Transformers: BotBots (cartoon)

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Can't kill Optimus Prime if he never shows up in the first place!

Transformers: BotBots is an animated series based on the franchise of the same name. First announced on February 25, 2021 alongside Transformers: EarthSpark, the series is produced by Entertainment One and animated by Boulder Media Studio, with Kevin Burke and Chris Wyatt showrunning and executive producing. A single season of ten episodes was released via Netflix on March 25, 2022; each episode includes two 11-minute stories.

{{#if:The theme song.|
“ When energon struck a mall nearby,
We became more than meets the eye
We’re everyday objects, motionless parts,
We burst to life to let the party start!
 ”
{{#if:The theme song.|

—The theme song.{{#if:|, {{{3}}}}}

}}

}}

Storyline

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When a shopping mall is struck by lightning from an energon cloud, the various ordinary objects within it are given life and become the race of tiny transforming robots known as BotBots. By day, they hide in plain sight, but by night, they emerge from hiding to have all kinds of fun. These tiny bots have organized themselves into squads based on their stores of origin, but some were left in the Lost and Found when the surge occurred. After accidentally revealing themselves to the night shift security guard, breaking the BotBots' most sacred rule, these Lost Bots are shunned and treated as outcasts by the others. Now, seeking to find where they belong, these misfits must work together to reingratiate themselves with the other BotBots in hopes of being taken back by their true squads, all while preventing the security guard from exposing their existence. As they adventure together, however, they might just learn that they've already found where they belong...

Characters

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{{#if:true ||(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)}}

{{#if:{|border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="background:transparent"
Lost Bots
Hunger Hubs
Sugar Shocks
Gamer Geeks
Custodial Crew
Jock Squad
Shed Heads
Science Alliance
Fashion Forwards
Arcade Renegades
Pet Mob
Top secret squad
Unknown/unconfirmed squads
|

!! style="background:#ffdddd;" | BotBots }}{{#if:| !! style="background:#ededff" | Decepticons }}{{#if:* Dave (Mark Little)

!! style="background:#fbefde;" | Humans }}{{#if:| !! style="background:#ffeeb8;" | Others }}{{#if:| !! style="background:#d5e6d5;" | Misc }}{{#if:| !! style="background:#fedeb5;" | Misc }} |- {{#if:{|border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" style="background:transparent" |- |style="background:transparent;border:0px" valign="top"|

Lost Bots
Hunger Hubs
Sugar Shocks

|style="background:transparent;border:0px" valign="top"|

Gamer Geeks
Custodial Crew
Jock Squad

|style="background:transparent;border:0px" valign="top"|

Shed Heads
Science Alliance
Fashion Forwards
Arcade Renegades
Pet Mob
Top secret squad
Unknown/unconfirmed squads

|}|| style="background:#ffdddd;" valign="top" |

Lost Bots
Hunger Hubs
Sugar Shocks
Gamer Geeks
Custodial Crew
Jock Squad
Shed Heads
Science Alliance
Fashion Forwards
Arcade Renegades
Pet Mob
Top secret squad
Unknown/unconfirmed squads
}}{{#if:|

| style="background:#ededff;" valign="top" | 

}}{{#if:* Dave (Mark Little)

| style="background:#fbefde;" valign="top" |

| style="background:#ffeeb8;" valign="top" | 

}}{{#if:|

| style="background:#d5e6d5;" valign="top" | 

}}{{#if:|

| style="background:#fedeb5;" valign="top" | 

}}
|}

Episodes

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{{ #if: {{#ifexpr: 2 }}

|

2

|

  1. Mall Than Meets the Eye / (Never) Be Yourself
  2. Escape from Snackatraz / I, Cheeseburger
  3. Phoning It In / The Lost Bots and the Claw Crusade
  4. Live and Let LARP / Lone Bot and Carb
  5. Dimlit in Love / On the Bot Prom Dance Floor
  6. The Ruckus Rally / Crime and Bun-ishment
  7. Spirit of Halloween / Rage Against the Karaoke Machine
  8. Scanned Out / The Science Alliance
  9. Agent Smartlit / Shopping Brawl
  10. The Goldrush Games - Part the First / The Goldrush Games - Part the Second

