As in, the long pan across the ark after the volcano explodes in More Than Meets the Eye part 1. Ok so I'm sure at some point most people have had some fun with this scene. When I used to watch old VHS copies of this episode, I figured there were a few recognizable guys and then mostly a bunch of random trash. When better quality DVDs became available, I realized that actually most of them were actual Autobots and Decepticons, and at least most of the color schemes were accurate to who we would expect. So I started looking a little deeper into it and trying to make positive identifications to everyone. Some were obvious, some were not, and some were obviously colored wrong upon closer inspection. It's going to be difficult to get through this without the aid of pictures, but I'll do my best.

Let's get a few out of the way first. The yellow bot in the bottom left corner is Sunstreaker. Sliding to the right in the foreground we have Jazz, then Brawn, the Soundwave. Right above Brawn and Soundwave is Hound. Then Sideswipe, Huffer, and Reflector, and Trailbreaker is mostly hidden behind the rock. Hopefully we are all in agreement there. I'll admit that I'm not 100% convinced about Sideswipe and Trailbreaker, but at least to my eye all the right details check out.

Straight up from Jazz sprawled over the console is Bluestreak even though he's colored like Prowl (notice the detail on the upper legs). What looks like a dark hole next to him is actually Wheeljack's windshield.

Continuity between this scene and the next few is awful, but Ironhide (at least I think it's him) is lying on his back ("Quickly, we must revive the other Decepticons") so I called the light blue one in the back right behind Huffer and Reflector Ratchet. Also, Starscream is missing his left leg and wings as Megatron drags him over which sort of matches "Thundercracker"'s destroyed body. Since neither looks like Skywarp as the beam hits him, that makes the seeker in the back next to Wheeljack Thundercracker. Of course, you could argue that Megatron wouldn't drag Starscream over to be revived and *that* was the scene that was actually miscolored... If you wanted to take it a step further, Megatron drops Reflector(no lens on chest) next to Soundwave and then "Starscream" but then in the final shot of them charging, it's Soundwave, then Reflector (different position, lens on chest), then Thundercracker. Not a big help, but I like that it kinda supports my theory.

Since all the seekers (well, at least the main ones) are "accounted" for in one way or another, that makes the white and black bot in the far back right Prowl. He's the only other bot with that wing shape and the general shape of his chest looks right.

There's quite a few that I thought if I sat down and studied and referenced character models that I could get, but in the end I couldn't identify for sure. The dark blue, olive drab, and orange guys above "Thundercracker", the Gears colored guy to their right (it could be Gears, I just can't see it clearly enough), the olive drab robot next to Reflector, and the blue and grey legs seen below Reflector.

There's also some purple parts and a red component above Sunstreaker and some really dark stuff (maybe red?) and some green junk above Sideswipe. All that could just be debris - but I'm trying to be thorough!

Elephant in the room - the orange bot is Hauler. I mean, maybe? Probably not, but it's at least worth looking into. To my untrained eye, the light orange, dark orange, and grey are a pretty close match to his scene later with Ratchet and Cliffjumper - but I can't make heads or tails about what's going on with his upper body. Is that an arm? A crane arm? What are those curved components on his back? Either way, he's the most prominent of the unidentified, and there's nothing I can match up with any of the existing character models.

We can play the guessing game all day long. Like the olive drab one is kinda seeker like and kinda Rumble like and Skywarp was initially olive drab....but I'm looking for more definitive proof. So here is my request to anyone with better photo manipulation skills than I. Is there a way to take this scene and remove everything except the original line work? That might make it easier to make further identifications or otherwise completely rule them out as generics.

We don't get much more ancillary help beyond this scene. Process of elimination (even including Shockwave) didn't produce any ah-ha moments. As far as I know, the final storyboards haven't been found yet. The only ones I know about are the preliminary ones that don't correlate to the final scene (and have that weird Optimus/Soundwave hybrid). And like I said before, the next few scenes really don't help much either. I think I can spot a Reflector colored like Hound, an all white Optimus Prime (Ultra Magnus?), maybe some white Bumblebee parts, and Bluestreak is in a completely different position (maybe it's blue Bluestreak!). And then the scene where Optimus falls over has Ironhide?, Trailbreaker, Sideswipe?, Ratchet, and black Cliffjumper?

Added bonus, check out the beautiful color of Skywarp's weapons up on the ledge.

