Misconceptions and urban legends about Transformers

Over the years, many misconceptions and urban legends have sprung up within Transformers fandom, often resulting from such factors as fuzzy childhood memories, inaccurate catalog illustrations, mistranslations of foreign material, and the occasional outright lie.

As time has gone on, most of these have faded from the general fandom consciousness, as access to information has grown exponentially, both in terms of what we have learned from official sources, and the ease with which such information can be spread (like, say, via this very wiki). Still, we present them here alongside some that are still fairly persistent, as some were "common knowledge" for years, if not decades, before being corrected. And you never know when something old and wrong will get a weird surge of believers.

General misconceptions

• Transformers is (only) a cartoon from the Eighties that was brought back into vogue with the 2007 movie.

A misconception usually held by casual fans or nostalgic adults is that Transformers went away some time around 1986 (or 1987, or 1988—pick your year). People who stumbled across a newer incarnation of the Transformers franchise before 2007 commonly assumed that it had only recently popped back up as an attempt to cash in on '80s nostalgia. From 2007 onwards, people who were (obviously) aware of the live-action film series commonly believed that it was the 2007 movie that brought the franchise back from limbo. Neither assumption is correct.

In fact, the Transformers brand has been continuous since 1984 (there was a brief gap between 1990 and 1993 as far as the United States market was concerned, but the brand still continued with new products in other markets). It includes many lines of toys, cartoons and comics that span four decades now, with no sign of stopping, as Hasbro considers it a core brand. Each line has experienced varying degrees of success, rebooting when its target audience gets too old or uninterested in the toyline and fiction.

Some of this misconception is based on the fact that most of the original audience stopped watching and following the franchise long before its initial US cancellation (as it wasn't "cool" to be kiddy once puberty hit). Without any exposure to the market, the toyline and the new cartoons, they simply assume that Transformers has sunk in popularity, quality and/or sales, since it's not what they remember.

It is true that Transformers hit a low point of popularity in the early 1990s, what with the cancelation of Generation 1, the unremarkable sales of Generation 2, and newer properties like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers coming along to dominate the kids' toy market (not to mention the exploding home video game market). But the successor Beast Wars line re-established the brand for a new generation beginning in 1996, and Transformers has been a dominant toy franchise ever since. While it's true that the live-action movies caused a major hike in popularity for the brand, they didn't revive a long-forgotten franchise; rather, they merely turned a steadily successful toy series into a major worldwide multimedia phenomenon.

• Generation 1 obviously has the best toys, cartoons and characters.

Casual fans likewise tend to assume automatically that the original 1980s iteration of Transformers is the best and most successful line to date, with all other successors being unpopular and/or unsuccessful ventures.

While it's hard to measure the overall success of every line in all its aspects, the original line has been surpassed in both quality and sales multiple times over (if not for warm-fuzzy nostalgia-feels in 80s kids). In factors such as realistic alternate forms, durability, articulation, action features, and complexity, various later toylines have all exceeded Generation 1. And while fiction can't be measured objectively, many fans will swear up and down by some of the later incarnations of Transformers.

Arguably, Transformers is in an endless cycle of creating new fans who share new opinions on what is "teh greatest".

Not literally a waste of packaging material.

• "Repackaged" toys are literally unsold toys sent back to Hasbro, taken out of the old packaging, put into new packaging and then sent back to stores.

Every so often, a Transformers toy line features seemingly identical toys in multiple different packaging versions, such as multi-packs containing toys that were previously available separately. In addition, some toy lines also feature rebranded items, namely toys that were originally released under one line, but are later re-released as part of another line with virtually no changes to the toy itself, only the packaging it is available in. The final stages of the original Universe line took the concept of "rebranding" to a new level, featuring numerous straight re-releases of toys from the since-ended Energon and Cybertron lines, among many others. Since then, it has been repeated with the 2006 Classics line, the 2008 Universe line, the 2010 Transformers line and many others. Because a common fandom term for those releases is "repackages", a popular misconception claims that those toys are literally "repackages": namely, unsold toys sent back to Hasbro, taken out of their old packaging, put into new packaging and then sent back to (different) stores. (The same train of thought also—very rarely—suggests that "repaints", another common fan term for redecos, are literally "repaints", i.e. existing toys painted over in new colors, rather than new production runs from the same toolings using new plastic colors.)

Needless to say, this theory is dubious for various reasons. Generally, old unsold toys are not sent back to Hasbro. They either remain in the store until someone finally decides to buy them, or the store somehow dumps them, such as by selling them off to closeout chains. And even if Hasbro did regularly get sent back huge shipments of unsold toys, they'd be highly unlikely to go through the effort (and additional cost) of literally repackaging them. Hasbro confirmed this in January of 2009, stating that due to the toys being manufactured in Asia, it would be a waste of time and money to repackage them only to sell them at the same price-point. Thus, they are not repackaged old product, but new production runs of previous product. These days, this misconception should be much easier to dispel: Every toy now features a manufacturing date stamp etched into the figure, as well as a product code tampographed onto the figure, thus proving that a figure was manufactured more recently than its superficially identical predecessor.

The similarities are astounding. Especially those that aren't there.

• A new toy that is vaguely reminiscent of an older toy is a retool of said toy.

Hasbro likes to redeco toys a lot (usually to recoup the R&D costs for developing the original mold). They also like to release redecos of toys from older lines in newer lines. In some instances, Hasbro also don't just redeco a toy, they retool it (or create new toolings for new parts that replace parts of the old version of the toy)—sometimes to improve a feature or fix an error, but sometimes also to give the toy new features or gimmicks, or simply to make it different enough from the original version so owners of the original version would be interested in buying the "retool" as well.

Some of those retools are comparably minor (such as Final Battle Jazz from the 2007 Movie line), whereas others can be pretty elaborate. Sometimes the retools are so elaborate that the line between "retool" and "new mold" gets blurred. The most drastic instances in this regard would be K-9 from Beast Wars (based on Wolfang from the same line) and Dark Crumplezone from Cybertron (based on the original Cybertron Crumplezone toy), both of which have most, if not all of their parts entirely retooled. Another borderline case would be the Armada Mini-Cons Mirage and Swindle, which were released around the same time and are based on the same basic design, share a similar body structure and have very similar alternate modes.

However, sometimes fans definitely get too far decrying a new toy a "retool" (or "remold"). Toys that share some superficial design similarities, coupled with similar transformation schemes, are often mistaken for retools even though they're simply that: Similar toys based on the same general design, maybe even directly influenced by the older toy, but nothing more. For more examples, see: retool.

• Hasbro is responsible for your local store not having the newest toys right now.

Hasbro actually has almost nothing to do with distribution (when Product A arrives in Store B) beyond making sure the manufactured product leaves the factories and shipyards of China at the desired time, and even that is something their control over is limited at best. Once the items arrive on US shores, they are almost immediately sent from the ships to the distribution centers for the retail chains that ordered them. From there, it's more truck rides to various regional warehouses, which is all controlled by the retailers, not Hasbro. After that, the schedule for taking product from those warehouses and putting it on shelves is dictated by each chain's inventory system.

It's conceivable that Hasbro could take more control of the situation, but that would require chains like Walmart to release the vise-like death grip they have on manufacturers' nards that lets them dictate how the system works—and they're sooooooo not doing that.

• Hasbro should totally cater to the wishes of older collectors, as they purchase the most Transformers product.

Fans would like to think they've got some sway over the direction of the Transformers brand. After all, they've been buying toys for many years (as opposed to the limited purchasing span of most children), and they buy many more toys than any individual child. And in truth, Hasbro does pay attention to the desires and discussions of its older buyers, even designing certain line segments like Alternators or Classics and its successors with collectors as the primary target audience.

Collectors, however, simply can't compare to the vast numbers of children out there whose parents buy Transformers for them. The bulk of Transformers product is purchased for and/or by young children, and if a company like Hasbro wants to stay in business and keep making money (and by extension, more toys), it must design and market its products accordingly. No accurate figures exist on the collector/children ratio, but estimates mentioned at BotCon panels range from around 10% to 20% of all purchases coming from older collectors—enough to be worth listening to, but not at all the driving force behind the brand. Past toylines have shown that betting too much on sales from adult collectors can be disastrous.

Furthermore, it's not as though the fans speak with a unified voice. More often, for every fan pushing for one particular idea, there's another fan who thinks that same idea is boring or awful.

• Hasbro pays its licensees to publish comics for them, and profit directly from the comics selling well.

Presumably stemming from the fact that most Transformers cartoons are commissioned by Hasbro in order to advertise their toys, a lot of fans are under the impression that Hasbro pays comic publishers like IDW Publishing and Skybound Entertainment to produce Transformers comics for them. This is the exact opposite of how licensed comics work; these companies pay Hasbro for the privilege of publishing Transformers comics, and they keep all the profits outside of that licensing fee. As such, Hasbro doesn't have any particular investment in the comics selling well, other than their indirect effects on toy sales and potential negative press caused by "failing" comics; all that matters to Hasbro is that they sell well enough that they keep paying for the license.

Haha, silly Takara just keeps accidentally letting piles of unmarked toys escape their factories... Including even those that they haven't produced for over a decade!

• So-called high-quality Transformers knockoffs are actually "factory rejects", i.e.; authentic figures being unofficially sold for a reduced price because they failed to pass Hasbro / Takara's quality control standards.

This is an incredibly persistent myth in both Transformers collecting and, in general, across the world of collectible consumer goods broadly: it's not unlikely that you've heard the same claim being made about other types of action figures, as well as trading cards, sneakers, luxury bags, etecetera. The story goes that cheap high-quality copies of these products (the likes of which you'll usually find on Chinese-connected e-commerce websites like AliExpress, Taobao, and Wish) are actually not knockoffs but rather just official items that did not pass quality control during their production cycles because of some minor imperceptible flaw, and as a result, either they were rescued off the factories by savvy workers who did not want these near-perfect products to go to waste or — as it's sometimes even claimed — they were sold at a heavily reduced price (or even just directly given!) to online resellers by the original manufacturers.

