Post by Pinwig on Mar 18, 2018 11:15:23 GMT
4.01 – The Rebirth – Part 1
Hasbro’s interest in using cartoons to promote their toy lines waned as the Transformers reached the end of its third season, and the series came to a halt in the autumn of 1987 with a three-part story written by experienced show writer David Wise. As a series, The Transformers outlived most of Hasbro’s other toy-driven 80s cartoons. Of the other big names, GI Joe finished in November 1986 (with the aborted cinema film following on home video in April 1987) and My Little Pony in September 1987 after a shortened fifteen-episode second season. Only Jem and the Holograms outlived The Transformers into 1988 before Sunbow ceased syndicated cartoon production altogether until 1991[1].
The on-screen credits for The Rebirth reflect Hasbro’s change in attitude and the subsequent downsizing at Sunbow, containing little reference to the West Coast staff who governed the production of the later second and third season episodes. It seems this encore story was produced much as the early episodes had been, with Sunbow’s involvement more or less reduced to being an interface between Hasbro and Marvel Productions. Even Marvel’s long running production co-ordinator for the series, Paul Davids, was no longer involved:
“As best as I can remember, there were severe cost-cutting measures in effect at that point, because Marvel only had a commitment to do a small number of additional shows. Essentially, Gerald Moeller, who had been responsible for bringing me aboard after the first 13 episodes, played the dual role of Producer and Production Coordinator for Marvel to wrap up the production.”
Unlike his previous second-season experience of working for Bryce Malek and Dick Robbins at Marvel, Wise recalls being approached by Sunbow directly to write the mini-series (as writers had been for the third season), but notably The Rebirth isn’t credited with a script or story editor at either company.
“By the time they got around to Rebirth the system was totally different. Marvel was out of the picture. I guess Marvel produced them but that was it. Somebody called me up; I don’t think it was Jay [Bacal, Sunbow Creative Director] – I can’t remember who it was now – and said, ‘we’re doing a five parter and we want you to write it’… I went sure, because you guys pay more for your scripts than Marvel ever did, and also because it was Transformers and I hadn’t done it for a year and a half and I sort of missed it.” [Kid Rhino DVD / Moonbase 2 Podcast]
These sketchy recollections show how low-key the fourth season of The Transformers was, and during the story-writing, Wise was presented with further difficulties when the initial order of five episodes was cut to three[2], giving him the headache of trying to juggle a meaningful storyline with the priority of introducing a multitude of new characters. In many interviews he famously recounts “doing the math” on the phone at the time to work out that across three episodes of animation, the new characters would have to be introduced at the rate of two or three a minute to get them all in, necessitating the ‘gang’ introduction approach the final story would eventually use. For Wise this was a compromise he had to make reluctantly:
“There are times when you can’t do what you want and you take your marching order. This was what we called a toy parade; it was literally to show the toys. The nature of it was such that I couldn’t say, ‘My artistic integrity won’t allow me to do this, give me some other Transformers to write about,’ because those were the toys for that year’s wave of Transformers. The problem was they were clever ideas as toys, but didn’t really make for great characters because they were like a line; there were twelve Headmasters and twelve Targetmasters, so how do you start differentiating and doing character and that kind of stuff when you’ve got these guys who were more or less identical?” [Kid Rhino]
Never-the-less, the end result is a surprisingly coherent three-part story with unusual depth, helped by the fact Wise tackled writing it by picking up ideas from his own earlier scripts, such as The Key To Vector Sigma, rather than taking the third season route of continuing ideas introduced by the film, with which he may not have been as familiar:
“I said we’re going to be creating new Autobots, obviously we’re going to use Vector Sigma and involve Alpha Trion and because everybody knew that this was it for the Transformers, we thought forever, I said - I want to give them a happy ending so we’re going to bring back the original Cybertron, we’re going to give them back the golden age and get them off Earth and resolve everything.” [Moonbase 2]
Ironically, in the finished story Vector Sigma has no direct input into the creation of the Headmasters (perhaps because the process is largely about combining existing lives rather than creating life), but instead is implied to be the orchestrator of Galvatron’s scheme to unleash the plasma energy chamber, which eventually restores Cybertron to its former glory.