Bonus bonus. As Prime paces by his troops, Sideswipe, Jazz, and Hound aren't draw the absolute best in the world, but all the details seem to be there. The same can't be said about yellow Cliffjumper. Putting my conspiracy hat on, there's enough different that I almost want to believe it's closer to Bumper than than either Cliffjumper or Bumblebee - but that's probably just my mind running wild.

BJN

On Thursday, June 29, 2023 at 10:50:57 AM UTC-6, Brian Nelson wrote:

> So here is my request to anyone with better photo manipulation skills than I. Is there a way to take this scene and remove everything except the original line work? That might make it easier to make further identifications or otherwise completely rule them out as generics.

Okay, that seemed like a fun challenge. I took screen shots from the scene in question (from "More Than Meets the Eye" part 1 for anybody else playing along), and tried my best to isolate the characters from the background. I didn't do a great job, but it's good enough for government work.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4m9sxdljcttcug7/dead_ark_bots.jpg

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9svx2fnpve6ti88/dead_ark_bots_02.jpg

Before we dig into this, I just want to say... this is really exceptionally well-done animation. Like, the animators could have just invented a bunch of damaged robot parts and colored them all willy-nilly, and I doubt anybody would have noticed or cared. But, they actually took the time to make sure that these were all existing characters, and then color them (mostly) accurately. They actually thought about it, and made sure the exposed machinery on the damaged characters who were missing joints (like Thundercracker) would be a metallic color. They even looked at the individual character designs and went, "Hey, those are the headlights and windshield on Brawn, so those would probably be broken, right?" I also like how everybody has a visible hole in the bottom of their foot, because everybody could fly at this stage in the game, so that was likely a rocket thruster. I mean, that's an absurd level of attention to detail. Especially since, for all the animators knew, this was going to be a three-episode toy commercial and that would be the end of it. Nobody knew it would spin off into an entire series, and *definitely* nobody knew that in 40 years' time, there would be Transformers scholars dissecting this scene piece by piece.

> Let's get a few out of the way first. The yellow bot in the bottom left corner is Sunstreaker. Sliding to the right in the foreground we have Jazz, then Brawn, the Soundwave. Right above Brawn and Soundwave is Hound. Then Sideswipe, Huffer, and Reflector, and Trailbreaker is mostly hidden behind the rock. Hopefully we are all in agreement there. I'll admit that I'm not 100% convinced about Sideswipe and Trailbreaker, but at least to my eye all the right details check out.

Agreed so far.

> Straight up from Jazz sprawled over the console is Bluestreak even though he's colored like Prowl (notice the detail on the upper legs). What looks like a dark hole next to him is actually Wheeljack's windshield.

I see three robots in that cluster—it looks like a pile of Prowl and Wheeljack and Bluestreak to me. But, as you say, Prowl is further back.

> Since all the seekers (well, at least the main ones) are "accounted" for in one way or another, that makes the white and black bot in the far back right Prowl. He's the only other bot with that wing shape and the general shape of his chest looks right.

I had some of the Transformers Action Cards when I was a kid, so I studied the cards from this scene pretty intensely. When Skywarp is dragging Megatron into the repair beams, I'm pretty sure that's a destroyed Bumblebee in the background. Poor Bumblebee looks like his windshield shattered and his horns got ripped off in the crash. I always felt bad for him!
> There's quite a few that I thought if I sat down and studied and referenced character models that I could get, but in the end I couldn't identify for sure. The dark blue, olive drab, and orange guys above "Thundercracker", the Gears colored guy to their right (it could be Gears, I just can't see it clearly enough), the olive drab robot next to Reflector, and the blue and grey legs seen below Reflector.

Chances are that the original line art on the physical animation cels was much more crisp, and that the cel painters could more easily identify which robot was which. We do lose some definition when converting to home video, even with the comparative clarity of the DVD release. (Also, I just noticed that of the two video players I have on my computer, the one I did NOT use to take my screen shots actually produces a better picture. Sigh.)

> There's also some purple parts and a red component above Sunstreaker and some really dark stuff (maybe red?) and some green junk above Sideswipe. All that could just be debris - but I'm trying to be thorough!

No idea what that purple thing is. (Maybe the red thing is Sideswipe's rocket pack?)

> Elephant in the room - the orange bot is Hauler. I mean, maybe? Probably not, but it's at least worth looking into. To my untrained eye, the light orange, dark orange, and grey are a pretty close match to his scene later with Ratchet and Cliffjumper - but I can't make heads or tails about what's going on with his upper body. Is that an arm? A crane arm? What are those curved components on his back? Either way, he's the most prominent of the unidentified, and there's nothing I can match up with any of the existing character models.

