Many, many popular misconceptions have cropped up regarding the Transformers franchise over the years, enough for TFWiki.net to create a lengthy page
devoted to discussing them.
- A common one is the idea that Transformers are "robots in disguise", and therefore use their altmodes to maintain The Masquerade, often lambasting characters like the Dinobots for their obvious failings in that category. In the majority of series, including the original, the Autobots and Decepticons soon become public knowledge due to the absolute incompetence of either side in maintaining any masquerade. Altmodes are used more for combat, speed, or alternate functions (turning into a spaceship to fly and carry people, for instance) than to hide as cars. And that's ignoring a number of stories (most notably Beast Wars) that feature few or no human characters at all and therefore give no reason for the Transformers to be in hiding.
- There are many casual fans who will claim that The Transformers was redubbed anime originally from Japan. In reality, pretty much all the production except the animation work was done in America—and even then, much of the animation was farmed out to South Korean studios in later seasons due to Toei being more expensive.
- Most people vaguely familiar with the original series claim that Soundwave turns into a boombox or stereo. In reality, he turns into a handheld microcassette recorder, albeit one of made-up model, with his toy being meant to be actual-size. (This is also why the original G1 cassettes are so small; they're microcassettes rather than full-sized ones.) It doesn't help that his rival Blaster does indeed turn into a boombox, and the show made them about the same size—in reality, Blaster's toy is about twice as big, which makes it pretty clear they don't turn into the same thing.
- Two for The Transformers: The Movie: that there's some kind of hardcore "unrated" cut which features more explicit violence and that Optimus Prime crumbles to dust after his infamous Disney Death. The former seems to just be an internet rumor, while the latter is likely caused by people confusing scenes; Starscream does crumble to dust when he dies and it happens shortly after Optimus dies, so people may have just mixed the two up. Storyboards and scripts leaked over the years have shown that there were more sequences planned, but most of them were either cut at the scripting phase (Megatron's cannon tearing Brawn in half; replaced with him simply dying from a single shot), or weren't any more graphic than anything else in the movie (a longer firefight during the Battle of Autobot City that took place at the same time as Optimus and Megatron's final battle).
- One misconception that's arisen about the movie in recent years is that either scriptwriter Ron Friedman or voice actor Scatman Crothers coined the word "ginormous" in it, due to Jazz mistakenly referring to Unicron as a "ginormous, weird-looking planet". Actually, the term has existed since at least the 1940s.
- There have also been some false claims about the movie's Japanese release. One is that it was never released theatrically in Japan at all; while it wasn't released at the same time as other markets, with Japanese fans getting the Scramble City: Mobilization OVA instead, it did eventually make its way to Japanese theaters in 1989. Another is that it was released under the title Matrix Forever; in reality, a 20-minute promotional video called "Apocalypse: Be Eternal, Matrix" was released shortly before the film's Japanese release to build anticipation, with shoddy translations and a lack of information about the Japanese side of the fandom at the time leading to the "Matrix Forever" title.
- Since Jazz makes no speaking appearances in Season 3 and 4, he's often said to have been written out of the series due to the death of his voice actor Scatman Crothers. This is an understandable mistake, especially since Cliffjumper effectively disappeared from the series following issues with his own voice actor, but the dates don't add up. Virtually all of Season 3 had already aired by the time Crothers died; since the voice acting had to be done well in advance, it's all but impossible that his death affected the writing process. The more likely explanation is that it happened because his toy was discontinued.
- For a long time, the US fandom had a lot of weird misconceptions about the Japanese Transformers works. Claims like "Metrotitan is a zombie" or "the Decepticons are from a different planet than the Autobots" were thrown about thanks to bad translations and misinterpretations of obscure material.
- In Japanese media, the factions were renamed - the Autobots became "Cybertrons" while the Decepticons became "Destrons". Since the Cybertrons are named after their home planet, it led to a widespread belief that this must mean the Destrons similarly came from a planet called "Destron", and are alien invaders in the Japanese canon. In truth, the Destrons are still natives of Cybertron even in Japanese G1.
