Trivia / The Transformers (Marvel)

• Artist Disillusionment: Bob Budiansky, who has lost all interest in the series even several decades after he left it. According to post-Transformers interviews, while he initially approached the project with complete enthusiasm (even writing the "Tech-Spec" bios for the toys), Executive Meddling and the constant need to feature new toys sapped it away. It doesn't help that his tenure was derided by some fans who consider his stories more juvenile than those of Simon Furman — a point that Budiansky agrees with, as he was targeting his stories for prepubescent boys.
• Creator's Apathy: Hasbro didn't really care what kind of stories the Marvel writers told as long as the comic shilled their toys and stayed child friendly. One editor even mentioned that by the end of the comic's run, they didn't have to submit the stories to Hasbro for approval, something that would be unthinkable for any licensed tie-in today (this was likely due to the franchise itself being in terminal decline at the time; Beast Wars would not come along to revitalize things for several years).
• Creator Breakdown: Bob Budiansky (see above) suffered from stress due to trying to constantly shove in new toys, which led to him leaving the comic. He has since said that he has no intention of working on Transformers again, though that doesn't mean he wouldn't say "no" if Hasbro asked him. His only post-Marvel Transformers work was IDW's faithful adaptation of the animated movie, which was less stress-inducing for obvious reasons.
• Creator's Favorite:
  • Bob Budiansky's favorite character was Blaster, seemingly due to the fact that Blaster's storyline was a lot darker and more ambitious than most of what he wrote. In The Toys That Made Us, he specifically cites Blaster as a character he would have loved to write more of if not for the Merchandise-Driven needs of the comic shoving him out of the spotlight.
  • Simon Furman has a couple favorites:
    • Grimlock. By his pen, Grimlock is a cunning warrior who uses Hulk Speak to make his enemies underestimate him, while the TV series simply had him be too dumb to string a sentence together.
    • Nightbeat, a C-list character whom Furman brought to the forefront by making him a Film Noir-style Hardboiled Detective. In the current IDW-universe that Furman is helping to write, he killed Nightbeat off fairly early on so fans can know that Anyone Can Die, even his own favorite character. He did something similar in the G2 comics, killing off Nightbeat as a self-inflicted Player Punch.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Hasbro at first did not approve Megatron's name, believing that the name evoked images of nuclear bombs. Bob Budiansky responded that this was exactly the point, as Megatron was the series' main villain. Hasbro wisely backed off and approved the name.
  • The reason female Transformers didn't appear from the very start (aside from Marvel's adaptation of the animated movie and Arcee's appearances in UK-exclusive stories). Budiansky was ready, willing and able (Ratchet was even a candidate for an early female character), but the Hasbro execs thought there shouldn't be girls among "toys for boys" in a comic book "for boys" (human female characters were obviously exempt from this reasoning).
  • Hasbro demanded that the comic give attention to every new toy they produced and to routinely remove older or discontinued Transformers. This annoyed the writers, particularly Budiansky, as they regularly had to get rid of major members of the established cast and bring in large rosters of characters they didn't know what to do with.
  • Marvel had licensed out Spider-Man to Mattel in 1984 and they only agreed to let the character make a guest appearance in the Hasbro licensed comic if he appeared in his black symbiote suit, which had just been recently introduced and would be less identifiable then his classic suit. Ironically, the black suit would become Spidey's standard costume for a few years and Mattel had to produce toys of it.
• Exiled from Continuity:
  • When it comes to reissues of the series, people want readers to forget Spider-Man was in issue 3. The Savage Land is also prominently featured as the resting place of Shockwave and the Dinobots upon their arrival on Earth, but that was nixed as the book was slowly separated from the rest of the Marvel Universe.
  • Circuit Breaker, due to appearing in Secret Wars II before The Transformers, is owned by Marvel and not Hasbro. As such, for a long time IDW reprints didn't include stories featuring her. The IDW-published The Transformers: Regeneration One features her as an unnamed silhouette in a flashback, while in the present day she's dead, with Spike Witwicky becoming Circuit Smasher.
  • Death's Head, the famous bounty hunter from the UK version of the series, fell into the same issues as Circuit Breaker and is under Marvel's ownership instead of Hasbro's, his transition to the Marvel Universe occurring courtesy of the Doctor himself. Hasbro responded years later by creating the similar character Lockdown so they could use their own Death's Head.
• What Could Have Been: Techno-X, a proposed 90's revamp of Circuit Breaker and the Neo-Knights by Simon Furman and Andrew Wildman, integrating the team more fully into the Marvel universe. Had the series been picked up, the Transformers would have been retconned as an elaborate training simulation created by G.B. Blackrock (who, supposedly, would've had a dark secret and fought Tony Stark). Team member Dynamo would have also been retconned as part of the simulation, since, by Furman's own admission, they had absolutely no idea what to do with him once the Transformers comic ended.

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