}}

Notes

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  • BotBots is the franchise's first straight-up comedy series.
  • This is the first Transformers cartoon to feature a Canadian voice cast since 2005's Cybertron cartoon, though based in Toronto rather than Vancouver.
  • Staffers on the show received three Industry Excellence Award nominations from the Manchester Animation Festival in November 2022:
"Crime and Bun-ishment" ultimately walked away with both awards.

Differences from the toyline

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  • Naturally, the show could not be reasonably expected to feature the entire BotBots toyline; even if they only featured one of each mold, that's still over 200 BotBots! They do manage a pretty impressive spread, however, with Bots from Series 1 through 4, and several from Series 6 (which was announced just a few days before the show's premiere, seemingly originally planned for a Series 7). It's unknown if the Bots from Series 5 and the original delayed/canceled Series 6 lineup were not "available" or just the showrunners didn't pick anyone from them, or a combination of the two.
  • The cast is skewed heavily towards the initial Series 1 crew, even continuing some plans that were changed in the final version: toy-Kikmee was originally slated as Series 1 Lost Bot, but got pushed to Series 3 and released as part of the Playroom Posse.
  • Many characters in the show are a different gender from their toy-bio selves, in both directions: toy-Kikmee is male, where show-Kikmee is female, while Fomo goes from toy-female to show-male. As such, these characters' "main" bio writeups on this wiki are written with gender-neutral pronouns, with male/female pronouns used as appropriate in the other sections.
  • A few characters even swap squads! Frostferatu is a Lost Bot in the toyline, but is part of the Sugar Shocks in the show.
  • And, of course, the character designs are certainly a departure from the on-package illustrations, typically (but not always!) being much more rounded and human-proportioned than the toys. They're not all as extreme a change as Kikmee (wow we're bringing her up a lot this section, aren't we?), and some bots are much more toy-like than others, but the overall vibe is definitely more [[wikipedia:{{#if:|:}}Mega Man|{{#if:||Mega Man}}]] style robot than a traditional Transformer.
Who are the BotBots in your neighborhood?
  • Crowd scenes are filled out with "generic" BotBots models in multiple colors that come in six forms: condiment-bottle bots (similar to the Fottle Barts model), pencil bots, coffee-cup bots, scissor-bots, lunchbox(?) bots, and camera bots (based on the Spud Muffin model). The first five listed have "male" and "female" models (basically identical except for the addition of "eyelashes" on female BotBots), while the big hunky camera-bots appear to be all males. As the condiment, pencil and coffee bots seem to be based on existing toys, it's possible that those with matching colors could be considered appearances by the likes of Must Turd, Point Dexter, Latte Spice Whirl, etc. A single "generic" female cannolo-bot has also appeared in a crowd scene once; it is uncertain if this character is just a still image (several toy-based BotBots only appear in still-image form) or a fully-rigged character like the other generics.