Wise is never shy about taking credit for ideas, but the skeleton plot The Rebirth shares with the comic version of the story shows that the character names and fundamental idea of moving away from Earth in preference for the new world of Nebulos was part of his initial brief. While the comic created a pocket continuity by initially confining the new characters to a spin-off introduction away from the main story, Wise used the status quo achieved at the end of The Return of Optimus Prime as a start point. It is worth noting that one of the fundamental premises behind the story, that Spike becomes the core of Fortress Maximus, is much better suited to the cartoon than it is the comic, which had to belatedly introduce the character to achieve this. While in the early days it was the Marvel comics developed origin tale which fed the creation of the cartoon, it would seem by this point that Hasbro wanted it to be the other way around. The Headmasters story dovetails with the cartoon continuity better in general, and Wise’s intention to create a definite finale for the series is underpinned by the way the story begins with the remnants of the old guard, again led by Optimus after his return, before the cast is thinned out by the plasma explosion that moves the story to Nebulos.
“There was no place in the plot for Optimus Prime because there was so much stuff going on, but I loved Optimus and I was very glad they brought him back… I wanted to involve him deeply in these final episodes so I came up with the idea of this mystical vision coming to him… that all of this horrible stuff was actually for a good purpose, and the good purpose winds up being the rebirth of Cybertron… It finally gave the Autobots a happy ending. To give Optimus Prime something as massive to do as solving what has been the Autobots’ problem from show one, which is ‘our homeworld is destroyed, we’re stuck on Earth’ – I loved being able to do that. That was worth bringing on those gangs of Headmasters and Targetmasters in huge numbers.” [Kid Rhino]
To assist with the speed with which the new characters had to appear, Wise kept to the series’ tradition of treating them as if they’d always been there and instead focused on the Headmaster/Targetmaster conversion process as being the new promotion point. For the new characters who wouldn’t undergo this change, the opening battle scenes on Earth and Cybertron serve as their moment in the spotlight and stand as the only overtly obvious moments of toy promotion in a story entirely about that. The most prominent of these, Sixshot’s thirty second appearance showcasing his six modes in quick succession as he guns down the Aerialbots, begs the question of where the allegedly beleaguered and defeated post-hate plague Decepticons suddenly gained these powerful new warriors from – particularly the three Earth-form beasts who become Headmasters. This volume of short appearances is necessary to clear the decks for the influx of Nebulon partner characters in the second episode, but far from being the transparently obvious “toy parade” Wise feared the story would be seen as, the action is notably superior to the usual Autobot/Decepticon battles of the series because of the speed at which it plays out and the variety of characters on display. It’s more reminiscent of the Battle of Autobot City in the film, which served the same purpose of quickly rattling through as many characters as possible, than the stand-offs typical of the older cartoon.
That said, Wise’s rigid compartmentalising of the story to structure its necessary beats is obvious. The first act deals with extraneous characters and introduces the Optimus/plasma energy plot; the midpoint of the episode sees the key Autobots shipwrecked on Nebulos; the end of the second act establishes the enmity between the Nebulon rebels and the Hive; and the third act brings the Decepticons to Nebulos, presents a potted history of the planet and introduces the headmaster process as a way the Autobots and Nebulons can help each other. Broken down that simply, the first part does become an almost by numbers writing process, but the skill with which Wise hides this within a genuinely interesting narrative puts the story well above the average plotting the series usually exhibits.
Part of making this work is the shift in Optimus Prime’s leadership from being the action hero of the earlier seasons into an older, more fragile, character, subject to troubling visions and concerns about the future. The mysticism Wise injects into the story by keeping the Autobot leader largely out of the action so he can act as an interface to the past, carrying the narrative as he does, adds a layer to the story that the movie managed less well with the Matrix of Leadership – an all-powerful but undefined McGuffin that twice by this point had saved the day simply by being opened.
Wise’s equivalent – Vector Sigma – has more purpose from the outset, and as such in this story is easier to accept as the guiding light it seems to be. It’s important to remember that through lines like “Before Cybertron was… I was,” The Key To Vector Sigma established the super-computer as a sentient being, albeit one with an off switch. This suggests that when Optimus says, “Ever since I released the energy of the matrix, I’ve had these overwhelming feelings that something’s going to happen. Something big,” it’s Vector Sigma sending him messages, rather than something to do with the Matrix. Vector Sigma at least seems to be proactive in its interactions with the Transformers, born out by the eventual revelation that it is orchestrating the entire plot of the story, whereas the Matrix seems to merely be a repository of wisdom (see The Return of Optimus Prime).
