BW Media Spotlight

We’re halfway through the production notes that led to the second draft of making a Saturday morning Transformers for CBS in the 1980s, after the same parties minus CBS already made a syndicated three episode miniseries for weekend airing. I still don’t get why, with everyone still there, they had to start from scratch. The work was already made. They had the backstory. They had the previous stories, meaning they had the cast and the history. I have my theories–infighting for various reasons, as I’ve stated–but it feels like a lot of work that could have gone into just making the stories, which they ended up doing with a syndicated series.

So far we’ve seen what went into the first draft, but now it’s time for Hasbro and for CBS to add their own notes. Sunbow and Marvel Productions weren’t doing this alone. The network has to deal with parent groups, hence some version of the Bureau Of Standards & Practices, and what they could and couldn’t get away with, as well as what marketing “genius” thought would sell the show to the kids versus whatever show it was put up against, or in some cases dump something into the slot that’s going against a juggernaut show and hope to get some of the stragglers who weren’t into that show. That’s usually the death knell for a show, especially in Prime Time but also in the SatAM slot. Plus they’re going up against sports, parents who make their kids play outside instead of watching TV (so the parents can watch TV), family parties, and other activities with the weekend off from work and school. Why make a tough battle worse?

Then there’s Hasbro. Their main goal is to sell toys to kids (or was back then–it’s up for debate now with the adult collector market and kids getting the shaft and blaming it on video games and tablets). Confusing kids isn’t a good idea, and they already paid Marvel a bunch of money to create lore, characters, and ideas that were all over the toys and other merchandise. The picture and coloring books were already telling the story of the Transformers (sorry, Rad) and what we saw in the first draft matched none of that. So we’re starting with Hasbro’s notes on what they didn’t like  So what were Hasbro’s concerns?

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