Sunbow Sundays

[Pinwig]

Episode 49. Discounting the movie (which might need dealing with in a different way to the usual weekly write ups simply because of what it is) that brings us to half way through the 98 TV episodes! it also brings me to the 75,000 word mark!  

Good episode this. Makes good use of the sources it draws on.

49 - Sea Change

When placed in the context of his other writing for the series, Douglas Booth’s fingerprints can be seen all over Sea Change. Not only does it take its principle inspiration from a cherished work of literature, as was the case with A Decepticon Raider at King Arthur’s Court, it also revisits both the idea of an underwater kingdom (Atlantis, Arise!) and uses themes lifted from ancient cultures while doing so (Fire on the Mountain, and A Plague of Insecticons). However, to call it a greatest hits package - this being his penultimate script - would be harsh because it presents ideas new to the series as well, and provides a chance for an closer look at the so far largely ignored character of Seaspray. On the surface, the whole ‘Seaspray falls in love with a woman’ idea does sound a little unlikely, but when looked at more thoroughly, his affection for Alana is more a by-product of the thought provoking themes Booth explores with the story.

Rather than simply meaning a change brought about by the sea, “sea-change” is an idiom which in literary terms is a reference to something that undergoes a transformation, sometimes into a higher or more profound state. This originates in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, in which the sea nymph Ariel tricks Ferdinand, the prince of Naples, into believing his father has drowned in a storm. She sings about how his body lies on the sea bed suffering a “sea-change into something rich and strange”. On the one hand this can be read as a poetic phrasing of the process of decomposition, but on the other it questions what the body becomes - perhaps mortal remains returning to the ground while the soul transforms into another state. This becomes one of the main themes in The Tempest, which explores the idea of soul and transcendence through the wizardly Prospero and his two servants - Ariel representing the elemental or metaphysical side, and the troll-like Caliban, the baser and more physical.

It’s a popular and frequently recurring theme in a wide range of literature. Examples would include Hans Christian Anderson’s ‘The Little Mermaid’, in which the titular mermaid dissolves into the foam of the sea only to rise again as a ‘worthier’ spirit of the air; Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, in which the scientist Jekyll tries to improve himself by separating his positive and negative qualities; and more modern stories such as Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001 - A Space Odyssey’, in which astronaut Dave Bowman transcends the boundary of human existence to achieve a higher state of understanding.

It’s also worth noting another deliberate water connection while looking at the inspiration for this story. When needing an alien culture, Booth does exactly what Buzz Dixon did with The God Gambit and takes from Aztec and Mayan sources. Step pyramids are becoming a familiar motif in the series, but in this case Booth uses the Aztec paradise ‘Tlalocan’ as the basis for the Tlalakans. It’s no coincidence that in Aztec mythology, Tlaloc is a rain god who looks after the souls of those who perish through drowning (among other things).

These references may seem a little high-brow when analysing a children’s cartoon, but it shows how clever Booth has been in the way these ideas are suggested, but channelled in such a fashion that they are easily understood in the context of the medium. In that regard it is worlds apart from A Decepticon Raider… and goes deeper than simply being a story about Seaspray illogically falling in love with a ‘human’. Transformers clearly do have emotions - Bumblebee has an obvious affection for Spike - but more than that the series has yet to explore properly, and won’t until David Wise starts messing about with the idea in a more ham-fisted way with The Girl Who Loved Powerglide and then War Dawn.

The allusions to the Tempest become more strained after looking at the initial inspiration, Booth taking the idea of metamorphosis literally with the ‘Well of Transformation’, but the way it allows Seaspray to question his desires goes beyond simply being a story about him getting a girlfriend.

His character is noticeably altered from the one presented by his biography to allow for this. In its cartoon form it simply says he “loves the ocean and its creatures”, but the fuller Marvel version also talks about his pride at being a naval commander for the Autobots - a role made unique by the fact that Cybertron has no seas. His love of water is certainly shown in this episode, but the way it opens with him wishing upon a star, leading into the whole exploration of his being, marks him out more as a Beachcomber style philosophical thinker than a warrior of the sea. In terms of practicalities it’s also worth noting that he travels on the surface of the water as you’d expect here, as opposed to hovering in the air as he has in previous appearances.

The biggest area of his character explored here is his obvious affection for Alana, which leads to his desire to become ‘human’ (Or Tlalakan) - rejecting his robot form as inferior in the process. It would be convenient to be able to say that he is drawn to her because of her nature as a water-based life form, but the blushing incident happens well before he is even aware of that, making his initial attachment to her appear to be based purely on looks. This is quickly followed by the introduction of the well. Alana explains: “The Well of Transformation dissolves the body, leaving only the essence which can then reform into whatever new body we choose”. This appears to be a conveniently magical way to give the Tlalakans the ability to transform like the Autobots, which the story can get away with because of its setting on another planet (compare to the believability of something like Beachcomber’s Earth-based electrum pool in The Golden Lagoon). It also links to the Tlalocan inspiration and the way the rain deity absorbs the essence of drowned souls. However, the amphibious living of the Tlalakans is less important to the plot than the effect their ability to transform has on Seaspray.

When he eventually decides to see what the pool will do to him, it is telling that part of him remains in robot form. This may seem comical, but it’s a way of showing that he is undecided about whether assuming a human form is right for him and that, as he says, part of him will always be a robot (even if this is forgotten in the next scene when he gains a tail). When pondering this, he questions himself - “maybe that is all I am - a bunch of transistors and bolts” - the implication being that he sees Transformers as a lesser species than humans, and specifically that his “heart looks like an energon pump, but that doesn’t mean it can’t feel”, referring to the fact he has emotions regardless of his robotic insides.

This confusion introduces what will become the moral of the story, that what you look like on the outside doesn’t determine the person you are within. The story plays with the idea of physical perfection being the way to happiness, what with Seaspray’s “How do you like that?” when he appears as a muscular, golden-haired man, causing Alana to fall into his arms, and then her seductively toned, “You like?” when she adopts the form of a svelte female robot. However, she follows this quickly with, “a temporary measure for fighting Decepticons”, making it clear that she is only doing this to prove a point, not to permanently assume a form designed to appeal to Seaspray. This is reinforced by the conclusion when Alana says that although she prefers her human form, it “doesn’t mean I don’t love you. We don’t have to be the same outside to share the same feeling inside”, which gives a neat and easily understood message about prejudice to the juvenile audience. This is subtly different to the intention of the original synopsis, which reads: “Disappointed by his humanoid form, Seaspray transforms back to a robot, and Alana says that, although they are different, she will always love him”, putting the emphasis on Seaspray making the decision about his future rather than Alana telling him it doesn’t matter he’s a robot. Seaspray’s position as the romantic among the Autobots is then confirmed when Bumblebee asks Perceptor if he wants to make a wish on the first star of the evening, eliciting the response, “Whatever for?”.

Aside from the discussion about the nature of being, the episode provides further evidence of the expansion of the Decepticon Empire. However, unlike The Gambler, in which Megatron appears to have made links with other planets after his arrival on Earth, Sea Change uses a scenario which seems to pre-date that event. Perceptor’s decoding of Deceptitran’s SOS signal reveals it to be of the kind that was used during the “Third Cybertronian War”, suggesting that he has been operational on the Tlalakan world since then.

It seems likely that Deceptitran started out as a Decepticon equivalent to Teletraan-1, despite the difference in the suffix spelling. The synopsis describes him as a “non-sentient Decepticon computer”, which clearly changed at the scripting stage because of the need for exposition to explain the plot, presumably also necessitating a more mobile physical form; the villain of the piece wouldn’t amount to much if he was just a faceless computer, something also seen by TORQ III in Day of the Machines.

Megatron also doesn’t display much affection for what he calls a computer, implying that Deceptitran’s presence among the Tlalakans isn’t one of his current energy harvesting plans. In addition, Deceptitran’s greeting, “How good it is to see Decepticons again!” suggests a) that he doesn’t know Megatron by sight, and b) that it has been a considerable length of time since he last saw Transformers. Megatron treats him as an automaton, referring to him as a “hysterical piece of machinery” in need of reprogramming, and that he “cares nothing for it”, which again suggests a computer of some age, well past its sell by date. This suggests Megatron has stumbled across this resource because of the distress signal, rather than having set it up recently himself. It’s also worth noting that despite the fact they can speak, Deceptitran’s drones are deliberately shown to dissolve into nothing in the Well of Transformation, marking them out as not being sentient, and that the sentience, or soul, of Seaspray is what allows his transformation to work.

With its discussion of the metaphysical, and roots in Shakespeare and Aztec culture, Sea Change is far more of an interesting episode than it may initially seem. It gives Seaspray one of the more three-dimensional characters among the Autobots, and also expands elements of the still ill-defined Cybertronian war by showing how the Decepticons were harvesting energon off-world to support their cause. Because of that, it’s possible to overlook its more questionable aspects, such as Seaspray blushing and falling for Alana in the first place, making it a worthwhile and thought-provoking addition to the series.

[Pinwig]

And on with the second half...

50 - Triple Takeover

Essentially a vehicle to push the two 1985 released Decepticon triple changers, Triple Takeover is the third of Larry Strauss’s four scripts for the series. As mentioned under his previous episode, Blaster Blues, he famously stopped writing for the Transformers claiming it was too violent, which is reflected in the way this episode carries an intentionally humorous undertone to what is essentially a big leadership fight.

Astrotrain and Blitzwing are likely candidates for prime roles in the Decepticon ranks because they are the only characters from the 1985 rosta that stand out as unique. By the time of the second season, the Insecticons and Constructicons already had their roles defined, and apart from the ignored Deluxe Insecticons, the cone heads were the only other characters to bring in. The new jets make excellent additions to the rank and file, but even a different shaped head can’t really differentiate them from Thundercracker and Skywarp. The triple changers meanwhile are much more distinct, and Astrotrain especially becomes a series staple because of his transport ability. This is also noted under the entry for The God Gambit, where Astrotrain appears to take a leadership role in the Decepticon away team before getting delusions of grandeur on Titan. It could be because there were no other options, but it’s clear from that and this episode that the two triple changers were seen as important figures who were high up the pecking order. That might also explain the absence of Soundwave in this episode; Starscream is swiftly dealt with, but Megatron’s natural right hand is deliberately left out because his devout loyalty would conflict with the way the plot works.

It being that there is very little continuity between the episodes, there is no real build up to why Astrotrain and Blitzwing suddenly feel the need to try and usurp Megatron - a figure feared by every other Decepticon. Astrotrain has shown previous intentions when it comes to leadership bids as noted with The God Gambit, but if anything it’s his occasional grumbles in the past about being used as an undignified transport ship that suggest he might be looking for a larger role; much like the few references Grimlock made to being used before revolting in Desertion of the Dinobots. Blitzwing meanwhile has even less motive to want to lead. He has been seen before now as an away team commander (The Golden Lagoon) but more often than not is - literally - the heavy artillery in any large scale battle. Neither character has any suggestion in their biographies that they have aspirations to command, Astrotrain simply being listed as military transport and Blitzwing a commando. As such, it’s most likely the need to push the toys that leads to Strauss making both characters out to be more than they really are.

However, part of the fun of this episode is that once Megatron and Starscream are out of the way, everyone seems to feel they should have a shot at leading the Decepticons - even Devastator, who is shown in the series to be fiercely loyal to Megatron (see The Core). For this to work at all, Starscream has to be kept out of the action as much as Megatron, and so he becomes part of the plan at the beginning to remove the pair of them. This initial step is really the most impressive thing Astrotrain and Blitzwing manage in the episode, perhaps showing that together they could be a force to be reckoned with. The fact they part company as soon as they’ve pulled off the initial ruse seems odd, but the original synopsis for the episode explains: “Blitzwing and Astrotrain compete with each other to determine who should be leader of the Decepticons”. This isn’t made clear in the final episode, but again comes back to the way that Strauss uses the element of competition to inject humour into what otherwise would be a knockdown fight between the pair. It may also explain why Blitzwing is so worried about the scoreboard - as if this is what remains of an original intention for the pair to keep score to see who should ‘win’ control of the Decepticons.

As said, Strauss is very careful throughout the episode to ensure that any violence carries a subtle undertone of comedy - depicting both Astrotrain and Blitzwing as bumbling fools wherever possible. Astrotrain trying to create an army out of real trains who respond to his upgrades by beeping and flashing their approval is a good example of this, as is the sports metaphor used throughout with Blitzwing: his misunderstanding that the football coach would naturally be a fine military strategist, and the ‘zone defence’ joke that leads him to order the Constructicons to build a maze outside his stadium base. In particular it’s worth comparing the Astrotrain of this episode to the much more overtly nasty one in The God Gambit, again showing Strauss’s reluctance to have genuinely evil and violent characters in his stories. The humour is then extended by the way the Autobots are used as incredulous bystanders, either cheerfully clearing up after the Decepticons as the city floods, or laughing as they fight among themselves - not getting “involved in domestic squabbles” as Prime chuckles.

As Strauss isn’t a frequent contributor to the series, and his previous episode, Blaster Blues, is some way in the past, it’s interesting to note that a lot of the peripheral Autobot cast featured in this one are the same. This lends to the idea that certain characters are ear-marked as being essential to an episode, whereas the supporting cast are chosen by the writer. Examples here are how in Blaster Blues, Red Alert and Inferno are shown together as a partnership because at that point it happened almost every episode, yet neither feature here because their time in the limelight has passed. Conversely, in the lesser roles, Strauss uses Prowl, Trailbreaker and Hoist again, the latter two as was the case before to utilise their skills. It’s worth noting that Skids appears here briefly too - his only other appearance in the series beyond being seen being repaired by Hoist in Quest for Survival. Ironhide also gets a look in, giving him the chance to grumble about finishing the Decepticons off for good in a very pilot episode style. In fact the Autobot scenes in this episode are highly reminiscent of the first season generally, and the way they usually react to Decepticon trouble rather than being proactive about stopping it.

This doesn’t stop them being fodder for the might of the triple changers though, particularly Blitzwing, who uses his two modes to great effect in his ‘zone defence’ to flatten the Autobot cars in an unusually comprehensive manner. Showing their strength is all about selling them, but it’s noticeable that the Constructicons get good exposure in this story too. Not only does the impressive maze they build remind the viewer of their role in the Decepticon ranks, but in building a throne out of the Autobots trashed by Blitzwing there is a subtle reference to Scrapper’s biography, which includes “shows malevolence by incorporating defeated Autobots into his structures”. It’s interesting that Scrapper himself sits on this throne until Smokescreen’s trademark black cloud gets him off it, which foreshadows the appearance of Devastator at the end of the episode and the revelation that Blitzwing tricked the Constructicons into helping him by offering them joint leadership.

An uprising among the Decepticons is a good source of material for the cartoon. Megatron’s troops are generally shown to be mindless followers, with only Starscream offering any resistance to him. Astrotrain and Blitzwing are more likely candidates for a coup than any others, and the way the story builds toward a Royal Rumble between all interested parties makes for an interesting conclusion. The wrestling metaphor is apt here, in that viewers know that within the restrictions of the series no one is going to be permanently deactivated and that Megatron will prevail, but an all out fight between the most significant of the Decepticons, including Devastator no less, makes this episode well worth the price of admission.

[Pinwig]

Excellent concept, botched implementation

51 - Prime Target

With the introduction of Devcon several episodes previously, the idea of bounty hunters in the Transformers’ universe is one that has real potential (Death’s Head in the UK comics, for example, launched a career with it), and the idea of the mighty Optimus Prime being the most prized trophy of all is a reasonable pitch in the context of the series’ increasing involvement with life away from Earth. However, instead of taking this exciting, world-expanding option, writers Buzz Dixon and Flint Dille chose to spoil the idea by knocking out a filler yarn using a stereotypical British Empire era big game hunter instead.

Dixon impressed when writing alone about one of his pet subjects with The God Gambit, but for Prime Target he partnered with his GI Joe co-writer to create something less thought-provoking. Dixon and Dille were both heavily involved with the Joes, writing many episodes as well as story editing the first season together. That first season was in production at the same time as the Transformers’ second, and it’s possible to see the duo’s shared input into a Transformers story as a little light relief from the relentless pace of GI Joe production - either that or a filler to replace something that fell through. Dixon talks in his Rhino DVD interview about the hectic pace of the office sometimes meaning Sunbow employees would fill in where necessary.

However, what the union of shows does provide is the first instance of a genuine cross-over, albeit done on the sly. The opening scene of Prime Target, featuring the Russian pilot claiming to be ‘Oktober Guard One’, is a reference to the Oktober Guard of the GI Joe universe. Having first appeared in the Marvel GI Joe comic in its sixth issue (dated December 1982), the Oktober Guard made a handful of appearances in the Sunbow GI Joe cartoon - the first of which (The Invaders) was actually broadcast two weeks after Prime Target in November 1985. Dixon would then go on to feature this team, the Russian equivalent to GI Joe, in his own second-season opener Arise, Serpentor, Arise! As such, the unnamed pilot here, evidently intended to be the Oktober Guard’s pilot, Daina, makes a brief screen debut in a series other than her naturally intended one, potentially written around the time Dixon was also script-editing her first cartoon Joe appearance.

Being 1985, the idea of a stolen experimental jet fighter bringing Russia to the brink of war with America isn’t beyond the bounds of credibility, but this opening, and the fervour with which Optimus tries to save his team (and therefore the world), doesn’t marry well with the story’s main antagonist being a stock character from an era a hundred years in the past. Racial stereotypes being used to create quick character portraits in 1980s cartoons is nothing new, not even to the Transformers, but Lord Chumley and his aging butler present a picture of English life matched only by Wigend of Blackthorne in Douglas Booth’s A Decepticon Raider in King Arthur’s Court. Whereas Booth can claim a legitimate connection to the English aristocracy, being the 3rd Baronet of Allerton Beeches, Dixon and Dille’s creation is clearly a straight off the peg film stereotype. The reference to the Boer War (1899-1902) provides a vague connection to the real 5th Marquess of Cholmondeley (pronounced Chumley), who fought in that particular South African conflict, but nothing about this background has been properly thought through because the war reference would make Dinsmoore at least a hundred years old. Chumley is presented as a big game hunter from the era of the British Empire, which is why the reference is to the Boer War and not either of the more likely world wars.

Being an English Lord, Chumley of course lives in a castle, rather comically set up as a gothic edifice high on a mountain plateau in a landscape more akin to Bram Stoker’s Dracula than anything found in the English countryside. Prime only refers to it anonymously as “the target area”, so it’s possible it isn’t actually in England, but he does arrive there by using a previously unseen rocket on his trailer which appears to enable him to fly. Chumley drinks tea through a handlebar moustache, both noted Edwardian stereotypes, and Dinsmoore refers to Prime’s behaviour at one point as “not being cricket”. Thankfully his animal hunting trophies are quickly passed over to focus more on his desire to display military hardware. The jump to an empty plaque awaiting Optimus’s head is as awkward a transition as the one from a stuffed bird to a crashed “Huey” helicopter, but the following scenes showing the capture of the Autobots demonstrate nothing is beyond this man, including the incredible Creamy Cream hand which extends out of its billboard advert to grab hold of Blaster. Even that bizarre dimensional anomaly is topped at the end of the episode though, when Prime appears to reach Chumley’s control room by bursting out of the monitor screen he is being observed on.

The episode allows the writers endless inventiveness with the traps Chumley creates, which is probably the appeal in writing it, but one easily overlooked point is that Chumley, being a hunter, wants to capture Prime in his own habitat, and therefore the odd collection of buildings outside his castle that look like a disused gasworks are in fact Chumley’s own “well researched mock up of Cybertron”.

In keeping with the trend for promoted characters to appear in sequential episodes, the focal Decepticons in this story are the same as the previous one, minus the Constructicons. There are only four, and they aren’t properly introduced until half way through the episode, making this a light episode for the usual bad guys. Megatron finds Chumley’s activities impressive, has Starscream to ask him questions about it, and then dispatches Blitzwing and Astrotrain to investigate - who then turn tail when they realise the Autobots are free.