The plasma energy chamber adds to Wise’s version of the mythos. Having established Vector Sigma as being the computer that gives Transformers personalities, the chamber is introduced as “the foundry in which the original Autobot bodies were forged, millions of years ago”. This carefully avoids referring to the Quintessons, and while not conflicting with anything established in the third season, leaves open the question of whether the chamber is part of the Quintesson manufacturing process shown in the flashbacks in Five Faces – Part Four, or something mythically deeper. Either way, being so unstable makes the birth of the Transformers created in it seem something of a tumultuous affair, and its evidently explosive power leaves the question of how the foundry was controlled originally when in regular use. It’s a nice (but no doubt coincidental) touch that it is Scourge, recently seen to be power hungry and ambitious (The Burden Hardest to Bear), who is tasked with opening the chamber by Galvatron – receiving a “power overload” in the process reminiscent of his attempt to absorb the Matrix. At this early point in the story, the revelations about the chamber are far more interesting than anything else that has happened, and its use here as the method by which the Headmaster and Targetmaster characters are separated from the others neatly sets up its bigger role in the third episode.
The Nebulos of the cartoon is slightly less complicated than the one of the comic, with less focus on the political and social wranglings of a technologically advanced planet and more on control by the ‘Hive’. In the comic, technology is equated to war, and the story of Galen’s moral dilemma over using the locked away Nebulan (Nebulan is spelt with an ‘a’ in the comic, but an ‘o’ in cartoon documentation) weaponry to defend his planet an obvious metaphor for the real world Cold War fears of the time. Wise takes the basic premise but instead adapts it into something more fitting for the cartoon – that ownership of technology on Nebulos by the Hive has reduced the rest of the population to be a subservient feudal society controlled by a privileged elite.
This neatly also provides a natural distrust of the Transformers by the Nebulon rebels who first encounter them. Given their equivalence in stature to humans, this first contact with the Transformers is very different to the original episodes of the first season. Despite the fact both stories begin with a spaceship full of robots crashing on an alien planet, long gone is the idea of the Transformers being robots in disguise. This isn’t helped by the sparse nature of Nebulos’s surface, offering little in the way of places to hide, but the Transformers being used as humanoid characters (as per the drive of the third season) rather than robots that can blend in by changing forms, is obvious. The first season’s message of peace and cooperation between races does persist, but the almost super-powered Nebulons take the upper hand in the relationship immediately, needing the Autobots to offer something as precious as their heads to prove their peaceful intent. It’s hard to see the original Autobots under Optimus Prime on Earth offering something so significant to Spike and Sparkplug as a way of demonstrating their peaceable nature – in that relationship the Autobots were always in control.
It’s notable that rather than introduce the Nebulon characters up front, Wise chooses instead to get straight into a dialogue between them and the Autobots, which leads to an initially confusing situation where many characters aren’t easily identifiable. It isn’t until six minutes later during the info-dump about Nebulon society (a considerable length of time in such a fast-paced episode), that each character is introduced by name. Only Firebolt, Hot Rod’s future Targetmaster, is named in the initial scene, and it quickly becomes apparent that in the absence of the Galen character from the comics (himself a stopgap before Spike’s introduction) that Gort appears to be the lead Nebulon rebel. Because of this, his appearance and character is reshaped by Wise into being a more considered and older leader type – far from the energetic ‘working class boy made good’ loved by every girl on the planet of his Budianski biography.
It’s clear because of the time constraints placed on Wise in writing the story that although there are differing personalities among the Nebulons, their dialogue is more about driving the story than it is selling them. While the Autobots are clearly separated by their individual personalities, the Nebulon characters aren’t what would sell the toys and so don’t get as much differentiation. The fact that Daniel’s injury is the trigger that causes Brainstorm to further his initial musings on combining human and Transformer life (something that is largely irrelevant to Hasbro’s needs because neither he or Arcee were promotable toys) shows how the Nebulons themselves play second fiddle to the Transformers, despite being the characters in control of the situation. Wise clearly still feels the need for an audience identification character, something missing in the third season due to the absence of a Bumblebee equivalent in the regular cast, and although The Rebirth largely becomes the story of Spike in its closing stages, Wise expands Daniel’s role to be the trigger for the Headmaster process.
