S. Witwicky Auto Repairs & Tow Service
- S. Witwicky Auto Repairs & Tow Service is an automobile service station from the Marvel portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.
S. Witwicky Auto Repairs & Tow Service is a service station and auto junkyard run by Sparkplug Witwicky, a mechanic who served in the Korean War. It sits adjacent to the Witwicky home, located in a residential area in the outskirts of Portland, Oregon. Its competitors include Scarpatoni's Garage. At one point it opened a Wash and Roll franchise.
Fiction
[edit]Marvel The Transformers comics
[edit]
Sparkplug's youngest son, Buster Witwicky drove a damaged Volkswagen Beetle into the garage after it was attacked during a drive-through movie by three fighter jets. The car, which could speak, begged to be repaired. The Transformers Sparkplug agreed, and after the car was repaired, it introduced itself as an alien robot, an Autobot named Bumblebee. Before the end of the day, the street in front of S. Witwicky Auto Repairs was home to a battlefield between two warring factions of robots. At first Sparkplug and his son were safe hiding within a wrecked truck in the service station's junkyard, but soon Sparkplug was discovered and kidnapped. Power Play!
Sparkplug was hospitalized due to a heart attack, leaving his son to run S. Witwicky Auto Repair, but Buster was a bookworm and had no idea about machines. He sadly fielded calls to customers who were waiting for their cars to be fixed during his father's absence. DIS-Integrated Circuits! Amazingly, Buster, via the power of the Creation Matrix suddenly learned how to master machines, and was able to fix all of the cars in the garage before his father got home from the hospital. The Next Best Thing to Being There!
A breakdown on the interstate meant this was a job for S. Witwicky Auto Repairs & Tow Service and their tow truck they totally owned before that moment. After the broken car was retrieved, the repair shop was visited by Bumblebee again, looking for Buster. Brainstorm!
Years later the junkyard was replaced by a Wash and Roll car wash franchise. This brought in double the money to the Witwicky's business. Sadly, it was revealed later that Wash and Roll was a fuel-stealing business run by Ratbat's Decepticons, so the car wash was closed and the junkyard was restored. Buster Witwicky and the Car Wash of Doom
Ratbat himself would later visit Witwicky Auto Repair along with the five Predacons. When Sparkplug refused to say where Buster had gone, the Predacons tore the service station apart, and it collapsed on top of the mechanic. Toy Soldiers! It took a day for RAAT and the local authorities to dig Sparkplug out, but he was mostly unharmed. Witwicky Auto Repair, however, was forever demolished. Trial by Fire!
Notes
[edit]- The name of the place changes from issue to issue. It's first introduced to us as "S. Witwicky Auto Repairs" (plural), then just "S. Witwicky Auto Repair" (singular), then amended to "S. Witwicky Auto Repairs & Tow Service," and then finally the first initial is dropped (and all mention of the tow service). The size and shape of the Witwicky residence also changes, as does the length of the junkyard.
- It's never specified in-story what the "S." stands for. One would think maybe it stood for "Sparkplug," but Marvel Comics' original treatment for the Transformers specifies that it stands for "Stanislas." [1]
- Following the demolition of his business, Sparkplug lived for a short time in the Cascade Vista Motel, followed by a boarding house in a sketchy neighborhood. (It looked much nicer later.) Since Spike Witwicky dumped his Headmaster helmet in some other junkyard 20 minutes away, the state of the old auto service and its junkyard was probably not very good. Hey, if a junkyard's too demolished to throw more junk on it...