The Full Story of the Transformers Cartoon

A toy company bought a box of transforming robot toys from Japan and discovered it had no idea who any of them were. It handed the problem to the comic-book company that had just built G.I. Joe, where one editor sat down over a Thanksgiving weekend and invented names and personalities for two dozen robots, then kept going until he had named more than two hundred. Two years later, that same toy company ordered the hit cartoon to kill its own hero to clear shelf space for new figures, and the writers are still explaining what happened.

The Transformers premiered in first-run syndication on September 17, 1984, produced by Sunbow Productions and Marvel Productions with animation by Japan's Toei. Hasbro had licensed the transforming toys from Japan's Takara but had no fiction for them, so Marvel Comics supplied it: editor-in-chief Jim Shooter devised the backstory and writer Bob Budiansky named and characterized the robots. The show ran 98 episodes through 1987 and existed to sell toys so completely that Hasbro had the 1986 movie kill Optimus Prime to retire the old line, then resurrected him after children revolted.

A toy with no story

Hasbro's problem was never the toys. It was that the toys meant nothing. Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter, who had already turned Hasbro's G.I. Joe into a comic-and-cartoon franchise, tells the origin in detail on his own site. A Hasbro executive named Bob Prupis came to his office, pulled vehicles from a bag, and unfolded them into robots. "The problem, he said was story," Shooter wrote. "He said that the Japanese storyline associated with the toys wasn't useful. Japanese kids, apparently, don't require much justification. Cars become robots, robots become cars." American kids, Prupis thought, "would like to know why," and he asked whether Marvel could "develop this toy concept for comics, animation and other entertainment the way we developed G.I. JOE?"

Shooter had rehearsed this act once already. Before Hasbro, a company called Knickerbocker Toys had brought Marvel nearly identical transforming robots under the name "Mysterions," and Shooter had written a back story and treatment for them before Hasbro acquired Knickerbocker and the project died in the shuffle. So when the Transformers arrived, the studio knew the shape of the job: invent a reason for a car to become a robot, and a war worth fighting once it did.

Naming a universe over a weekend

The single most consequential piece of work on Transformers was done under deadline by a junior editor nobody else wanted to bother. Shooter wrote a six-page description of the world and needed someone to name and give personalities to the first 26 toys. As Bob Budiansky told The Guardian in a 2017 "How we made" interview, Shooter walked the hall asking editors, and it was the week of Thanksgiving, so everyone declined until he reached Budiansky, who had been at Marvel six months. "Sure, I'll give it a try," he said.

He built the names out of pop culture and wordplay. "Ratchet, a medical robot, was inspired by Nurse Ratched from the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Ironhide came from the old TV show Ironside," Budiansky said, and he humanized each robot with a single relatable trait, "such as 'this guy likes jazz.'" His proudest was the villain. "One name I'm proud of is Megatron. Back in 1983, the threat of nuclear war felt very real, and destructive force was talked about in megatons," he said. Hasbro rejected it as too scary until Budiansky pushed back: "Well, he's the main bad guy. He's supposed to be scary." The demand never stopped. As new toys arrived by the dozen, he kept naming, until "after about 250, I was struggling," and by his fiftieth comic issue he "was pretty burned out."

The cartoon writers built on top of that. Bryce Malek, who joined Marvel in the summer of 1984 with his writing partner Dick Robbins, told The Guardian the studio had to "develop a 'bible' for writers, explaining how the show worked," and invented the space bridge to the robots' home planet Cybertron, a device that conveniently let new toys arrive whenever the line expanded. The disconnect from the merchandise was total: "no one ever provided us with any of the toys, we worked from photocopies of designs," Malek said. He bought a few himself but never managed to find an Optimus Prime figure, because it was sold out everywhere.

A machine for selling toys

More than any of its peers, Transformers ran on the schedule of the toy aisle, and the writers knew exactly what they were doing. Flint Dille, who came aboard as story editor and associate producer for the second and third seasons, described the process to interviewer Todd Matthy in 2011 with unusual candor. Characters entered and left the show by fax. "We'd get 'faxes' or 'Fedex's' telling us about new characters for both Joe and Transformers and telling us other ones had been discontinued," Dille said. "We wrote out the discontinued and added in the new ones." Who appeared in any given episode was, in his words, "shockingly arbitrary," depending "on who marketing wanted to see or who we happened to like." He summed the whole enterprise in four words: "Remember, Hasbro sells toys."

