Well, break is over and it’s time to start on the second draft of the attempt to bring the Transformers to CBS Saturday mornings.
For those of you who came in late, after the syndicated miniseries “More Than Meets The Eye”, Hasbro worked to partner with CBS to get a potential wider audience for their TV ad show by bringing it to Saturday mornings. CBS would pay more of the bill, Marvel Productions and Sunbow Productions would still be a partner (as they worked with CBS in the past), and more kids would get the show because they wouldn’t be hunting down local channels to carry it at a time when they weren’t all owned by some national group like they are today.
This pitch also failed. However, it would be made closer to “More Than Meets The Eye”, taking place five years later and ditching the gender swaps…or in Sideswipe’s case ditching him altogether. They also cut out Teletraan-1, because CBS assumed robots already had built in computers that could do everything he did. That’s kind of dumb. You can check out the episode of Transformers: The Basics for more on the history. I’ll also be going over various details as we go on in the next batch of articles going over this new pitch, as well as the final part of this series where I look at an actual scripted episode from the show. If you want to follow along, these documents were all found by The Sunbow Marvel Archive, who posted them to their site. This is what I’ll be working from. Scroll down past the Season 1 section to find them.
I skimmed a bit through the early pages to get an idea of how I’d be breaking this draft down. It not only appear to have some clear divisions, but Jeffrey Scott took the time to set them up like a set of computer reports on the current state of Earth after the miniseries as they would have been done back in 1984. Originally done in February, the Archive has a revised version from March. So would this have been a better take than the first one, and why didn’t it succeed? Over the next few weeks we’ll find out, and that starts now with the revised premise, more in line with the backstory already created by Marvel Comics’ Jim Shooter and Bob Budiansky.
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