As with most myths, there is a very slight hint of truth to this one: cases of "factory second" products that did not pass quality control and are thus sold off at a cheaper price do actually exist, but not just is this a far less common practice than what the memorabilia-collecting internet might lead you to believe, such items are also often sold with the acknowledgement of the official brands through either their own websites or by means of reputable connected retailers as one-off discounted batches of products, not dropshippers on AliExpress. Other comparable, more legally ambiguous cases of factories overproducing products beyond the total amount that they were commissioned to make and selling them on the grey market — often called "factory overruns" or "ghost shifts" — also do exist, but again, these are significantly rarer. Still, the question lingers: could those very legitimate-looking Transformers on Chinese e-commerce sites be one of those rare cases?

Well... No. When it comes to Transformers specifically, there has never been any credible evidence that any series of knockoffs are "factory rejects" or "overruns", and a lot of evidence to the contrary: sure, there are some strikingly accurate bootlegs based on series like Masterpiece, Human Alliance, and the occasional Prime Wars Trilogy Legends class toys, that really do look and feel like authentic products beyond an occasionally worse quality control... Until you realize that it's 2026, and brand-new batches of all of these bootlegs are still consistently showing up for sale (the Masterpiece KOs practically flood Chinese e-commerce sites!), years or often even more than a decade after Hasbro and Takara stopped producing official copies of those same toys. This means that either A) Chinese resellers just keep stumbling into a mythical pile of brand-new unsold copies of old factory-rejected figures or B), as it is more plausible; they're just counterfeit copies that are continually being churned out of Chinese factories with no affiliation to Hasbro or Takara... And yeah, the latter one is demonstrably the case: for instance, some newer batches of Masterpiece KOs have distribution stickers that identify them as made by companies like "Yiwu Yiluo Electronic Commerce" with production dates timestamping their manufacturing to as recent as July 2024, making it evident that they are not, in fact, lost "factory rejects" that accidentally slipped out of official production chains.

Part of the reason why this myth persists comes down to, again, these bootlegs just being of a very high-quality (usually they're only distinguishable by minor differences in molding and the package's printing), to such an extent that — especially during the early 2010s when high-quality Masterpiece knockoffs were still novel — a lot of fans simply could not believe that some shady factory operating off an unknown clandestine location in China could produce figures that were near matches to Hasbro and Takara's quality while selling on the market for only a fraction of the price. But then again, once you consider the emergence of "fourth party" bootlegs, that is; of Transformers knockoffs that are often specifically modified and overhauled to improve the original toys (and often also sell for less than their originals!), it becomes pretty clear that the existence of these near-perfect counterfeits isn't at all incompatible with the current capabilities of bootleggers.

To be clear, it's not impossible that, by some chance, some other batch of Transformers toys being sold on the bootleg market might have been "factory rejects" — it's just that, again, there's no evidence for any such ocurrence, and as we've seen, the bootlegs that are most often described as factory rejects are demonstrably not factory rejects. As such, you can mostly write this one off as a myth.

Takara vs. Hasbro

Cybertron Vector Prime features different color applications dependent on whether it was released in Takara or Hasbro's market.

• Takara (alternatively, Hasbro) are solely responsible for designing, developing and manufacturing (all, or certain specific) Transformers toys.

This was true only for the first few years of the original Transformers toyline. Most of the toys from 1984 to 1986 were imported (and, occasionally, slightly altered) versions of already-existing Japanese toys originally designed and released by Takara. Following that, Takara developed new toys both for the Japanese and the Western market, now specifically with Transformers in mind. The primary exceptions are a handful of toys licensed from other Japanese companies (Jetfire, the Autobot Deluxe Vehicles and Deluxe Insecticons, among others), and the 1986 toys for the animated movie, which were mostly based on designs by Floro Dery.

However, ever since 1988, most "main" line toys released both in Japan and the Western hemisphere have been designed and developed in cooperation between Hasbro (or its subsidiary Kenner) and Takara (now TakaraTomy). (For the specifics of this joint venture development process, see the article about toys.)

Still, numerous reasons have led some people to assume incorrectly that all Transformers toy lines were solely developed by only one of the two companies:

• The Western public and mainstream media, naturally, tend to be unaware of the existence of Takara (TakaraTomy these days). It's therefore logical to assume that Hasbro, the company responsible for distributing Transformers toys outside Japan, is also solely responsible for developing and manufacturing the toys. The fact that Hasbro has historically chosen not to mention their Japanese business partner in official press releases and interviews hasn't exactly helped matters, either.

• On the other hand, Western anime fans are used to Japanese companies being solely responsible for designing robot toys, which are then imported and sold by Western companies. For lack of better knowledge, those people then simply assume the same also applies to Transformers toys — namely, that Takara does all the design and engineering work on their own, and Hasbro is merely the Western distributor of those toys. The fact that the back of Hasbro's packaging for Transformers toys sports a small note saying "Manufactured under license from Takara Co., Ltd." (changed to "TOMY Company, Ltd." on more recent toys) is occasionally cited as "proof" that Takara is the sole manufacturer of Transformers toys as well. A long paper trail of evidence to the contrary has not been able to convince those people of the flaws in their conspiracy theory — rather, some of them have even postulated the existence of a so-called "Hasbro PR machine", whose sole purpose is to convince Transformers fans that Hasbro has a larger part in the development of Transformers toys than is actually the case.

That being said, there are indeed a few toys originally developed by either Hasbro or Takara without the other one's involvement, and then later picked up by the other company, but they're fewer than usually assumed: For Takara, those include the new molds for Beast Wars II, Beast Wars Neo and Car Robots, plus various mostly short-lived, collector-aimed, niche market lines (such as the new Robotmasters molds, the Smallest Transforming Transformers, the Hybrid Style toys etc.); for Hasbro, those are mostly either toys originally based on fiction-based franchises that did not originate with Hasbro (such as Animorphs or the Star Wars Transformers and their later successor, Transformers: Crossovers), cross-brand lines within Hasbro where the Transformers toys only make up one part of the overall lineup (such as the Titanium Series and the Robot Heroes figures) and a few very rare "main" line Transformers toys such as Grimlock, Swoop, Alpha Quintesson, Energon Kicker and High Wire from Energon.

• Takara's Japanese-market releases are always of intrinsically better quality than their U.S. counterparts. (E.g., they have sweeter exclusives, and are always more show-accurate, have more accessories, and have tighter quality control.)

Let's never forget that Takara made this on their own.

This one depends a bit on the speaker, as it can either be a genuine misconception, a matter of opinion, or at worst, willful snobbery. But, like many broad generalizations, it does have some basis... but it's also worth noting that since the later 2010s, Takara's "mainline" retail releases have largely been identical to the Hasbro versions outside of packaging, so a lot of this is basically past-tense.

• "Better quality" often comes down to very subjective personal preferences. A small handful of Takara toys have clear-plastic windows where Hasbro's use painted opaque plastic (the first Deluxe movie Bumblebee), or have vac-metallized parts where the equivalent U.S. release doesn't (Energon Optimus Prime/Grand Convoy). Or, "better" "quality" can refer to the fact that Japan has different toy safety laws, thus Takara can give Prime toys old-school long smokestacks, which are now shortened in the U.S. for safety reasons, or can release Megatron toys that turn into realistic firearms where Hasbro absolutely cannot.

In many lines, Takara releases can often boast more paint applications. For example, many Unite Warriors figures have painted rims, while their Combiner Wars counterparts went without. The paint issue is at least in part due to differences in how Hasbro has to budget an entire "wave" of figures at once for retailers (not just the new toys in the wave, everything in the shipping case!) while Takara operates within a less restrictive, individual-item-based pricing structure. And like the distribution issue above, this is a factor of their respective retail environments that the companies have no control over. This is also not universal: most notably Takara's version of the Prime toyline severely cut back on paint in favor of customer-applied decals.

• "More show-accurate decos" does have some basis, as Takara frequently releases its toys later than Hasbro does Stateside, and thus can sometimes better reflect the character's in-show coloration (such as with the original Rattrap or Armada's Tidal Wave). The most extreme example of this was Beast Wars Returns, the Japanese release of Beast Machines, which was years later than in the U.S., allowing Takara to make some figures much closer to their show models, though how truly accurate any given deco was varied from figure to figure. On the other hand, Takara sometimes goes massively overboard with "show-accurate" decos on toys that weren't actually designed with the original animation models in mind, leading to weird blocks of color meant to represent major details from the show models that simply do not exist in any way on the toys' sculpts. Just ask Unite Warriors Firebolt, Sling and Drag Stripe. And of course, whether you think fidelity to certain character models is a plus or minus is a personal opinion: do you prefer Cyclonus in dark purple (original toy) or light lavender/powder-blue (original cartoon)?

• "More accessories" mostly comes from the fact that some of Takara's releases have some extra accessories, but this is far, far from the norm. In the original line, the Mini-Cassettes had extra tape cases, and Fortress Maximus had two swords his Hasbro version lacked. Some late-run Super Link releases came with redecoed Energon weapons as well. Henkei! Henkei! Hot Rod came with two missile launchers and missiles not included with Universe Hot Shot due to budget constraints, and featured the original tooling for the rear bumper for their inclusion. Part of this is, like the paint applications, thanks to Takara's ability to be more flexible when budgeting individual toys.

However, sometimes the Takara versions have fewer accessories. The original Takara Megatron may have had a sword and bullets the Hasbro version lacked, but he lacked the barrel, scope and stock extensions that he was always depicted with! Henkei! Henkei! Lambor was lacking the supercharger engine accessory Universe Sideswipe came with—Hisashi Yuki, the toy's designer, claims the intent was for only Sunstreaker to have it, with it being meant to differentiate the two, but Hasbro chose to give it to both.