If we assume that Hauler was intended to be the Diaclone crane truck, then it follows that he would have had a robot mode design. It's *possible* that it's just some random robot the animators invented, but the fact that pretty much EVERY other robot is an existing, identifiable character puts that theory to shame. Occam's Razor suggests it really is Hauler, inserted into an early scene before the character was (for whatever reason) excised from the show.

> We can play the guessing game all day long. Like the olive drab one is kinda seeker like and kinda Rumble like and Skywarp was initially olive drab....but I'm looking for more definitive proof.

If the olive drab robot is an early Skywarp, then it's the *only* time his color model has surfaced. We know he was described in the show bible as being that color, but there's never been an animation model showing him in those colors. It makes sense that they would have axed that color scheme, since Hasbro had already established army green as being a "good guy" color for G.I. Joe. (It's likely the same reason why Blitzwing wasn't sold in his original Diaclone colors, too.)

It's possible that this pan of all the dead Transformers on the Ark was one of the first scenes animated. That might explain why they were able to spend so much time paying attention to the characters and getting the details right. It clearly was not rushed. If this was an early scene, it might explain why Skywarp is in his concept colors and why Hauler appears. (I would really love to know the reasoning why Hauler was removed from the show, only to reintroduce the same toy a year later as Grapple. It makes no damn sense.)

Now that I get a good look at it, that light grey cylinder to the left of Thundercracker actually looks like the early Megatron fusion cannon, the one used in the first few issues of Marvel Comics (and in the early animated television commercials). That's another piece of evidence that this could have been a scene that was animated very early on, before Megatron's character design was revised. Interesting.

Zob (clearly, Ravage and Laserbeak were safely inside Soundwave's chest, because he is a good pet daddy)

On Thursday, June 29, 2023 at 12:50:57 PM UTC-4, Brian Nelson wrote:

> Bonus bonus. As Prime paces by his troops, Sideswipe, Jazz, and Hound aren't draw the absolute best in the world, but all the details seem to be there. The same can't be said about yellow Cliffjumper. Putting my conspiracy hat on, there's enough different that I almost want to believe it's closer to Bumper than than either Cliffjumper or Bumblebee - but that's probably just my mind running wild.

Cool thread!

So if you want to go all in on the tinfoil stuff with the Bumper sightings, that orange bot you think might be Hauler has white thighs. If Hauler was just proto-Grapple, he likely wouldn't, but there is one bot in the pilot episode who is yellow/orange and DOES have white thighs...Sunstorm!

(Incidentally, I am very glad Hauler is always Constructicon green in his modern appearance. Makes for a better character roster than Grapple and Grapple II, who is not actually Grapple.)

Zobovor wrote:

>Now that I get a good look at it, that light grey cylinder to the left of Thundercracker actually looks like the early Megatron fusion cannon

It looks like a severed arm of Huffer to me.

I always thought that shot of Thundercracker's torso was unbelievably morbid. Kind of trails a little too close to how I imagine some victims of real plane crashes ended up. It seems like a lot of these bots were intended to be well and truly dead from that crash, not just unconscious, in stasis or "deactivated" or whatever. Well, Skywarp does say as much ("we are alive again!"), though I guess being in a coma for 4 million years is as good as dead either way.

On Friday, June 30, 2023 at 8:12:59 AM UTC-6, Zobovor wrote:

> Also, I just noticed that of the two video players I have on my computer, the one I did NOT use to take my screen shots actually produces a better picture. Sigh.

The blurry screen shots were really bothering me, so I took some new ones with my other video player. I also sharpened the image slightly and increased the brightness/contrast just a little bit.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/16lm7x9b1n2o9zo/dead_ark_bots_03.jpg

Zob (there, now all is right with the Universe again)

On Sunday, July 2, 2023 at 5:46:48 PM UTC-4, Zobovor wrote:
> On Friday, June 30, 2023 at 8:12:59 AM UTC-6, Zobovor wrote:
>
> > Also, I just noticed that of the two video players I have on my computer, the one I did NOT use to take my screen shots actually produces a better picture. Sigh.
> The blurry screen shots were really bothering me, so I took some new ones with my other video player. I also sharpened the image slightly and increased the brightness/contrast just a little bit.
>
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/16lm7x9b1n2o9zo/dead_ark_bots_03.jpg
>
>
> Zob (there, now all is right with the Universe again)

Slightly better than the copy I've been working off from, so that's a big help! Well, actually not really considering I've made basically no progress at all... But working off of 2 different images does off a slightly different perspective and that is helpful.