The first episode finishes with a neat string of conclusions as to why the Headmaster process needs to go ahead. The Nebulons see it as a way to empower themselves enough to defeat the Hive machines; the Autobots see it as a way to rescue their captured friends; and Spike knows it’s the only way to save his son. Thankfully, because the seed for the idea has already been sown by the earlier scene of Hot Rod and Blurr racing on Cybertron, this unusual concept doesn’t feel inappropriate or too left-field to fit the story; Wise is careful enough with his writing to slowly grow the idea of the Headmaster process alongside Optimus’s premonitions of something ‘big’ being about to happen, making the first episode of The Rebirth come across as a well-rounded opening, juggling the needs of excessive character introduction with a genuinely interesting story idea. It’s arguable that the Japanese version of the story, in which the Headmasters are just smaller Transformers controlling bigger ‘Transtector’ bodies, is more logical, but given the jigsaw pieces he had to play with, Wise does well to fit them all into an appreciable picture. The, “Autobots, you’re about to become Headmasters,” cliff hanger is about as exciting as the TV series got, and sets up anticipation for the next instalment.
[1] Jem’s phenomenal popularity meant the cartoon outlived the toy line it was based on, having been the number one Nielsen rated syndicated cartoon series in November 1986 and the third most watched children's program in syndication in 1987 (with 2.5 million weekly viewers). In fact, the last run of Jem episodes in February 1988 meant the series would reach the 65 episode mark – important in making it viable for selling as a syndicated series that could run on weekdays for a quarter of a year – just as The Transformers had been intended to do by the end of its second season when it reached the same total.
[2] In later interviews, Wise talked about what was cut from his original five-part premise to reduce it to three episodes: “The basic story was the same, in the outline it just unfolded more carefully. There was a lot more characterization of the Nebulos rebels and emotional bonding between them and the Autobots. Early in Part One there was more on Daniel’s relationship with Arcee. There was more on the history of Nebulos. The Hive had more characterization. Things rolled out a little more smoothly. I think at first, we just created one Autobot Headmaster – the Daniel/Arcee partnership. Then, when the Nebulons and Autobots saw how effective they were as a team, they went for the idea of doing more Headmasters. In the finished show, it all happens insanely fast! I believe the Targetmasters would have had more to do – they are really an afterthought in the final script.” [geewunner.com]
Hasbro’s interest in using cartoons to promote their toy lines waned as the Transformers reached the end of its third season, and the series came to a halt in the autumn of 1987 with a three-part story written by experienced show writer David Wise. As a series, The Transformers outlived most of Hasbro’s other toy-driven 80s cartoons. Of the other big names, GI Joe finished in November 1986 (with the aborted cinema film following on home video in April 1987) and My Little Pony in September 1987 after a shortened fifteen-episode second season. Only Jem and the Holograms outlived The Transformers into 1988 before Sunbow ceased syndicated cartoon production altogether until 1991[1].
The on-screen credits for The Rebirth reflect Hasbro’s change in attitude and the subsequent downsizing at Sunbow, containing little reference to the West Coast staff who governed the production of the later second and third season episodes. It seems this encore story was produced much as the early episodes had been, with Sunbow’s involvement more or less reduced to being an interface between Hasbro and Marvel Productions. Even Marvel’s long running production co-ordinator for the series, Paul Davids, was no longer involved:
“As best as I can remember, there were severe cost-cutting measures in effect at that point, because Marvel only had a commitment to do a small number of additional shows. Essentially, Gerald Moeller, who had been responsible for bringing me aboard after the first 13 episodes, played the dual role of Producer and Production Coordinator for Marvel to wrap up the production.”
Unlike his previous second-season experience of working for Bryce Malek and Dick Robbins at Marvel, Wise recalls being approached by Sunbow directly to write the mini-series (as writers had been for the third season), but notably The Rebirth isn’t credited with a script or story editor at either company.