• "Sweeter exclusives" is more or less a mix of "the grass is always greener" and some occasional hits. The truth is, there are a lot of popular molds, characters, and entire toylines that only show up on Japanese shores or as part of special promotions. However, many Hasbro toys don't get released by Takara and never reach Japanese fans who don't go the import route. American fans who are willing to pay import fees simply don't tend to notice when Japanese fans miss out unless they pay very close attention to what's being released there, and due to the simple way that news and hype works, flawed Japanese exclusives tend to simply fly under the radar.

• "Tighter quality control" is a total myth. Takara products are manufactured under much the same production conditions as Hasbro's: pretty much everything for both markets is made in China—in fact, according to Hasbro Australia representatives and Hasbro designer Eric Siebenaler, all of the Transformers toys jointly developed between Hasbro and Takara/TakaraTomy are manufactured at factories contracted to the Japanese toy company. This means Takara is (at least indirectly) responsible for whatever quality control problems occur with Hasbro-released toys. Takara's standards of quality control for their domestically-released toys are just as likely to let mistakes creep through. Just ask any buyer of Henkei! Henkei! Thundercracker how well his weapons stay attached to the arms. And let's not even get started on Masterpiece Rodimus Convoy's first production run.

I SAY HEY! WHAT'S GOIN' ON!!

• The fields in which Takara genuinely excels Hasbro are comparably minor: Takara's stock photography has historically tended to be more impressive than Hasbro's, without obvious mistransformations and awkward poses, and at the same time looks more representative of the actual toy due to less reliance on blatant digital touch-ups. But again, this is a trend, not a rule, as evidenced by whatever the hell is going on with Takara's pre-release images of the Earthrise Allicon. Also, while Hasbro's stock photos were pretty error-prone and used unfinished toys through the early/mid 2000s, the quality has improved over time... plus they've largely moved to using CAD imagery the final toys are made from for stock imagery, which definitely cuts back on room for pre-final changes in the toys and posing/transformation by people unfamiliar with the toys. Notably, when Hasbro mistakenly used Thundercracker's stock photography for Siege Ion Storm, TakaraTomy did not fix this mistake in their separately taken photography.

Likewise, Takara's instructions generally have tended be more detailed and useful than Hasbro's, though this largely started during Beast Wars and continued up until around the latter 2010s, when Takara started to align its products more with Hasbro's packaging and presentation. With Beast Wars in particular, this was because Hasbro had to print instructions for the carded toys on the back of the card, which had limited real estate to work with. Folded-up paper instructions only came with larger boxed toys in the Hasbro Beast Wars line, while virtually all Takara Beast Wars toys came in boxes, and had packed-in instructions. But like the stock photography, the divide has shrunk considerably in recent years as the two companies aligned the look and packaging of their product together.

• Hasbro lost the rights to a lot of G1 Transformers names. That is why you see toys named "Autobot Jazz" or "Decepticon Brawl" these days. Takara is more competent than Hasbro and doesn't need to change their toys' names.

That's not quite how name rights —aka trademark— work. There are indeed instances where another company has snatched a trademark, making it unavailable for Hasbro's use. The reason is because trademarks need to be consistently used in commerce (roughly once every year or so), or it could be considered "abandoned", making it open for grabs should another company try to claim it. "Hot Rod" was unavailable to Hasbro because Mattel held several similar trademarks, "Bluestreak" was too similar to Gendron's "Toledo 'Blue Streak'" trademark, and a company named Lanard held the trademark "Shockwave" until 2005. This prompted Hasbro to use substitute names for toys based on these characters, such as "Rodimus Major" and "Rodimus" for Hot Rod, "Silverstreak" for Bluestreak and "Shockblast" for Shockwave (Hasbro has since managed to reacquire all three aforementioned trademarks).

Meanwhile, the names with prefixes such as "Autobot" or "Decepticon"? Those are usually non-compound single real words from the English language. Hasbro's legal department considers them too "generic" to be easily defensible as trademarks, hence the addition of prefixes such as "Autobot Jazz", "Decepticon Brawl", or "Constructicon Devastator" for better protection. This does not work with names already trademarked by another company–otherwise, Bandai could release a toy named "Gunpla Optimus Prime" tomorrow, and Hasbro couldn't do anything about it.

For a while, it seemed like these trademark quibbles were limited to Hasbro, and Takara was somehow exempt due to a different market situation. However, the Henkei! Henkei! line saw the emergence of quite a few "Cybertron", "Destron" and "Stuntron" prefixes, implying that the trademark situation on the Japanese market was changing, and starting with the Movie line, TakaraTomy (now adopting Hasbro names instead of their established Japanese-market names) began to use "Autobot" and "Decepticon" prefixes. With Revenge of the Fallen and United, TakaraTomy even used prefixes for names Hasbro has been able to use without prefixes.

Generation 1 misconceptions

Toys

Generation 1 (1984-1990)

• Some Generation 1 toy molds were in use as long ago as 1974.

Some Micro Change-derived toys have the text "©1974, 1983" or variations thereof stamped on them, with the actual Micro Change releases of the earlier figures even featuring a blatant "©Takara 1974" printed on the front of their packaging, and as a result are occasionally sold on eBay with descriptions such as "original 1974 Ravage". Likewise, the Diaclone-derived toys also have two dates as part of their copyright markings, with the earlier one being invariably "1980".

In reality, though, the first Micro Change toys weren't even designed until the early 1980s. Those confusing double copyright dates are a result of the way Japanese IP law worked at the time. The earlier copyright date in question refers to the year the toyline in general, as well as its fictional backstory, was first launched (1974 in the case of the original Microman franchise, 1980 in the case of Diaclone), while the second one refers to the date the toy itself was created.

You had this as a kid. The picture, that is. Not the toy.

• A super-rare blue variant of Bluestreak was available during Generation 1.

The very earliest Generation 1 toy catalogs used a photo of a blue-sided Diaclone Fairlady Z to represent Bluestreak; photographs of the same toy were used for Bluestreak's own instruction booklet. The same blue-sided color scheme was also used on his box art; which was in turn shown on every 1984 instruction booklet as a sample tech spec.

All this gave rise to a long-standing myth that a blue Bluestreak toy was sold under the Transformers brand during Generation 1, with some people going so far as to "remember" owning blue Bluestreaks as children, or at least knowing someone else who did. Adding to the confusion, ToyFare magazine had a long history of listing the supposed blue Bluestreak as a "foreign variant" in its monthly price guide.

However, actual samples of a blue-sided Bluestreak in a sealed Transformers box have never appeared, and the collectors who have been at it since the very beginning and amassed insane numbers of rare Transformers have never seen one. After literal decades of no samples ever being found, it is certain that this holy grail is just a legend.

Oddly enough, numerous other Transformers toys from that era were depicted in both catalogues, packaging art, and even cartoon character models with colors they were never released in —Perceptor, Astrotrain, the Constructicons, Slag, for example— yet Bluestreak is the only one to be (mis)remembered in this manner, perhaps because his name is Bluestreak, so he had to have been blue, right?

"Bumblejumper", who later would be known as "Bumper".

• "Bumblejumper" is just a yellow Cliffjumper.

In 1984, Hasbro released three different similar-form toys as part of the Minicar assortment: Bumblebee, Cliffjumper, and a third unnamed toy that was not advertised in any capacity, sold only on Cliffjumper cards (at least, no samples on a Bumblebee card have ever surfaced). This third mold was a "leftover" from the Micro Change line, based on a Mazda Familia 1500XG sedan, and was very quickly phased out (resulting in him becoming the first of the "holy grail" super-costly Transformers on the secondary market). The exact nature of how and why this toy got released is still unclear. Fans took to calling this third mystery mold portmanteau names such as "Bumblejumper", "Cliffbee", and "Bumper"; that last one eventually becoming his official name when he appeared in the ongoing Generation One Volume 1 comic series by Dreamwave Productions.

Adding to the confusion is that both Bumblebee and Cliffjumper were available in two color schemes: their fiction-supported colors (Bee in yellow, Cliff in red) and in reversed colors (Bee in red, Cliff in yellow) up through 1985. And since Cliffjumper and Bumper are both similarly boxy in vehicle form, and Bumper was only available in yellow, and only on Cliffjumper cards for a very short time, and was not in any catalogs and had no name and didn't appear in any cartoons or comics....

Further adding to the mistaken memory pile is Hubcap, a yellow retool of Cliffjumper released in 1986. Fun!

Patience. You just have to wait 22 years.

• A show-accurate Skyfire toy was available during Generation 1.

Due to some legal entanglements, Jetfire was renamed "Skyfire" for the original The Transformers cartoon, with a character model that bore only a vague resemblance to the toy. Some confused viewers seem to have come away assuming that there had to be a show-accurate Generation 1 toy by the name of Skyfire. There was not. Not a lot more to elaborate on here.

Of course, later toys are another story. The Classics Jetfire toy is actually designed as a mix between the original toy and the cartoon character model, and many later toys of the character have aspects of/are based on the cartoon model.

Seriously, aren't you glad your poor parents didn't have to waste like a hundred bucks on this back in '86?

• A Unicron toy was available during Generation 1.

No toys of Unicron were available (or even produced beyond prototype) until 2003. In fact, the mere existence of those prototypes wasn't actually officially confirmed until many years later. The first official Unicron toy to be released came out as part of the Armada line in 2003 and was a brand new mold, not based on an old, unused prototype. Even then, a G1ified version of the figure wouldn't be released until 2010.

The fictional existence of a Generation 1 Unicron toy is likely based on schoolground one-upmanship: if one kid had a larger toy such as Metroplex or Scorponok, a rival kid would claim to have a Unicron toy in order to appear cooler, but would most likely retire to his bed a sobbing mess, knowing in his heart that one day God would punish him for being a HUGE FIBBER.