The triple changers have more settled personalities by this point, and it’s interesting that Astrotrain particularly is the figure he was in the previous episode, and not the much more sinister version Dixon wrote in The God Gambit (again perhaps lending credence to the idea that The God Gambit was originally about Megatron or Starscream, but the desire to promote Astrotrain and position him above the strike planes in the Decepticon hierarchy caused a switch). In keeping with the way they were shown in Triple Takeover, they are by this point seen as a Laurel and Hardy style partnership, with Astrotrain considering himself superior to the clumsy Blitzwing - the obvious dramatic irony being that they’re as bad as each other. His line, “Blitzwing, how do you get into these messes?” is very Oliver Hardy.

The triple changers also serve another purpose in diffusing Prime’s threats. Much of this episode is about Optimus trying to get to Chumley, ostensibly to free the Autobots, but also to ‘correct’ Chumley’s wrong doing. Threats such as, “If that was your best shot you’re in deep trouble”, suggest he intends Chumley harm, but obviously as the leader of the good guys he can’t hurt a human and so Astrotrain and Blitzwing get to chase Chumley around for a bit instead.

The end of the episode, which explains that by delivering the jet fighter and its thief back to the Russians, Optimus has returned “Earth from the brink of war”, reminds the viewer of the subtle undertone carried beneath the hi-jinks with Chumley. The occasional news reports through the episode are of more historical interest than the main plot, and play off the general paranoia surrounding the real possibility of nuclear war at the time. It’s a glimpse at how real concerns permeated through life generally, even into children’s cartoons, although the chance to explore the idea properly is overshadowed by Chumley’s hunt. It’s also worth mentioning the fact the Autobots are watching a soap opera when the first news report interrupts it, showing a vague integration between the Cybertronians and American media culture.

The idea of Prime being hunted as a trophy is handled here in a mundane and straightforward way. Even though the increasingly outlandish traps set by Chumley are fine entertainment for a juvenile audience, they aren’t really anything to do with the Transformers and it would perhaps have been more fitting to see Megatron trying to incite a nuclear war by stealing the plane. In that regard, Prime Target works well, but it leaves the more dedicated viewer wondering what this episode could have been like had it been written by someone like Michael Charles Hill (The Gambler) who pitched stories that tried to develop the Transformers world instead of poking fun at it.

[Pinwig]

This is one of those episodes that on the surface sounds ridiculous, but once you start to think about it, it's got some pretty neat stuff going on.

52 - Auto-Bop

Auto-Bop shows the usual traits of a David Wise script in that it’s built around an attention grabbing climax with the rest of the story a simple explanation of how that point is reached. Although it comes off the back of what Wise says was a Sunbow request for another Tracks/Raoul story, the one-line pitch would be: ‘Blaster and Soundwave battle in a duel of sound’ - which is as great an idea as his last episode headlining fight between Omega Supreme and Devastator (The Secret of Omega Supreme). Fortunately, in this case, the script stays within established continuity and by re-using the successful setting from Make Tracks is built on firm foundations.

Auto-Bop is almost a direct sequel. It uses the same New York setting, features Raoul and Tracks again (as well as Blaster) and even revisits the secret Autobot base hidden behind “Sparkplug’s” repair shop, containing an interface to Teletraan-1. The art may not match up entirely with the base’s previous appearance, but the intent is definitely there that this is another story of the Autobots’ peacekeeping detachment in the Big Apple. It’s also notable that the story takes place entirely at night again, giving it the same underworld vibe Make Tracks had, and although it’s firmly about the Decepticons and doesn’t involve significant human antagonists (as was the case with the Geddis Brothers) it focuses as much on the human element of the story as the robotic.

The fact that in this case it means Raoul gets another shot in the limelight is not only Wise giving one of his own creations another run out; it also helps to make the tone of the story slightly more mature and closer to reality than allowed for by the detached figures Spike and Sparkplug had become. The fact that the story features Sparkplug’s garage, but not Sparkplug himself, speaks volumes. The intention here is to make the setting feel as real as possible, or as close to the way film and television portrayed edgy, big city life at the time. In looking for a story to build around the theme of music, freedom of expression through dance and break-dancing in particular match the 1985 zeitgeist perfectly - exemplified by the TV series Fame (1982-87, also set in New York), and films of the time such as Flash Dance (1983), Footloose (1984) and Breakdance: The Movie (1985). In that regard, Wise attempts to engage his audience by using contemporary teenage trends instead of the usual approach of recycling stock cartoon plots or lifting ideas from aging books and films. A good comparison is the way the dark, neon-lit cityscape of Tokyo was used for comedic effect in Kremzeek!, compared to the way an identical setting has a much darker feel here.

The cartoon’s environments never quite look real because they have to be copyright-infringement free interpretations made by Toei’s Japanese animators, which means keeping text such as billboards and shop names generic, but Wise counters this in the script by using an unusually high number of real world references instead. When Raoul makes to escape from the hypnotised dancers he suggests it’s “time to pull a Michael Jackson”, Poplock adding “let’s beat it” - referring to the singer’s 1982 hit single. Then when explaining to Blaster and Tracks why they’re being chased, Raoul refers to their pursuers as “road warrior rejects”, referencing the second Mad Max film (released under the title ‘The Road Warrior’ in the US in 1981) - particularly the lead punk, whose studded leather and mohican bear a noticeable resemblance to Wez, one of Mel Gibson’s main adversaries. Further examples are Rocksteady’s dismissive retort to Raoul, “you know the Autobots like I know Prince”, and Tracks explaining his suspicions about the Dancitron patrons by referring to how odd it was to see “a guy off the cover of GQ dancing with a housewife”, referring to the New York based men’s magazine.

Most of these references come at the beginning of the episode before any Transformers have been introduced, setting the unusual tone so that when they do appear they feel more imposing and out of place than usual - as if they are entering an existing story rather than the story being about them. It’s a subtle difference, but one that makes Tracks and Blaster seem more significant, especially the way that Tracks appears in car mode first as a hidden observer. When he and Blaster transform to take on the hypnotised night clubbers, the moment has more impact than usual, helped by some low camera angles.

Adding to this is the fact the cast of Transformers for this episode is smaller than the human one, totalling just four of any significance. This gives them more focus, and the shadowy figures of Starscream and Soundwave looking down over the Dancitron floor consequently seem much more sinister than usual. In terms of mind control stories, the violent nature of the humans here is much darker than the slaves Megatron uses in The Ultimate Doom.

Soundwave is an unusual figure anyway, and despite the need for him to be present because of the musical theme and intended battle with Blaster, he fits into this setting well. There are several factors that seem to differentiate Soundwave from other Transformers in the eyes of casual fans - the two most notable being the expressionless face and the monotone modulated voice. Here he comes across as darker even than the growling Megatron, manipulating sound and light to control humans, and it’s no coincidence that in later iterations of the character, such as the Michael Bay and Transformers: Prime versions, that he remains faceless and silent, and is all the more frightening because of it. Soundwave generally seems to be considered the ‘cool’ Decepticon, leading to tie-ins such as the gold Linkin Park version that came out in 2013, and episodes like this are partly responsible for that reputation.

Like Make Tracks, a lot of this story is played in a detective style with Tracks and Raoul solving a mystery. Although the audience is made aware early on that the Decepticons are involved, their actual plan remains shrouded until the duo work it out. This is where the most glaring problem with the episode lies - in that the script never explains properly why Starscream and Soundwave are hypnotising people to work on a construction site in the middle of the night. When Starscream reports to Megatron, he simply says that the “construction is proceeding on schedule”. Only when looking at the original story synopsis is it revealed that the building is “a new headquarters being constructed by the hypnotized patrons from Dancitron” - information which doesn’t seem to have reached the animators as the building is drawn as a typical New York skyscraper with human sized doors and windows, rather than something more in the style of any of Megatron’s other temporary bases. Of course it makes sense that to conceal their involvement, the Decepticons took over an existing building site, which would be far less conspicuous than constructing a Cybertronian edifice in the middle of a busy city, but it’s an unusual approach for the usually arrogant and outlandish Megatron to take (see City of Steel).

Although this episode has much less of a ‘making it up as you go along’ feel than many of Wise’s scripts, it’s grey areas like that (and the entirely irrelevant hypnotised driver apparently trying to crash the train for no reason other than drawing the Autobots into the story) that betray its origins. The story is all about finding a reason for Blaster to take on Soundwave, so the small details as usual are overlooked. Others include why Tracks would just happen to be sitting in that alleyway at precisely the moment Raoul runs past it; why suited businessmen and housewives in dressing gowns would have been in the nightclub to be hypnotised anyway; that water can mysteriously break the hypnotism; and that Tracks has a previously unseen ability to release a chemical in his flight mode that can create rain. In fact Tracks seems to have an awful lot of gadgets and abilities in this story which haven’t previously been mentioned, but that is purely a side effect of there being so few Transformers in the story. Between them, Tracks and Blaster have to do it all and that makes Tracks especially suddenly seem a very versatile character.

However, these problems are small enough not to spoil the story, which features not only the bout between the cassette decks, but also Tracks having the option to show off his versatility and take on Starscream in an aerial battle. The close focus on these four characters makes that all the more interesting, and it’s only a pity that Blaster’s, “I’ve been waiting a long time for this” when he confronts Soundwave doesn’t have a genuine history behind it to make it worthwhile. It is of course also a shame that the fight doesn’t include each character’s respective cassettes, but because Blaster was a 1985 toy and his team mates weren’t released until 1986, they didn’t feature in animated stories until the Blaster/Soundwave rematch in the 1986 movie. Making the battle too one sided might also explain why Soundwave doesn’t eject any of his own, especially as the synopsis suggests that this should have happened (“A battle of transforming cassettes and audio vibrations takes place between Blaster and Soundwave”).

As with all contests between Transformers, it’s unusual for the Decepticons to win outright, but the confrontation is handled cleverly here in that Soundwave is shown to be the stronger robot with Blaster needing to improvise to win. Notably, he doesn’t beat Soundwave, but destroys the nightclub and therefore the Decepticon’s ability to control the humans. Soundwave turns tail and flees not because Blaster has won the fight, but because the plan has failed and it’s therefore illogical for him to remain. Similarly, Tracks recognises that Starscream is bigger and more powerful than him, but beats him by using his manoeuvrability.

Auto-Bop is as unique as Make Tracks before it, despite the shared use of settings and characters. The episode particularly focuses on integrating the Transformers into the real world, and manages it successfully with apt cultural references in both the idea and the dialogue. Despite the odd plot hole, it’s an entertaining story geared toward the two final showdowns, and the match up between Blaster and Soundwave especially is worth the build up. It’s a story much closer in tone to the early American Marvel comics than the more child-like approach of a lot of the second season (Rock and Roll Out and Soundwave’s attempt to use the sound system at the concert springs to mind), and turns the one off setting of Make Tracks into an established continuity point. Sadly, the detective duo of Tracks and Raoul don’t get a third outing in the series, but the legacy of this episode is how it cements that partnership, changes Tracks’ character from the vain prima-donna to one much more multi-faceted, and the way it introduces the idea of a rivalry between Blaster and Soundwave which is revisited until their final fatal showdown in the Japanese Headmasters cartoon two years later.

[Pinwig]

Bit of a gap since the last post, but I haven't stopped writing. Despite best intentions it seems impossible for me to do more than one of these a week, so I'm going to run a few weeks behind and be done with it. I've got a few more ready to go, so it'll give me a bit of breathing space if I don't post the lot at once. To be honest I can't see anyone caring!


53 - The Search for Alpha Trion

The Search for Alpha Trion is a curious episode that tries to marry a stereotypical story of unrequited love with the idea of a female guerrilla movement being active on Cybertron in the absence of the other Autobots. On the one hand it portrays the unit’s leader, Elita One, as a typical damsel in distress, and on the other as a strong independent commanding officer with her own objectives. It also introduces the character of Alpha Trion, an elder statesman who appears to have been in hiding since the Ark left the planet and a conduit through which answers to questions about the origins of the Transformers can finally begin to flow.

The subject of gender in Transformers is one of the most debated in the history of the toy line, and has been approached from many different perspectives in various media and continuities over the years. While the character of Arcee in the animated movie is often incorrectly regarded as the first female Cybertronian, it is in this second season episode that the first proper female Transformers of any kind in any media are seen.

Fortunately, because the cartoon likes to keep things as simple as possible, there can be little debate about whether Elita One and her team are regarded as ‘female’. They are portrayed as such and are referred to as such, and are rather awkwardly grouped together under the banner ‘the female Autobots’ whenever they’re mentioned - as if that’s a sub-group name equivalent to ‘the Dinobots’ or ‘the Constructicons’. This begins when Shockwave specifies them as female at the beginning of the episode, as if their gender is a significant factor in the threat they pose him. The impression this gives is that Elita One’s team are viewed as being female and therefore different, as opposed to the rest of the existing cast who are just ‘Transformers’.

Their character designs echo this difference. There have only been two other female robots used in the series to this point, and while Elita’s comrades aren’t as sexualised as Alana’s deliberately voluptuous robot form (Sea Change), they aren’t as practical or unique as Nightbird (Enter the Nightbird). Nightbird looks the way she does because she’s a Ninja; Elita One looks the way she does because she’s a woman. Their designs are typical of this kind of thing, adapted from the archetypal female robot Maria (from the film Metropolis, 1927), and don’t seem to appear among the character reference sheets for the series - suggesting their presence was never meant to be more than a token one-off appearance. Visually, all six are based on the same figure and their thighs and stomachs are left exposed with a variety of helmets and knee pads suggesting something akin to protective wrestling gear over an otherwise naked body, something that should be contrasted with the way the ‘male’ Autobots are built, and the effort put into designing the grand wizard Alpha Trion for this episode. As well as this, they all feature the same basic face - differentiated only by their helmets. Even there, Chromia’s seems to be a cross between the designs for Kup and Cyclonus, whereas Firestar’s is very close to being a red Blurr. Devcon (The Gambler) also seemed to draw on similar sources for inspiration, again suggesting it might not have been coincidence.

These generic figures are saved somewhat by Beth Bornstein’s attempt to individualise them in her writing, which gives them distinct personalities. Elita One eventually does gain her own back story, although this is more by accident than design (War Dawn). It’s a pity that Bornstein doesn’t appear to have spoken about her role in writing this episode - identifying whether Elita One’s detachment are solely her creation or if there was a desire on Sunbow’s part to introduce female Transformers into the series. It seems unlikely Hasbro would want input on anything that wasn’t directly promoting the toy range, and whereas other cartoon originated entities that come into the series at this point (Alpha Trion, Vector Sigma) appear to have been created higher up the chain, there is nothing in available interviews with the Sunbow staff of the time that sheds any light on the origin of this female team.

Within the narrative, their existence on Cybertron is retro-fit into the original pilot episode in a manner which adds to, but does jar with, More Than Meets The Eye - Part 1. The flashback in this episode shows the Ark was under attack at the point it left Cybertron, and that the female Autobots were believed destroyed as the others fled the planet. The original pilot doesn’t marry with this - the Autobot departure is very casual and watched by the Decepticons from afar aboard their own ship. However, it’s not beyond the bounds of credibility to think Shockwave may have been in a battle with Elita One at the time, and that amidst the turmoil of the Ark taking off he thought them destroyed.

It does explain why there are no female Autobots on Earth, but again reinforces the notion that they are a distinct group who operate separately to the others. The fact there are so few is excusable in that there seem to be very few Transformers generally in this continuity, certainly left on Cybertron, and having been operational for the four million years Prime and the others lay dormant, more could have been lost along the way. Shockwave’s exclamation that he thought female Autobots were “extinct!” could apply to his own clean up operations as much as the battle at the Ark, and ironically in terms of what’s been seen on screen, the Autobots now outnumber the Decepticons. Shockwave’s insistence on calling them “the female Autobots” also begs the question of where the female Decepticons might be.

The episode’s other significant contribution to the series is the introduction of Alpha Trion, a character developed over this and further second season appearances to be an Obi-Wan Kenobi style mentor to Optimus. His role is overshadowed by the events of the movie and the direction the series goes in the third season with the Quintessons, but this is the point at which the Transformers begin to get a proper origin story. It’s notable that the episode is named after him, showing his importance (although the fact there isn’t much of a ‘search’ for him suggests this episode’s title may have been a late change). It’s a shame that there is no reference to him in the cartoon bible beyond his appearances in this episode, The Key to Vector Sigma and War Dawn, because his repeated use in stories so close together suggests he wasn’t a creation of either Bornstein or David Wise. In interviews, Wise has talked about how another significant cartoon creation, the life giving computer Vector Sigma, was handed to him as a given by script editor Bryce Malek. From this, it seems around this time some thought was being given to the origin of the Transformers at an executive level, whether at Sunbow or Hasbro, but it’s also interesting that it’s one which not only conflicts with the comic, but also the direction Flint Dille took in The Five Faces of Darkness.

Taken at face value, this episode hints that Trion is responsible for creating Optimus Prime, but rather than being a significant event in its own right, the revelation is used as a tool to assist Bornstein’s love story. David Wise will expand on the Optimus origin story in War Dawn, again suggesting that both writers were being fed background info from elsewhere.

In this case, the purpose for giving Prime and Elita One the same heritage is so that when she lies drained of power at the end of the episode, he can save her with the equivalent of a blood transfusion. Alpha Trion tells Prime that, “Only your design will properly interface with Elita One”, which is often interpreted sexually, but in the context of an operating theatre it makes more sense that Trion is saying they effectively both have the same blood type, which is then followed by the power transfusion that revives her. This approach would suggest Prime and Elita are better matched as brother and sister than as lovers, both having been created by Alpha Trion, and it’s just about possible without the addition of War Dawn to read the episode this way, but it seems unlikely from the manner of their interaction that this was the actual intention.

Love itself is a thorny issue in the world of Transformers. Seaspray has already introduced the concept with his affection for Alana (Sea Change), so it’s clear these robots can feel affection - as is the case for Powerglide in The Girl Who Loved... However, it’s also clear they are built rather than born, and there is no evidence of family at this point beyond references in biographies, such as Sunstreaker and Sideswipe being brothers (which is more a product of them having the same car modes than anything intentional), so the function of love is only defined vaguely. Optimus and Elita spend this episode carefully skirting around using the word itself, and the closest Optimus comes to expressing direct affection is when he says he will “do anything” to save her. Even there, his desire to save her can be read as much as an obligation he feels because of leaving her on Cybertron for four million years as it is him wanting to rescue his ‘girlfriend’. The implication never goes away though, and returns repeatedly through the episode to suggest there is a relationship between the two, especially when Elita’s oddly named ‘special power’ is read as a metaphor for love. When both characters save each other they do it through personal sacrifice, but Elita’s is more significant because of the way this ‘special power’ puts her in mortal danger, exposing her and illustrating her affection for Optimus.

Alpha Trion and the female Autobots dominate any reading of the episode, and it’s easy to forget that the story also features the first return to Cybertron since the Dinobot desertion fifteen episodes previously. This means another airing for the almost forgotten Shockwave, this time with some impressively explosive action supported by actual Decepticons rather than drones, and setting aside the love theme momentarily, the episode is an exciting and perilous action rescue story. It even suggests the possibility of a new hierarchy on Cybertron - when Elita says, “It’s amazing how quickly Alpha Trion set up our new headquarters”, it’s impossible not to imagine a Charlie’s Angels type show with Trion and the ‘girls’ of Cybertron confounding Decepticon plans on a weekly basis.

This far on, it’s hard to know how much of this episode is as Bornstein originally scripted and how much was altered in editing (Ron Friedman’s annotated scripts show that in some cases almost all the dialogue for episodes was re-written). It does present the idea of female Transformers in a positive light, and as equals to their ‘male’ counterparts (deliberately written into the dialogue when they all meet, and shown in the way Elita One saves Prime before he saves her), but it can’t escape the stereotype that involving women equals love and relationships in fiction. All Megatron is missing by abducting her to get at Prime is a top hat, cloak and handlebar moustache. Perhaps this is simply because of the way film and television worked in the era the story comes from, but it is important to look at the story in the wider context of the series as a whole. Elita One comes across as a stronger and more rounded character than the mother figure Arcee is used as, and it’s a pity that she and her team aren’t used again.