“By the time they got around to Rebirth the system was totally different. Marvel was out of the picture. I guess Marvel produced them but that was it. Somebody called me up; I don’t think it was Jay [Bacal, Sunbow Creative Director] – I can’t remember who it was now – and said, ‘we’re doing a five parter and we want you to write it’… I went sure, because you guys pay more for your scripts than Marvel ever did, and also because it was Transformers and I hadn’t done it for a year and a half and I sort of missed it.” [Kid Rhino DVD / Moonbase 2 Podcast]
These sketchy recollections show how low-key the fourth season of The Transformers was, and during the story-writing, Wise was presented with further difficulties when the initial order of five episodes was cut to three[2], giving him the headache of trying to juggle a meaningful storyline with the priority of introducing a multitude of new characters. In many interviews he famously recounts “doing the math” on the phone at the time to work out that across three episodes of animation, the new characters would have to be introduced at the rate of two or three a minute to get them all in, necessitating the ‘gang’ introduction approach the final story would eventually use. For Wise this was a compromise he had to make reluctantly:
“There are times when you can’t do what you want and you take your marching order. This was what we called a toy parade; it was literally to show the toys. The nature of it was such that I couldn’t say, ‘My artistic integrity won’t allow me to do this, give me some other Transformers to write about,’ because those were the toys for that year’s wave of Transformers. The problem was they were clever ideas as toys, but didn’t really make for great characters because they were like a line; there were twelve Headmasters and twelve Targetmasters, so how do you start differentiating and doing character and that kind of stuff when you’ve got these guys who were more or less identical?” [Kid Rhino]
Never-the-less, the end result is a surprisingly coherent three-part story with unusual depth, helped by the fact Wise tackled writing it by picking up ideas from his own earlier scripts, such as The Key To Vector Sigma, rather than taking the third season route of continuing ideas introduced by the film, with which he may not have been as familiar:
“I said we’re going to be creating new Autobots, obviously we’re going to use Vector Sigma and involve Alpha Trion and because everybody knew that this was it for the Transformers, we thought forever, I said - I want to give them a happy ending so we’re going to bring back the original Cybertron, we’re going to give them back the golden age and get them off Earth and resolve everything.” [Moonbase 2]
Ironically, in the finished story Vector Sigma has no direct input into the creation of the Headmasters (perhaps because the process is largely about combining existing lives rather than creating life), but instead is implied to be the orchestrator of Galvatron’s scheme to unleash the plasma energy chamber, which eventually restores Cybertron to its former glory.
Wise is never shy about taking credit for ideas, but the skeleton plot The Rebirth shares with the comic version of the story shows that the character names and fundamental idea of moving away from Earth in preference for the new world of Nebulos was part of his initial brief. While the comic created a pocket continuity by initially confining the new characters to a spin-off introduction away from the main story, Wise used the status quo achieved at the end of The Return of Optimus Prime as a start point. It is worth noting that one of the fundamental premises behind the story, that Spike becomes the core of Fortress Maximus, is much better suited to the cartoon than it is the comic, which had to belatedly introduce the character to achieve this. While in the early days it was the Marvel comics developed origin tale which fed the creation of the cartoon, it would seem by this point that Hasbro wanted it to be the other way around. The Headmasters story dovetails with the cartoon continuity better in general, and Wise’s intention to create a definite finale for the series is underpinned by the way the story begins with the remnants of the old guard, again led by Optimus after his return, before the cast is thinned out by the plasma explosion that moves the story to Nebulos.
“There was no place in the plot for Optimus Prime because there was so much stuff going on, but I loved Optimus and I was very glad they brought him back… I wanted to involve him deeply in these final episodes so I came up with the idea of this mystical vision coming to him… that all of this horrible stuff was actually for a good purpose, and the good purpose winds up being the rebirth of Cybertron… It finally gave the Autobots a happy ending. To give Optimus Prime something as massive to do as solving what has been the Autobots’ problem from show one, which is ‘our homeworld is destroyed, we’re stuck on Earth’ – I loved being able to do that. That was worth bringing on those gangs of Headmasters and Targetmasters in huge numbers.” [Kid Rhino]
To assist with the speed with which the new characters had to appear, Wise kept to the series’ tradition of treating them as if they’d always been there and instead focused on the Headmaster/Targetmaster conversion process as being the new promotion point. For the new characters who wouldn’t undergo this change, the opening battle scenes on Earth and Cybertron serve as their moment in the spotlight and stand as the only overtly obvious moments of toy promotion in a story entirely about that. The most prominent of these, Sixshot’s thirty second appearance showcasing his six modes in quick succession as he guns down the Aerialbots, begs the question of where the allegedly beleaguered and defeated post-hate plague Decepticons suddenly gained these powerful new warriors from – particularly the three Earth-form beasts who become Headmasters. This volume of short appearances is necessary to clear the decks for the influx of Nebulon partner characters in the second episode, but far from being the transparently obvious “toy parade” Wise feared the story would be seen as, the action is notably superior to the usual Autobot/Decepticon battles of the series because of the speed at which it plays out and the variety of characters on display. It’s more reminiscent of the Battle of Autobot City in the film, which served the same purpose of quickly rattling through as many characters as possible, than the stand-offs typical of the older cartoon.