What might also have attributed to this misconception was the voice actor for Unicron himself, Orson Welles. He died before the movie's release, and the part in the 1986 movie was his last role before his death in 1985. He loathed the part and could not even remember his character's name; he was quoted as saying, "I play a big toy who attacks a bunch of smaller toys," mistakenly believing that there was a toy of his character (an understandable assumption)... though at the time, the number of children who would have heard this quote would likely be vanishingly tiny.

Individual buttons. It's a lost art.

• The reissue Soundwave toys released by Takara are reverse-engineered from Soundblaster because the original molds are lost.

Both the The Transformers Collection and Encore Soundwave releases have different tape buttons and hinges than the ones found on the vintage Hasbro release. While the vintage Hasbro Soundwave had inset controls and an internal tape deck hinge, the Takara reissues have a large button block that serves as a pivot point for an external tape deck hinge. The supposed reason for this is the mold for the original versions of the buttons and door are lost or worn out, so a new single tape door was made to work with the Soundblaster mold.

In fact, the buttons and hinge used on the reissue Soundwaves were originally a retooled running change variant of Takara's original 1985 release of Soundwave. The further Soundblaster retool was based on the later Japanese version of Soundwave, as were the reissues. Presumably, the original mold in its original condition is lost — but this happened long before Takara retooled Soundwave into Soundblaster.

This led to more confusion than you'd think.

• Various misconceptions about Beastformers.

While it has been common knowledge since the early days of online fandom that the Hasbro Battle Beasts toys were sold in Takara's markets in 1987 under the Transformers banner as Beastformers, many of the details of how they were sold were misreported. Given it's a somewhat niche piece of Generation 1 history, the early online fandom's general lack of access to Japanese sources, and the fact that few/no Japanese sources kept track of the rather complicated release history of the toys (outlined on their own page, linked above), it's not hard to see how some of this propagated and persisted for decades since.

For a while, it was often said that the Beastformers had Autobot/Decepticon rubsigns, as the characters had been split up into Autobot/Decepticon-allied sides. But the Beastformers had the same Fire/Wood/Water rubsigns as their Hasbro counterparts (their rubsigns were also significantly smaller than those on the Transformers!), it's just that the Transformers media they (briefly) appeared in made no mention of this play gimmick for whatever reasons; the packaging certainly made note of it.

Not all of the Beastformers toys were actually released under the Transformers umbrella, at least directly. This is an easy one to see how it got spread, as all of Takara's Transformers catalogs and advertisements in 1987 showed the entire lineup of 76 figures found in Battle Beasts. Even many of Takara's modern retrospectives do this! But in reality, only 54 figures and only one of the vehicles, the Red Phoenix Fortress, actually came in Transformers-branded boxes. In 1988, Beastformers was spun off into its own series without the Transformers branding as a sequel set after the war with the Cybertronians, and even really played up the Fire/Wood/Water gimmick. It is in this line that 20 of the missing 22 figures (yes, there are two Beastformers shown in numerous sources that ultimately were never released in Japan), the remaining five vehicles, as well as the entire run of Laser Beasts, finally reached Japanese toy shelves. Many of the toys from the Transformers-branded part of the line were re-released in this sequel series, but not all of them... though again, Takara's marketing materials continued to show all 76. Confused? We don't blame you.

Arguably one of the most fascinating people involved with the creation of the Transformers brand.

• In 2005, a crazy old man claimed he had created the original Transformers toys.

In 2005, the Transformers fandom learned, by way of a newspaper article posted by an internet fan site, of the existence of Henry Orenstein, a former toymaker. Although the main focus of the article was Orenstein's then-current achievements in the field of poker, it also implied that Orenstein had "created" the original Transformers toys, and even featured a photo that depicted a somewhat confused-looking Orenstein holding 20th Anniversary Optimus Prime. Many fans subsequently assumed that this was a deluded old man who believed he had created the concept of Transformers toys, even though the fandom knew full well by this point that the original toys were originally created in Japan. His status as the "creator" of the Transformers toy line was subsequently repeated in several other articles about the man, last with the news of his passing in 2021.

The fact is that Orenstein had worked for Hasbro during the 1980s, and was the person who had convinced George Dunsay, then Hasbro's Vice President of R&D, to acquire the rights to a (more or less) innovative type of Japanese toys, which would eventually become known as the original Transformers toys. Aside from that and the original patent for the rubsigns, which he shares with Dunsay, Orenstein has made no known contribution to the Transformers brand. Obviously, the writer of said newspaper article had only marginal knowledge of the history of the Transformers brand, was told what was most likely nothing more than an anecdote by Orenstein (his biography, by the way, is so fascinating that his involvement with the Transformers brand is arguably one of the less noteworthy details), and subsequently inflated it massively with hyperbole, possibly in an attempt to gain more attention to his article due to the popularity of the brand, even before the 2007 movie. The only question is, where did the photographer get the 20th Anniversary Optimus Prime toy from?

Generation 2

• "Generation 2" means "after The Transformers: The Movie."

This common but explicitly false idea probably stems from the many casual fans who grew up with the original Transformers line but stopped paying much attention around 1986, when the animated The Transformers: The Movie debuted and the Transformers craze began to die down. Many such fans regained some interest in Transformers many years later, particularly with hype surrounding the 2007 live-action movie. Seeing the phrase "Generation 2" batted around in fandom, it might seem natural to assume it refers to the big changeover that happened with the animated film. It certainly didn't help that, early in the life of Dreamwave, Pat Lee shared in this misconception, leading other new arrivals to the fandom to ape his use of the term.

While the original animated movie certainly marked a change from one "generation" of toys to another, along with some new design trends, the phrase "Generation 2" refers to a very specific franchise, marketed from 1992 to 1995—years after the animated film had come and gone. Its relative obscurity probably contributes to the mis-attribution of the term, as Generation 2 marks a low point in popularity for Transformers as a whole.

Its a exclusive!?[sic]

• The orange Generation 2 Constructicons were exclusive to KB Toys.

In 1993, Hasbro reissued the Constructicons under the Generation 2 line. The initial (and more common) versions saw the original Generation 1 figures' green plastic changed to yellow, while a later, rarer version featured an orange plastic color for the entire team instead. A popular rumor, which is also propagated by many an eBay seller, claims that the orange versions were exclusively available at KB Toys (formerly "Kay Bee") in the United States.

No substantial evidence supporting this rumor has ever surfaced. It should be pointed out, though, that store exclusives were still fairly uncommon prior to Beast Wars, with the only confirmed example being the Classic Pretenders being sold without their Pretender shells under the name "Legends", exclusive to Kmart.

Since the packaging for the orange versions is identical to that used for the yellow versions, down to the UPC barcodes, it is very likely that Hasbro didn't actually consider the orange versions as separate products, but as mere running change color variants, just like the Generation 2 versions of the Dinobots had been available in there different colors each.

Also, since some people insist having purchased the orange Constructicons at other stores such as Mills Fleet Farm, the most likely explanation is that KB Toys was merely the chain that ordered the largest bulk of them, thus leading to the faulty perception that they were "only" available at KB Toys. Additionally, one has to understand that in the early days of the online Transformers fandom, when the latter consisted entirely of the text-only usenet news group alt.toys.transformers and long before official announcements of new toys by Hasbro via social media, it was anything but uncommon for people to assume every other newly-found figure to be "exclusive" to whatever chain they were first discovered at by default.

Alternators

• A yellow version of Alternators Tracks was released to North American stores (but then recalled by Hasbro).

Only in Japan, baby.

When Hasbro (and Takara) originally announced the Alternators version of Tracks in 2004, the toy's vehicle mode's primary color was yellow. This caused the ire of a significant portion of the fandom, which insisted that the toy had to be blue, like its Generation 1 predecessor.

Hasbro eventually confirmed at OTFCC 2004 that the initial idea had been to release the toy in yellow first, and then later as a running change variant in blue, like Takara would ultimately do. However, Hasbro had encountered problems at the test shot stage, where it became evident that some of the toy's innards were shining through the yellow plastic. As a result, plans for a release of the yellow version were scrapped, and it was decided to release the blue version from the get-go.

Rumors started circulating that some stores (usually Walmart) had indeed received a shipment of the toy, but were then asked by Hasbro to send back the entire batch. Naturally, no substantial evidence has ever surfaced to back up these claims. And while toys may occasionally be recalled for safety reasons, it's highly doubtful that "aesthetics" would be enough of a reason to warrant an expensive product recall.

The only "packaged" versions of a yellow Alternators Tracks we ever got to see were internet pranks of the "yellow Binaltech Tracks in photoshopped Hasbro box" variety. Which, of course, didn't help matters at all.

• Hasbro omitted Alternators Windcharger's gun barrel for safety reasons.

Castrated at the request of Honda.

When the first stolen test shots of Alternators Windcharger surfaced in 2004, the toy sported an extraordinarily long gun barrel (which doubled as the vehicle mode's drive shaft). The toy was ultimately released without the barrel, which was not shown or mentioned anywhere on the packaging or in the instructions. Indeed, Windcharger's weapon accessory was officially identified as a "shield" on the back of the packaging (in addition to the actual, ragtop roof shield). Takara, on the other hand, later released their own Binaltech version of the toy (named Overdrive) with the full barrel, prominently shown in the official promotional photos.

The initial fan theory upon seeing the barrel-less toy was that Hasbro had gutted it for safety reasons, under the notion that the long barrel might pose a choking hazard. Even though this was refuted by actual experts on toy safety standards, the rumor still persisted. An official response from Hasbro's customer service department to an e-mail inquiry (published on a fan site's message board) confirmed that the reason for the barrel's omission was "so the accessory would not look like a weapon". Eventually, Hasbro (in the presence of Takara representatives) would confirm the full story at BotCon 2005: It had indeed been Honda, specifically their North American branch, that had asked to remove the gun barrel and all references to "weapons" from the toy, its packaging and included paperwork. Honda's Japanese department, on the other hand, had no such concerns, which is why Takara were able to release the Binaltech version with the barrel intact.