Cool thread!

So if you want to go all in on the tinfoil stuff with the Bumper sightings, that orange bot you think might be Hauler has white thighs. If Hauler was just proto-Grapple, he likely wouldn't, but there is one bot in the pilot episode who is yellow/orange and DOES have white thighs...Sunstorm!

I like the way you're thinking, outside the box! And I agree, proto-Grapple (if it is him, for the record I don't think so) probably would have dark grey as his secondary color. Probably not much different than Joe's truck when the workers inspect the power station (that's also a point that bugs me, that that truck and maybe probably not Hauler have the same-ish color scheme). To play along that it *is* Hauler, I would say that the white is influenced by the chrome on the toy itself.

(Incidentally, I am very glad Hauler is always Constructicon green in his modern appearance. Makes for a better character roster than Grapple and Grapple II, who is not actually Grapple.)

I hate it - but that's a different rant.

I always thought that shot of Thundercracker's torso was unbelievably morbid. Kind of trails a little too close to how I imagine some victims of real plane crashes ended up. It seems like a lot of these bots were intended to be well and truly dead from that crash, not just unconscious, in stasis or "deactivated" or whatever. Well, Skywarp does say as much ("we are alive again!"), though I guess being in a coma for 4 million years is as good as dead either way.

I agree with you. I almost wonder if this was intentional. Sort of like a drawing that was shown to execs as in, "see, since they are robots we can have cool scenes like this that we could never pull off with human-like characters." An interesting point I noticed - with the possible exception of Trailbreaker all the way on the right - not one single face is shown. So maybe that was the line they couldn't cross. Maybe there was original art that actually had dead Optimus Prime and Megatron's faces that they had to edit out and redraw last second and that's why it seems there are some unrecognizable bots.

BJN

On Friday, June 30, 2023 at 10:12:59 AM UTC-4, Zobovor wrote:
> On Thursday, June 29, 2023 at 10:50:57 AM UTC-6, Brian Nelson wrote:

>
> Before we dig into this, I just want to say... this is really exceptionally well-done animation. Like, the animators could have just invented a bunch of damaged robot parts and colored them all willy-nilly, and I doubt anybody would have noticed or cared. But, they actually took the time to make sure that these were all existing characters, and then color them (mostly) accurately. They actually thought about it, and made sure the exposed machinery on the damaged characters who were missing joints (like Thundercracker) would be a metallic color. They even looked at the individual character designs and went, "Hey, those are the headlights and windshield on Brawn, so those would probably be broken, right?"

I also like how everybody has a visible hole in the bottom of their foot, because everybody could fly at this stage in the game, so that was likely a rocket thruster.

I have always wondering what was going on with those holes! You are probably 100% correct.

I mean, that's an absurd level of attention to detail.

All the more infuriating that I can't positively identify everything.

> > Straight up from Jazz sprawled over the console is Bluestreak even though he's colored like Prowl (notice the detail on the upper legs). What looks like a dark hole next to him is actually Wheeljack's windshield.
> I see three robots in that cluster—it looks like a pile of Prowl and Wheeljack and Bluestreak to me. But, as you say, Prowl is further back.

I'm rethinking this. I originally called the bot sprawled backwards over the console Bluestreak because of the detail in the thigh and the cleanness of the lower legs. But looking at it again, both Prowl and Bluestreak have that detail, and there seems to be a dark round shaped object at the bottom of his leg that could be Prowl's wheel. So I'm going with that for now. Then Wheeljack, then it's definitely a seeker - check out the thrusters, shape of the foot, and protrusion of the crotch piece.

> > Since all the seekers (well, at least the main ones) are "accounted" for in one way or another, that makes the white and black bot in the far back right Prowl. He's the only other bot with that wing shape and the general shape of his chest looks right.

I'm second guessing this one as well. His "right wing" which is kinda blue might be a monitor or it might even just be the end of that control panel. His "left wing" might be another bump out control panel (the angle would match), and the white bump out on his back might actually just be another monitor. I'm also uncomfortable with how long those wings are (even considering for how big they are as Mirage lands at the end). One thing that is pretty distinct is a circle in the front left of his chest. If I'm seeing that right, it narrows it down to Prowl, Bluestreak, or Hound.