[Pinwig]

In which Pinwig has a jolly good go at trying to prove this episode has often overlooked depths to it. No, really... 

54 - The Girl Who Loved Powerglide

Writer David Wise has said in interviews that by this point in the series he was looking for options other than the standard squabbles between the Autobots and Decepticons to generate ideas for his stories. Speaking to Austin Welch in 2004, he said, “I wanted to do new things. And I felt that human characters brought out certain qualities in the robots that another Autobot or Decepticon might not”. It’s no surprise then, that some of his later second season stories show an increasing reliance on humans to add the extra dimension he was looking for. He managed this successfully with Raoul in Make Tracks and Auto-Bop, and in this episode the new character of Astoria takes the idea in a different direction by moving from Raoul’s crime genre stories toward comedy.

Although Powerglide is one of the second season’s more heavily featured Autobots, this episode shows Wise ticking another requirement off the cartoon bible’s prescribed list of featured characters - fulfilling the need for an episode that has “New Decepticon planes (also Powerglide)”. It’s fair to say that a straight fight between the three new jets and the much smaller Powerglide is going to be somewhat one-sided, but the way this story integrates the requirement with a plot that switches between Wise’s own New York setting, the Ark, Megatron’s new floating platform and the undersea Decepticon base, creates a fun, unusual episode and makes it easier to overlook what few shortcomings it has.

One of which is the requirement to push the new Decepticon jets. The so-called ‘coneheads’ don’t come out of this episode any better defined than they already have been, and remain largely characterless thugs. Most of the Decepticon second-string characters are used throughout the series for light relief, portrayed as henchmen and goons with little independent intelligence, but Ramjet, Dirge and Thrust always seem to come off worst. Some of the Decepticons are differentiated and given broad personalities and ambitions, Astrotrain and Blitzwing being examples, but with the new jets there is nothing in this episode or elsewhere that separates Dirge, Ramjet and Thrust in the way vague attempts were made in the first season to give Skywarp and Thundercracker their own characters. While their aerial antics and displays of firepower make them desirable as toys, it’s a shame that in many cases their animations are carbon copies of each other, particularly when transforming, which only adds to the problem. Despite being unique characters, the three are no more individual than the now forgotten Reflector triplets.

In contrast, and if you want to read any depth into these characters, Powerglide comes out of this story with much more depth than he has had before. As was the case with Tracks, Wise takes a superficial and vain Autobot and adds facets that make him more appealing to the toy buying public. His cartoon bio says he is, “A show-off... delights in displaying his dazzling aerial virtuosity” and that he, “just wants appreciation from friends and foes alike”. This is illustrated at the start of the episode where Ramjet mocks him: “Such superb aerial agility… truly a worthy adversary”. Although this comes as Powerglide is trying to right himself after being thrown into a dive by the machine-mangling Astoria, it makes him the sympathy character in the eyes of the viewer, which is later played on by the way Astoria gets at him (exemplified by lines such as, “Why does everything always happen to me?”). This utilises the reference in his bio to him tending to “get into more trouble than he can handle”, which is also reflected in the way he takes on the Coneheads alone to try and rescue Astoria.

He certainly gets out of his depth in trying to take them on without thinking, but it’s also possible to see his desire for “appreciation from friends and foes” in the way he outwardly denounces, but inwardly enjoys Astoria’s attention. This really is the root of his affection for her, rather than what would be a more difficult to explain physical attraction (as was more the case with Seaspray and Alana in Sea Change). That subtlety makes this episode’s love story easier to accept - both Astoria and Powerglide inwardly seek attention in otherwise mundane lives, which doesn’t necessarily equate to romantic love.

It also works because Powerglide is one of the more diminutive Autobots. His position as a minibot makes it easier to see him being pushed around by a human because of the way Bumblebee’s relationship with Spike has the pair roughly on an equal standing. Their personalities have to match too - where Tracks and Raoul were the ‘cool’ partners, Astoria and Powerglide are the vain but insecure couple.

Spike’s appearance in this episode may seem a little out of place, but his short scene serves several functions. As well as helping to show that Astoria is besotted with Powerglide, Spike working in his father’s New York workshop allows the story to demonstrate Astoria’s odd ability to break machinery, which is why she is kept away from the industrial side of Hybrid Technologies. Wise has also been vocal about his dislike for Spike and Sparkplug, labelling them the “boringest characters in the whole series”, so a chance to allow his own character, Astoria, to shoot down Spike’s advances seems like a personal joke on the writer’s part.

Astoria herself is a perfect foil for Powerglide’s submissive stance. While she has her own insecurities, her personality dominates the relationship because Powerglide’s allows it to - shown visually in ridiculous moments such as the pair riding the merry-go-round. While she does allow her fears to show at times, such as when she seeks reciprocation of her affection, (“You’re a robot; you’re above all those kinds of things”), what she really sees in Powerglide is someone who can protect her and offer the excitement she seeks.

Her name, Astoria Carlton-Ritz, is an obvious play on two of the longest established high-class Manhattan hotels (the Waldorf Astoria and the Ritz-Carlton), but far from being the spoilt upper class brat she initially seems to be, she is far more down to earth. A more accurate source of inspiration for her, and her relationship with Powerglide, would be the couple comedies of 1950s American television which featured strong female roles, such as I Love Lucy and more obviously here, The Honeymooners. Astoria is scripted very much in the vein of the character Alice Kramden from Jackie Gleeson’s fondly remembered sit-com, and it isn’t a huge leap then to see Powerglide’s dialogue being inspired by Gleeson’s own character, Ralph. This also explains the peculiarly ‘knock-about’ nature of their interactions, such as Powerglide throwing Astoria to the floor on their first meeting, telling her to “shut up and listen”, and his exclamation “I’ll send you flying!” - reminiscent of Gleeson’s empty threats to send Alice “to the moon!”. During the episode’s climax he calls her a “little creep” and then throws her out of the floating platform’s control room, to which she retorts “I oughta sock you one!” - all of which by this point carries affectionate undertones. Perhaps it’s coincidence, but Powerglide’s Brooklyn accent is a close match for Ralph Kramden’s, as is the way Powerglide is described as a ‘blowhard’ by Spike in this episode - a term also used to describe Kramden.

This kind of slapstick humour wouldn’t work in isolation unless the general tone of the episode supported it. The biggest example of this is Megatron’s attempt to extract the information he wants from Astoria, not knowing it’s actually in the locket around her neck. Reducing the Decepticon leader, Soundwave and Rumble to Three Stooges levels of ineptitude through the continual failure of the equipment is conveniently explained by Astoria’s eerie ability to wreck any machinery she comes in contact with, but the fact Soundwave, the most sinister of the Decepticons, is brought as low as holding the pads against her head while Megatron screams, “I do not believe this!” is genuinely funny in this context, even though it’s completely out of character. Wise said in the interview previously mentioned that he “found the TF villains to be a little strident and one-note. That’s why, if I could find a way to mix things up a little bit to show the villains in a different light I always went for it. In ‘The Girl Who Loved Powerglide’, I just loved writing Megatron and the others all flummoxed by this teenage girl.”

The way the story moves through a series of settings, building up to the climax on the sky platform, adds to its variety. It begins in the New York of the Raoul stories, but this third appearance is the first time Wise’s version of the city is seen in daylight. This better suits the light-hearted tone of the writing, and the shift of genre from crime drama to comedy. Sparkplug’s garage is now established enough that it doesn’t even get a name check, and no introduction is given to the fact there is an Autobot base hidden behind it with a link to the Ark; this New York is now firmly part of the continuity. The geography is somewhat compacted as the episode quickly moves around the globe, with a nice cameo for Ratchet and Wheeljack (often replaced by Hoist in the second season) to drive the damaged Powerglide back to the Ark, and Powerglide then flying to a location above the North Atlantic where Megatron’s energy collecting platform is positioned.

Wise uses Sky Spy again to link the locations (as in Kremzeek!) - a device from the original pilot episode forgotten by most other writers. Rather pleasingly, he also incorporates the main underwater Decepticon base, which like its appearances in The Golden Lagoon and The Quest for Survival is something of a rarity at this point, as is the fact Megatron’s plan is about energy collection - one that’s even vaguely original by the series’ standards.

The Girl Who Loved Powerglide is a neat package that combines comical characterisations with a rolling plot that touches on lots of different series elements. It’s easy to sniff at the overt use of humour, particularly the way it belittles the Decepticons (Megatron: “Energise the force fields!” / Soundwave: “What force-fields?”), but the careful use of Astoria’s machine destroying ability just about stops it turning into self-parody. Tonally it does stand out from the episodes around it, but it’s more enjoyable than the attempts the series makes to ‘do humour’ while keeping the robots as the straight men, such as Changing Gears, A Decepticon Raider in King Arthur’s Court or Kremzeek! It also deals with the concept of love between humans and Transformers in a way that incorporates get out clauses to explain it, and at the end Astoria seems naturally to understand she can’t stay with Powerglide. Their break is far cleaner than Seaspray and Alana’s more wistful “We’ll always have Paris” style parting in Sea Change. Even Powerglide’s secretly illuminated diodes in the last shot don’t seem too out of place, knowing the circumstances of his affection for Astoria, and overall Wise deserves credit for making something so obviously out of place work.

[Pinwig]

In which Pinwig spots the roots of Earl Kress's later cartoon successes.

55 - Hoist Goes Hollywood

Earl Kress wasn’t one of the most prolific writers for The Transformers, and his previous solo efforts (The Immobilizer and Desertion of the Dinobots) give the impression of a man still learning his craft as a screen writer. Although his name is attributed to the 1981 Disney adaptation of The Fox and The Hound, he was only one of eight credited writers who adapted the 1967 source novel, and after writing a further handful of scripts from other people’s stories, it wasn’t until The Transformers that he started writing his own. As such, his teleplay for The Ultimate Doom - Part 2 from Douglas Booth’s story can be seen as something of a trial run, which secured his full scripting debut early the following season with The Immobilizer, but Kress himself cites how he was approached by script editors Dick Robbins and Bryce Malek to write for the show.

What hampered The Immobiliser - a script too complicated for a 22 minute cartoon - helped his next, Desertion of the Dinobots, when Sunbow executives asked for it to be extended to two parts. It meant that enough of the plot could spill over into the second episode to make the first truly stand out, but it left the two halves noticeably unbalanced with very little of the original plot to pad out the second part. This is relevant to Hoist Goes Hollywood in that although the subject matter for the episode itself might be light-hearted and less in keeping with the series than his previous efforts, it shows him learning to pace stories much better.

It’s also important to note that The Transformers was only the beginning for Kress, who went on to enjoy enormous success as a cartoon writer before his untimely death from cancer at the age of 60 in 2011. Hoist Goes Hollywood’s relatively madcap nature by Transformers standards shows the beginnings of the kind of series he would eventually become famous for, including Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain. His evident love of zany comedy can be seen here in scenes such as the repeated crashing of the Autobots into buildings as stuntmen, and the aping of 50s alien invasion movies as the Autobots don deliberately goofy looking masks and trudge zombie-like across the screen. Lines such as Tracks’, “Precisely what sort of character am I supposed to be?” - spoken as he tries to tackle the concept of method acting from behind a rubber face - is funny if you’re prepared to go with the story, but it’s a long way from what many would expect the series to be. In fact this aspect of the story, the heroes becoming actors, has very little to link it directly to the Transformers as characters - it’s a plot that could easily be used in any children’s cartoon; as with the joke names of the human stars of the film, Harold Edsel and Karen Fishook, it’s all a bit of fun.

What this means is that as with many later second season episodes, whether its any good or not comes down to how the viewer wants to read it. Sea Change, for example, could be regarded as a terrible story because of the way Seaspray randomly falls in love with Alana, but deeper layers of meaning make it much more interesting than it initially seems. In other cases where stories miss the mark completely, such as Child’s Play, it’s harder to find anything of value. Hoist Goes Hollywood is somewhere between these extremes in the category of Transformers stories that adopt a tone outside the standard expectation.

The basic premise, that one of the most unnoticed Autobots gets his moment to shine, is taken literally in the way Hoist accepts the offer of becoming a movie star. This then ultimately leads to him finding it all a bit much, despite saving the day, and he returns to his quieter role at the end of the story having discovered that being the action hero doesn’t really suit him. It’s a typical tale of over-reaching ambition and ‘knowing your place’, but even so, Hoist does seem an odd choice for the character most likely to become stage-struck.

His character, as established in The Master Builders, is a fussy worrier, well matched with Grapple as a pair of older sounding robots who are more concerned with building and inventing than they are fighting. This makes being a film star an odd choice of story for Hoist’s feature episode, and despite using the ‘humble servant becomes the hero’ idea, seems to have been devised for any character to fill the lead role without really using anything specific to Hoist’s character or ability set. In that regard, the terrible, A Decepticon Raider at King Arthur’s Court is a much better vehicle for him, using his ability as an inventive mechanic to help save the day. In contrast, the rescue in the opening scene in this episode is very dynamic, ignores the fact that Hoist has a winch that could pull the cars to safety, and instead has him clambering down the side of the mountain to rescue the stranded drivers in the vein of one of the much more agile Autobots.

He is also surprisingly eager to take up the director’s offer of a part in the film, which jars with his reserved nature. The odd union is explained in the original synopsis with the almost apologetic line, “Hoist, whose Autobot role is often limited to cleaning up after a battle with the Decepticons, is immediately star-struck and accepts”, which would be more feasible if the script did a better job of supporting the idea. It’s possible to see this scene working much better with showy characters like Sunstreaker, but by this point the first season cast were well out of the limelight and the point being made is more that the most unassuming of Autobots is the one who happens to end up in this situation by chance.

As the requirement in the cartoon bible’s list of featured characters for a Hoist focused episode comes straight after ‘one with the Decepticon planes and Powerglide’, it’s also possible that he was suggested as the lead for Kress’s escapade by the script editors, but the scripting fits well enough for it to have been Kress’s intention to feature Hoist in this story from the start - even if he doesn’t seem like the kind of character who harbours a secret desire to be centre stage, figuratively or literally.

Aside from poking fun at the film industry, the episode has a good go at making the Decepticons look daft too. Megatron’s plan to steal one of Wheeljack’s devices could be a fairly dramatic story, and Kress has already used the idea with The Immobiliser. Making that connection immediately shows how much less seriously he takes the Transformers in this story, and Megatron is much diminished as he skulks about on the studio lot repeatedly failing to get the film incriminating him.

Kress himself confessed how much he used to like having Megatron take out his anger on Starscream, but it’s used to extremes here for comedic effect in the manner of a Loony Tunes cartoon. Megatron repeatedly blames Starscream for everything, even though it isn’t always his fault, and uses him as a punch bag. The way Megatron rips wires out of his lieutenant, causing him to shut down, is a surprisingly violent moment in the context of the Transformers cartoon, but it’s clear from the build up that this is intended to be funny in the way Road Runner repeatedly dropping rocks on Wily Coyote is. It’s perhaps intentionally ironic at that point that Starscream’s idea (of simply destroying the studio completely to get rid of the film) is much more Decepticon-like than Megatron’s own alternative, which simply sustains the silliness.

The only characters taken seriously in the episode are Spike and Carly, who progress the plot while the Autobots act and the Decepticons fall over themselves. Being Kress’s own creation, Carly is inevitably in this episode, although she is largely redundant compared to the roles she took in her previous stories. The fact she has been absent for the last sixteen episodes suggests other writers didn’t really know what to do with her (or even know about her, as Spike tends to chat up any female characters he encounters in other tales, such as Astoria and Nimue), and here she is pretty much Spike’s sidekick as opposed to the other way round when she was first introduced.

The focus on Megatron trying to gain the incriminating film is the extent of the plot, meaning other aspects of the story are ignored because they’re redundant to the fun - the biggest being that the episode’s MacGuffin, Wheeljack’s device, is never actually explained. It doesn’t need to be because there’s no space to use it, and the fact the Decepticons revere this device just because it’s big and Wheeljack made it adds to the humour. Ultimately, the entire story is silly - why should Megatron care if the Autobots know he has Wheeljack’s device? It would be more in keeping with his character for him to parade it before them rather than attempt to conceal it.

This brings us back to the point that whether this episode is any good comes down to how the viewer perceives it. In terms of plotting it’s tightly structured, has multiple threads which are eventually woven together and has far fewer plot holes than most Transformers episodes. In context, it all makes sense and shows Kress has learned to pace his writing better inside the short 22 minute running time. If you’re prepared to accept that across the board the Transformers involved are played out of character for the sake of humorous effect, and that this is a cartoon for young children, then it works really very well, but alternatively it’s possible to look on this as being as ill-fitting as genre-changing failures such as A Decepticon Raider… and Child’s Play. Because it’s well written and genuinely funny in places, it doesn’t fall as low as those two examples, but at the same time is never going to be a true classic.

[Pinwig]

Finally we arrive at the most important and pivotal two episodes of the second season.

56 - The Key To Vector Sigma - Part 1

The Key to Vector Sigma begins a run of ten episodes which conclude the second season of The Transformers, and almost work as a mini-season in their own right. They revolve around the introduction of the first four so-called ‘Scramble City’ style combining teams, and focus almost exclusively on them. The four combiners are the only toys released in 1986 to feature in pre-movie cartoon episodes, first airing at the end of 1985 (just as the first 1985 toys appeared in the cartoon at the end of 1984), and don’t appear in the film (see below for more on that).

It fell to regular series writer David Wise to introduce these new characters with a two-part story that in terms of Transformers lore went far beyond simply bringing in new faces - it defined the way Transformers are given life. As is often noted, Wise had little regard for what existing continuity the show had (The Secret of Omega Supreme being an obvious example), didn’t read other scripts and largely wrote stories because he wanted to tell them. As such, the fact that the Vector Sigma computer is a fundamental part of giving life to Transformers when both Wheeljack and Megatron appear to have done that without it would seem to be Wise working in his usual vein, however he himself has explained in interviews over the years how Vector Sigma wasn’t his own creation. Talking to Austin Welch in 2004 he said:

“I was unaware I was the first guy to write Vector Sigma; I thought it had been used in prior scripts because Sunbow just sort of handed the concept to me. They said, ‘do a show that introduces these two groups, the Stunticons and Aerialbots, and oh, by the way, there’s this big computer called Vector Sigma. Use that to create them.’ So I said to Bryce, ‘What’s a Vector Sigma?’ Bryce called Sunbow and… they said it was the computer that gave the Transformers their personalities.”

This does conflict with the way Wheeljack and Ratchet were apparently able to create the Dinobots, and Megatron the Constructicons, but it’s also true that once into season two, giving new characters proper introductions was sidelined in favour of simply slotting them in as if they’d always been there because of the sheer number needing to be added. Within continuity this is explicable in that the Dinobots are always shown as a subservient class with limited intelligence, implying Wheeljack has some ability but not complete mastery of Transformers’ consciousness. Equally, Megatron saying the Constructicons were “Worth the time we spent building them in these caverns” (Heavy Metal War) makes far more sense when read as re-building them, ie. giving them Earth bodies into which existing brains (or in later years, sparks) are put. Otherwise, in this episode once he has built the Stunticon bodies it makes no sense he would have to take them to Cybertron to bring them to life.

It seems at this point the idea of how Transformers are born was being thought about across the board. Having avoided the issue with the Dinobots, the Marvel comic presented its own solution using the Matrix when the Constructicons were introduced in issue 10, on sale in July 1985 just as the combiners were being added to the cartoon bible. The transfer of the initially unnamed creation device from Optimus to Buster happened earlier in issue 6 (available in March) however, so it’s not impossible to think that the comic was partly responsible for inspiring Sunbow to take the idea more seriously.

