BW Media Spotlight

The only comic produced for this toy series.

When it comes to the Cybertron toyline I have mixed feelings. On the one hand they’re some of the coolest looking Transformers of the Unicron Trilogy. Sure I don’t buy that Optimus Prime’s new form is a fire truck but it looks darn cool and one of the favorite trailer combos of the Primes among fans for a reason. For some odd reason I’m more into RID1’s Optimus Fire Convoy Prime but Galaxy Optimus Convoy Prime still looks darn cool. It could be because Fire Prime actually looks like a fire truck or maybe because he can link to Mini-Cons?

And that’s kind of what my problem with Cybertron was. The gimmick is basically Armada’s gimmick, only swap out “cool little robot that are their own toys and characters while also having extra features the media ignored” with “small circle of plastic claiming to be a key that’s easier to lose because it gets ignored when not unlocking the extra weapons”. The story for Cybertron is that the Autobots and Decepticons can now summon “cyber keys” out of nowhere to unlock hidden weapons while searching the galaxy for four Cyber Planet Keys, physical objects in the show while in the toyline it’s just the specially colored keys of the various planet leaders. When inserted in the Omega Lock (and I forget if they’re even needed on the toy, you just need the Omega Lock) they allow Primus to turn Cybertron into his robot body, ready to finally have a fair fight with Unicron…except Unicron is dead, thus losing that potential. A handful of Cybertron’s Transformers are Mini-Con compatible, and a smaller number of those have Mini-Con partners, but it’s the keys that unlock the gimmick. It’s kind of a disappointment.

The show on the other hand may be the better of the three, which let’s be honest isn’t saying much. We’ve forgot to tell someone at Gonzo, the new animation studio, that this was the final chapter of a trilogy, forcing the dubbers to try to force connections in with dialog and a specially drawn sequence showing what happened to the other human characters. They also tried to add some more character to the characters, explain some of the odd choices of the Japanese counterpart, Galaxy Force, and not having the Autobots shrugging off tense situations. They also made Nitro Convoy, leader of Speed Planet (a world where racing really is king), from male to the female Override because Cartoon Network wanted a female Autobot I guess. She would be the first one since G1 (not counting Maximals or computer AI holograms), and there was a female Decepticon named Thunderblast, the second time we saw a female Decepticon outside of manga in a series. Anime purists who saw the subtitles for Galaxy Force weren’t happy of course but as far as the Unicron Trilogy goes this had more effort put into it than the previous two. Too bad the CG/traditional animation hybrid still looks terrible. Zoids was out around this time, guys. We knew it could be done right.

I can’t finish this overly long intro (which is why I didn’t go into the stock footage transformations that takes more time than actually transforming the toys) without warning you that Galaxy Force had five intros! However, three of them have so few variations that I’m not going to try to track them all down. Cybertron only has one so let’s start with that.

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