> Chances are that the original line art on the physical animation cels was much more crisp, and that the cel painters could more easily identify which robot was which. We do lose some definition when converting to home video, even with the comparative clarity of the DVD release.

That would be the Rosetta Stone we would need. That's why I was wondering if someone had some really fancy photo manipulation software that could do it's best to delete all the color and just show the original lines.

> > There's also some purple parts and a red component above Sunstreaker and some really dark stuff (maybe red?) and some green junk above Sideswipe. All that could just be debris - but I'm trying to be thorough!
> No idea what that purple thing is. (Maybe the red thing is Sideswipe's rocket pack?)

I *want* to think it's Sideswipe's rocket pack, but like you mention below about Megatron's fusion cannon, I think that's a case of seeing what we want to see. Neither are an exact match (and not to Cliffjumper's bazooka either) and there's another fusion cannon type thing on Hound's legs. *However* - I would love to be proven wrong. Of note, a few pieces of the debris are colored, whereas most of it is different shades of blue/grey, so there *might* be some significance. Or that's all just pieces of Thundercracker.

> > Elephant in the room - the orange bot is Hauler. I mean, maybe? Probably not, but it's at least worth looking into. To my untrained eye, the light orange, dark orange, and grey are a pretty close match to his scene later with Ratchet and Cliffjumper - but I can't make heads or tails about what's going on with his upper body. Is that an arm? A crane arm? What are those curved components on his back? Either way, he's the most prominent of the unidentified, and there's nothing I can match up with any of the existing character models.

I've gotten nowhere with this guy. Of all people, BLUESTREAK hits a few of the right notes. He's got the cleanest legs of the bunch, and they actually just look like knee high boots. Then the curved stuff on his back could be a weird version of his roof.

> If the olive drab robot is an early Skywarp, then it's the *only* time his color model has surfaced. We know he was described in the show bible as being that color, but there's never been an animation model showing him in those colors.

There's been possibly one other place. https://twitter.com/DaGrimBo/status/1512251524692553728

Interestingly enough, there's also this version of this scene. https://www..youtube.com/watch?v=PAmUyILBLyQ
where "Starscream" is corrected, but there's still not Autobot or Deceticon symbols.

It makes sense that they would have axed that color scheme, since Hasbro had already established army green as being a "good guy" color for G.I. Joe. (It's likely the same reason why Blitzwing wasn't sold in his original Diaclone colors, too.)

That's a good point. It's interesting to think that there probably were some hand mockups or prototypes available in olive drab if one was sent to David Schleinkofer for the back of the box painting and one sent to Bob Budiansky for the character write up. I wonder if him being olive drab made Bob think of Vietnam guerilla warfare and that's where the "sneaky" came from?
>
> It's possible that this pan of all the dead Transformers on the Ark was one of the first scenes animated. That might explain why they were able to spend so much time paying attention to the characters and getting the details right. It clearly was not rushed. If this was an early scene, it might explain why Skywarp is in his concept colors and why Hauler appears. (I would really love to know the reasoning why Hauler was removed from the show, only to reintroduce the same toy a year later as Grapple. It makes no damn sense.)
>
> Now that I get a good look at it, that light grey cylinder to the left of Thundercracker actually looks like the early Megatron fusion cannon, the one used in the first few issues of Marvel Comics (and in the early animated television commercials). That's another piece of evidence that this could have been a scene that was animated very early on, before Megatron's character design was revised. Interesting.

I've thought this myself from time to time. It would have been a good marketing tool, there's no voice acting required, only a time amount of "animation". It also has a completely different "feel" than the next couple scenes of them waking up. And we also know that different parts of these episodes were either developed by independent teams or with weird reference material (like those weird puffy designs in part 2 and 3). But that isn't really proof of anything. Conversely, Sunstreaker and Sideswipe have the correct color schemes, there's no Kohara or otherwise old models in evidence, and the likely timeline between Sunstreaker and Reflector's character models being ready and the rest of the show being drawn is probably too tight to allow such an occurrence.

And as soon as I said that, I suppose just to be fair... A lot of the dark greys of the animation models are a really dark black here - especially noticeable on Trailbreaker. And you know that silver and blue leg right underneath him? It's not an exact match, but take a guess who it's closest to. Blue Bluestreak.

BJN