Regardless of where it came from, Vector Sigma was a huge departure for the cartoon. The Search for Alpha Trion had extended viewers’ knowledge of life on Cybertron before the war with the introduction of the titular character, apparently Prime’s creator, but even he pays deference to Vector Sigma in this story, and whereas Trion is painted as a father, Vector Sigma’s opening line, “Before Cybertron was, I was” appears initially to give it a position more akin to a god, which is also shown by the way the Centurion droids drop to their knees in deference when Megatron shows them the key. The fact this almighty computer is visualised as a multi-faceted glowing sphere is disappointing, but is a way of deliberately keeping it anonymous. Wise has talked about how he based the computer’s booming presence on Deep Thought from Douglas Adams’ Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but had it been shown like that in the cartoon it would have come across much more as a tangible presence, a character, rather than the motiveless disembodied voice that it is.

The way the characters interact with Vector Sigma shows it is far from being a god. For a start it can be turned off and on using a key, and it’s also noticeably disinterested in the affairs of the Autobots and Decepticons - strongly suggesting a lack of sentience. Rather than denouncing Megatron’s request to imbue the Stunticons with “hatred for the Autobots and all that the Autobots stand for”, it offers no opinion at all and obeys Megatron’s request. Rather than being a god, this more implies Vector Sigma is simply a complex tool used to program personalities into the Transformers, which for those interested raises the question of who created it. Objectively, this life-giving process could also be regarded as showing mechanical tools being given life so they can continue their tasks autonomously, and this along with the question of Vector Sigma’s creator opens the door for the Quintessons’ connection with Cybertron.

Other than Alpha Trion, only Optimus, Megatron and Shockwave speak as if they know what Vector Sigma is. For the benefit of the viewer, the rest of the cast stay ignorant so they can ask questions to help explain this new addition to the viewer, most notably Rumble who in this episode acts as Megatron’s assistant in place of Starscream. Prime doesn’t recognise Vector Sigma by sight, whereas Megatron appears to, but as all these characters must have come into contact with it to be created originally it doesn’t make a lot of sense that they don’t know what it is. The implication is that Vector Sigma is a forgotten artefact of ancient history, which therefore implies that no new Transformers were created under Prime or Megatron’s commands during the great war.

With Vector Sigma already established, Wise goes about constructing a plot to introduce the first two combiners with his usual enthusiasm and unrestrained imagination. Being a writer who starts with the climax and works backwards, and one who likes to use title card fights for those moments, the obvious conclusion to this story is a grand battle between Superion and Menasor. Having two episodes to get there means the build up has time to avoid the assumptions and lurching jumps Wise’s stories often have, and because he’s building mostly on new ground, he also avoids treading on established continuity without having to try to.

A good example of the way this story unusually pauses to explain its logic is how the opening takes time to establish why Megatron wants to add cars to his ranks. Although it’s comical that the Autobots basically win the opening skirmish by driving into a tunnel, it gives a qualified reason for Megatron’s thinking. The Decepticon leader has flirted with the idea of using weaponised cars in a David Wise story before (Make Tracks), and before that, Douglas Booth gave us the Battle Taxis in City of Steel, so although unintended, there is a continuity in the way Megatron has been moving toward adding a versatile team of agile ground vehicles to his ranks. Ignoring the fact that Teletraan-1 has the power to reformat the Transformers’ alt modes (Megatron has few enough warriors as it is to go losing any of his air power), the result is a team of bruising sports cars led by the impressively dour Motormaster. As Megatron tests their abilities by remote control, Wise even drops in thoughtful dialogue such as, “The automatic force fields make their hulls impenetrable” to explain why Earth cars can now bounce off trees unscathed.

The cliff-hanger for the first part puts the Autobots in a race against time to create a new aerial squadron as the Stunticons wreak havoc at the super-fuel site on Earth. It’s a nice payoff having Megatron apparently achieving what he sets out to do for once because single episode stories will never allow him to win. It only happens here because this is the half way point in the story and the Autobots can reset the status quo by the end of the second part. It does make for an unusually exciting episode climax though - even if there’s no sense in the army general assuming the driverless aggressors must be Autobots because they’re cars (although this is explained in the second episode as them being confused).

Unlike the more unbalanced two part stories, The Key to Vector Sigma comes across as two halves of a complete whole, rather than being a single episode stretched to double length (Desertion of the Dinobots) or two different stories bolted together (Dinobot Island). It may contain padding in the way the key and the Centurion drones delay both Megatron and Optimus from reaching Vector Sigma, but being able to leave it with Megatron triumphant is an unusual and exciting cliff-hanger. This half deals with the idea of creating life, and the next the consequences of that - extending the series lore in the process. While in this case it’s hard to rate half a story, it’s undoubtedly one of David Wise’s most important contributions to the series, and one of his best written.


Why aren’t the combining teams included in the Battle of Autobot City?

One of the more obvious missing elements in the Battle of Autobot City at the start of Transformers: The Movie is the four combining teams, whose TV debut was some eight months before the film was released in American cinemas. It’s entirely possible that in such a packed film, designed to introduce new characters and remove older ones, that the newest arrivals into the cartoon series were simply surplus to requirements because they would return in Season Three anyway, but dates on surviving documents show how the longer time the film spent in production meant the combiners weren’t finalised when it was being written.

The ten episode run that introduced the combiners at the end of the season came as a revision to the cartoon bible’s original Season Two outline. The initial index for the bulk of the second season details the toys to feature in episodes with production codes from 27 through to 59 (i.e. season two, episode 14 onward), which shows how the second season was broken into an initial run of 13 episodes focussing on the season one cast, and a second longer run introducing the new toys (Dinobot Island - Part One). This index was then later revised to reduce the number of appearances for some toys to leave a third block of ten episodes free at the end for “future new TRANSFORMERS products!”.

Unfortunately, these lists aren’t dated, but the bible contains the biographies for the Aerialbots, Stunticons and Combaticons over four revisions dated June to August 1985, and a final addendum which adds the Protectobots on August 14th. Separate documentation shows how the voice recordings for the film happened only a month later in the middle of September 1985, meaning that the script for the film would have been finalised long before the Scramble City teams were added to the cartoon rosta.

As an aside, it’s interesting to note that the time from the addition of the Protectobots on August 14th to their first appearance on television on January 8th 1986 gives a rough window of only four and a half months from their cartoon inception through being scripted into stories and voice recorded and animated. The Aerialbots and the Stunticons, first appearing on documentation dated June 18th, only had a few weeks longer before they debuted in The Key To Vector Sigma. It seems likely at this point that things were getting a little rushed, as the regular weekday pattern of broadcasts for season two is interrupted through December 1985, suggesting new stories were aired as soon as they were ready rather than being part of a finished package. In contrast, the combiner teams didn’t appear in the Marvel comic until issue 20 went on sale the following June, boasting the ‘Aerialbots over America’ on the cover a whole year after they first appeared in cartoon documentation.

The fact that ten final episodes of season two were ‘reserved’ for new toys also suggests the Sunbow team were hanging on for the combiners to be finalised to fit them in before the turning point of the film, otherwise promoting them would have been lost in the very different post-movie season three, which began airing in September 1986 – more than six months after the combiners went on sale. By slotting them into season teo, repeats of the their episodes would have been on screen when the toys actually went on sale.

The way the combiners were almost lost in the rush to release the remaining Diaclone toys before the movie reset the range is never more evident than in the UK, where the ‘Special Teams’ managed only a three-month promotional window from their introduction in a hurriedly produced comic supplement in mid-March before their adverts were replaced with newly designed ones promoting the film toys in June. Knowing that the first American stories to feature the combiners wouldn’t run in the UK comic until December 1986, by which time fans were firmly focussed on the film, Hasbro made the UK team produce a three-part story (Second Generation, issues 63-65, June 1986), which stands as the only proper ‘in continuity’ promotion the Special teams got at the time the toys were launched. While the combiners remained on sale a long time after their introduction into the range, their moment alone in the spotlight was sadly short-lived considering the lasting impact they have had.

[Pinwig]

57 - The Key To Vector Sigma - Part 2

The first part of The Key to Vector Sigma sets up the premise of how Transformers are given life and independence, which means the second can spend more time on making the new sub-teams appealing to the increasingly saturated toy-buying public. It also explores what it means to give Transformers predetermined personalities, and the potential consequences of that through Silverbolt’s acrophobia. Of course, it also brings two new giant combined robots into the series for a climax which in terms of impact is up there with the best of the assorted end of episode face-offs David Wise wrote.

The episode begins with the Autobots trying to find a way to use Vector Sigma without the key that Megatron has taken. The fact that Alpha Trion is a previously established character who is effectively killed off to do this suggests the production team liked the idea of using non-toy characters for shocks, in the way the comic dispatched Straxus and Scrounge in the Return to Cybertron arc. It’s also possible that his Obi-Wan style transformation into a spiritual guide for Prime had always been an intention, or that it provided a convenient way to ensure questions wouldn’t be asked as to why Trion wasn’t in the film.

Transformers don’t die by violent means in their American TV adventures, so being absorbed into Vector Sigma after activating it because he is a “first generation product” is creative and fitting, and subtly introduces the idea of Transformers being ‘products’. The way Trion clearly feels responsibility to his ‘son’, and is prepared to sacrifice his life willingly to help him, works well in this scene. The emphasis is on him doing this because he lost the key to Megatron and can help Optimus, not simply that he is willing to give his life for the Autobot cause in general. The simple line, “Have you forgotten that you are my creation Prime?” is both understated and noble, and gives Trion’s limp body hanging from Vector Sigma a strong emotional pull. It also foreshadows the way Omega Supreme almost gives his life to get Prime back to Earth later in the episode - all of which underpins the theme of honour and sacrifice eventually used to win the Aerialbots over to the Autobot cause at the end.

In the case of the Stunticons and the Aerialbots, the creation process shows that ‘new-born’ Transformers begin life with a fully developed intelligence, and, more interestingly, an awareness that they have just been created. This goes as far as each character already knowing their name, or naming themselves, at the point they start speaking – something Optimus expects to be the case when he asks the Aerialbots to introduce themselves. Rather than making them new-borns in the traditional sense, they have teenage personalities to demonstrate their youthful nature, which is markedly different to how the Dinobots were introduced. Wise also gives the limb-bots typical teenage attitudes, which are used in both teams to show their immaturity: the Stunticons with their surly natures and irresponsible desire for wanton destruction, and the Aerialbots in their self-centred inability to empathise with the plight of others.

Of the ten, Silverbolt is the one given the most depth. Flawed characters are more interesting than straightforward stereotypes, and Silverbolt’s reserved but thoughtful persona works well with his fear of heights because it means he has his own sub-plot, which is eventually resolved during the episode’s climax. In working that into the plot, Wise inadvertently introduces a complication in that Silverbolt states his phobia wasn’t a problem previously because he was “a low level cargo transport” (as well as somewhat confusingly claiming to be a courier ship), implying that his consciousness, and possibly fear, existed before Vector Sigma gave him ‘life’. His phobia and the fact Prime gives him leadership of the Aerialbots to occupy his thoughts is derived from his biography, and the way Silverbolt tricks his team into returning to the Ark on the pretence they can take over illustrates this rather neatly.

Ignoring Silverbolt’s prior awareness, which makes a nonsense of the whole story, there is a further question in how Vector Sigma generates the personalities it formats robots with. If it isn’t sentient itself (as discussed under the previous episode), it can only work as a computer program, possibly guided by external parameters such as Megatron’s specific desire for hateful robots. This fits the way the Aerialbots are built, in that Prime is much more vague about his desires, asking for robots that can “grow in knowledge and wisdom” as much as ones who “value freedom and life wherever they find it”. In this story, the Aerialbots at first appear selfish and arrogant, but by the end of the story have grown in “knowledge and wisdom” to “value the freedom” they have been given.

The crux of this episode is how the Aerialbots initially don’t see the Earth and its inhabitants as being anything to do with them (despite Optimus introducing the planet to them as their “home”), but then turning the tide when they decide the Autobot cause is worthy. Apart from being a typical cartoon moral, this makes the new toys essential Autobots to the toy buying viewers because Prime can’t beat the newly expanded Decepticons without them. In the original synopsis, this important turning point is simply given as, “Silverbolt reminds Slingshot they owe their very existence to the Autobots”, which in the final episode becomes the revelation that Sparkplug, a human, continues to work for the Autobots even after Ratchet can’t go on (saying he needs to recharge - referencing the sleep machines Wise introduced in his first Transformers script, Attack of the Autobots). This would work better if the theme of sacrifice in the episode was more pronounced, but by itself it’s an odd reason to hinge the resolution of the story on.

This is because it seems to be a hasty replacement for the intended reason, which was the Aerialbots realising that Omega Supreme almost sacrificed his life to get them back to Earth from Cybertron. What’s missing from making this work is a scene cut from the original script in which Omega Supreme is damaged fighting Shockwave on Cybertron to keep him away from the Autobots while they build the Aerialbots. This also explains why he inexplicably explodes after returning the Autobots to earth. Ironhide’s line, “Now all we gotta do is hope Shockwave didn’t get the better of Omega Supreme” appears to be a hastily written patch to try and explain this. Another edit point is where Prime is deliberately cut off in the middle of asking Omega what’s wrong with him before he explodes. It’s a shame because a one-line script amendment to have Omega suggest an off-screen battle with Shockwave would be a far better and more humbling way for the Aerialbots to be won round, he effectively defending them as they’re being born, than the given reason using Sparkplug and Ratchet. It would also make the final double-team on Menasor more significant. Instead, the script is patched to erase Omega’s fight completely, which leaves Slingshot’s assumption that “all it took was a one way trip from Cybertron” for Omega Supreme to “fall apart” unchallenged.

In fact, Omega isn’t mentioned at all in the original episode synopsis, which means that the final showdown as conceived was: “The Aerialbots transform into Superion and defeat Menasor” - which would be an unusually straightforward resolution for a toy-promoting Transformers fight because it would make the Aerialbots superior to the Stunticons. Where high profile battles like this happen in the series they are always resolved by some trickery to avoid an outright win, such as Blaster using extra power to destroy Soundwave’s nightclub (Autobop), or Hound’s hologram confusing Devastator (Heavy Metal War). Here, both Superion and Menasor need to be shown as undefeatable to promote their status as the newest, greatest toys, and so therefore Omega’s assistance is what tips the balance.

Optimus introducing the Earth as the Aerialbots’ new home shows another misunderstanding on Wise’s part. When Prime fills the Aerialbots in on the history of the war he says, “And that is why the Transformers left Cybertron for a new world, a world the Decepticons have sworn to plunder, but which we have sworn to protect - our new home - the planet Earth”, implying that the Autobots left Cybertron specifically to settle on a new planet, rather than being stranded on Earth accidentally after the tussle with the Decepticon ship. It’s a subtle difference, but an important one in that it implies the Autobots intended to desert Cybertron rather than find energy to restore it. It would also mean that if Prime had deliberately targeted Earth as his preferred energy source, he didn’t care too much about what that would mean for the locals.

Having used Silverbolt’s biography to spotlight him, Wise gives a similar moment to his counterpart Motormaster in the final battle. Motormaster’s cartoon bio says he can “survive a collision with anyone, except Optimus Prime”. This is a truncated version of the fuller Marvel version, which more implies he looks forward to meeting Prime to see which of them is truly the “king of the road”. Wise uses this idea directly, having Motormaster exclaim, “Now Optimus Prime, we’ll see who’s king of the road!” when the two trucks clash.

This moment sets up Motormaster’s hatred of Prime, and adds to the diversity of the two encounters between the new teams in the episode. Both battles make a point of using robot and vehicle modes interchangeably to show how exciting the new toys are, which is something often forgotten in the cartoon battles. The irony is that the beginning of part one showed how the air based Decepticons couldn’t beat the ground based Autobots, so Megatron added cars to his forces to counteract that, but when the Autobots add jets to their side, they have no trouble at all fighting against the new Decepticon cars.

The way Menasor and Superion are introduced to bring about the climax of the episode raises the question of where their combining ability comes from. It makes sense because of the high profile Vector Sigma has that it was the personality imprinting process that did it, but both Megatron and Optimus know their own teams can combine without having been told that in the story, implying it was always part of their (surprisingly similar) plans. It’s a pity this point isn’t made more central to the plot – the reveal of the combined forms is certainly an exciting climax to the story, but because it hasn’t been signalled in the plot at all it does come out of nowhere. Similarly, the fact the Scramble City style limbs are interchangeable isn’t demonstrated here, which is their one truly unique selling point and essential to explaining why these combining robots are worth making a fuss about when Devastator has been around since the end of the first season. What they do have over Devastator, though, is mobility. The final showdown between the gestalts is faster and more dynamic than anything the green giant has been involved in, coming across more as a wrestling match than the ‘topple the tall building’ feel Autobot assaults on Devastator have.

No Transformers episode is ever going to be perfect though, and there is no doubt that across its two parts, The Key to Vector Sigma is a cracking story. It debuts a host of new characters in a way that finally reveals how Transformers are given life, and maintains an exciting plot that builds solidly over 44 minutes to a worthwhile payoff. While David Wise can be held accountable for some of the laziest writing in the series, this story proves he can also produce some of the best.

[Shockprowl]

AAAARRGH! I'M SO FAR BEHIND READING PINWIG'S REVIEWS!!!

But Key to Vector Sigma is one of mine and the Children's favorite episodes. I think you've nailed it in your review, Pins'. And I think a fight between Omega and Shockwave would have been brilliant and would have made far more sense than Omega just exploding.

[Pinwig]

I need to go back to these two episodes at some point and add more in about that. I bought the Metrodome DVDs for Season 2.2 second hand last week to get the scripts that are on the discs because they aren't on my Rhino ones. They seem to be recording scripts - they aren't the original ones written by Wise. They're purely the dialogue with no direction and each line is numbered, exactly what the voice actors would have had. Oddly though they have dates that say they were recorded in January/February 1986 - which can't be right because the episodes had been broadcast by then. I need to find out exactly what they are. 

Anyway, all the dialogue for Omega's fight with Shockwave is there. It must have been cut for timing reasons because there are about five short scenes of the two fighting, with Omega progressively getting more and more battered. The crucial bit though is at the end of ep2 where Slingshot is questioning why Sparkplug wants to help the Autobots:

Silverbolt: Sparkplug, what really caused Omega to explode?

Sparkplug: He caught a cyberbomb in the chest, but to save your skins he forced himself to hold together. (Angrily) And now it may cost him his life!

That comes straight after the stuff about Sparkplug wanting to help, and before Silverbolt asks Slingshot if he's getting the point yet, and makes the Aerialbots' resolve to fight for the Autobots so much more powerful.

I'd love to have a full set of scripts for one good episode to compare them - original draft, final draft, script editor's amendments and recording script. I think it would reveal a lot about the way the various people who worked on the series saw it working. Certainly, when you look at the Ron Friedman scripts that Jim Sorenson released through his blog, there are a huge number of changes to dialogue between what the writer had and what he changed it to. Douglas Booth in particular must have been quite peeved with it all - almost none of his original dialogue made it into some episodes, Friedman re-wrote it all. He didn't take lines out, he just changed what each of them said. That I think is why the script editors for the show claim in interviews that they wrote so many episodes. They didn't actually write them, the structure and direction is all still the original writer's, but the actual words being said on each line are different. 

[Pinwig]

Look out, Douglas Booth's turned in another stinker.

58 - Aerial Assault

Of all the regular writers on the Transformers, Douglas Booth is possibly the most left-field in terms of ideas. Often inspired by works of film and literature (A Decepticon Raider at King Arthur’s Court and Sea Change being examples), he also has a tendency to set stories in other countries to make use of their cultural and religious backdrops. Fire on the Mountain was set in the Peruvian Andes, A Plague of Insecticons in Bali, and when the alien races of Atlantis, Arise! and Sea Change are added to the list, the theme becomes apparent.