That said, Wise’s rigid compartmentalising of the story to structure its necessary beats is obvious. The first act deals with extraneous characters and introduces the Optimus/plasma energy plot; the midpoint of the episode sees the key Autobots shipwrecked on Nebulos; the end of the second act establishes the enmity between the Nebulon rebels and the Hive; and the third act brings the Decepticons to Nebulos, presents a potted history of the planet and introduces the headmaster process as a way the Autobots and Nebulons can help each other. Broken down that simply, the first part does become an almost by numbers writing process, but the skill with which Wise hides this within a genuinely interesting narrative puts the story well above the average plotting the series usually exhibits.
Part of making this work is the shift in Optimus Prime’s leadership from being the action hero of the earlier seasons into an older, more fragile, character, subject to troubling visions and concerns about the future. The mysticism Wise injects into the story by keeping the Autobot leader largely out of the action so he can act as an interface to the past, carrying the narrative as he does, adds a layer to the story that the movie managed less well with the Matrix of Leadership – an all-powerful but undefined McGuffin that twice by this point had saved the day simply by being opened.
Wise’s equivalent – Vector Sigma – has more purpose from the outset, and as such in this story is easier to accept as the guiding light it seems to be. It’s important to remember that through lines like “Before Cybertron was… I was,” The Key To Vector Sigma established the super-computer as a sentient being, albeit one with an off switch. This suggests that when Optimus says, “Ever since I released the energy of the matrix, I’ve had these overwhelming feelings that something’s going to happen. Something big,” it’s Vector Sigma sending him messages, rather than something to do with the Matrix. Vector Sigma at least seems to be proactive in its interactions with the Transformers, born out by the eventual revelation that it is orchestrating the entire plot of the story, whereas the Matrix seems to merely be a repository of wisdom (see The Return of Optimus Prime).
The plasma energy chamber adds to Wise’s version of the mythos. Having established Vector Sigma as being the computer that gives Transformers personalities, the chamber is introduced as “the foundry in which the original Autobot bodies were forged, millions of years ago”. This carefully avoids referring to the Quintessons, and while not conflicting with anything established in the third season, leaves open the question of whether the chamber is part of the Quintesson manufacturing process shown in the flashbacks in Five Faces – Part Four, or something mythically deeper. Either way, being so unstable makes the birth of the Transformers created in it seem something of a tumultuous affair, and its evidently explosive power leaves the question of how the foundry was controlled originally when in regular use. It’s a nice (but no doubt coincidental) touch that it is Scourge, recently seen to be power hungry and ambitious (The Burden Hardest to Bear), who is tasked with opening the chamber by Galvatron – receiving a “power overload” in the process reminiscent of his attempt to absorb the Matrix. At this early point in the story, the revelations about the chamber are far more interesting than anything else that has happened, and its use here as the method by which the Headmaster and Targetmaster characters are separated from the others neatly sets up its bigger role in the third episode.
The Nebulos of the cartoon is slightly less complicated than the one of the comic, with less focus on the political and social wranglings of a technologically advanced planet and more on control by the ‘Hive’. In the comic, technology is equated to war, and the story of Galen’s moral dilemma over using the locked away Nebulan (Nebulan is spelt with an ‘a’ in the comic, but an ‘o’ in cartoon documentation) weaponry to defend his planet an obvious metaphor for the real world Cold War fears of the time. Wise takes the basic premise but instead adapts it into something more fitting for the cartoon – that ownership of technology on Nebulos by the Hive has reduced the rest of the population to be a subservient feudal society controlled by a privileged elite.
This neatly also provides a natural distrust of the Transformers by the Nebulon rebels who first encounter them. Given their equivalence in stature to humans, this first contact with the Transformers is very different to the original episodes of the first season. Despite the fact both stories begin with a spaceship full of robots crashing on an alien planet, long gone is the idea of the Transformers being robots in disguise. This isn’t helped by the sparse nature of Nebulos’s surface, offering little in the way of places to hide, but the Transformers being used as humanoid characters (as per the drive of the third season) rather than robots that can blend in by changing forms, is obvious. The first season’s message of peace and cooperation between races does persist, but the almost super-powered Nebulons take the upper hand in the relationship immediately, needing the Autobots to offer something as precious as their heads to prove their peaceful intent. It’s hard to see the original Autobots under Optimus Prime on Earth offering something so significant to Spike and Sparkplug as a way of demonstrating their peaceable nature – in that relationship the Autobots were always in control.
