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?
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