Whether this simply reinforced stereotypes or provided a window through which middle-class American children could see the rest of the world is questionable, and it’s sad that the portrayal of the people in the unnamed middle-eastern country featured in Aerial Assault does nothing more than reinforce the Hollywood stereotype of Arabian people being greedy perpetrators of organised crime. As has been seen before though, the Transformers cartoon wasn’t unique in this kind of behaviour, and is merely a reflection of the way Western society even as recently as the 1980s hadn’t quite got its head round casual unintended racism. These days we may not laugh at the plethora of headscarf adorned thieves bundling plane parts into the back of laundry trucks, or the bad guys getting their comeuppance by being doused in their own oil, but at the time this episode was first broadcast very few people would have batted an eyelid. More broadly speaking, its worth noting that most of the human characters in the series are stock stereotypes, whether foreign, American, heroes or villains, so the ones in this episode aren’t necessarily worth singling out just because of their heritage.

Like the positioning of Child’s Play and The Gambler, this episode is another example of where the production order for the second season wasn’t the correct order to view the episodes in. By featuring the Combaticons as established characters, Aerial Assault must come after their introduction (in Starscream’s Brigade and The Revenge of Bruticus), so although it has a production code that places it directly after The Key To Vector Sigma, it makes logical sense it should be broadcast as the season’s penultimate story. In this case, the production order also became the broadcast order, preserving the continuity error on screen. Referring to the episode’s synopsis in the production bible explains why this problem may have come about in that it wasn’t originally intended to feature the Combaticons, making it a solo venture for the recently introduced Aerialbots taking on the ‘evil Ali’ and Megatron’s griffin-like aerial attack fortress in the way Masquerade is a solo story for the equally new Stunticons. As intended, it doesn’t sound a particularly strong episode, doesn’t feature any Autobots other than the Aerialbots, and inexplicably begins with, “Left in a Middle Eastern hanger for repairs, Slingshot and Skydive are dismantled and spirited away…”, giving no explanation as to why they’ve ended up there.

Based on this odd synopsis, and the weak scenes TFWiki.net outlines as having been cut from the original script (in which the dismembered Slingshot and Skydive are rebuilt by Hassan as refrigerators to disguise them), it seems obvious that the Combaticons were added to give more purpose to the story, therefore requiring it to be moved.

Sadly, even the addition of the Combaticons can’t save what is essentially a filler episode with a badly realised premise. The opening dialogue between the Aerialbots implies that this new air team will enable the Autobots to reach areas of the world the other land based characters can’t get to easily, which is an intriguing idea then undone seconds later when Optimus, Jazz, Ratchet and Hoist turn up out of nowhere to rescue them from the Combaticons. It is also an obvious juncture to point out that Skyfire, the old Autobot air service, is now long forgotten.

The theme of infiltration that drives the episode is a typical genre television type plot, with the heroes going undercover to find out what the villains are up to on their own turf. The problem here is that the far more powerful Autobots have to be prevented from just overpowering Ali and his crones when they find out what is going on. This introduces the sub-plots of Slingshot having his weapons disabled, and also he and Skydive being disassembled, and the lunacy that a Harrier and an F-16 can be compacted into a couple of boxes that fit in the back of a laundry truck. Adding to the silliness, we also learn here that Transformers can still transform when in pieces, which leads to the ungainly sight of the two Aerialbots sitting armless in crates like two jack-in-the-boxes discussing their situation.

The other awkward element of the story is not so much the way Hassan is able to repair Slingshot using the grill from the front of a Rolls Royce, but the way this grill appears and disappears through the rest of the episode because it isn’t standard to his animation model. There are myriad animation errors in every episode of the Transformers, but in this case the grill is made part of the plot and when it’s brought back into the dialogue at the end of the episode it has deliberately fade back into view as if to say ‘it’s been here all the time, you just couldn’t see it’. This might be a way of suggesting the grill has been reshaped into Slingshot’s actual chest, but the way it flickers on and off as Slingshot moves in the scene makes a farce of the big reveal that Hassan is actually the mechanically minded Prince Jumal. The most interesting thing about that scene is that the grill is definitely named as being taken from a Rolls Royce, an unusually specific brand naming for the cartoon.

Hassan himself is an interesting addition to the cast, but never quite gets the focus that someone like Raoul has in Make Tracks and Autobop. This is probably to preserve his secret identity, but by the end of the story he still feels like ‘someone the Transformers know’ rather than being a friend and confidant on the level of the more defined human characters in the series.

From the Decepticon point of view, Megatron is doing nothing that he hasn’t done before. Allying with easily corruptible humans is a trait he often displays, and Booth reuses his own idea of the drone battle taxis from City of Steel here in the form of the drone planes. Comparing these two episodes shows how weak this one is. In this case the driving force behind the plot is the drones themselves, whereas in his earlier story, the battle taxis are merely one element of Megatron’s plan to turn New York into New Cybertron. In place of the towering metal skyscraper base that replaces the Empire State Building, in this story Megatron has the most peculiar of his wide array of temporary bases yet. The logic behind it comes from the original outline, which as noted, didn’t include the Combaticons. Megatron therefore needs an awesome display of aerial firepower for Superion to beat, but his old existing strike force (absent from this episode bar fleeting appearances for Dirge and Ramjet) can’t be shown to have the power necessary to take on the new and exciting Aerialbots.

Referred to as ‘Fortress’ in the script, and “a winged Sphinx robot” in the synopsis, its unique griffin-like design seems to be an attempt to reflect the vague middle-eastern setting of the story. Looking back at Booth’s use of other cultures as backdrops, this idea almost seems to fit with Megatron’s crystal powered weapon atop the step pyramid in Fire on the Mountain, or the way Sub-Atlantica advances on Washington in Atlantis, Arise! but Fortress is certainly the most bizarre of them all. It almost appears to be inspired by the character design for Sky Lynx, but is an attempt to create something that feels like it might suit the story’s setting. Booth’s reference to a Sphinx in the outline suggests an Egyptian connection, but by using a griffin instead (a mythical creature not associated with any one specific religion or region, but which does have connections to Islam) the story has something which gives the suggestion of an ancient religion without having to explain it; just like Fire on the Mountain.

The implication that the griffin is the most majestic of creatures and the ruler of the air is eminently fitting for Megatron’s character, but of course Fortress is dealt with at the episode’s conclusion just as the Combaticons are. The battle between the two giant combiners doesn’t rate that highly among the tussles these last season two episodes have, but again it’s worth noting that there is no clear winner presented based on strength alone. In this case, the Aerialbots separate as Bruticus flings himself at Superion, and then set the oil field on fire to cause the Decepticons to turn tail. The Autobots win the fight, but not definitively.

Of the stories that focus on bringing the combiners into the series, Aerial Assault is one of the weakest. The plot is standard fare for the series, and it does little to improve the definition of its key players beyond vaguely demonstrating Skydive’s analytical ‘student who should be a professor’ nature in the way he speaks. By moving the story to the end of the series from originally coming directly after Vector Sigma, it makes it hard for the script to know if it’s continuing Slingshot’s dismissiveness toward Earth, and although him volunteering to become bait in the trap is evidence of his cavalier attitude, it doesn’t quite match the character as he was introduced, or the insecurity that his biography is strong on pointing out (dialogue cut from the episode suggests he volunteers to stay with Skydive so he can avoid fighting the Combaticons again). Perhaps it lost something during the dramatic writing changes it underwent, but the end result is an episode that doesn’t do a huge amount to promote the Aerialbots or the last minute stand-in Combaticons.

[Pinwig]

David Wise proves why he's excused the madness of his early episodes.

59 - War Dawn

It’s clear that by this point in the series David Wise had become a writer the in-house Sunbow staff saw as not only reliable, but one who they felt was experienced enough to step beyond the confines of the standard twenty-two minute, self-contained story. Although many of his stories contain outlandish ideas and show a disregard for what little common sense the series has, he is also most responsible for giving any kind of depth to the background of the Transformers, and in that regard War Dawn even outshines The Key To Vector Sigma as being essential viewing. What Wise has said about Vector Sigma suggests he was guided by Sunbow with it, the computer being a pre-requisite, but interviews suggest War Dawn was solely his idea.

While it’s a pivotal moment in the series - providing the cartoon universe’s origin story for Optimus Prime - objectively it isn’t any different to providing an origin story for Omega Supreme or creating the alternate Autobase in New York; it’s about a writer trying to find interesting stories to tell with the tools he has to play with. Wise is renowned for being a writer who told stories he felt were worth telling, and paid no attention to what other scripts were doing. Speaking to Austin Welch about this episode’s origins in 2004, he said, “I really did feel like I was writing something special and epochal. In fact, the whole time I was writing it, I was afraid somebody would kill the episode because it conflicted with some piece of backstory I was unaware of!”

Wise also cites the character of John Rambo (First Blood, 1982 and at this point Rambo, 1985) as an inspiration for the story: “I saw a lot of young boys admiring this character who (has) big muscles and a big gun, so he must be cool, right? This reminded me of the Aerialbots’ initial admiration of the Decepticons in ‘The Key To Vector Sigma’, so I thought, what if these naïve kids could see the ugliness behind this?” So I came up with this idea of sending them back in time to the very beginning of the Cybertronian war. Well, it isn’t enough for them to just see nondescript robots getting blasted, I knew they’d have to make friends so they would experience a personal loss. This immediately led me to think of a character who would be destroyed and rebuilt by Alpha Trion as Optimus Prime”. The second Rambo film was released in America in May 1985, a few months prior to when Wise would have written this episode.

Thematically it also links to The Key To Vector Sigma because Wise is able to carry over the idea that the Aerialbots haven’t quite settled to the idea of life with humans, who they regard as unimportant, and that by looking after their own interests first, the Decepticons appear to be a better side to ally with. This seems to flow on from the original end to Vector Sigma, which focused more on Omega Supreme’s sacrifice than Sparkplug’s. With that, the opening of War Dawn is almost a direct continuation, and whether intentional or not, it’s pleasing that Prime mentions the Aerialbots have now been on Earth for “a few weeks”, allowing time in the order as broadcast for the events of the two Stunticon focused episodes (Masquerade and Trans-Europe Express), to happen in between. This kind of flow to the continuity between episodes hasn’t happened since the first season and makes the series feel much more cohesive, no matter how slender the links.

It’s noticeable that apart from Omega Supreme, the other characters this story are drawn entirely from the original Season One cast, perhaps intentionally because of the way it gives the Autobots a feeling of being the ‘old guard’ - the most noble and admired - to play against the recklessness of the young Aerialbots (although Wise often uses his old favourites in stories over newer characters). Ironhide gets a lot of dialogue, he being one of the most fiercely loyal to Optimus and the Autobot cause. It also means the Aerialbots get an appetising opportunity to encounter the three original Decepticon jets, although the viewer is denied the chance to see an all out fight between the old and new air powers because of Slingshot’s admiration for them. The feeling of respect Slingshot has for Starscream et al here is nice in that it makes even the first series Decepticons feel like revered heroes, which is echoed in the way Orion Pax admires Megatron.

In a typical Wise-esque moment of unexplained backstory, Starscream dumps a cargo of humans in the air so the Aerialbots are forced to break off their attack and rescue them, showing again that his disregard for human life is more callous even than Megatron’s. Narratively, this also helps to cement Slingshot’s feelings about humans because his new ‘cool’ hero, Starscream, doesn’t care about them.

Why Starscream is inexplicably carrying a cargo of humans, far too many to actually fit inside his jet mode, is nothing compared to the next leap of faith Wise expects from the viewer - that Shockwave has apparently been quietly building a time travel device on Cybertron. It has to be said that in an otherwise very tightly scripted episode, this is the only real out-of-the-blue moment, and it ranks alongside Wise’s other great double-takes designed to quickly kick-start stories, such as Megatron’s invisibility cloak in Attack of the Autobots and the brief appearance of the Decepticon ship in Microbots. The fact that Shockwave seems to be able to make this for no other reason than that he was asked to has the potential to radically change his character from the caretaker the cartoon made him to the pioneering scientist of the comics; suddenly Shockwave has a purpose beyond guarding the door to the space bridge. It’s a shame the viewer is simply asked to accept he can do this on a single line of dialogue; it makes about as much sense as the awkward and paradoxical reasoning that Megatron wants such a device so he can plunder energy reserves from Cybertron’s own past. Neither of these things display much thought or sense because they don’t matter to the story beyond the fact that the Aerialbots need some way to time travel. That said, Wise’s premise is much more in keeping with The Transformers than Douglas Booth putting time travel into the realms of magic in A Decepticon Raider at King Arthur’s Court.

All of this nit-picking is small change compared to the core of this episode though. While the Aerialbots discover the origins of Optimus and the Third Cybertronian War in the past, Prime’s battle with Megatron continues on exactly the same site in Cybertron’s present. It’s a clever idea to use the disbelieving Aerialbots as eyes through which the viewer can see the beginning of the most significant of the Transformers; we get big questions answered about him while they learn the truth about the Decepticons.

Wise is clearly skirting any potential continuity clashes by placing the action an extraordinary nine million years in the past. Perhaps the war does need an epochal sounding length to make it fit with the four million years the Transformers lay dormant on Earth - a fifty year war followed by a hiatus of millions doesn’t sound quite right - but the idea the Transformers have been fighting for five million years before the start of the series does seem a little unlikely, particularly because the past Cybertron presented in this episode doesn’t seem an awful lot different to the present beyond it being better lit and Alpha Trion having more neatly trimmed facial hair.

What this past does give us is more definite confirmation of the differentiation between male and female genders, with Orion explicitly stating that Ariel is his girlfriend. The trio of Aerial, Pax and Dion are deliberately shown to be carefree teenagers to enhance the lighter feel of the younger Cybertron, and Pax’s menial job as a fuel unloader at the docks echoes the boring day-to-day lives of any number of heroes in teen films of the 80s and earlier. Pax’s admiration for the Decepticons (“It’s really a thrill to meet you sir!”) echoes the Aerialbots’ own respect for them, which means that he can take the fall to teach the Aerialbots that Megatron isn’t quite what they think he is. Slingshot remains the focus for this, and it’s seeing Megatron mercilessly gun down his new friend that finally turns the tide for him and the rest of the group. This extension to Slingshot’s personality, carried through Vector Sigma and this episode, is entirely Wise’s doing as his cartoon biography makes a point of stating his loyalty to Optimus Prime.

Alpha Trion makes his third appearance in the series to perform the reconstruction of Prime, dovetailing this episode with Beth Bornstein’s The Search for Alpha Trion. How much of this sequence is purely down to Wise and how much is directed by the script editors is unclear. Wise said that, “…rebuilding Ariel as Elita One was not my idea. If you look closely, you can see that the lines of dialogue about it were added in post-production. I assume that was Sunbow’s doing”, making this neat continuity link seem like an opportunistic afterthought rather than being an intentional link. Trion’s line saying that he will rebuild Ariel using “your schematics” to the newly created Prime is also a deliberate reference to the way Prime saves Elita One in the earlier episode.

Wise’s writing is so far-reaching in the series at this point that he is able to draw on his own continuity to add background detail to these later stories - here the origins of Omega Supreme as outlined in The Secret of Omega Supreme are reused in the way the guardian robots, of which Omega is one, are present as Cybertron’s peacekeeping force. They are deliberately recoloured to keep Omega distinct (or are perhaps a different class) and like the Decepticons are sadly mute, but never-the-less add to the feeling this story has of being properly immersed in the Transformers’ world. It’s a shame that Megatron’s forces are characterless drones again and that none of the other proper Decepticons feature in the past, particularly because of the way in the present Thundercracker talks about being given a pounding by the guardians in “the old days”, but this is possibly Wise’s way of avoiding potential continuity problems he wouldn’t have known about - such as Starscream’s position as a scientist. It also means, as with every other story set on Cybertron, there is an easily disposable force of clones on hand for the Autobots to inconsequentially gun down to show their superiority - important in this case to show the strength of the new and improved Optimus Prime.

The episode builds to an exciting climax with the battle happening on two fronts, and the Aerialbots switching from the past to the present in the middle of it. Nice touches such as Megatron using the headless Guardian in the present that was involved in the battle in the past show Wise enjoying his writing; for once everything comes together, making War Dawn an excellent episode not just because of the origin story it contains, but because it shows Wise at the height of his power and thoroughly immersed in the source material. At this point he is becoming the writer whose style defines the tone of the show and a benchmark by which others are compared. It would be interesting had he been more involved in the scripting of the film, and the third season, to see what his take on the changing events would have been.

[Philip Ayres]

If I count right that was Pinwig's 8000th post. Congratulations!

[Pinwig]

Ha! Good episode to do it with.

[Pinwig]

60 - Trans-Europe Express

Trans-Europe Express is the final episode written by David Wise before his eventual return at the end of the series for the Rebirth trilogy. It’s also the ninth written by him of the twenty-five episodes that make up the second half of this season, which shows how prevalent his writing is at this point and therefore how much his style defines the viewer’s understanding of what the cartoon is supposed to be.

Over the course of evaluating his episodes it becomes apparent that his imagination provided a diverse range of interesting and original ideas for the series, most of which approached the core premise of the Autobots foiling Megatron’s scheming in ways that remained true to the first season while offering tangential fun in addition. Kremzeek is the only real example where this fails; in most other cases, right from Attack of the Autobots through to this episode, when he isn’t writing the ‘big’ stories like Vector Sigma and War Dawn, Wise clearly has an eye for what a young audience might enjoy. It’s no surprise that when he was given Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to develop two years later it was so successful.

Being an episode which focuses on pushing the new Stunticons, Wise makes an obvious but sensible choice in using a car race as the ‘vehicle’ to do it, thus promoting the robots in car mode for more of the episode than usual. Being a writer who has said he deliberately didn’t read other peoples’ scripts, it’s unlikely he was aware Donald Glut had already used the idea of the Autobots racing for charity earlier in the season in The Autobot Run; the two stories bear no similarities beyond the way they utilise the Transformers’ Earth modes as a way to sell them - something often forgotten in the series.

The episode’s original synopsis refers to the car race as the Trans-Europe 3000, running from London to Turkey, which could have been changed to Paris in the final episode to more directly reference its probable inspiration - the Paris to Dakar Rally (a high profile European racing event of the time that saw hundreds of cars annually attempt to navigate the 6000 miles from Paris down the west coast of Africa to Senegal). It’s also possible that Wise was inspired by popular road race comedies such as Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and The Cannonball Run (1981), shifting the location to Europe to avoid associating the connotations of illegal racing practises with a children’s cartoon. However, in terms of inspiration, Wise has also explained that the episode title comes from the album Trans Europa Express, released by German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk in 1977. Referring to a rail network rather than a road race, the real TEE’s goal was to unite Europe with interconnecting high speed railways, and at its peak in the early 1970s reached as far as Denmark, Spain and Italy, and had its eastern most tip in Vienna, Austria. The Trans-Europe 2000 goes even further east, and Wheeljack refers to the 2000 in the name as being the number of miles it covers. This may explain the change from 3000 in the original synopsis because a route encompassing Italy would cover approximately 1750 miles using modern roads, arguably closer to 2000 using the snake-like route on the map shown in the episode.

Unlike most of Wise’s later episodes, the climactic battle in this one isn’t necessarily his start point in terms of developing the plot. Instead, the idea of the Stunticons trying to sabotage the Autobots’ attempt to reach Istanbul takes centre stage and makes the end of the story much less obvious because of the reveal that the Pearl of Bahoudin is actually a Cybertronian weather controller that Megatron needs the metal from Auggie Cahnay’s special car to control. This convoluted conclusion feels more like the unexplained throw-away ideas Wise usually uses to set up his stories (like the sleep machines in Attack of the Autobots), and narratively the end is more about giving a reason why the Stunticons need to stop the Autobots getting to Istanbul than being the point of the story.

That said, it’s a nice idea that neither the Autobots nor Decepticons are aware of what each other are up to at the start, but anticipate the others’ interference: Optimus Prime has the Autobots guarding Cahnay in case the Decepticons go for the engine, and Megatron has the Stunticons on standby in case the Autobots come sniffing around his excavation. This helps to make the plot more interesting than the usual slow build toward an obvious end, and the way the two halves come together at the end is well thought out - even if it does need an enormous info-dump from Megatron two thirds of the way through to explain everything quickly.

Dialogue cut from the recording script also highlights why Cahnay is so negative toward the Autobots when the story implies they are there as his personal protection. At the point Wheeljack explains to the others that Cahnay’s engine is made of a “weird metal” which might draw Decepticon attention, Tracks questions him about it:

Tracks: As long as we’re checking under everyone’s hoods, what about your engine?
Auggie: (STUNG) There’s nothing out-of-line about my engine.
Wheeljack: Oh yeah? What’s the main block made out of, triple adamantium?
Auggie: None of your business!

This shows that at this point the Autobots don’t know what is special about the metal, and that Cahnay doesn’t know they’re there to protect him. This allows Cahnay to be the daredevil driver the script needs him to be for the end of the episode, and the Autobots to be the enforcers of sensible behaviour in trying to keep him safely on the road. It’s also worth noting that in the original synopsis Cahnay isn’t mentioned and there is no connection made between the Autobots protecting a car with a “secret engine” in the race, Megatron needing it (he just coincidentally happens to be in Istanbul) and the special car being the one that smashes into Menasor - again showing how the final episode much more finely integrates the various plot elements.

Because of the distance between him and the Autobots, Cahnay is less well defined than Wise’s usual human accomplices, but both he and Professor Teranova join the list including Raoul and Astoria as human perspective characters in Wise’s stories that ignore Spike and Sparkplug - who the writer claimed to hate. In keeping with the tongue in cheek naming of Astoria Ritz-Carlton, here Teranova is corrupted from the Latin for ‘New Earth’ and Wise himself has explained that Cahnay is a rather random pun on the pronunciation of the Italian word for dog - Cane. The man Megatron seeks at the beginning of the episode, written as Abdul Ben-F'aisal in the script, is also probably derived from the Saudi-Arabian businessman Mohammed Bin Fasial Al Saud, notable for his failed 1977 plan to bring icebergs from the Arctic circle to Mecca as a water source.

Wise’s familiarity with the cast of Transformers at his disposal by this point lends itself to the way he appears to cherry pick favourites for the story. The fact it doesn’t feature Optimus Prime suggests someone who has written enough episodes not to feel the need to include him by default, and of course his own favourite Autobot, Tracks, returns. Being a car race it’s nice to see Sideswipe and Sunstreaker almost brought out of retirement to display their road handling skills, but this episode is really Bluestreak’s moment to shine. Massively underused, this is one of his most prominent appearances in the series - and it seems almost laughable that he still needs to speak in sound bites from his biography to explain who he is a handful of episodes before his exit.

The conclusion to the story works very well, uniting the two plots and delivering an exciting showdown that uses the tornado released by the pearl as a backdrop to increase the drama. There is the smallest hint that because the weather controller originally came to Earth on the Decepticon ship that the Decepticons may have already been thinking about the colonisation of other planets at the time they left Cybertron in pursuit of the Autobots, but more rationally this is just an easy way for Wise to explain why we haven’t seen it before. Like the use of the ship’s power source (the ‘Heart of Cybertron’) in Microbots, Wise is experienced enough to draw on the show’s mythology to fill in the gaps. The tale of it being encased in gold by a Persian seer in the 14th century may sound unlikely, but does the necessary job of providing it with financial value while also holding back its destructive power - adding to the reasoning that Megatron needs the new alloy to control it properly.

The fact this is woven into a battle between the outgunned Autobots and Menasor makes for a satisfying episode conclusion. As is typical, the new gestalt mustn’t be defeated in a straight battle, so in this case it’s Auggie’s change of heart that wins the day as he relinquishes his selfish ways to send his car into Menasor’s face. His transformation into a good guy is then made complete at the end of the episode when the Autobots realise Megatron has staged the race to obtain Auggie’s car, and he gives up the pearl’s golden case to replace the twenty million dollar charity prize.

For a David Wise script it’s unusually clever, almost too intricate because of the way it has to explain itself in such tight dialogue in the final act, but it does a massively better job of giving the Stunticons a focus story while juggling the rest of the cast than something like Aerial Assault does for the Aerialbots. On the down side, the Stunticons remain one ‘character’ even as five individual robots because there is very little for them to do here other than drive into things. Poor animation also mars the final battle because Menasor is drawn as a simple robot with his limb cars added on almost as shields, giving him a very peculiar padded-shoulder look wen bending his elbows (this comes from the lazily drawn animation model, which doesn’t match Superion’s for detail).

As the second season begins to wind down, and with the focus intended to be on promoting the new combiners, Trans-Europe Express does a fantastic job of making them the focus in a strong ensemble piece. It’s a more than fitting end to the regular contributions from the series’ most prolific writer.

[Pinwig]

Strong episode. Nice to see a little more depth to Megatron's character.

61 - Cosmic Rust

Paul Davids is a name new to the writing of the series at this point, but not to the series itself. Having acted as the production co-ordinator for The Transformers since the beginning of the second season, he had been as involved with the series on a day to day basis as much as story editors Dick Robbins and Bryce Malek - but on the logistics and management side of production rather than the creative. As such, it’s not surprising that a man whose teenage years had been spent making 8mm stop motion monster movies, and before working for Marvel Productions had written his own film (She Dances Alone, 1981), would eventually want to try his hand at writing stories for the series he was co-ordinating. Cosmic Rust was the first of four of his ideas that Robbins and Malek thought worth developing.

Davids’ in depth involvement with the series is clear in the way Cosmic Rust draws on various elements from the history of the series, be it using characters in their established roles (such as Astrotrain transporting Decepticons through space or Starscream and Rumble being Megatron’s principle question askers), the casual use of established locations (such as the main Decepticon base and the Ark), or often forgotten traits (such as the first season ability to swap hands for tools, Laserbeak’s spying ability and Wheeljack’s penchant for making devices that don’t work). This knowledgebase allows Davids to come across as much more accomplished than a first time writer for the series usually seems, allowing Cosmic Rust to fit seamlessly into the ongoing continuity.

Starting with the ‘what if?’ idea of a rust plague spreading among the Transformers in the manner of something akin to the black death (as mentioned by Perceptor in the episode), Davids builds his story around this premise, working backwards into how it might be initially contracted, and forwards into how the problem can be solved. In an interview with the Cybertron Chronicle, Davids said this idea was inspired by the fear surrounding the spread of AIDS at the time, although moments such as Megatron’s hand falling off make it seem more akin to a flesh eating disease. That sinister undertone aside, it’s one that sixty episodes into the series feels like it should probably have been done already, but by instilling a mortal fear in the Transformers, and exposing a weakness in Megatron’s character, Davids edges the show in previously unexplored tonal directions.

Coming amid the episodes designed to promote the combining teams, it’s a story that is surprisingly light on pushing any particular new toys with the Aerialbots and Stunticons peripheral to the main plot, and it’s nice to see them integrated rather than being the purpose of the episode. If anything this is a Megatron focus episode, showing depths to his character not seen before as a result of him feeling genuinely threatened for once. The shots of him half in shadow in his quarters with his back turned to the door are about as moody as the series gets, and the way he abducts Perceptor, offers him peace in return for his help and then betrays him is a great display of his predatory, self-absorbed nature. For a moment it seems as if the helpless Megatron is genuinely at Perceptor’s mercy, helped by the removal from the finished episode of the line: “if you do what I ask, I might be trustworthy, if you don’t I will definitely be vindictive” from their conversation, which would simply reduce him to being a bully. However, the way he turns from victim to gloating triumphantly as he slow cooks the Autobots, accelerating the spread of the plague, only serves to make him more despicable - but it’s hard to forget that for a moment his ‘autonomic perfection’ couldn’t even be saved by Starscream the scientist.

It isn’t just Megatron whose character is touched on in this episode though. Other snippets of dialogue cleverly encapsulate motives without having to make a big thing about it - a good example being the way Prime says, “I had no choice… I had to rescue Perceptor”, when he realises his actions have unwittingly endangered the rest of the Autobots. Cosmic Rust is certainly an episode that knows its characters.

Around this impressive character driven core sit the mechanics that make the plot work, such as the way in which the plague is initially contracted and how Perceptor cures it with his ‘Corrostop’. In terms of how Megatron first catches it, a space-born disease seems just as fitting as anything else. This allows Davids a moment of fun in creating a lost tribe of Autobots, adding his own contribution to the mythology of the series while keeping the plague away from Cybertron. Why Megatron is in space to begin with isn’t made clear, but the general expansion of the series off Earth in the second half of this season makes it entirely reasonable that he would be. Less explicable is why an Autobot city would glow visibly from space in the shape of the Autobot symbol, but once this has attracted Megatron’s attention the job of finding a way to get the plague into the story is done.

A whole different group of Autobots with their own planet is quite a heady concept to introduce into the series just to kick start a plot (see Thirteenth what? below), but Davids is careful with this to have the only contact with the past being via a hologram and Teletraan-1’s files, so the lost legion can remain lost. The rhyming nature of the ancient Autobot’s warning is typical of cryptic clues in this sort of story, and Rumble is right in that it sounds more like a curse than a direct warning to keep away. It’s also comical how yet again another second season ‘generic Autobot’ design seems to facially resemble the soon-to-debut Blurr.

It’s a shame at this point the way the whole Antilla concept is rendered redundant because it isn’t until after leaving the planet that Megatron contracts it. The original episode synopsis reads, “once he returns to Earth with the icon, he finds himself covered with rust”, which is more subtle and better matches the ancient Autobot’s warning about the planet. That way though, the other Decepticons with him on Antilla should also have contracted the plague. The way Megatron later oddly exclaims, “Decepticons! We are about to be cured!” suggests the others do have the problem - but this isn’t shown to be the case. Instead, in another of the more artificial moments of the episode, a plague carrying asteroid appears to tail Astrotrain as he leaves, apparently under its own power. It’s possible the intention here is to show the rust germs are drawn to the Lightning Bug ray, but sadly on screen it more looks like they are piloting the asteroid after Megatron with malicious intent. It also makes no sense that the exploding shard that embeds itself in Megatron gives him the plague and not Astrotrain, who is also pierced by it. The implication is that because the shard is physically stuck in Megatron it has longer to infect him, but the way the germs later spread through the Autobots so rapidly suggests Astrotrain should have been infected just as badly as Megatron. In all, the Antilla sequence serves only to show the devastating effect of the plague, and the majesty of the architecture and the awe with which the Decepticons explore the dead world is largely lost, leaving the idea of the Thirteenth Legion dormant from here on.

More bizarre than the rust plague are the episode’s other plot devices, built around making the plague work. The first of these is the plague accelerant Lightning Bug ray. Recognised as a lightning bug by Starscream, presumably from his experience of being on Earth, there appears to be no reason why a weapon would resemble a firefly. Megatron assumes the Autobots made it, so presumably it is fashioned in deference to an insect or creature native to Antilla. Perhaps there is also a vague connection in the way insects can spread diseases, and this one encourages the rust germs to spread, but this is tenuous at best and Davids himself has offered no explanation for its origin in interviews.

Opposing this is Perceptor’s Corrostop, the cure for the plague. This element is transparent in its purpose, despite the engaging way in which it brings the Statue of Liberty into the story as a backdrop for the episode’s big fight. Davids is clutching at straws by this point in his plotting, evident by the way that the Corrostop can’t be replicated without more of the poorly named ‘Ingredient X’; Cosmos’ sweeping statement, “There is no more ingredient X, anywhere!” is a sure sign of a writer out of ideas. Worse than this though, is the get-out-of-jail-free Matter Duplicator, which is introduced as if it’s been in previous episodes, but hasn’t, and can be miraculously made to work just when it’s needed. The implications of this device stretch way beyond being a method to resolve this episode - if the Autobots can duplicate anything, this immediately solves every problem they have, and those of Earth as well. Unsurprisingly, this is scuffed over and ignored in the heat of the episode’s climax.

These shortcuts are forgivable though in an episode which otherwise ticks all the necessary boxes, and more. The essential final battle between Superion and Menasor seems almost superfluous in such a packed episode, but the way the Stunticons initially abduct Perceptor almost by stealth rather than force at least gives another dimension to their limited personalities. The Aerialbots get more dialogue than their counterparts during the abduction scene, which also nicely brings in Blitzwing to balance the use of Astrotrain in space. This scene is then one-upped by the finale, which is a brilliant ensemble piece with almost forgotten characters such as Gears and Prowl making cameo appearances to cap the huge rosta of 44 separate identifiable Transformers on screen during the episode. Although it’s not uncommon to find older characters reappearing in the series at this point for encore performances before their exit in the film, it’s clear that from his advantageous position, Paul Davids had a good handle on what made the Transformers series work, and it’s a pity that his contributions came so late in the day.


Thirteenth what?

One of the most interesting things about this story is the concept of a lost Autobot legion inhabiting the planet Megatron finds. As shown, Teletraan-1 reveals it to be called Antilla, and that, “At the dawn of time, there was a thriving civilization of Autobots” there, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, but then adds that these Autobots were “The 13th Legion, the Lost Legion.” Optimus seems entirely unsurprised by this revelation, but equally doesn’t appear to know about the fate of the Thirteenth because he still needs to ask Teletraan-1 about the origin of the germs.

Interestingly, dialogue is cut from the beginning of the episode which dates the disappearance of the legion more sensibly. When Starscream claims no one can speak ‘ancient Autobot’ as they look at the monument on Antilla, Megatron rebukes him:

Megatron: Speak for yourself, illiterate clod! It says the Thirteenth Legion of Autobots arrived here (in) the first millenium after the creation of the Autobot Matrix.
Starscream: Which would make it about five hundred thousand years before we (left) for earth.

This may have been removed because of the way it conflicts with other dates given in the series, as well as the episode itself (the “dawn of time” can’t be half a million years before the Transformers arrived on Earth, and War Dawn also established Cybertron was in full swing nine million years before that). It’s also possible this dialogue was cut because of the way it references the Matrix, a device familiar to Transformers comic readers, but one that wouldn’t become part of the cartoon mythology until the film. Although there are plenty of one shot macguffins used in the series which are never referred to again, reference to a ‘matrix’ without further explanation would seem odd to comic readers. This again shows how Davids was familiar with the ongoing production of the series, and was involved with the film, but presumably at this point wasn’t aware the Matrix was as yet unexplained in the series.

The Thirteenth Legion itself is an interesting idea. Davids may have been inspired in this by Battlestar Galactica’s Thirteenth Tribe, the mythical lost colony separated from the other twelve expansionist groups leaving Kobol that Commander Adama and the others spend that series looking for. This concept would fit magnificently with the idea that as Decepticon power grew on Cybertron, Autobots slowly left the planet in pursuit of more peaceful habitats, and the 500,000 years before More Than Meets The Eye date would fit perfectly with that. However, the way both this and Teletraan-1’s explanation are worded suggests the idea is more something from an ancient, mythical history than something the characters in the series would remember.

In turn, this suggests this Thirteenth Legion (and quite probably Galactica’s version) are inspired by the discussion about the ‘lost’ thirteenth tribe of Israelites caused by confusion in the Book of Genesis over which of Jacob’s descendants form the Twelve Tribes of Israel when thirteen are named in the text. This mythical origin also ties in with the derivation of the name Antilla, as explained by Davids in the Cybertron Chronicle interview:

“The derivation of the word 'Antilla' was from 'Antilles' -- always thought of as the inaccessible 'hinterland' in the days of the explorers. The myth of the 'destroyed civilization' is a recurring one in human history, so I presented 'Antilla' as a sort of Autobot 'Atlantis' -- a super-civilization that met its end.”

[blueshift]

That cut bit is interesting. I seem to remember the Matrix was in the series bible from the very start but just no-one bothered to mention it until the movie, rather than it being a thing made up specially for the movie.

[Pinwig]

I made an interesting point! I'm so proud

I can't see any reference to the matrix in the Bible. I'd say it was an idea pinched from the comic by Sunbow because of the way it was slightly misinterpreted as the matrix of 'leadership'. They didn't need a creation tool because of vector sigma. But it is odd that it turns up in a cut line, especially as it can't be determined why the line was cut.

[Pinwig]

Michael Hill drops the mic on new character introductions.

62 - Starscream’s Brigade

Michael Charles Hill proved with The Gambler that stories which expand the world of the Transformers, rather than rehashing the weekly struggle for power on Earth, add an exciting and much needed depth to the series. By this point, the more involved fan is craving that evolving continuity, found in abundance in the comics but overlooked by the cartoon because of its need to have so many writers working on it simultaneously. This is why episodes such as The Key to Vector Sigma and War Dawn stand the test of time when nonsense such as Prime Target or Kremzeek don’t; they enrich the back story rather than ignoring it. David Wise found ways to expand the universe by delving into its past so the current continuity wasn’t directly affected, but Hill took this approach one step further by managing to embed his world building into the present. The way Megatron is hinted at having an expanding empire off Earth in The Gambler is a good example of this - it’s subtle, but it fires the imagination; as does the character of Devcon, whose lack of toy status meant he could occupy a one-off role that served a distinct purpose rather than generically being ‘one of the crew’ like the other Autobots.

Starscream’s Brigade approaches this from a different perspective. It’s every bit as world-expanding as The Gambler, but instead of creating new characters to do it, Hill takes the great rivalry of the series and explores it in a way that other writers have been afraid to do because of the continuity busting potential of the consequences. From the start of the first series the question of whether Starscream could mount a serious attempt to overthrow Megatron and what the consequences would be has been an elephant in the room because of the inability the cartoon had to permanently remove characters. Hill’s story tackles the idea of a rebellious Starscream, and while it does shy away from offering a proper resolution to the power struggle, it finds ways round the problem that don’t leave the viewer feeling short changed.

The Starscream of this episode is very much the early first season version seen in episodes such as Transport to Oblivion - brash and assumptive, looking to take control at any opportunity because he genuinely feels himself superior. Second season episodes such as Enter the Nightbird and A Prime Problem softened his character somewhat to provide a reason why Megatron keeps him around. Because his bravado is easily broken, Megatron enjoys toying with him and using him as a demonstration to others that he cannot be dethroned. Megatron’s line, “You’re a fool, Starscream, if you think that anyone would ever follow your orders”, illustrates this. Hill has said that before he started writing for the series he went back and watched a lot of the early episodes, giving an indication of why this Starscream is the earlier version wanting to win by force rather than trickery.

Regardless, their venomous exchange at the start of the episode is glorious to see because it’s been such a long time coming. Starscream’s rage leading him to shoot Megatron is a genuinely thrilling moment, but even here the trigger for Starscream’s initial outburst isn’t his desire to overthrow Megatron, rather his jealousy of Shockwave’s rise in the ranks. As with A Prime Problem, it’s Starscream’s desire to be recognised by Megatron that causes the conflict between them, in this case over-spilling into a reaction almost like a jilted lover. The irony in this is the choice of Shockwave as Starscream’s rival. Unlike his much more powerful comic persona, Shockwave is a bit part in the cartoon and is described in his bio a being nothing more than a caretaker. Megatron calling him an “ideal soldier” because he’s “both humble and respectful” is at odds both with his presence in the cartoon, where he has spent the last sixty episodes guarding a door. It’s the Marvel biography that goes into detail about his desire to overthrow Megatron, and Hill seems to have picked on his background from there as the second most powerful Decepticon, ignoring the more fitting cartoon continuity candidates of Astrotrain and Blitzwing as Starscream’s rivals.

Another reason why this episode works so well is that the power struggle is only part of the overall plot, and in many ways is simply an excuse to find a way to introduce the Combaticons. It seems likely because of the amount of stories written simultaneously that when Hill wrote this script he wasn’t aware of the Vector Sigma concept, and instead created his own solution to the problem of new toy introductions by uniting his self-professed love of war films with the Combaticons’ Earth modes. Speaking to the Cybertron Chronicle, he said: “I think Hasbro had already designated the individual characters as military vehicles so for me it was a "no brainer" to have them borne out of WWII”. Hill also intended the episode title to reflect his inspiration, and was originally titled ‘30 Seconds Over Megatron’ as a reference to Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, MGM’s 1944 dramatisation of the retaliatory air strike against Japan after the Pearl Harbour bombings. The episode is still referred to by this title in the production bible, but Hasbro vetoed its use because they were uncomfortable with the connection. By the time of recording it had changed to ‘The Mutiny of Starscream’, and finally became ‘Starscream’s Brigade’ in what appears to be another sly film reference, this time escaping Hasbro’s notice. Perhaps more directly comparable as inspiration, The Devil’s Brigade is a 1968 United Artists feature about real-life Lieutenant Colonel Robert T. Frederick’s mission to turn a group of military convicts into the 1st Special Service Force, a dangerous missions unit who proved their worth by re-capturing strategic points in Italy from the Nazis. The Combaticons being military prisoners links conveniently with the film, but Hill hasn’t attributed the connection.

Once Starscream is dumped on the island of Guadalcanal, the unusual opening flashback begins to make sense. There are many simpler ways in which Starscream could obtain five military vehicles, but by finding a real world location suitable for Starscream’s exile that would allow him to stumble on the idea of building his own army, Hill again shows the consideration he gives his audience in trying to present a coherent story. It’s intricate by cartoon standards, but enthralling because of that. While it’s true that Starscream isn’t restricted to the island because of his flight ability (and he leaves almost immediately) it gives a reason why he would be able to obtain the vehicles without having to fight his way single-handedly through an army base to do it. The Pacific island of Guadalcanal and its liberation from occupying Japanese forces in 1943 isn’t relevant to the plot in itself, but the coincidence it creates is a delightful way of allowing the Combaticons to be created by chance.

The concept of Megatron having a prison for dissenting Decepticons makes complete sense and opens up all kinds of possibilities, as does the way in which Teletraan-1 explains that prisoners are removed from their bodies and reduced to something like the brain module previously seen in episodes such as SOS Dinobots. Perhaps inadvertently, this unites the various ways in which new Transformers have been introduced into the series. Shockwave refers to these boxes as ‘personality components’, which matches the term used for the ‘spark’ of life that Vector Sigma creates (it and Megatron talk several times in The Key to Vector Sigma about ‘personality programming’ being what brings the Stunticons to life). If these components are removable, it could be used to explain the first season origins of both the Dinobots and the Constructicons in that both groups had new Earth built shells for existing personalities. The Key to Vector Sigma showed with the Aerialbots that their ability to transform came as a result of the personality programming process, which would then explain why the Combaticons are suddenly able to transform in the “crude carcasses” Starscream inserts them into. What this is saying is that Transformer personality components can physically change inanimate objects into transforming robots. However, it’s also possible because Starscream is a known scientist and is able to leave the fuel absorbers out, that he rebuilt the vehicles himself like Megatron did with the cars the Stunticons came from.

Although the detention centre is a one-shot device to explain the existence of the personality components, made clear by the way Starscream deliberately destroys the room when he leaves it, the implication for Decepticon history is significant. It suggests that Megatron has fought off many usurpers in the past, perhaps even won civil wars, and if the room number Starscream looks for (217) is just one in the centre, rather than the centre itself, there could be thousands of potential Decepticon soldiers being held in storage. The Revenge of Bruticus shows how Megatron can reformat the Combaticons to make them loyal to him, which suggests he potentially has a huge reserve army just waiting for energy. In addition, if he has beaten this many rivals in the past, the existence of the detention centre also adds another dimension to his lack of concern about Starscream’s weak threat.

In terms of the creation of the Combaticons, it’s also worth noting that Starscream only takes one box from the detention centre room and that he appears to know which box he is looking for, suggesting the group already existed as a team whose reputation Starscream was aware of, and that when he introduces them to the viewer he is using their existing names rather than naming them for the first time. This is supported by Blast Off saying “I’m sure Onslaught has a brilliant plan… he always does”, in the next episode when the group are working out their revenge on Megatron. It’s therefore conceivable that Starscream knows he is stealing the personalities of a combining team, and would also explain why he takes the precaution of leaving out their fuel absorbers and adding the three-spot deactivation device used in The Revenge of Bruticus, knowing that he would need leverage over five friends to keep them on his side.

This set up then leads to the second half of the episode, a series of successively bigger battles as Starscream’s new unit first take on the Autobots, then the Decepticons and finally instigate an all out civil war as Megatron brings Devastator to bear. The climax manages to present a genuine feeling of uncertainty as Decepticon fights Decepticon with the Autobots observing from afar. Even though it’s impossible to think the status quo might actually change, the fact that almost all the Decepticons in the series are involved in these scenes gives the battle an air of importance. That Devastator is defeated in a straight fight (the first time that happens in any of the struggles between the combiners, showing his lesser importance at this point) adds to the excitement, and the way in which Megatron is forced to succumb gives Starscream his finest moment in the entire series.

The original episode synopsis details that Starscream is defeated because the Combaticons’ inability to refuel means they run out of power just as he triumphs, which is straightforward, but would be a glaring tactical error on Starscream’s part. Instead, at the script stage the fuel absorber sub-plot was introduced, designed to leave the Combaticons one short (Starscream having taken them from Jazz, Cliffjumper, Dirge and Ramjet) so Bruticus isn’t at full power in the final battle, therefore losing. TFWiki says the original script notes that Brawl is the one who isn’t re-energised, but on screen it’s Blast Off who doesn’t have cables attached to him at the power station, with Brawl in the dialogue script saying, “This is more like it”. It’s possible the originally scripted ending made all this clear, but the late addition of the Stunticons and lack of any dialogue about Bruticus being underpowered means it looks more like he’s simply defeated because Menasor flattens him. The Stunticons’ addition is clearly a very late change to the script because of the way they’re absent from the rest of the story, and feels like a decision made to ensure the episode again features two combiners - perhaps a requirement made by Hasbro - with Superion not being applicable because of the way the Autobots keep out of this story. A ‘two per story’ mandate would also explain the late changes made to Aerial Assault to bring the Combaticons into that.

Starscream’s Brigade is undeniably a superb episode. An all out fight between the Decepticons is a brilliant idea because it stops the climax being the usual foregone conclusion of the Autobots confounding Megatron’s latest plan. Here it’s Starscream with the plan being stopped by Megatron, and the inclusion of so many characters gives the story an epic feel. Almost the entire Decepticon roster are included - to the point that Shockwave is dragged away from Cybertron and even the long forgotten Reflector gets a cameo in the underground station. Only the Insecticons, Blitzwing, Ravage and the rarely used Buzzsaw and Frenzy are absent. Enhancing this is the fact that aside from Powerglide, all the speaking roles in the episode are given to the first season characters, and small but deliberate choices such as Starscream having to threaten his old companions Thundercracker and Skywarp to gain access to the spacebridge, add to the feeling that this episode wants to reach back right to the beginning of the first season.

By doing this Michael Charles Hill creates what feels like a pivotal moment in the series. Even if the outcome is never really in question, the battle is intense, and the fact that all of this is a backdrop to the birth of the third combiner team puts even the two part Key to Vector Sigma in the shade. It’s a story that revolves around the characters and their interactions rather than a spurious energy quest or MacGuffin, it expands the Transformers’ world by introducing the idea of the detention centre and what that means for Megatron, and above all it finally gives Starscream, one of the series’ biggest names, his moment of glory.

[Pinwig]

Why a proper ongoing continuity would have made the series ten times better.

63 - The Revenge of Bruticus

Larry Strauss’s limited association with the series sadly comes to an end with The Revenge of Bruticus, the fourth and final story he scripted before giving up writing for children’s cartoons because of what he felt was an excessive requirement for violence to make them appealing. It is also by far the best of his efforts, and demonstrates like Blaster Blues did that he knew how to pitch to the intended audience and could construct engaging stories using character motives to drive them. This episode also has the added complexity of needing to continue the plot from the previous one, with Starscream and the Combaticons exiled to a floating asteroid and desiring revenge on Megatron. The transition is seamless though, and The Revenge of Bruticus is Starscream’s Brigade - Part 2 in all but name, the two halves being a stronger example of ongoing continuity than the other instance of this in the second season - Child’s Play and The Gambler. This affords the story the luxury of not needing a first act set-up to establish the initial situation, which benefits Strauss by giving him extra time to play with the story’s overall resolution. The fact that this works so well shows just how good a writer he is; this two part story is far better than the three others in the second season where both parts were written by the same writer (Dinobot Island, Megatron’s Masterplan and Desertion of the Dinobots).

This is especially worth noting because the writer of the previous episode, Michael Charles Hill, said that he doesn’t recall specific conversations about the story with Strauss, although Hill’s position as an in-house writer at Sunbow would have given him a better direct line of communication with the co-ordinating script editors. Either way, it seems unlikely that this complete episode is something Strauss could have pitched independently because of its reliance on the previous one, but may have started out as a solo idea which was then adapted. Moving the Earth toward the sun does sound like an episode premise in its own right, suspiciously reminiscent of the way Cybertron is moved toward the Earth in The Ultimate Doom - the first story Strauss was involved with (which also used the spacebridge as the mechanism to do it). It’s possible to see how the antagonist could originally have been Megatron because of the way the action unusually picks up mid-story on Earth with the Autobots already engaged in stopping his energy harvesting plan - the usual act one set up being replaced by the scenes with the Combaticons. Putting Bruticus in Megatron’s place instead would also create the knock on effect of Megatron needing to ally with Optimus, something that happened in the resolution to The Ultimate Doom too.

The only noticeable jump in the handover between episodes is one difficult to solve from either writer’s perspective. Starscream’s penance for his betrayal naturally has to be exile rather than destruction, so the idea that he and the Combaticons are stranded on the asteroid without power (as per the end of Starscream’s Brigade) would explain why Blast Off can’t fly them off it when Astrotrain flew them to it. However, this puts Strauss in the impossible position of having to find a reason why they can escape at the start of his episode, so the lack of power element is fudged. Onslaught states Starscream doesn’t have enough power to return to Earth (on full power, Fire in the Sky showed he could travel from Cybertron to Earth and back when it was much further away), but Blast Off has enough to give the asteroid the momentum to reach Cybertron. This suggests the asteroid is close to Cybertron, something of a mistake on Megatron’s part in sending them there.

The opening dialogue between the exiles shows how the Combaticons are driving the quest for revenge rather than Starscream, shifting the focus to them. They clearly have a long standing grudge against Megatron because of the way they notice later in the episode that technology has changed during the time they were imprisoned, also claiming that to be “millions of years”. However, their conquest of Cybertron is less impressive than may have been originally intended. The sentinel robots they defeat when fighting Shockwave are referred to in the script as being “giant”, which implies they have been confused with the larger Omega Supreme class ‘guardian’ robots seen in War Dawn. As it is, the use of the sentinel character models previously seen under Shockwave’s control in Desertion of the Dinobots gives Bruticus a relatively unimpressive win, even if Vortex’s spinning rotor blades destroying them is visually striking. As was the case with Starscream being exiled though, the lack of option to destroy named characters means that after tearing the sentinels apart, Bruticus inexplicably fires Shockwave into space instead of destroying him.

Shockwave’s substantial role in this story is a reminder of how many of these last ten season two episodes bring older characters to the fore for encore performances before their exit in the film. This is followed here by Prowl, Sideswipe and the Insecticons giving a delightfully season one feel the battle on Earth - added to by the old-school notion that Megatron is trying to ship energon to Cybertron via the spacebridge. This is then balanced by the excitement of Prime adding five brand new characters into the mix in the form of the Protectobots, even if Groove rather comically has ‘POLISE’ spelt wrong on his panniers for his debut. Where these five suddenly appear from and the impact they have on the episode is explored in the addendum ‘Attention, Protectobots!!’ below.

Spike and Perceptor’s short scene is designed purely to set up the notion of the Earth colliding with another celestial object being a bad thing, but inadvertently demonstrates that Teletraan-1 must have an incredibly high resolution display if Perceptor can magnify it by zooming into it. There also seems to be a deliberate irony in the way Perceptor saying, “The chances of this planet ever colliding with a real star are remote!” is followed immediately by Starscream colliding with Shockwave in the vast gulf of space.

Putting Megatron’s two most powerful lieutenants together in an uneasy alliance is one of the highlights of an already superb story, as is the way Starscream vainly tries to bluff his way through being in charge on Cybertron and how they blame each other for the situation when Megatron turns up. Strauss though is careful to leave reasons why Megatron yet again doesn’t destroy Starscream for his traitorous behaviour at the end of the story: only he knows how to bring down Bruticus because of the convenient three-spot failsafe he added during their reconstruction; he has the plan to use the hologram projector to fool the Autobots into thinking Bruticus is destroyed; and most importantly, when Megatron finishes the episode by saying, “Once we finish reprogramming Bruticus to obey only me, he will be unstoppable!” the emphasis is on the ‘we’, rather than I, implying he needs Starscream to do it.

The Revenge of Bruticus builds on the scale of the previous episode, giving the two parts together the feel of a significant end of season finale. It’s as close as the TV series gets to the grander scale of the film, and not only provides an action packed story in its own right, drawing together a number of characteristics and plot elements from the previous sixty plus episodes, but it perfectly concludes the premise set up in Starscream’s Brigade. It’s also self-aware enough to incorporate ideas that Strauss knows fans will love and have indeed stood the test of time as memorable moments - such as Bruticus using Shockwave as a weapon and Optimus and Megatron having to unite and sacrifice parts of their own bodies to get the spacebridge console working. In addition, by using Cybertron as well as Earth as stages for the two sub-plots it unites both of the Transformers’ worlds in one epic ‘save the planet’ narrative that, although is pinched from The Ultimate Doom, makes it feel like the ongoing story is escalating beyond the restrictions of its episodic nature. Part of this is also the way Bruticus is given much more presence as the single giant obstacle all the other Transformers have to overcome, rather than the other combiner focussed stories which diminish them by pitting them against each other in wrestling matches. No Transformer has had this kind of threat since Devastator first appeared in Heavy Metal War, and the legacy this provides is seen through the years in the way the Combaticons reappear more frequently than the other combiners in toys, fiction and games. Together, Michael Hill and Larry Strauss provided one of the pinnacles of the series, and gave a strong indication of how much better it would have been had it used an ongoing continuity throughout its run.


Attention, Protectobots!!

As was noted under the addendum to The Key to Vector Sigma, although the last ten episodes of season two are mostly dedicated to promoting the four ‘Scramble City’ style combining teams, evidence points to their addition being a rushed last minute affair, with the Protectobots coming off worst of all. As the last team to be added, the bible actually takes time to point out that their biographies arrived after the episodes were under way:

“Although the enclosed product information arrived too late to be incorporated into the final premises of the series, Hasbro and Griffin/Bacal would appreciate it if they could be inserted into existing story development. The Protectobots (formerly known as the Rescue Group Vehicles) have no known origin at this time.”

This explains why when the other three teams have extensive origin stories worked out that the Protectobots appear out of nowhere in this episode. It’s endearing to think that the production staff were keen to point out the team have no back story, considering the lack of proper introduction for any of the second season characters before this point, but given the improved flow between these last ten episodes, it is a shame that there wasn’t enough time to make their introduction continue the narrative. Instead, the request to fit them into existing story development is taken literally with Hot Spot’s crew helping the rescue attempts on Earth - something not mentioned by the original episode synopsis.

The changes were made early enough to give the Protectobots lines, possibly taken from other characters, but First Aid is the only one of the five mentioned explicitly in the dialogue. The script does name Streetwise and Blades too, but Groove is called ‘Cruiser’ and Hot Spot is omitted entirely. Further evidence of Hot Spot’s very late addition can be seen in on screen edits. When he puts out the fire at the farm he does it without speaking, showing the shot was animated after the voice recordings had taken place and presumably replacing the original intention to have a larger cameo for Inferno and Red Alert. The late insertion of this sequence also means the following two shots needed to be cut short, causing Inferno’s next line (“Everything we snuff catches fire again”) to overrun Red Alert’s (“Keep at it, Inferno”) - making it look as though Red Alert is speaking with Inferno’s voice.

[Pinwig]

Menasor on Menasor action. 

64 - Masquerade

Although Masquerade is the penultimate story of the second season in terms of production numbering, it was originally broadcast straight after Aerial Assault, completing a pair of episodes which focus individually on the two new combining teams introduced in The Key To Vector Sigma. While Aerial Assault’s anachronistic use of the Combaticons and uncharacteristically helpful Aerialbots meant that story sat entirely out of place when broadcast, Masquerade is a straightforward follow up to Vector Sigma which gives the Stunticons room to breathe in their own story and more definition as a set of five unique characters.

Almost all of the last ten episodes of the season are written by well established names, the script editors possibly needing reliable writers because of the speed at which the stories were produced, and in this case it’s dinosaur expert and gothic horror aficionado Donald F Glut who returns to contribute his penultimate story for the series, unusually relying on neither of his pet subjects. Most of his stories are average at best, but Masquerade bucks the trend by providing a compact tale of deception which also develops the Stunticons.

Masquerade gives the five a deliberate reintroduction, with Megatron’s opening dialogue pointing out their “unique transformation powers make them the perfect choice” for his mission (despite the fact they split up seconds later) and Motormaster name checking the entire team twice in quick succession as a reminder to viewers of who they’re buying watching. While the Aerialbots started out as sceptical about life on Earth, the Stunticons seem to take an opposite course - beginning by swearing allegiance to Megatron in The Key to Vector Sigma and being obsequiously subservient here, to the point at the end of the broadcast stories where they’re almost too busy to help out in the battle against the renegade Combaticons (The Revenge of Bruticus).

This introduction is followed by a dramatic and well orchestrated action sequence as the Stunticons obtain the parts that Megatron wants before being captured by the Autobots. The concern the Autobots have about the Stunticons is highlighted by the tone of the conversation between Ironhide and Ratchet before they go after them - Ironhide, one of the toughest and oldest of the Autobots, feeling he needs “souping up” to take on the newer, younger car robots. In fact, the quintet is surprisingly easily defeated given Megatron talks about the way their “automatic force fields make their hulls impenetrable” when they are first created. The fact Warpath can punch straight through Dead End’s roof completely ignores this; it’s a surprisingly violent moment for the cartoon, got away with because Dead End isn’t in robot (humanoid) form at the time.

The combinations of Autobots chosen for each vignette make capturing the Stunticons seem reasonable propositions - such as the way Grapple uses his intelligence to set fire to Breakdown to slow him before Inferno puts him out. Tracks also gets to show off his flight mode again (although biographically speaking he doesn’t need to because his top speed is far in excess of Dead End’s), and also his black beam gun, which interestingly when fired at Dead End’s windscreen appears to blind him.

These confrontations also allow for a rematch between Optimus and Motormaster. It’s probable that when writing this episode, Glut was unaware of the similar moment in The Key to Vector Sigma, but Motormaster’s bio makes a match up with the Autobot leader an obvious idea to pick on and may also have been suggested through script editing for added continuity. Here again the “king of the road” quote from his bio is used to suggest Motormaster’s jealousy of Prime - all of course based on the alt modes they share rather than any direct clash of personality. As before, the dialogue suggests a long standing rivalry in the way Motormaster says, “I been waitin' fer this a long time, Prime”, which is derived more from the wording of his extended Marvel biography than the abbreviated cartoon version and is somewhat at odds with his very recent creation. However, it does give the moment a feeling of significance to end the first act and adds to Motormaster’s grizzled nature.

This jealousy is only one example of how Glut takes care through these scenes to draw on the Stunticons’ biographies to make them individual. What’s significant is the way this is done without the usual sound-bites and blatant signposting common in the series, instead allowing the five characters to demonstrate their personalities and traits in a more natural and sometimes entirely unspoken manner. A good example of this is the fuel leak which allows Grapple to set Breakdown on fire. It’s a problem mentioned by his bio and isn’t a result of the battle, but isn’t accompanied by the kind of trite dialogue you’d expect that would point this out. Similarly, the original dialogue script has Breakdown for the most part speaking with a pronounced stutter as a reference to his nervousness and vibration ability. Ultimately, only one line was actually recorded like that – at the point he uses the ability to short out the bars of the prison cell - but his extreme self-consciousness is also noted in the line “They're gawking at us! How morti-frying” when the Stunticons are captured. This defines Breakdown as a character through his actions and allows the audience to learn about him by his behaviour, rather than simply being told about it through dialogue.

The other Stunticons gain the same treatment. The negativity in almost everything Dead End says reflects his sullen and fatalistic nature, also explaining why he finds Tracks’ aerial ability “droll”. In addition, Wildrider is shown as the “reckless driver” of his bio, accompanied by the “screaming and laughing” it mentions. This makes the Stunticons feel like individuals more than in any of their other appearances, and also more than the other combining teams, which might be a contributing factor to their general popularity.

The core idea for the episode, that the Autobots impersonate the Stunticons to find out what Megatron is up to, is clever and uses the Decepticon leader’s original reason for creating the Stunticons (that he was tired of being defeated on land by the Autobot cars) against him. The original story synopsis is less complicated than the finished episode in this regard, simply saying that several repainted Autobots impersonate the Stunticons’ vehicle modes to gain access to the construction site, but are unmasked when they can’t combine. As such, the use of Windcharger’s magnetic ability to hold the Autobots together to prolong the confusion seems to have been an afterthought, albeit a clever one, but creates additional problems the episode can’t satisfactorily resolve – such as Optimus needing much more than just a respray with camouflage paint to be able to replicate Motormaster’s torso mode.

In truth, the idea that Jazz painted red would look like Dead End because they’re both Porsches is stretching reality just a little, as is the case with Mirage and Dragstrip being the same because they’re both Formula style racing cars. Sideswipe and Breakdown are a perfect match being derived from the same Lambourgini model, but Wildrider poses a problem because of the lack of an Autobot Ferrari equivalent. Despite being a Pontiac Firebird, Windcharger is as close a visual match as the others are, and his generic reference to simply being a ‘sports car’ in his cartoon bio leaves him open to interpretation on the part of the writer.

Rather than rewrite the script to make the combining idea work properly, Glut left the vestiges of the original repainting in the episode, but then added the unnamed device Ratchet uses to visually alter the Autobots anyway for good measure. It’s a pity there wasn’t a way to get Hound involved, as his hologram gun would have solved the problem of changing the Autobots’ appearances in a manner fans of the cartoon would be familiar with. As it is, it’s likely the device Ratchet uses is supposed to be Mirage’s photon disruptor, but isn’t drawn as such. Mirage’s bio notes that his disruptor “can make him invisible, or alter his physical placement or appearance. Can also project holographic images”, which is enough to make this idea work, but annoyingly this isn’t made clear and also isn’t how the disruptor has been seen to work throughout the series. Mirage’s abilities are definitely part of the way the idea works though because of the way he refers to having to keep up the “phoney face” when the Autobots form their fake Menasor. They also seem to be able to ‘switch off’ the disguises when Optimus says there is “no need for them” anymore, again suggesting a projection of some kind. All this would answer the question of how the Autobots can follow the Stunticons’ transformations on screen – it being a simple illusion.

A further quirk of the scripting process illustrates how even one line can have a significant impact on the reading of an episode. As originally outlined, the Autobots are as usual reacting to one of Megatron’s schemes. It implies they know about the concealed construction site and are looking for a way to get into it, leading them to the idea of abducting and impersonating the Stunticons. This is standard fare for the series, but as broadcast, the Autobots are already trying to track the Stunticons to capture them before they know about the construction site. Prime’s idea to camouflage Autobots and infiltrate Megatron’s construction site is only prompted by the scientist who mistakes the Stunticons for Autobots; it isn’t his intention to do this from the outset.

The difference is subtle, but important in that it suggests Optimus considers the Stunticons a threat that must be proactively combated and was trying to do that before getting interested in what they were stealing. It’s an unusually aggressive stance for the Autobot leader, who never instigates conflict with the Decepticons. It implies his original intention was to ‘confiscate’ the Stunticons from Megatron and hold them prisoner permanently, and the fact this is an accidental by-product of the way the script evolved is a shame, because it’s one of the most interesting discussion points about the episode. Either way, the idea reinforces the notion maintained through the series that Optimus sees his job on Earth as keeping the Decepticons in check rather than actively looking to destroy them, coming across rather like a parent dealing with a difficult child.

It’s easy to see how everything else in the episode is peripheral to this core plot idea, particularly the way Glut relies on the old series stereotype of a crystal being the power source for the weapon. This week’s stone of choice, a ruby, harks all the way back to the ruby crystal mines of Burma in the original pilot episodes, but in reality it doesn’t matter what Megatron is up to, what matters is that the Autobots can’t see it. This appears to be the only reason Megatron is building the laser in a meteorite crater, as if denying the Autobots direct line of sight is enough to hide the weapon (this is implied in dialogue cut from the final episode in which Hound projects a hologram of the crater showing the Decepticons, but isn’t able to discern what they’re doing). While this works in as much as it facilitates the Autobots hatching their plan to get into the crater, it ignores the fact that in the past Megatron has built and failed with giant crystal-powered laser weapons, which in the case of Fire on the Mountain were also discovered much more simply by the Autobots using Sky Spy.

Some concession can be given to the fact Megatron is building a weapon in a hole in that the line “Imagine my turning that ray on the Autobots’ headquarters” implies it will be portable once complete, or that he’s at least thought about the uselessness of a super weapon being stuck in the bottom of a pit, but this, coupled with his odd decision to dismiss the Constructicons after they’ve finished building the weapon (a decision Glut even acknowledges the stupidity of by having Starscream question it), and the ease with which it is destroyed (apparently because Ironhide of all people ‘altered’ the crystal), shows how the focus of this episode is so much on the meeting of the two Menasors that everything else is given very little thought.

It’s a pity then that more isn’t made of that final pay off. In both cases, the animation for the combination sequence suffers as usual in comparison to the other combiners in that Motormaster (or Prime in disguise) simply expands his arms and legs to form Menasor almost by himself, with the four other cars simply clamping themselves onto him like armour. The showdown between the two – which has been anticipated by the viewer for most of the episode - is over in a flash, and despite the glorious shots of Megatron wielding his super weapon and displaying his mania by ignoring Soundwave’s warnings, the Decepticons turn tail yet again without any attempt to salvage the situation.

Masquerade then is an episode which is all about the climax, but doesn’t really deliver when it gets there. Too much of the story’s logic is sacrificed to make the final confrontation work, whether that be the fudged way in which the Autobots can mimic the Stunticons, or the sense in what Megatron is doing in the first place. It offers the interesting discussion point around Optimus’s perception of the power the Stunticons have – and the ease with which the Autobots are defeated at the end preserves the feeling that these new toys really are the most powerful of the Transformers – but by recycling too much of the show’s past in crystal power, giant lasers and the Decepticon plan really not making much sense, as an episode it can only be a mid-card entry in the run of combiner-promoting stories at the end of the second season.

[The Huff]

I've been meaning to say for a while now, but I do look forward to these reviews every Sunday. It's always interesting to hear other peoples views on the episodes and also the extra facts from behind the scenes. So much work and detail goes into these articles so just to let you know that it's all appreciated and thanks!

[Pinwig]

That's lovely to hear. Thank you very much.

[Pinwig]

So is it really the worst episode ever?

65 – B.O.T.

Earl Kress’s final story for the series is often regarded as the worst of the entire ninety-eight episode run, and coming at the end of the hurried final block of season two that introduced the combiners, it certainly shows the signs of being put together very quickly. It contains glaringly obvious continuity problems which stop the story making sense, rolls together as many jarring character stereotypes as is possible in a twenty minute cartoon, and like Hoist Goes Hollywood, continues the trend of Kress’s writing moving away from the established tone of the Transformers and more toward the wacky cartoon entertainment he would become famous for. Kress himself refered to the Transformers as a “comedy adventure” series in interviews, which goes some way to explain his approach. Unfortunately, coming straight after two bona-fide series classics, the shift in pitch only makes the episode’s other shortcomings more obvious.

It is by no means a complete turkey though, and has some positives that make the ‘worst episode ever’ label seem a little harsh. Rather than going off at a complete tangent like some of the genuinely bad episodes in the second season (Child’s Play, A Decepticon Raider…), it sticks to the established series format, being loosely themed around another of Megatron’s energy harvesting plans. It also just about manages to use Swindle’s character traits to develop the plot - making him the most individual and memorable of the Combaticons as a result. It also further develops the relationship between Megatron and his new special teams and manages to differentiate Bruticus from the absent Menasor. With time and proper editing, B.O.T. could have been developed into something just as impressive as the previous two stories, but it’s inescapable that despite the potential it does have, the end result feels like an unpolished first draft.

It’s not difficult to see that the story is inspired by Swindle’s biography: “within him beats the fuel pump of the most greed-driven street hustler. Thrives on wheeling and dealing - works for his own personal advancement”. This encapsulates the original idea for the episode in a nutshell; the way Kress turns this into him selling his own teammates is genuinely clever and an entirely reasonable proposition given the antagonistic and unsettled relationships among the escaped convicts shown in their introduction. When Swindle explains later that it isn’t his fault he sold his friends because of his inbuilt greed, his flawed character becomes immediately more interesting than other uniform Decepticon henchmen like the coneheads. It presents the opportunity for a character driven plot - something the series has repeatedly shown leads to the best episodes.

The episode’s principle problem comes with the way this idea is garbled in the writing of the opening scenes. The wording of the original episode synopsis: “Swindle has left his fellow Combaticons inoperable, having sold their parts to the black market”, indicates that selling out his teammates is deliberate on Swindle’s part, which also explains why Megatron demands he reassembles his most precious new asset as penance. The synopsis doesn’t mention the Protectobots, likely for reasons explored under The Revenge of Bruticus, which suggests there originally could have been a different reason for how the other four Combaticons become inoperable. For the beleaguered production team though, looking for any opportunity to insert the Protectobots into these final few episodes, there is a lot of sense in having Defensor be the cause. As such, the last of the four giant robots appears with no introduction, just as the individual members did in their previous appearance. The suggestion is that Defensor and Bruticus are already about to engage in a high noon style showdown at the beginning of the episode for reasons ignored because they’re irrelevant to the plot. Everything about this opening scene, from the hurried nature of the animation, to the sight of Blast Off and Vortex in vehicle mode trundling alongside the others on a city street, screams ‘cheap last-minute production’, made completely obvious by the way Defensor can completely disintegrate four Transformers with a single shot. This whole scene is about disabling the other Combaticons as quickly as possible.

It’s worth pointing out that devastation on this scale has never been seen before in the series, and whether it is the fact that the characters will eventually survive the episode intact; something to do with the adhoc manner of the Combaticons construction; or simply that this hastily written scene had little thought put into it, it seems almost unthinkable that this was ever considered as a suitable solution to the problem of how they are disabled. All through these final episodes the battles between the combiners have been carefully constructed to avoid showing an outright winner – thus preserving the equality between the teams as purchasable toys. Here, Defensor by accident is made to seem several times more powerful than the other three. His hurried inclusion is also evident in the way that he appears in combined form at the start of the episode. This is a significant toy reveal, coming as it did in January 1986 largely before the toys were on sale, and goes against the way the other teams’ combined forms were used as big episode finales.

All of this is forgiveable given the behind the scenes context for Defensor’s inclusion, but far less easy to accept is the way the hasty script re-writing confuses the original idea of Swindle selling out his friends. In the first scene, his line “Now where am I going to find parts?” introduces his visit to the nameless general (interchangeably referred to in the script as ‘General’ and ‘Dictator’, leaving no doubt as to the stereotype being used), which is followed by him requesting “spare parts for my colleagues who were damaged in battle” when they meet. This clearly implies that Swindle is trying to repair his teammates rather than capitalise on selling their remains. However, in the next shot, far from receiving new parts, Swindle is selling off the functioning “weapons and computer systems” of his destroyed teammates to the Dictator instead. The rest of the episode then follows this original premise with Swindle trying to reassemble the pieces from the Russians the ‘Dictator’ sold them to – showing that the patch to add in the Protectobots was possibly written by a hurried script editor not completely understanding Swindle’s original intention. It’s a shame because this confusion means Swindle’s conflicting motives make no sense and deny him the chance to come across as the greed driven individual Kress obviously intended him to be. The way the rest of the script is written suggests that Swindle originally may have created the incident which causes the downfall of the other four, or at least saw the chance to capitalise on it, explaining why he alone inexplicably escapes the destruction unscathed. This would make the line, “It’s not my fault Megatron, this greed is built into my personality component!” make more sense.

The lack of cohesion with other episodes shows in other areas too, particularly in how Kress’s approach to the combiners as sub-teams mirrors the way the Dinobots and Insecticons were introduced in the first series - being almost independent to the main factions. Both the Combaticons and Protectobots have their own headquarters, something not seen for any of the teams before, and while Megatron sees the Combaticons as being subject to his whims in the way he says “Decepticons do not have to request anything from Combaticons” when Skywarp worries about landing at their base, the wording clearly differentiates the two parties. Similarly, the exchange:

ROLAND: You're not the Protectobots!
BUMBLEBEE: We're the Autobots!
GEARS: But we're all on the same team!

coupled with the way Streetwise says “The Autobots need us!” before the final battle, reinforces the independence the Protectobots have on the Autobot side, and the respect Optimus’ main team have for their new additions.

The Protectobots themselves get a better showing in this episode than their previous appearance. Groove is still referred to as ‘Cruiser’ in the script (as was the case with The Revenge of Bruticus) but the liquid nitrogen he uses at least approximates the “freezing” liquid weapon his biography mentions. Hotspot gets to speak for the first time too, his first line “And what you can't reach... I can!” referring to his ability to shoot liquids 1200 feet in the air using his high pressure hose. Defensor’s reappearance at the climax of the episode is interesting in as much as he wasn’t originally intended to be there, and so has to be removed before the more heart-felt intended ending from the original story (“the kids direct BOT to sacrifice himself by destroying the Decepticon laser”) can take place. Kress uses the flaw in Defensor’s bio to do this - that projecting his forcefield drains so much energy he can only sustain it for short periods, but because this goes unmentioned in the script it has the unintended and comical side effect of the Decepticons simply waiting for his shield to drop before attacking him. Far from being the “almost impervious to artillery” of his biography, this makes Defensor seem rather weak compared to Superion and the others.

Despite their shortcomings, the Protectobots are shown to be more dynamic and effective in the story than the bumbling antics of the old guard, in this case Ironhide, Gears and Bumblebee getting encore appearances in the way so many of the first season characters reappear to do so in these last episodes. Whether it’s a chance for the writers to bid a fond farewell to familiar faces before the events of the movie, or simply a way to show the combining toys being newer and better, watching Ironhide taking out the entire floor of a building above him to try and get to Swindle without any thought for the consequences is more endearing than it is ridiculous. These are the characters upon which the foundation of the series is built, and it’s hard to judge them inferior to the shiny new arrivals.

That said, the new combiners aren’t exactly shown to be flawless in the story, and the script gets around the shock that the Combaticons are reduced to scrap metal in the opening exchange by returning to the premise behind their original construction – that their bodies are shells controlled by ‘personality components’, and as such physically destroying the shells doesn’t kill the sentience inside. This is shown in the way Brawl’s personality, now housed in a physical case rather than being the glowing cube it was before, becomes integral to the plot. This idea, never properly explored in the series until these last few episodes (SOS Dinobots and Autobot Spike being the closest examples), is developed further in the 1987 toy line when it’s formalised with the Headmasters concept.

This of course introduces the other, much lamented, element of the plot – the three high school students and their use of Brawl’s personality to build their own Biotronic Operational Telecommunicator, a jumble of meaningless words designed to fit the acronym BOT. The influences of the popular ‘Brat Pack’ films of the mid-eighties are clear in the way these characters are written – particularly Martin and Rowland who carry the attitude of the Breakfast Club’s detention room into their science lesson and mix it with the scientific ambition of Weird Science. Both films were released in 1985, the latter in August right at the point this episode would have been written. The result is an odd amalgam of ideas, and one that doesn’t fit the ‘heart of gold’ nature of the other human protagonists in the series. Raoul may have had rough edges, but his intentions were always positive and he occupied the position of an ‘older brother’ role-model for younger viewers, much like Spike. Here the two boys echo too much the sulky, responsibility-free teenage angst of the time, laugh off the problems caused by their experiment and are poorly balanced by the bookish Elise.

Unfortunately, like the peaked-cap wearing and heavily medal-laden General Pinochet inspired dictator at the start of the episode, this means all three characters come across as clear stereotypes - Kress unsuccessfully trying to tap into the zeitgeist of the time in a fashion not suited to the tone of the cartoon. Martin and Rowland never really atone for their recklessness, laughing their way through the final battle as Elise guides BOT to his doom, and even at the episode’s conclusion, Elise, who technically saved the day, is gagged and dragged away by the boys for suggesting building a new robot, rather than being congratulated in any meaningful way. This sexist belittling of her role in the story is jarring to modern eyes, but the ‘haven’t you caused enough trouble already?’ ending is more about silencing the science geek suggestion than anything to do with her gender.

In summary then, BOT is a victim of the circumstance it came about in. It’s important to remember that at this point Kress was still a novice writer, the tone of this and his previous story, Hoist Goes Hollywood, showing someone still reliant on cartoon stereotypes far more than is beneficial to good writing. This episode clearly had less script-editing attention than the others around it and as such comes across as an interesting raw idea bent to suit the last minute need to add the Protectobots. Underneath the blue pencil the basics are there – Megatron wants to push the moon out of orbit to allow him to produce hydro-electric power by controlling the tides, and it’s the human built BOT who is sacrificed to stop him. There are elements of Autobot Spike’s psychology in this, and a reflection again on what makes a Transformer a Transformer, but the garbled nature and patchwork quality of the end result stops it coming anywhere near being a good episode.

[Pinwig]

Just a heads up. Having reached the end of Season Two I'm going to have a break for a few weeks. Writing this and the pap I do for my Doctor Who marathon is taking it's toll at the mo, but the Who run will finish over Christmas so I'll kick in with Season Three in the New Year. I'm going to do the Movie at the end as that will take a while I think. I'd like to do all of Five Faces before starting to repost, so my contributions to this thread will be back around the end of Jan.

That'll also give me a chance to kick off some other TF related writing I've been thinking about and get the letters page done for Blueshift's TFN zine. So the lack of posts for the next few weeks doesn't mean I've given up; I'm set on doing an essay for every story.

[Pinwig]

Update: I've been back working on Sunbow Sundays writing for about three weeks, but having got interested in the production of the series itself have gone down a rabbit hole looking into behind the scenes stuff as supplementary material to the episode reviews. That's delayed getting back to writing about the actual episodes, but having said this would recommence about now I just wanted to flag up that the wheels are turning, but it'll be another few weeks before regular posts restart. Hopefully with an interesting article on Sunbow and Marvel.

[Andy Turnbull]

Excellent!

[The Huff]

Without sounding impatient - any news on when we can look forward to this making it's comeback? I do enjoy it so much and Sundays have been so empty without it recently. No pressure of course.

[Pinwig]

Very soon. I finished Five Faces last week and am trying to work out what I'm doing with this longer piece I've been doing on Sunbow itself. I just wanted to get ahead far enough that I can regularly post every Sunday because there are inevitably going to be weekends in the next few months when I won't get time to write a new installment. A head start of five or six will give me a chance to keep it weekly.

I'm really pleased there's an audience for them! I've tried to cast the net as wide as I can for background research, and am quite eager to get Season Three done so I can go back to Season One and do those in more depth.