BW Media Spotlight

image source: The Clutter Reports (my other site–I reviewed this toy)

Rescue Bots was not intended to be part of the “Aligned continuity“. The third or maybe fourth attempt–I forget when the movie tie-in happened–at creating a line of Transformers for pre and elementary school kids (and the second one to get a show, as we’ll see in the finale of this article series) it wasn’t supposed to be part of the main series. However, Jeff Klein was working on this show as well and it debuted on The Hub at the same time as Transformers Prime so it makes sense to do this even though this show was targeted to a younger demographic. This did lead to changes from the Playskool concept but at this point I’d be surprised if a show actually followed the toy completely. The original series took all kinds of liberties with characters and designs versus the tech spec and toys, the Beast Machines toys had to make new versions of characters just to match the show, I’ve talked to death how the Mini-Cons play gimmick was underutilized, so by now this is just business as usual.

Instead of the human characters Playskool created for the Rescue Bots toyline the show instead introduced the Burns family, changing Chief Burns from a firefighter to a police chief because “Burns” is a great name for a police chief rather than a firefighter. The whole family is now named Burns, including the firefighter so I guess that works. Poor Axel Fraiser never got to own a transforming garage with Bumblebee. Yep, this was the only Transformers toyline that had a playset you could actually use the whole series with that wasn’t made of cardboard. (At best Metroplex and friends worked only with the minicars and the Micromaster playsets only worked with Micromasters.) The concept revolves around rescue vehicles, a non-combat version of the Protectobots or Rescue Roy. (Points if you get that last reference without using this link.) It’s also the only cartoon to get four complete seasons, plus a spinoff that is now the only remaining link to the Aligned continuity. Although it’s link is at times in doubt due to Optimus at one point being dead in Prime while alive in Rescue Bots there were other times when they did match up…as much as possible when the Rescue Bots were living on an island high-tech testing ground mostly cut off from the outside world. We’ll discuss the series as we go along, and with no Japanese counterpart I’ll thrown in the spin-off show Rescue Bots Academy. So let’s roll to the rescue already!

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