Despite this official statement by Hasbro, the myth still persists, and has actually since evolved into a conspiracy theory, which postulates that Hasbro deliberately lied to its fans in order to shift blame to Honda rather than admitting to have made that decision themselves in order to conform to safety standards. Which is mindbogglingly absurd.

Transformers Collection

A solicitation of then upcoming Takara reissues? Not really.

• Takara's Transformers Collection had something to do with Dreamwave.

In 2002, Takara launched their series of Generation 1 reissues named Transformers Collection, also commonly referred to as "bookbox reissues" or even "Dreamwave reissues" among fans. The reason for that is simple: The package art, especially for early releases such as Meister or Prowl, was often directly taken from the covers of and promotional posters for Dreamwave's first Generation One mini-series drawn by Pat Lee. A common misconception among fans at that time was that Takara was coordinating their reissues with Dreamwave. Some even tried to predict upcoming reissues based on the existing Dreamwave covers. Yet Mirage and Sunstreaker reissues never materialized.

In fact, probably the main reason why Takara recycled Pat's Dreamwave artwork of those characters for the packaging of their reissues was its coincidental availability: The artwork had already been created and paid for, so why commission new art when they could just use what already exists? Furthermore, only about half of the Collection reissues actually sported "Dreamwave" package art, whereas the rest used newly-commissioned art drawn by Japanese artist Hirofumi Ichikawa, who has never in his life worked for Dreamwave, and had been drawing in a heavily-toy-based style long before Pat Lee rose to his brief "superstar artist" fame.

Fiction

The Transformers cartoon

• The original The Transformers series was a redubbed anime which originated in Japan, just like Battle of the Planets, Voltron, Robotech and other such shows screened in the '80s.

Toransufōmā!

Although most moderate-to-hardcore fans are well aware that this is a fallacy, there are those more casual fans (or those who have not rewatched the original Transformers cartoon since childhood) who are under the misconception that The Transformers was an anime.

Although the original toyline and thus the characters' basic visual designs were taken from Japanese-originated products, the original characters, names, factions and entire story premise of the whole Transformers franchise were developed in the United States by Hasbro, Marvel and eventually Sunbow. Although the animation was farmed out to Japanese (and later also Korean) studios, the writing and original voice recording of all four seasons of the original series plus The Movie was entirely done in America.

This misconception probably stems from distant childhood memories of the cartoon, the fact that shows like the aforementioned Voltron and Robotech were redubbed anime, and the Transformers' obvious Japanese influences. This may also be due to passing exposure to the 2001 Robots in Disguise cartoon and the Unicron Trilogy shows which, viewed as an adult, are very obviously redubbed anime.

This is in part related to the misconception that all Transformers toys are solely designed, developed and manufactured by Takara, and all Hasbro ever does is to put them in new packaging and distribute them in the Western market (see above). Because this is true for other Japanese robot toylines, and therefore it must also apply to Transformers.

However, there's actually a little bit of truth to this misconception; since the G1 cartoon is an animated series made by Japanese studios, one could feasibly call it an anime; as "anime" is only a word to describe any form of animation in Japan, much like the word "cartoon" is here in the West, and not a term for a specific genre.

This wrecked Victory was never the Nemesis.

• The Decepticons' undersea base in the Generation 1 cartoon was the Nemesis, the ship that originally brought them to Earth.

In the three-part pilot mini-series of the Generation 1 cartoon, the Decepticons traveled to Earth aboard a starship that, years later, would be given the name of "Nemesis" by the final two episodes of the Beast Wars cartoon. For the rest of the Generation 1 cartoon's first two seasons, the Decepticons were stationed on Earth in an underwater headquarters that was originally another spacecraft that they had constructed on Earth during the pilot mini-series. The ship was supposed to take the Decepticons back to Cybertron, but it crashed into the ocean after a battle aboard its bridge. This ship would later be named "Victory" in 2009.

A combination of faulty memories, lack of proper access to the full G1 cartoon throughout the 1990s, and the Nemesis being found at the bottom of the sea in Beast Wars, led a sizable number of fans to misremember the Decepticons' underwater base as having been the Nemesis instead of the Victory. It certainly didn't help that the Victory originally had no name for twenty-five years, and that its design and appearance were always rather similar to that of the Nemesis. Nonetheless, the Nemesis eventually did show up in the second season episode "Microbots" as a completely separate vessel from the undersea base, buried inside a mountain in South America, with Megatron fully confirming it to be the very same ship that had originally brought him and his Decepticon crew to Earth.

And yet, this misunderstanding persisted just long enough to influence a few pieces of Transformers media of the 2000s. Namely the Generation 1 comics published by Dreamwave Productions, and one story from the Transformers Legends anthology book featured the Nemesis as the Decepticons' Earth-based undersea headquarters.

• Jazz was written out of the series due to the death of his voice actor.

Jazz conspicuously survives the events of The Transformers: The Movie, yet went on to make no speaking appearances in the third season of the cartoon. As his voice actor, Scatman Crothers, passed away of lung cancer in 1986, it is common for fans to assume that the latter caused the former. This isn't hurt by the fact that fellow Autobot and film survivor Cliffjumper also vanished due to issues involving his own voice actor, nor by the fact that one of Jazz's only appearances involved him seemingly being referred to as "Munka Spanka."

However, the dates simply don't match up: Crothers's death happened on November 22, long after the third season had begun airing. In fact, by that point, the only remaining episodes were the two parts of "The Return of Optimus Prime", both of which aired months after the rest of the season. Add in the fact that any dialogue for the episodes would have been recorded months in advance, and the idea that Crothers dying affected the writing process becomes borderline impossible. The more likely answer is that Jazz stopped appearing, like much of the Season 1 and 2 cast, because his toy was no longer on shelves.

• The Headmasters was going to be dubbed into English and shown in America.

In America, "Season 4" consisted of "The Rebirth", a 3-episode mini-series. In Japan, "The Rebirth" was ignored, and a full-fledged series titled The Headmasters continued the story instead. Rumors once swirled in the fandom of an American-led dub of The Headmasters series; the dub was largely finished, goes the story, till the materials were lost in a warehouse fire.

Given the meandering, continuity-heavy pace of the series (common for Japanese shows but anathema to American sensibilities of the time), the presence of numerous characters who had no toy equivalent on US shelves, the incompatibility with the "Nebulan" head characters, the number of Japanese cultural references, and the very existence of "The Rebirth", this rumor seems unlikely on the surface.

More to the point, no official confirmation or other evidence has ever surfaced to back it up. In all likelihood the rumor was probably a Chinese Whisper from the fact that the laughably-bad English language Omni Productions dub was screened on UK satellite TV during the 1990s.

• Transformers were meant as a "genderless" race. Arcee and the other female Transformers were added to the brand because feminists complained about the Transformers all being male.

When Bob Budiansky was assigned to work out the character details for the toys, he initially intended some of them to represent female characters, like Ratchet. However, he was not given permission by Hasbro to include females because the company feared it would have a negative impact on the sales of those toys. Budiansky complied, and in later years, would pen a story for the Marvel comic in which the Transformer race was stated to have no concept of gender.

The cartoon was a different story. Since television requires a bigger investment than comics, but also offers the potential for a much better payoff, it is of interest for a TV network to broadcast material that reaches the highest possible demographic. To this end, very early in its development, writer Jeffrey Scott penned a production bible which included original female Transformer characters as part of an effort to sell the series to TV Network CBS. When it was decided to produce the series for syndication rather than for a network, new story editors Bryce Malek and Dick Robbins dropped this idea, and the series went on to star an exclusively-male cast of robots. However, in late 1984, while working on the early story development for The Transformers: The Movie, writer Ron Friedman argued for the inclusion of a female Autobot in the story, on the basis that he "had a daughter who love[d] this stuff." Friedman won his argument, Arcee was added to the movie, and in 1985, female Autobots were incorporated into the series in advance of the film's release, with the introduction of Elita One and her Female Autobots in the episode "The Search for Alpha Trion."

In other Transformers cartoons, Sari Sumdac and the English dub gender flip of Override have also been added to their respective series because of network demands, whereas Airazor, Strika and Botanica were a request from the writers to Hasbro.

Despite persistent stories, there is no documented instance of feminists demanding the inclusion of female Transformers (and likely, they've got something better to do than complain about another generic boys show like there are hundreds of). There is, however, a comic story called "Prime's Rib!" which presents Arcee's introduction to the Autobot ranks as an attempt by Optimus Prime to appease human feminists. While the story is obviously satire, through hearsay it has become believed by some that it is what actually happened.

The Transformers: The Movie

Traumatizing enough as it is, frankly.

• There exists an "uncut version" of The Transformers: The Movie containing all sorts of non-kid-friendly content.

These stories stem mainly from the fact that many home-video releases of The Transformers: The Movie omit two relatively minor instances of characters using profanity, which during the 1990s resulted in some alt.toys.transformers posters advertising "uncut" VHS copies of the movie for sale, thus either intentionally or unintentionally creating the myth of a really foul-mouthed and ultra-violent alternate version of The Transformers: The Movie. At least one poster claimed to have uncut reels of the original film showing a number of violent scenes, but, unsurprisingly, was unwilling to provide any form of proof. So have ended all claims of uncut footage from the film.

A much stranger rumor, whose origins are unclear, claims that the original theatrical cut of The Transformers: The Movie depicted Optimus Prime crumbling into dust after dying, and that that scene was cut by the distributor in mid-release because children were traumatized by the imagery. Interestingly, the "Death of Optimus Prime" track on the original soundtrack album does contain ten extra seconds of music. At the end, just before the song's final low-octave percussion sequence, there is a very distinct series of notes that appears nowhere else in the song and is not in the onscreen version. However, no other evidence of this "lost" animation sequence exists among the many storyboards, preliminary animations, interviews, varying formats, etc., that have come to light. The myth could be related to the death of Starscream, a few scenes later, where Starscream does indeed crumble to dust after being shot by Galvatron; time and distance could lead fans to confuse the two scenes.

These claims should not be confused with the extra storyboarded scenes and early script revisions which have come to light over the years, which do in fact contain a lot more violence. But no evidence exists that any of these sequences, even those that made it to storyboard, were ever animated. Especially given the expense of producing full animation.

See also: The Transformers: The Movie#Edits.

• Some portions of Unicron's dialogue were recorded by an actor other than Orson Welles.

A common rumor in the Western fandom claimed that Unicron's final lines ("Destiny... you cannot destroy my.. destiny!") were recorded by Leonard Nimoy, based on claims that those lines sounded "different" from the rest of Orson Welles's lines. Compounding the rumor is the fact that Welles died shortly after recording his TF:TM lines (and indeed, one version of the rumor has Welles actually dying before completing his lines). Despite being debunked repeatedly (including by Susan Blu and Wally Burr, both of whom should know), this one still pops up from time to time.

Brawn can't shoulder the blame on this one.

• Brawn was killed in the movie by a single shot to the shoulder.

A long-running joke in the fandom is that the tough-as-nails Brawn was killed by taking a single shot to his shoulder. While it's true Brawn was killed by a single shot from Megatron in gun mode, there is a single frame showing the shot actually hitting him in the upper flat portion of his chest, with the massive explosion that follows obscuring exactly where he was hit. In the following shot as he falls, a entry wound can be seen lower on his chest, with a large exit wound seen on his back.

• The Transformers: The Movie/Scatman Crothers coined the term "ginormous", which has since been added to several dictionaries.

In The Transformers: The Movie, Jazz, voiced by Scatman Crothers, described Unicron as "a ginormous, weird-looking planet". The word "ginormous", a portmanteau of "gigantic" and "enormous", was officially added by the Merriam-Webster Online dictionary in 2007.

Some fans believe that Crothers had coined the term, which is incorrect for several reasons. Even putting aside the notion that under this theory, Crothers is assumed to have ad-libbed the line (rather than simply reading it from Ron Friedman's script), the term has actually been around for much longer, being listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as a "British informal" word that has existed since at least the 1940s, and was originally military slang.

• Scourge was the one who asked Galvatron "You want me to gut Ultra Magnus?"

During the Decepticons' second attack on Autobot City, Galvatron rode inside Cyclonus's cockpit, piloting him in vehicle mode. At one point, Scourge flew up alongside them, also in vehicle mode, and his robot mode head popped up when the line "You want me to gut Ultra Magnus?" was spoken to Galvatron. Ever since the movie's release, fans have debated over who said this line, with the majority insisting it was Scourge. The IDW adaptation of the movie even gave the line to Scourge in its second chapter. However, a closer examination of the voice that spoke the line reveals it was actually Roger C. Carmel (Cyclonus's actor), not Stan Jones (Scourge's actor): The voice is similarly guttural to how Carmel sounded when voicing the Quintesson Prosecutor later in the movie, and to how he would sound when voicing Cyclonus in certain episodes of the subsequent third season of the cartoon (such as when Cyclonus spoke the line "Your contributions will not be in vain, brothers," in "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 2"). The movie's final dialogue script even confirms that it was Cyclonus who spoke the line.

• The Transformers: The Movie was never released in Japan.

It is true that The Transformers: The Movie was not released in Japan at the same time it was released in Hasbro's markets, with Japanese fans instead getting the Scramble City: Mobilization OVA prior to the release of the third season of the show (second for Japan). It is also true that the movie never played in Japanese theaters either. But The Movie did ultimately reach Japan in August 1989, first through public charity screenings (of the original English version) and then on VHS and LaserDisc (both in Japanese and English). The various discrepancies between the film and subsequent Japan-only Generation 1 fiction (such as who didn't survive the movie) are largely a matter of the Japanese television animators and writers being unaware of the precise details of the film. This also led to a similar rumor that Scramble City was an out-and-out replacement for the film, similar to how The Headmasters replaced "The Rebirth." Actually viewing the OVA reveals that it has nothing to do with the events of The Movie, other than that both feature Ultra Magnus and take place between the second and third seasons; at no point does it significantly contradict the film, and pretty much the only third-season change the short film explains is where Metroplex came from. There were indeed attempts to summarize what had happened in the movie, including a narration added to "Five Faces of Darkness" and scans in TV Magazine, but Scramble City served much more as an advertisement for its subline than a major turning point of the continuity.

• The Transformers: The Movie was released in Japan under the title "Matrix Forever".

"Matrix Forever" is actually the shortened and slightly mistranslated title of a 20-minute video created to promote the Japanese release of The Transformers: The Movie, but some Western fans have been confused into thinking that The Transformers: The Movie itself was renamed "Matrix Forever".

Japanese Generation 1 fiction

• In Japanese continuity, the Destrons (Decepticons) were invaders from a planet called Destron.

The Autobots were renamed "Cybertrons" in the Japanese translation, resulting in a misconception that the Destrons (Decepticons) must hail from somewhere other than the planet Cybertron. However, the Japanese translation also used slightly different spellings for the faction, "Cybertron" (literally: サイバトロン, "Sa-i-ba-to-ro-n"), and the planet, (literally: セイバートロン, "Se-i-baa-to-ro-n"), commonly interpreted as "Seibertron" by Western fans, in order to avoid confusion, even though both words originally started out based on the English name "Cybertron".

This rumor presumably originates from an article a Thomas Wheeler had written for Attic's Collectible Toys and Values Monthly during the hiatus between the G1 and G2 toylines. According to that article, Hasbro chose not to follow this element of the story because of the similarity between the term "Destron" and G.I. Joe's "Destro" character. Of course, seeing as the story originated in America to begin with and was only dubbed into Japanese later on, this doesn't make a lot of sense. In later years, Wheeler wrote toy reviews for Master Collector's website, which occasionally also display a certain lack of knowledge about various toys and the Transformers brand's overall history, so it doesn't seem entirely out of place for him.

Interestingly, an earlier draft for "Desertion of the Dinobots, Part 2" would have established the Decepticons as "evil machines from another world", but this was not used in the final episode, which simply stated that "Decepticons, lusting for power, began a terrible war". "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 4" then established the true origin of the Cybertronian race, which was kept unchanged for the Japanese dub.

Ironically, the "Mystery" part of this title is the only actual mystery in this story.

• The Mystery of Convoy / Convoy no Nazo videogame is about Ultra Magnus searching for a missing Optimus Prime

A common misinterpretation regarding the (let's face it, otherwise not very well-developed) plot of 1986's Transformers: Mystery of Convoy for the Famicom is that the game follows Ultra Magnus in his search for Optimus Prime after he goes missing, this thus being the titular "Mystery of Convoy" (Convoy is, of course, Optimus's Japanese name). But in reality, both the game's manual and its TV advert already pronounce Optimus Prime as being dead and Magnus as the new Autobot leader, and within this context, it becomes clear that the game's rudimentary opening cutscene — where Optimus's head "explodes" and a couple of orbs fly in the direction of Magnus's model instead — is meant to depict the transferring of the Matrix from Optimus to Magnus. Eventually, the game's true ending involves unlocking Rodimus Prime, thus continuing the lineage of Autobot leaders.

Because of the aforementioned storytelling vacuum left between the second and third reasons of the show in Japan as a product of the film not getting a localized release until 1989, Mystery of Convoy's narrative was chosen, essentially; as an attempt to bridge that gap, more or less providing an alternative account to the movie's events. As to where the erroneously assumed plot comes from... It's anyone's best guess, but the odds are that the "Mystery" part of Mystery in Convoy and Magnus rather than Optimus being the main character has likely invoked the image of a "main-character-goes-missing-and-secondary-character-goes-after-him" type plot that was common in some retro games, like Mario is Missing! or Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest. The ending of the game's 2014 sequel / parody Q-Transformers: Mystery of Convoy Returns actually pokes fun at this whole kerfuffle, mentioning how to this day no one knows what the mystery of Mystery of Convoy actually was.

Of note is the fact that there was also another separate account of the game's story as part of a one-shot manga by Ikuo Miyazoe where Optimus is indeed still alive by the time of its events, but said manga follows a radically different (and much weirder) narrative that involves Ultra Magnus's young son — Ultra Magnus Jr. (yes, seriously) — travelling to a mysterious place called the "Decepticon World of Nightmares" where the game's events presumably happen — thus, it has nothing to do with either the game's original plot outline or also with a presumed story about Prime going missing.

• In Japanese continuity, Megatron and Galvatron are two separate characters.

There are a few instances of Japanese fiction (and advertising) that would seem to support this notion, all of which can be attributed to a lack of communication between Hasbro and Takara prior to the release of The Transformers: The Movie. All of them were ultimately ignored by the "primary" fiction, namely the (dubbed) third season of the cartoon (named Transformers: 2010 in Japan) and the accompanying manga, which followed the Western story concept of Galvatron being a reformatted Megatron.

The second issue of The Story of Super Robot Lifeforms: The Transformers manga depicts Galvatron commanding a legion of automatons created in Megatron's image, which some non-Japanese-speaking fans misinterpreted as depicting Galvatron and Megatron co-existing. This even extended into The Battlestars, where the appearance of Super Megatron solidified the idea to those fans; after all, surely if he were upgraded from Galvatron, he would be named Super Galvatron, right? One particularly sturdy rumor claimed that he was trying to hunt Galvatron down (possibly conflating him with Gilthor).

"What will you do?"
"Rebuild it. Just the way it was, brick for brick."

• Mars was destroyed in The Headmasters. Therefore, all of its later Japanese G1 appearances are continuity errors.

The planet Mars was blown up by the Decepticons in the fifteenth episode of the Transformers: The Headmasters cartoon. Yet, it made later appearances in both the Victory and Beast Wars II cartoons as a fully-intact, definitely-not-destroyed planet. For decades, fans in the West took these later appearances of Mars following its destruction to be, well, a glaring continuity error. However, it actually isn't.

In the final episode of The Headmasters, the Autobots succeeded in finally driving the Decepticons off the Earth for good, and prepared to leave the planet themselves. When saying goodbye to the Witwickys, the Autobot leader Fortress stated that, among many other tasks ahead of them, the Autobots planned to rebuild Mars as part of their efforts to bring peace to the universe. Evidently, they succeeded, given Mars's aforementioned later appearances.

The Western fandom's perception that Mars's appearances post-The Headmasters were in error stemmed from the fact that, in all official and unofficial English-subtitled releases of The Headmasters, Fortress's line about rebuilding Mars was completely overlooked and left out of the subtitle translations. It was, however, mentioned in the English dub produced by Omni Productions, but for the longest time, that was believed to have been an invention of the dub, rather than a (surprisingly) accurate translation of the Japanese dialogue.

In truth, Mars being rebuilt was mentioned in the Japanese dialogue from the very beginning, and the Western fandom at large simply failed to notice.

• Black Shadow and Blue Bacchus are both members of a "Space Mafia".

Black Shadow of Victory has his function listed as "Space Gangster". An early fan translation of his on-package bio misinterpreted the Japanese word for "gangster" to mean "Mafia", hence the belief that a "Space Mafia" exists in the Japanese Generation 1 universe. This was naturally extended to his partner, Blue Bacchus, whose function is "Space Gunman."

Maybe it's the way Ban Magami drew his mouth?

• Metrotitan is a zombie of Metroplex.

Metrotitan was a Destron redeco of Metroplex from the Zone portion of the original Japanese toyline. In the earliest years of the online fandom, some Western fans propagated the idea that Metrotitan was a "zombified" version of Metroplex, who had died somehow, sometime. (The details have never been specified.) A stranger variation on this rumor holds that Metrotitan was somehow "regrown" from one of Metroplex's legs.

This has long since been debunked, as Metrotitan is just a big Decepticon who showed up one day, as big Decepticons are wont to do. It is... unclear how the zombie rumor got started, but given the general sparsity of both reliable translations of Japanese material at the time, and of Zone fiction overall, it's kind of easy to see how it stuck around as long as it did.

Only those from the Beast Era and Victory travel through the Blastizone.

• Robotmasters is a multiversal crossover with characters dimension-hopping into Generation 1 from other universes.

Takara's Robotmasters series was released in 2004 to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Transformers brand. As such, it featured a big crossover storyline that brought together several famous characters from across the brand's history: Characters from Beast Wars, Victory and Beast Wars II traveled through time and space across a dimensional fissure known as the Blastizone, arriving on Earth in the year 2004 to team up with Generation 1 characters. This all happened around the same time as Hasbro's Universe series, which similarly featured its own big crossover story that saw characters from across the multiverse coming together from different universes to fight a war over Unicron's return.

Since the toylines of both Robotmasters and Universe consisted primarily of redecos of existing toy molds, and because both series were big crossover events that brought together different characters from different series across time and space, fans in the West considered Robotmasters to be the Japanese equivalent of Universe, and so initially mistook the events of Robotmasters for a multiversal conflict analogous to that of Universe, with some of its characters crossing over from other realities. Namely, both Wrecker Hook and Double Face were key suspects of Robotmasters characters speculated to have come from other universes (but that is a whole other can of worms).

However, a closer examination of the Robotmasters fiction reveals all this to have not been the case at all. Unlike Universe, Robotmasters did not actually feature any dimension-hopping whatsoever. Both the comic series and the relation chart (pictured right) found on Takara's official website specified which particular characters did and did not travel through the Blastizone, and the only ones who did were just time-travelers: Optimus Primal, Megatron, Psycho-Orb, Star Saber, Victory Leo, Gigant Bomb, and Lio Convoy. None of the other Robotmasters characters were ever indicated to be anything but native to the Japanese Generation 1 universe in the years 2004–2005 (including the aforementioned Wrecker Hook and Double Face).

Oddly though, the Robotmasters 3D diorama comics didn't even feature the Blastizone or any other signs of spacetime travel. All of the time-displaced warriors from Beast Wars, Victory, and Beast Wars II were just already there in the present, with no explanation given for how any of them got there. Even the final chapter's guest appearance of Cybertron Optimus Prime—the sole anomalous instance that could have been considered a universe-hop in Robotmasters fiction—was completely unexplained: He just showed up without any kind of portal or means of arrival, as if he, bizarrely, was also just a native to the Robotmasters world (From a real-world standpoint, his appearance was simply to advertise his then-new Hybrid Style toy).

European Generation 1 fiction

• Starscream and Shrapnel are female characters in the French dub of Generation 1.

This rumor is only partly true. The Transformers cartoon used three different dub teams for the French version: one for the TV show's dub broadcast in Quebec, one for the TV show's dub broadcast in France and one for the 1986 movie used in both countries. Neither of the TV show's dubs depict Starscream as a female as he uses a distinctively male voice; however, the movie's dubbing team used a female voice for Starscream, and at one point Megatron calls Starscream "une imbécile" (articles in French are gender-specific), clearly cementing Starscream's movie status as a female. All the same is also true for Shrapnel, who is even referred to as "Mademoiselle Shrapnel" by Kickback in the movie.

• The German version of The Transformers: The Movie was edited and didn't depict Starscream's death scene.

German TV didn't air a dubbed version of the original The Transformers cartoon until 1989. The Transformers: The Movie was aired for the first time on German TV in 1994, with only one repeat. For unknown reasons, a rumor was circulating for several years claiming that Starscream's death was considered too "violent" for German TV standards for children's programs and had therefore been edited out. However, recordings of the TV airing still exist, which don't feature any obvious edits other than Spike's infamous "swear" line. Furthermore, a German DVD edition of the movie released in 2004 that features an entirely different dub also depicts Starscream's death in all its glory.

Other

• Cliffjumper dies in every Transformers series he appears in, or is part of a franchise-wide running gag where he is killed over and over again.

I lived, bitch!

The 2010 series premiere of Transformers: Prime is well-remembered for its opening act, in which Starscream brutally kills Cliffjumper. Several years later, Cliffjumper made a prominent appearance in 2018's Bumblebee film, where he is tortured and killed by the Decepticons Shatter and Dropkick. By sheer coincidence, Cliffjumper had recently perished in IDW's concurrent Unicron miniseries; from these data points (sometimes adding in the fate of his mirror-universe self in Shattered Glass and a brief cameo in Siege that leaves his fate uncertain), some fans have extrapolated the idea that Cliffjumper must "always" die in Transformers stories, or that writers have somehow singled him out to die over and over again for the sake of comedy, not unlike the perpetually unlucky Waspinator.

The truth of the matter is a bit more nuanced. Named Transformers characters die all the time—across different works of Transformers fiction, characters named "Wheeljack" and "Blurr" have died just as often as Cliffjumper, and Bumblebee himself has died or otherwise suffered terminal damage onscreen just as often as Cliffjumper! Some of Cliffjumper's deaths were part of climactic "massacre" storylines that killed off dozens of named characters; his appearances in Bumblebee and Siege probably came down to the fact that it was easier to finagle another pre-existing character from their limited pool of robot parts by simply recoloring Bumblebee's pre-existing CGI model, rather than any kind of ulterior commentary on the character.

In 21st century media, Cliffjumper spent years as the POV character in Fun Publications' Shattered Glass stories; more recently, he got an entire two-part adventure to himself in 2020's Transformers: Galaxies series, where he turned out just fine. In 2023, he received a starring role in Skybound's Energon Universe comics, in which he temporarily inherited the usual "human ally" role from ... Bumblebee, who died in the very first issue. (See what we mean?)

Beast Era misconceptions

Toys

• Beast Wars didn't originally have the Transformers branding.

Let's play the "spot the Transformers logo" game.

While the early design of Beast Wars toy packaging had the Transformers brand name in a smaller typeface than the main Beast Wars logo, the toy range was always officially titled Beast Wars: Transformers in the United States from day one (while the back of the packaging typically added a definite article, Beast Wars: The Transformers, presumably in order to keep the trademark for the original toyline). The Beast Wars name was first reduced in size with the shift from rock bubble to smooth bubble cards, and again in 1998 with the release of the Transmetals and Fuzors subranges, which also saw the order of the two parts reversed to Transformers: Beast Wars, thus considerably increasing the prominence of the Transformers title.

In Canada and Latin America, the use of trilingual packaging necessitated that the triple Beast Wars/Guerre des Bêtes/Guerra de Bestias title was rendered in a smaller font than on United States packaging to begin with, resulting in the Transformers name being more prominent as well. The order of the two parts was switched analogously with United States packaging.

In Europe, things were a little less cut-and-dry: Initially, early production runs of trilingual English/Spanish/Italian packaging featured only the Beast Wars title in around the same size featured on United States packaging at the time, while the Transformers branding was placed in the lower right corner of the packaging. In the case of carded figures, that meant it was hidden far away from the Beast Wars title, while on boxed figures, it was simply much smaller than, and not at all aligned with, the main title. On top of that, it was rendered in red on an already red background (and, for some reason, also included a Generation 2-style Autobot insignia!). The same was done with early trilingual French/Dutch/German packaging, which featured the double title Beast Wars/Ani Mutants.