- A big one is that the various anime series are "more mature" than their English counterparts. Though there's a bit of content that might stick out if the shows were dubbed, one need only watch the ending theme of Transformers Victory to understand that these shows were still aimed at children.
- Another one suggests that the Japanese release of The Transformers: The Movie is more violent than the western release - usually related to the above-mentioned belief that the 1984 series is redubbed anime, since in the 80s and 90s, anime had a reputation for being much more violent and graphic than western cartoons made for the same age demographic. Nowadays, in the age of the internet, it's not hard to find the Japanese release of the film and see that it's just a fairly-faithful dub of the original English version with no additional content.
- No, Megatron and Galvatron are not separate characters in most Japanese continuities. This misconception partly stems from misinterpreted manga panels where Galvatron is seen with another Decepticon created in Megatron's image; many foreign fans (understandably but incorrectly) assumed this meant Megatron and Galvatron co-existed. This was then expanded on with an art piece that showed them alongside each other (an Early Draft Tie-In that owed to the creators not knowing they were the same person at the time), and rumors surrounding the series Return of Convoy, which involved the villain Super Megatron, creating rumors that Super Megatron was the real deal and not Galvatron (in reality, he was an upgrade on Galvatron, going back to his former identity). This is mostly because there was (and still is, to an extent) a decent-sized segment of the fanbase that hated the idea of Megatron becoming Galvatron, and so sought out proof that they were different entities. In addition, there are bits of western Transformers media that depict Megatron and Galvatron as different people, mostly released pre-movie (potentially as a misdirection to avoid spoiling Galvatron's true identity); the Japanese side of things just stuck with the idea very slightly longer due to the film taking longer to release there.
- In a particularly kludgey one, there's the idea that the Japanese Beast Wars anime sequel series (Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo) were meant to be contemporaneous with the American one, with the characters coming from hundreds of years in the future and jumping backward to prehistoric Earth. This was an idea no doubt fueled by the fact that Optimus Primal pops up in a movie for the former (providing people with lots of blurry screencaps). This isn't remotely true; the two series take place tens of thousands of years in the future, and they go to the Earth of their own time (which is long since abandoned). Primal in the aforementioned movie is basically treated as a figure of legend. This one was pervasive enough that it even leaked into some official bios, and formed the basis for IDW's comic take, albeit with a Hand Wave or two to justify it.
- Everyone “knows” Challenge of the GoBots as being a Transformers ripoff made by Tonka to try and copy Hasbro’s success... only that’s not quite true. At the very least, the situation is more complicated than that; the two franchises were created independently around the same time under similar means (reworking earlier foreign toylines into something newnote ) and the GoBots were technically the ones who came first, at least in terms of toys on shelves. At worst, the two were Dueling Shows for a brief time. And even ignoring all that, Hasbro eventually acquired the rights to the GoBots and effectively folded them into the Transformers universe; nowadays, Hasbro and the fandom largely treat Challenge Of the GoBots as just another Transformers series, which can be perplexing to casual viewers who only remember the former as the latter’s Unknown Rival.
- An infamous one is the mistaken belief that there was a blue-colored Bluestreak toy released during G1. There isn’t and there never was; the character has always canonically been colored silver. Bluestreak was based on a blue-colored Diaclone toy which got featured in toy catalogs and instructions by mistake instead of his real figure, leading to this misconception. The Non-Indicative Name definitely didn’t help, nor did Bluestreak's original toy being inaccurate to his show appearancenote , nor the fact that Bluestreak shares a mold with Smokescreen, who actually is colored blue. Hasbro tried to put a stop to this by renaming him Silverstreak (having briefly lost the trademark), but it didn’t stick. A few Bluestreak toys have cropped up since then that are blue, but they're more a reference to the phenomenon.
