The original draft for the first attempt at a Saturday morning version of the Transformers took three days to write, but before that was more brainstorming and coming up with ideas. One early idea was having the Autobots team with an auto club, and another had Wendy as the daughter of a senator who got dragged into one of Toad’s spy missions and ended up part of the team. Neither idea, and probably a bunch of others, did not make the final draft. And of course none of this ended up in the syndicated series we eventually got in any of the three seasons and two miniseries. Eventually, Hasbro and Marvel Productions went with the first-run syndication idea, a still new concept in TV and one lost in our current streaming entertainment culture.
Before that a second draft would be produced after Hasbro rejected the first one. I’ll go more into it as we go on, but I do believe it was the right decision given they had a perfectly good series plot already. Why was Jeffrey Scott not allowed to see all the existing background material? Was it some legal issue? Was Jim Shooter right about the two Marvels competing with each other? We can only guess and I’ve made my case that I believe Shooter, but the point is they already had the miniseries to go by, and they didn’t. In the second draft they would come closer to what we already knew…but what about this draft?
I already said Hasbro rejecting this was the right move, but why? Could the show have been good? Could it have been retooled into something original and would it have worked for at least a season? We can only speculate, and that’s what I’m going to.
Continue reading →
Tell others about the Spotlight:
