Obviously, the original Transformers cartoon was, to a large degree, meant to serve as advertising for the toys. It showcased Hasbro product, and the series was intended to encourage consumers to go out and purchase that product.

With that in mind, I think the show did a reasonably good job of balancing an accurate depiction of the product with the need to simplify the toy designs for the sake of animation. There were lots of little changes made, mostly to make the designs of the robot modes conform to a more humanoid aesthetic, but in broad strokes the cartoon was pretty accurate in terms of showing what the toys looked like and what vehicles they changed into.

I'm specifically talking about the transformation sequences, when the robots in the cartoon were shown rearranging their bodies into vehicles and such.. The animation could have cheated horrendously if they'd chosen to. There could have been a flash of light to mask the transformation. They could have just drawn the robots morphing into their car shapes. But, for the most part, the transformations were fairly accurate to how the toys themselves were designed. You could frequently figure out how the toys transformed just by watching their animated counterparts. This was true of so many characters—Optimus Prime, Soundwave, the Dinobots, and many more. Obviously there were exceptions (Ironhide and Ratchet), of course.

Floro Dery, or his assistants, were responsible for the look of the on-screen step-by-step transformations, just as they designed the look of the characters in the show. They dutifully reproduced the way the toys worked, more or less, and there was a great synergy between the Hasbro product and the way it was represented on TV.

Until we got to late season two.

At some point, somebody stopped caring. Or maybe they got lazy. Or maybe they were designing animation models without having the toys on hand, so they genuinely had no idea how the toys themselves actually transformed. But, something happened around the time the Scramble City characters were introduced. None of the on-screen transformations made sense any longer.

There were always step-by-step drawings to show the animators which parts of the characters folded up and became wings or wheels or whatever. Floro Dery would draw arrows to describe which parts folded up and in what order, so there was a clear and obvious means by which a robot would become a car. The early pictures were clear about how Mirage's waist swivels, how his chest folds up to form the front end of the car, and how his legs form the back of the car. But by late season two, the drawings made no sense. If you put the illustrations into words, it was basically "Motormaster lays down becomes a semi trailer. The end."

In the show, Silverbolt's entire jet nosecone retracted into itself so that his jet mode became a tiny box, and he sprouted arms and legs out of nowhere. This isn't at all how the toy was designed. Not even close. And it was this way across the board. Dead End folded up into a box and then his car windshield just sprouted from his back. Onslaught would lay down and his arms would disappear and his head turned into the front of his missile trailer mode. The wings for Blast Off somehow popped off and became the chest shield for Bruticus. Motormaster just transformed into Menasor on his own, and the other Stunticons attached to him afterwards. All of this is patently absurd.

And it wasn't the animators making mistakes. They were following the step-by-step transformation models as they had been designed for the show. It's just that the models themselves had been completely phoned in. They were such a horrible representation of the Hasbro product that I'm honestly surprised the Sunbow executives even gave them the go-ahead. Maybe Floro Dery was just trolling the studio by this point. We know he was dissatisfied because of the way the studio treated him, and this was either a symptom, or one of the causes, that led to his dismissal, and the reason he wasn't there to work on season three.

Whatever the reason, it's clear that the step-by-step transformation sequences devised for the show, this late in the game, were never meant to be a true and authentic representation of how the toys functioned. And I think the show was hurt by that. The transformations that we saw were utter fantasy, about as far removed from the designs of the Hasbro product as possible.. It stopped being an advertisement for the existing product and descended into a completely impossible depiction of what the toys could or could not do. And that's unfortunate.

For the first season and most of the second season of the show, there was an unspoken promise that if you watched a Transformers character in the series, his toy would be fairly close to what you saw on screen. Ironhide and Ratchet were the most disappointing toys of 1984 for precisely this reason, because they failed to meet this promise. But, by the end of season two, EVERY CHARACTER introduced was failing to meet this promise. All of them. Twenty-four of them, if you tally up the four new Scramble City groups plus their combined forms.