- The terms "Generation 1" and "Generation 2" being so commonly thrown around in the fandom led to a belief among more casual followers that the term referred to, for instance, the '86 movie characters or the '87 Rebirth characters. In fact, Generation 2 was a 1993 Soft Reboot of the franchise, and doesn't involve the above characters in any meaningful way (to the contrary, most of its prominent characters and figures are from the first two years of G1). The movie and Rebirth characters are considered a part of G1, which lasted until roughly 1991 (but kept going through 1992 in some regions), which is what necessitated a reboot to begin with. This is a pretty understandable mistake, as G2 itself didn't last long and the '86 or '87 characters could be described as a second generation.
- In more hardcore parts of the fanbase, a lot of characters are associated with G2 when they were actually very late-run G1 figures. This includes the Turbomasters, the Predators, the Action Masters, and a number of characters (the Aquaspeeders, the Stormtroopers, the Lightformers, the Trakkons, the Axelerators, the Skyscorchers, the Obliterators), initially released in Europe that only found their way to America in G2. This even leaked into Botcon, which, for its G2 celebration, made new figures of Clench and Pyro (Obliterators), Scorch (Turbomaster), and Double Punch and Slicer (Action Masters). The latter three were never released in G2 at all!
- It was widely assumed in the Western fanbase for decades that the line Transformers: Robotmasters was an Intra-Franchise Crossover involving The Multiverse, with characters from all kinds of continuities duking it out. The story involved a number of characters passing through a Negative Space Wedgie called the Blastizone, two of whom seemed to be reminiscent of characters from Robots in Disguise and Armada (namely, Wrecker Hook and Sideways), which meant that many assumed that it had pulled those characters from other universes. This was fueled further by the fact that it ran at about the same time as, and was highly similar to, the first iteration of the Transformers: Universe line, which actually did have that as its concept. However, the Blastizone was strictly a Time Travel-based warp, rather than an interdimensional one—all the characters in the story are meant to hail from some point in the Japanese G1 timeline, and many of them (including Wrecker Hook and Sideways) didn't even go through it and were, at most, just the G1 counterparts of those characters. This ended up having some major knock-on effects for both of those characters, as Car Robots being folded into G1 allowed Wrecker Hook to be revealed as the character he was assumed to be, and Sideways was now widely believed in the English fanbase to be a Dimensional Traveler, which went on to influence most of his future portrayals.
- One odd idea which gained traction is that the Japanese dub of Transformers: Animated rewrote the series so that it was a prequel to the live-action movies. This was based on an article in a 2010 issue of TV Magazine that discussed the then-upcoming Japanese dub, which was merely speculating based on pre-release information; aside from Bulkhead being renamed Ironhide (leading to the show's incarnation of Ironhide accordingly being renamed Armorhide), there's nothing in the Japanese dub to make it closer to the live-action movies.
- Based on the fact that he dies in Bumblebee and Transformers: Prime, it's become weirdly common in the fandom to claim that "Cliffjumper always dies," treating him as some kind of recurring Red Shirt who's fated to die in every continuity or angrily claiming that all he shows up to do is die. In point of fact, those are pretty much the only times he's had a significant death, and by most standards, he's died about as often as any other 1984-era Autobot—in fact, he actually survived some notable stories that killed off large numbers of established characters, such as the Underbase Saga of the Marvel Comics continuity or the original movie. (For comparison, fellow '84 Minibot Brawn died in both of the above, and got vaporized in Generation 2 for good measure.) The only reason Cliffjumper's 21st-century deaths are remembered is that they're some of the few times he's had major roles, as, like many other members of the massive G1 Cast Herd, he didn't tend to appear much until the IDW years. The misconception also might have been caused by how Cliffjumper never appeared in the Sunbow cartoon after The Transformers: The Movie (which, as stated before, was infamous for killing off many older Transformers to make room for new characters), leading to a lot of fans who don't remember the specifics assuming he was just part of the massive death count.note
