Talk:Commercial/International

Commercial only characters

Do any of these guys deserve their own page? Or merit mention on page other than this one?

--Tigerpaw28 19:58, 15 July 2010 (EDT)

Could the Cyclonus-like dude be mentioned on Cyclonus's Armada? --Khajidha 20:19, 15 July 2010 (EDT)

Filling in the blanks

I've uploaded and linked to a few ads that weren't documented here already (Dinobots, post-movie cars, and some others). Some from the UK, and others that originated in the UK but were dubbed into French or German. There are some others knocking around the net and in my own VHS collection which I'll add later.

We're missing a LOT, though. There are UK ads I know existed, but only from recollection. If it helps to jog anyone's memories, maybe we can dig these up from some place:

- Insecticons (1985) - I think TV Cream used to have a still frame of the end of this commercial on their site, but now I can't find it.

- Jetfire (1985/86) - IIRC the animation / jingle from the start of this is on the BBC I Love 1984 or I Love Toys documentaries, lifted from the US Jetfire / Shockwave ad.

- Headmasters (1987)

- At least a couple of the French ads from the Gen 1.5 era with the "circuit board" animation definitely made it to the UK - I remember they actually used to air sometimes on Sky One during reruns of the G1 cartoon in 1992/93. My money's on Turbomasters / Predators and Aquaspeeders. From recollection they had some pre-G2 CGI TF animation in them like the German Overlord commercial, which amazed me at the time.

- From G2 I have the UK edit of the Tank Megs / G2 Prime ad which I can upload. But there was also a UK cut of the Rotors / Laser Rod commercials - yes, with the rapping! - which ran on The Childrens' Channel throughout the summer of 1994.

These are just off the top of my head. I feel certain there was a TV commercial promoting the Shreddies cereal Transformers promotion around 1986 too. Sadly, some of this material is bound to be lost to the ages. But if anyone thinks they may have these or any other missing commercials kicking around, please upload 'em; it'd be much appreciated. ^_^ —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Asukasboy (talk • contribs){{#if:| {{{2}}}|}}.

Thanks for adding all those spots. Either the I Love Toys or the I Love 1984 documentary is linked to for the clips of the Megatron ad and the Autobot cars ad, the other one was linked to but the video was taken down. I did manage to save the clip before that, so I'll look and see if I can find the Jetfire clip. I think I do remember seeing it in one of those videos.

In regards to some of the other ads, I have a suspicion that from 1986 or 1987 (whichever year Europe got the Autobot Triple Changers) until the end of G1, the U.K., France and Germany all got essentially the same ads. I figure that they were originally filmed/narrated in English and then dubbed (and maybe occasionally edited, as seen with Overlord) for the other markets, since all three markets were handled by Milton Bradley. I just haven't seen a large enough body of evidence to safely make such an assumption. Given some of the radical changes in narration and music the French commercials would have to have made, it's probably not a bad idea to continue documenting the countries separately. As for commercials being lost to the ages, I wouldn't have thought we'd have as many of the US ads archived as we do. Heck, I was shocked when Soundwave with the U.S. audio and the Alex Karras spot turned up. So never say never. --Tigerpaw28 15:12, 9 August 2010 (EDT)

Five years on and new old ads continue to surface. I think we may now have a clean sweep of UK commercials from 1987, although sadly for several of them we still only have the subsequent French dubs. So what's left?

The Jetfire commercial with the Dinobots from 1986 is different to the one seen briefly in I Love 1984. So it seems the Dinobots and Jetfire had separate ads in 85 and then a joint one with Cyclonus and Scourge in 86. There must be a Jetfire commercial out there from 1985 that's yet to be discovered. The Insecticons one is still missing, and I find it hard to believe there isn't one for Soundwave and his cassettes given he was one of the more expensive toys. The general rule of thumb thus far seems to have been that if Hasbro had ads running for a toy in the Marvel UK comic, there was an accompanying TV commercial (from 1985 through 1987, at least).

Putting this out there -- I think there was some really early television advertising on TV-AM for either the Marvel UK comic (using footage from the MTMTE mini-series) or just the general promotion for the impending arrival of the cartoon. These are some of my earliest TF memories, so it's all a bit of a blur. The hunt continues... --Asukasboy (talk) 16:48, 2 May 2015 (EDT)

Some other things

I want to add some other commercials, albeit none of them are on Youtube. A particular one is a Italian one for 2010 toylines, made mainly with footage from ROTF and from the Power Core Combiners commercial, which shows at the end for "collect 'em all" sake PCC Aerialbots and RTS G2 Optimus... albeit the latter was never released in Italy actually. --Phantom Dusclops'92 14:22, 25 December 2013 (EDT)

Side note

This bit from the Classics Greek commercial: "It then switches to show a vehicle mode line-up of Prowl(?), Sideswipe, Mirage, Sunstreaker, Bluestreak, Red Tracks, and then Jazz and Smokescreen roll into view. Wheeljack, Sideswipe, Smokescreen and Tracks then rev up their engines for a race that Wheeljack seems to win, much to the delight of a young boy. Wheeljack transforms to robot mode to celebrate only to have the kid put him back in car mode." Is taken from the Italian Trasformer commercial FYI. --Phantom Dusclops'92 (talk) 15:13, 2 September 2016 (EDT)

Strange Spanish Coke add

Does anybody know what this is? It appeared for a few short seconds in Thew Adams' review on two knockoff WSTF Optimus figures that sported Pepsi and Coca-Cola decals on their trailers respectively. The clip can be found at 0:47.-DDog (talk) 22:44, 17 October 2021 (EDT)

Forgot to post back here. I ran this by User:MrRald on Discord a few weeks ago and he identified the ad: [1]. "I think it's from Paraguay. Special bottle caps could be redeemed for the sticker album or sticker packs. Completing the album could get you awards like plane tickets, a commodore 64 or a bicycle." --Tigerpaw28 (talk) 15:35, 4 November 2021 (EDT)

Tidying Up UK (and Euro) Sections

I've been expanding and restructuring the UK section more lately. One thing I've noticed is that a few of the entries in the listing seem to have been written based on what's in the French or German equivalent, I guess because they were the only source material available to work from at the time. I've found English copies of some of those and there are usually enough differences between the versions to stop that being a particularly reliable practice. So I've copied over some of those back into their own country's sections (Headmasters and Targetmasters to France for instance) and I've removed the foreign audio links in the UK section (pretty much all of which are dead anyway) but have taken the write-ups of them on good faith and left them pending an English copy being found (Autobot Heroes Rodimus and Wreck-Gar). The exception for this is the Classics Autobot Cars one, which was clearly written about the German ad and had no certainty of its accuracy to the UK one, so I've moved that into the German section. Just wanted to make clear my reasons for seemingly removing information. Danja (talk) 13:02, 11 April 2021 (EDT)