BW Media Spotlight

Previously in the first attempt to bring Transformers to CBS Saturday mornings:

Tens of years ago on a planet not called Cybertron, mechanical lifeforms formed because the gravity was too high for biology or something. On this unnamed world, the heroic Autobots managed to completely wipe out their ancient enemies, the Decepticons. However, Megatron and a group of his minions–the treacherous Soundwave and his loyal avian companion Buzzsaw, the bitter fembot Starscream, the silent red warrior Thundercracker, and the hate-filled Skywarp–came to Earth as glowing energy orbs, taking over Earth machine to transform into their new bodies. Their mission: give a new robot a body each week for their old enemies to blow up again.

The Autobots follow the Decepticons to Earth in their own glowy orb forms, with no telling if they died in the war, committed robo-suicide to follow them, or just ascended somehow. They, too have taken on vehicular forms for their mission: The leader Optimus Prime, second-in-command Jazz, the scout Trailbreaker, the info-gathering fembot Sideswipe (with a not so secret crush on Prime), the flashy Mirage, and the not-Bumblebee Toad. Also Ironhide, Prowl, Ratchet, and Hound who are…also here. As we begin the next exciting installment of CBS Transformers.

Humans. You know them. You love them…most of the time. Many of you probably are one yourself. And yet their appearance in Transformers fiction is strangely debated in the fandom. There is a side of the fandom that would rather humans not be there at all. While the live-action movies overuse them for budgetary reasons (the robots are technically still animated but have to look like they exist in the real world), if you’re setting your story on Earth you absolutely need them for narrative and strategic reasons. Cyberverse bypassed them for their own budgetary reasons, but they were also shorter stories when they were still on Earth and Cyberverse also might have been been on Cybertron for everything that happened after Bumblebee got his memory back, which they did. It’s also the only time I’ve actually enjoyed post-war Cybertron, but that’s another conversation.

On the narrative front, humans can ask the questions the audience would since they would be as unaware of Cybertronian life and culture as the audience. Strategically, as Sparkplug pointed out in “More Than Meets The Eye”, humans know more about Earth than the Autobots, giving them an advantage over the Decepticons. Comic Prime not using them, and the rest of the Autobots even after the G.I. Joe team-up, was always a mistake to me.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that Marvel Productions and Sunbow would have added humans to the CBS cast. However, by ignoring the miniseries they opted not to use the Witwicky’s. I can go more into that in the wrap-up and transition to the second attempt, though I will be doing comparisons between casts here at least in passing. For this installment I want to focus on the three humans created for this incarnation. The Autobots would again have two human allies, though this time even the Decepticons would have a human buddy that lasted more than four episodes. Let’s meet them today.

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