The show never really recovered from this. The Transformers: the Movie characters also didn't match their on-screen transformations, but for a different reason—because the animated characters were, for the first time, being designed first. The toys were a lackluster attempt at realizing those transformations in three-dimensional form. And, honestly, season three pretty much stopped making attempts at synergy altogether. Characters like the Predacons, Sandstorm, Octane—none of them transformed like their toys. I guess Sky Lynx was pretty close, at least in most episodes. But otherwise, it was a whole show full of Ironhides and Ratchets.

No version of Transformers that has followed has been as accurate in depiction on-screen transformations as early G1. Beast Wars employed cheats that were impossible for the toys to achieve. Beast Machines showed the characters' body parts shrinking and morphing in impossible ways. Robots in Disguise came close to approaching the authenticity of the G1 days. Animated cheated maliciously. And the live-action films share the problem with the 1986 film, where the toys were a grossly oversimplified version of what we saw on screen.

I'd love to see the synergy come back. I would love to see the product, and its animated representation, be a close match once again. But, it's much easier not to do so. It's far less costly, and takes far less time, to just cheat and invent wacky transformations on screen that have nothing to do with the toys. But, for a franchise that is predominantly merchandise-driven, I think it's a horrible idea. It's an unspoken promise that they have a history of breaking, and for once I would love to see that promise being kept once more.

Zob (thank you for coming to my TED Talk)

Zobovor <zmfts@aol.com> wrote:
>
> No version of Transformers that has followed has been as accurate in
> depiction on-screen transformations as early G1. Beast Wars employed
> cheats that were impossible for the toys to achieve. Beast Machines
> showed the characters' body parts shrinking and morphing in impossible
> ways. Robots in Disguise came close to approaching the authenticity of
> the G1 days. Animated cheated maliciously. And the live-action films
> share the problem with the 1986 film, where the toys were a grossly
> oversimplified version of what we saw on screen.

Cybertron. Utterly ridiculous fealty to the toys. It’s great. Even the
traffic light transformer has an amazing fealty to another toy — we should
have gotten a remold.

On Saturday, May 8, 2021 at 4:23:00 PM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:

> Cybertron. Utterly ridiculous fealty to the toys. It’s great.

I'll admit to not being intimately acquianted with Cybertron, but from what little I do know, I think I can state with certainty that the Thunderclash toy didn't actually have breasts and pointy nipples under her armor. But I'll concede the point.

I do need to back up just a bit, though, because I forgot all about the Netflix series. Given that they used the same CAD models in animation that they used to produce the toys themselves, there was a surprising level of on-screen accuracy. So, there's that.

Zob (still, some of the cheats used in other shows are absolutely unforgivable)

On Saturday, May 8, 2021 at 7:31:03 PM UTC-4, Zobovor wrote:
> On Saturday, May 8, 2021 at 4:23:00 PM UTC-6, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:
>
> > Cybertron. Utterly ridiculous fealty to the toys. It’s great.
> I'll admit to not being intimately acquianted with Cybertron, but from what little I do know, I think I can state with certainty that the Thunderclash toy didn't actually have breasts and pointy nipples under her armor. But I'll concede the point.
>
> I do need to back up just a bit, though, because I forgot all about the Netflix series. Given that they used the same CAD models in animation that they used to produce the toys themselves, there was a surprising level of on-screen accuracy. So, there's that.
>
>
> Zob (still, some of the cheats used in other shows are absolutely unforgivable)

G1's transformations, especially the iconic roll call sequence in MTMTE, are still the gold standard in terms of translating toy-accuracy to something that looks cool on-screen - the kind of transformation that makes you rush out to buy the toy, without feeling disappointed by the discrepancy between the animation and the real world article.

The likes of Energon, Cybertron, and Netflix literally transposed the toys to the screen, with jarring results. Pegs, portholes, ball joints, and other toy-necessitated details break the illusion of living robots and remind us that we're seeing toy puppets dragged across the screen. I'd prefer the toys live up to a cool animated design, rather than simplistic animation dumbed down to match a toy.