, one more than Lord Chumley and his flunky. I just don’t see the new humans as having the same staying power as the ones we got because they weren’t nearly as useful to their respective teams.
At least I can root for Muffler here.
As for the Autobots? I’m not against Firecycle and Whirlpool introducing female Transformers early. I’m not sure why they made Firecycle a medic with a motorcycle alt mode. Everyone else is close enough to either their tech spec profiles or their TV characters that I can accept it. Watching Jazz and Trailbreaker cut loose on Decepticons would have been very cool to watch. As stated before. Optimus actually using his trailer was cool. The show only did it once in season two and having a gun emplacement destroyed in the miniseries with little fanfare. Roller would hopefully get to do more as he only showed up slightly more than the trailer component, and those were only used in “Attack Of The Autobots” to increase the drama of Optimus’ evilizing. I actually have no problem with the Autobots…well, most of them.
Muffler. AKA “we still hate Bumblebee”. Having the comic relief malfunction machine that Muffler would have been, especially if they were going with that design, just wouldn’t work for me. I defend comic relief characters when I think they work, and Muffler didn’t. Orko was better with his magic than Muffler was with himself. The reduced cast meant we’d lose cool moments with the larger cast in battle, and Hasbro would be selling less toys. Beast Wars benefitted from its smaller cast, a technology limitation in the CG animation, but The Transformers felt more like a military unit from an alien robot planet, a mechanical space G.I. Joe. I’d hate to lose that and I’d hate to lose my favorite Autobot to this mess of a robot. This alone makes modern me, with the bias of hindsight, happy this version didn’t go through.
On the Decepticon side, the second draft did them a much better service. To continue the war story idea, this worked better than the “guest villain of the week” idea of the first draft. They’re a more serious threat. They’re closer to their tech spec and show ideas. The Decepticons were definitely served better by this draft. As for Negator replacing Megatron because CBS hated guns in kids shows? Given that today’s Megatron can’t by law have a gun mode (ticking off many toy collectors but tuff turkeys, it was a lame idea for the baddie leader anyway) and later original toys like Galvatron showed Negator’s form would have been possible even if they couldn’t find a counterpart from Diaclone and Micro Change. Personality-wise he’s still Megatron, and maybe even better at the role of evil faction leader.
In short, there are elements that I completely wish had made their way over to the show we got, and would have been changes for the better in how we view the franchise today. Other elements, the first draft being the worst of it, would have done no favors for the franchise or how it still exists today. At best it might have been a minor nostalgia hit like the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon or The Centurions, remembered but not really a part of the cultural zeitgeist. When it’s all said and done we definitely got the better deal, with three great seasons and a miniseries finale to go with the miniseries introduction. Could it have been good? Yes, just from the people involved. That doesn’t mean it would have worked as well as what we have. Sometimes you really are better off with what you already have.
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