It’s notable that rather than introduce the Nebulon characters up front, Wise chooses instead to get straight into a dialogue between them and the Autobots, which leads to an initially confusing situation where many characters aren’t easily identifiable. It isn’t until six minutes later during the info-dump about Nebulon society (a considerable length of time in such a fast-paced episode), that each character is introduced by name. Only Firebolt, Hot Rod’s future Targetmaster, is named in the initial scene, and it quickly becomes apparent that in the absence of the Galen character from the comics (himself a stopgap before Spike’s introduction) that Gort appears to be the lead Nebulon rebel. Because of this, his appearance and character is reshaped by Wise into being a more considered and older leader type – far from the energetic ‘working class boy made good’ loved by every girl on the planet of his Budianski biography.
It’s clear because of the time constraints placed on Wise in writing the story that although there are differing personalities among the Nebulons, their dialogue is more about driving the story than it is selling them. While the Autobots are clearly separated by their individual personalities, the Nebulon characters aren’t what would sell the toys and so don’t get as much differentiation. The fact that Daniel’s injury is the trigger that causes Brainstorm to further his initial musings on combining human and Transformer life (something that is largely irrelevant to Hasbro’s needs because neither he or Arcee were promotable toys) shows how the Nebulons themselves play second fiddle to the Transformers, despite being the characters in control of the situation. Wise clearly still feels the need for an audience identification character, something missing in the third season due to the absence of a Bumblebee equivalent in the regular cast, and although The Rebirth largely becomes the story of Spike in its closing stages, Wise expands Daniel’s role to be the trigger for the Headmaster process.
The first episode finishes with a neat string of conclusions as to why the Headmaster process needs to go ahead. The Nebulons see it as a way to empower themselves enough to defeat the Hive machines; the Autobots see it as a way to rescue their captured friends; and Spike knows it’s the only way to save his son. Thankfully, because the seed for the idea has already been sown by the earlier scene of Hot Rod and Blurr racing on Cybertron, this unusual concept doesn’t feel inappropriate or too left-field to fit the story; Wise is careful enough with his writing to slowly grow the idea of the Headmaster process alongside Optimus’s premonitions of something ‘big’ being about to happen, making the first episode of The Rebirth come across as a well-rounded opening, juggling the needs of excessive character introduction with a genuinely interesting story idea. It’s arguable that the Japanese version of the story, in which the Headmasters are just smaller Transformers controlling bigger ‘Transtector’ bodies, is more logical, but given the jigsaw pieces he had to play with, Wise does well to fit them all into an appreciable picture. The, “Autobots, you’re about to become Headmasters,” cliff hanger is about as exciting as the TV series got, and sets up anticipation for the next instalment.
[1] Jem’s phenomenal popularity meant the cartoon outlived the toy line it was based on, having been the number one Nielsen rated syndicated cartoon series in November 1986 and the third most watched children's program in syndication in 1987 (with 2.5 million weekly viewers). In fact, the last run of Jem episodes in February 1988 meant the series would reach the 65 episode mark – important in making it viable for selling as a syndicated series that could run on weekdays for a quarter of a year – just as The Transformers had been intended to do by the end of its second season when it reached the same total.
[2] In later interviews, Wise talked about what was cut from his original five-part premise to reduce it to three episodes: “The basic story was the same, in the outline it just unfolded more carefully. There was a lot more characterization of the Nebulos rebels and emotional bonding between them and the Autobots. Early in Part One there was more on Daniel’s relationship with Arcee. There was more on the history of Nebulos. The Hive had more characterization. Things rolled out a little more smoothly. I think at first, we just created one Autobot Headmaster – the Daniel/Arcee partnership. Then, when the Nebulons and Autobots saw how effective they were as a team, they went for the idea of doing more Headmasters. In the finished show, it all happens insanely fast! I believe the Targetmasters would have had more to do – they are really an afterthought in the final script.” [geewunner.com]