What is surprising is that the writers found this freeing rather than stifling. Compared with the parents' groups and standards departments that policed network cartoons like He-Man, Dille remembered the toy-show model as looser: "it was a lot better than working with the networks at that time. Much less censorship and general meddling. No child psychiatrists, legions of politically correct advocates. An amazing amount of creative freedom from Hasbro. They just wanted to see their toys presented the right way. They weren't trying to engineer society." The one iron rule was that the toys came first, and Budiansky had heard the company's honest metric from a Hasbro executive: "any toy that lasts two Christmases is considered a success."

The day they killed Optimus Prime

The toy-first rule produced the most famous moment in the show's history, and its ugliest. For the 1986 theatrical film The Transformers: The Movie, Hasbro wanted the old cast cleared out to make room for a new wave of figures, and that meant killing Optimus Prime. Ron Friedman, who wrote the movie, told Todd Matthy in a 2013 interview that he fought it. He understood Prime as the irreplaceable center of the story: "To remove Optimus Prime, to physically remove Daddy from the family, that wasn't going to work. I told Hasbro and their lieutenants they would have to bring him back but they said no and had 'great things planned.' In other words they were going to create new more expensive toys." His arguments went nowhere: "We had some steaming arguments that never got to Hasbro because they blocked it." To soften the loss he invented the Matrix, a soul passed from Optimus to his successor Rodimus Prime, comparing it to the apostolic succession of the papacy. He still hated the assignment: "I sure as hell hated doing it and I was thrilled when he came back."

Children were, in the interviewer's word, traumatized, and Hasbro reversed course fast. Dille remembers the resurrection episode being "written in a panic. Hasbro was very upset that Optimus' death had traumatized so many kids. They wanted to fix the situation so bringing Optimus back to life was a first priority." The two writers' memories differ in a revealing way. Friedman recalls knowing all along that Prime was sacred and battling to save him; Dille recalls a writers' room that thought the characters were largely interchangeable and cut whoever the faxes retired, admitting, "I didn't know that Optimus and Megatron and Bumblebee and Starscream were iconic characters. It seems pretty stupid now." Both were describing the same machine from different seats.

How the telling has grown over the decades

• 2011, JimShooter.com. Marvel's former editor-in-chief publishes his own account of the concept's origin, including the aborted Knickerbocker "Mysterions" precursor and Hasbro's request to build the toys out "the way we developed G.I. JOE."
• 2011, Todd Matthy interview with Flint Dille. The story editor lays out the toy-driven machinery, the fax-driven character turnover, and the panicked resurrection of Optimus Prime.
• 2013, Todd Matthy interview with Ron Friedman. The movie's writer explains the death of Optimus Prime as a Hasbro mandate he resisted, and the invention of the Matrix to make it bearable.
• 2017, The Guardian. Bob Budiansky and Bryce Malek describe the naming of the characters and the writing of the show bible, the origin story finally reaching a mainstream outlet decades later.

The drift in the Transformers story is not about the facts but about intent. Every maker agrees the show was built to move product and that Hasbro's toy calendar drove the fiction, up to and including the death of the hero. Where they differ is how knowingly it was done. Friedman remembers understanding Optimus Prime's mythic weight and losing the fight to protect it; Dille remembers a room that treated most of the cast as disposable and only learned which characters were iconic when the fans told them. The dates and the credits are firm. What is still argued is how much the people making a toy commercial understood they were making a legend.

The honest bottom line

The Transformers is the purest example of the 80s toy cartoon, a show whose plots were dictated by a fax listing which figures to promote and which to kill off, made by writers who worked from photocopies because nobody sent them the actual toys. It should be cynical, and in its mechanics it was. What redeems it is that the people hired to do the naming and the writing treated it as real work anyway. Budiansky gave two hundred robots inner lives, Shooter insisted the war have a reason, and Friedman built a hero's death solid enough to wound a generation and outlast the toy line it was meant to retire. Optimus Prime was killed to sell plastic and brought back because children would not allow it, which is as good a proof as any that the fiction had escaped the merchandise.

Sources

• The Guardian, "How we made Transformers," interviews by Graeme Virtue with Bob Budiansky and Bryce Malek, January 17, 2017.
• JimShooter.com, "The Secret Origin of the Transformers, Part 1," Jim Shooter, 2011.
• Todd Matthy, "An Interview with Transformers Writer Flint Dille," 2011.
• Todd Matthy, "He Killed Optimus Prime: An Interview with Ron Friedman, writer of Transformers: The Movie," 2013.
• Wikipedia, "The Transformers (TV series)" (premiere date, episode and season counts, Sunbow, Marvel Productions, and Toei credits, Takara sponsorship, cross-checked).

More show stories live at /full-story/. Related: the full story of the G.I. Joe cartoon and the full story of Voltron.

Frequently asked