Visual style

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Top: mixed-media on display, literally.
Bottom: "pillbots" aplenty.
The cypher for most of the on-screen text.
  • The show has a visual style unique among Transformers cartoons, using a "mixed media" format. The robot-mode characters and humans are "traditional" two-dimensional animation using digital "puppet rig" models, while virtually everything else is rendered as semi-photorealistic still images moved in a "cutout" method: the characters' alt-modes, backgrounds, vehicles, many props, etc.
  • Stock photos of real humans and actual video of real-life objects are also used at points, primarily for comedic effect.
  • Extreme long-shots often show the BotBots as little stacks of colored stripes matching their normal colors, which the production team have dubbed "pillbots", in order to simplify big crowd scenes.<ref>{{#if: The production team referred to these as "pillbots"-- so when we needed a wide shot with lots of incidental bots, we'd discuss it as a "pillbot shot." |"The production team referred to these as "pillbots"-- so when we needed a wide shot with lots of incidental bots, we'd discuss it as a "pillbot shot.""—|}}{{#if: https://twitter.com/otherland71/status/1508460334922670082 |Chris Wyatt|Chris Wyatt}}{{#if: Twitter |, Twitter|}}{{#if: |, ""|}}{{#if: 2022 |, 2022{{#if: 3 |/{{#switch:{{#len:3}}|1=03|3}}{{#if: 28|/{{#switch:{{#len:28}}|1=028|28}}|}}}}|}}{{#if: https://twitter.com/otherland71/status/1508460334922670082 ||}}{{#switch:{{#sub:https://twitter.com/otherland71/status/1508460334922670082%7C7%7C11}}%7Cweb.archive= (archive link)|}}{{#switch:{{#sub:https://twitter.com/otherland71/status/1508460334922670082%7C8%7C11}}%7Cweb.archive= (archive link)|}}{{#switch:{{#sub:https://twitter.com/otherland71/status/1508460334922670082%7C7%7C10}}%7Carchive.is= (archive link)|}}{{#switch:{{#sub:https://twitter.com/otherland71/status/1508460334922670082%7C8%7C10}}%7Carchive.is= (archive link)|}}{{#if: | (dead link)}}</ref>
  • It also features very little on-screen English, or any other existing written language. While the show will use English words for big important text (mainly in the service of comedy), virtually all the background text on store signs and computer screens is replaced with a new set of made-up symbols (seen at right), done mainly to accommodate the fact that it was simultaneously released in multiple languages in multiple markets. These characters map to the standard ABCs (numbers are kept normal) and the text translates to standard English... usually. Occasionally it's gibberish, and sometimes severely typo'd English. In a new twist however, there are separate symbols for capital and lowercase letters.
    • Aside from the main cypher, there are two other types of font used in the show, but much more sparingly; a "handwritten" script and a "tech" script. Neither of these make enough appearances to properly figure out how they translate to English, or if they even do. There is also the occasional piece of background "text" that is meant to kinda look like a word without actually being that word.
    • And in the act of truest irony, this comedy show does not use the cypher text to hide in-jokes and references, unlike more or less every other Transformers cartoon to feature a coded print language. Every piece of non-gibberish text is pretty straightforward stuff.

Continuity, schmontinuity

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The showrunners have been purposefully vague on where BotBots fits in the grand Transformers mythos. In numerous interviews, they've shied away from calling it any form of reboot, and stated that all that other Transformers stuff was happening elsewhere outside the mall. Their focus was to make this show a "jumping-on" point for new audiences young and old who might not be already vested in the minutiae of Transformers lore, limiting themselves to the odd nod and easter egg for previous fans, and focusing on the "universe" of the mall, the only universe the BotBots know. And this is 11 billion percent a valid approach to the show, helping it stand on its own merits (and for many fans, something of a relief given the prior decade of nostalgia-sodden fiction).

But we are TFWiki.net, and we wouldn't be us if we didn't tug on those strings just a little bit, and at least note where this series probably can't be happening.

  • First of all, "all that other Transformers stuff" consists of a massive multiverse with nearly four decades' worth of fiction. Technically, yes, it's all happening elsewhere/when. Can't call them liars there. That doesn't narrow things down much.
  • That the humans (besides Dave the security guard) do not think "robots in disguise" are a thing that exists eliminates a fair few realities/time periods where the Autobots and Decepticons are very well-known, like the original "G1" cartoon and comic, the overwhelming majority of the 2005 IDW continuity and live-action film series timelines, etc. It also takes it out of the latter portions of a few others, like the Cyberverse cartoon.

Of course, all this jibba-jabba is pretty much just that. This series is functionally its own little universe until explicitly said/proven otherwise, and the showrunners seem pretty uninterested in tying it to something specific we already know, and it's probably best to just leave it at that.

References

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