Eventually, English/Spanish/Italian also adopted a second title, becoming Beast Wars/Biocombat, and the Transformers name was placed directly below it, with the color changed from red to white and the Generation 2 Autobot insignia dropped, just like on American packaging. Unlike English/Spanish/Italian packaging, this packaging design was continued all the way through 1997. Finally, the introduction of the Transmetals and Fuzors subranges in 1998 also saw another change: While English/Spanish/Italian packaging simply reduced the size of the entire title on Basic and Deluxe blister cards, but still kept the Transformers portion as the secondary title for the remainder of the toyline's run, French/Dutch/German packaging followed the example of American packaging and moved the Transformers name on top, while keeping the title itself in the same font size also featured on each packaging's English/Spanish/Italian counterpart.

Lastly, when British ITV national breakfast franchisee GMTV aired the Beast Wars television series, the Transformers name was edited out of the title sequence entirely.

Fiction

Japanese Beast Wars

• Preface

To give a better idea of how the following misconceptions came about, many of them stem from how little access the Western fandom had to understandable forms of the Japanese Beast Wars media at the time. After all, when the series were first released, the internet was still a relatively "new" thing, where USENET forums were still a major outlet for fan information and websites were... rudimentary. For about two decades since that time, the most that the West had access to were a small number of fan-subtitled episodes of Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo, a fansubbed version of the theatrical feature segment Lio Convoy in Imminent Danger!, a translation of the first Beast Wars II toy catalog, and second-hand accounts from those who had seen the untranslated episodes of either series or had read each's respective manga series. On top of that, direct contact with Japanese fans was limited to say the least, with a lot of information coming only periodically from one or two sources (usually through an intermediary). Over time, those who lacked an understanding of the Japanese language would misinterpret much of these series' specifics. The following are a few of the most well known misunderstandings.

Well, that's just Prime.

• In Japanese Beast Wars continuity, Optimus Primal and Megatron were the same characters as their Generation 1 namesakes.

In hindsight, it sure seems like this was originally going to be the case. When the Beast Wars toyline first debuted in the West, both Megatron and Optimus Primal were identified in their earliest toy bios as being new iterations of Generation 1 Megatron and Optimus Prime, respectively. This was most evident in the bios of the very first toys of the two: the Basic class bat Optimus Primal and crocodile Megatron toys. But when the Beast Wars cartoon started up later, it did away with that idea entirely, by firmly establishing that the two leaders were instead completely separate individuals from their Generation 1 namesakes.

When Beast Wars was first brought over to Japan, Takara evidently thought that the original notion was still in effect: Optimus Primal was renamed "Convoy", the same Japanese name as Optimus Prime, and the Maximal and Predacon factions were given the same Japanese names as those of the Autobot and Decepticon faction—"Cybertron" and "Destron", respectively. Optimus and Megatron's Ultra and Basic class toys were each given Japanese bios loosely based on their respective Basic class toys' English bios, with their Ultra class toy bios even giving them the same functions as their Generation 1 namesakes (Supreme Commander and Emperor of Destruction, respectively); the one for Optimus even indicated him to be the very same Optimus of old. Both of their Basic class toys were even given special redecos with new bios that explicitly claimed the two had previously been a tractor trailer and a Walther P-38, the very same altmodes of the Generation 1 Optimus Prime and Megatron.

When the first season of the Beast Wars cartoon began airing in Japan, it was initially ambiguous on the matter, never actually saying one way or the other if Optimus and Megatron were meant to be new characters like their English counterparts, or the same characters as their Generation 1 namesakes. This was because, despite the many adlibs that were added to the Japanese dub, it was still largely dubbed in accordance to the English version, which rarely ever touched upon the subject in its first season (because it never needed to, since it was abundantly clear in that version that Optimus Primal and Megatron were not their G1 namesakes). This initial ambiguity would later prove to be the Japanese dub's saving grace from what all came next.

When Takara made the first Japanese-original spin-off series, Beast Wars II, Optimus Primal made a few guest appearances in both its manga and its movie. A short bio for him was printed at the end of the third chapter of the manga, which described Optimus as "A fearless fighter who has continuously battled the Destron army for thousands of years." The same chapter also depicted him as a sitting member of a council that oversaw the military operations on Cybertron, presenting Primal in a lofty position of authority. Then, three months later, Optimus made a big-screen animated appearance in Lio Convoy in Imminent Danger!, in which he was presented as a "legendary Supreme Commander", complete with his own Matrix; a stark contrast to his American cartoon depiction as merely the young and untested captain of a lowly science vessel. Likewise, the Predacon leader Galvatron referred to a "Megatron" as "the greatest and most vicious legendary Transformer in history." But, it was never clarified if this grandiose description was in reference to Generation 1 or Beast Wars Megatron... likely because, at the time, the movie treated the two as if they were the same person, just as it seemed to do for Optimus.

Hello there, past self who is a completely different individual.

Despite this initial impression, however, new information would come to light in Beast Wars Metals, the Japanese dub of the Beast Wars cartoon's second and third seasons. These two seasons had been held back from airing on Japanese television until after both had been completed by Mainframe, and thus did not reach Japanese audiences until after Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo had come and gone. In short, Metals remained consistent with the original English version by treating the Generation 1 and Beast Wars namesakes as separate characters: The Japanese dub of "The Agenda (Part 2)" even had Beast Wars Megatron refer to Generation 1 Megatron as "My ancestor Megatron" (我先祖のメガトロン, Waga senzo no Megatron) when relating the history of the Golden Disk to Ravage.

Consequently, Metals choosing to remain faithful to the English version on this matter suddenly rendered all of the above Japanese-original media that had previously linked Beast Wars Megatron and Optimus Primal to their Generation 1 counterparts no longer applicable for the cartoon's continuity. The first-year toy bios were relegated to a micro-continuity, while the Beast Wars II comic was always its own continuity separate from its counterpart cartoon to begin with. Though, both it and the subsequent Beast Wars Neo comic were followed by a Beast Wars Metals manga whose final chapter would link it back to the Beast Wars II comic, while also retaining the American cartoon's depiction of the Beast Wars and Generation 1 Optimuses and Megatrons as separate individuals, despite all the aforementioned implications made previously about Optimus Primal in the Beast Wars II comic. So... it's not perfect.

As for the "legendary" status of Beast Wars Optimus and Megatron in the animated movie, that can easily be brushed aside as merely an aspect of long-running Japanese children's series that have multiple shows (e.g. – Kamen Rider, Super Sentai, etc.), in that the main hero of a previous series is treated with awe and reverence by the cast of the next series in any crossover team-ups. Optimus Primal was the leader of the good guys from the series preceding Beast Wars II, so the cast of that series revered him with due respect. Later, the cast of Beast Wars Neo did the same for Lio Convoy of Beast Wars II, calling him a "legendary warrior" in Episode 29. Heck, even Big Convoy was called a "legendary warrior" multiple times in Neo, even as early as the first episode. To put it simply, being "legendary" in Japanese Beast Wars fiction isn't as special as it sounds.

Incidentally, it would later be confirmed that the Beast Wars II cartoon actually took place eons after the later-made Beast Wars sequel series Beast Machines (see below for more). This meant that Beast Wars Optimus Primal and Megatron actually were figures of the distant past from the Beast Wars II cast's point-of-view. In hindsight, this legendary status of the two in the movie fits rather well with how, in Beast Machines, Megatron singlehandedly conquered all of Cybertron and "viciously" captured the sparks of its entire population, while Optimus "legendarily" saved the whole planet from Megatron at the cost of his own life. As Japan would not receive that series until 2004—six years after the movie's release—this all proved rather fortuitous in the end.

• Optimus Primal was sent to Planet Gaia in the Beast Wars II movie when he flew into the alien machine at the end of "Other Voices, Part 2".

The Beast Wars II feature film, Beast Wars Special Super Lifeform Transformers, was initially released in Japanese theaters before the second season of the American Beast Wars cartoon first aired in Japan. During the Lio Convoy in Imminent Danger! segment of this film, Optimus Primal made a guest appearance to team up with the cast of Beast Wars II. At the end of the segment, he declares that he must "return to Energoa"; this was the name given to prehistoric Earth in the Japanese dub of the Beast Wars cartoon, before its true identity as Earth was revealed. This meant that he had been transported to Planet Gaia—future Earth—from prehistoric Earth during the time of the Beast Wars.

The final episode of the first season of Beast Wars, "Other Voices, Part 2", ends with Optimus Primal flying up into the Vok's planet-destroying weapon, sacrificing himself to save the planet. Three episodes later, he is restored to life after a difficult resurrection process. Since Primal's appearance in the movie was screened in Japan between the Japanese airings of Seasons 1 and 2 of Beast Wars, some took this release order as a literal chronology for Optimus Primal's Japanese cartoon appearances, thinking that his final moment in "Other Voices, Part 2" was the exact moment he was pulled into the future and brought to Gaia. A statement given in the Beast Wars Special Super Lifeform Transformers Film Book even seemed to confirm this theory.

Some even took his presence in the movie as an explanation for why the Maximal Rhinox had great difficulty locating Primal's spark within "the other side of the Matrix" in "Coming of the Fuzors (Part 2)", as if to mean that it wasn't there at the time. Lio Convoy in Imminent Danger! is even bookended by sequences that recap the events of Primal's death and rebirth in Beast Wars. And most of all, when Optimus is brought to Gaia, he initially appears in a glowing, yellow, ghost-like form, which wasn't the case for the story's main antagonist, Majin Zarak, who had arrived on Gaia through the exact same means as Optimus. He even returns to this glowing, yellow, spectral form upon his departure near the end of the movie.

However, despite the longevity of this theory, the opening narration of the very next part of the movie—the Japanese dub of the Beast Wars season 2 episode "Bad Spark"—actually seems to debunk it by essentially reiterating what was true of Primal's fate in the English version of Beast Wars. In this narration, Rhinox and Rattrap claim that Optimus Primal did indeed die in the transwarp explosion at the end of "Other Voices, Part 2", and that Rhinox had brought his spark back from the dead in "Coming of the Fuzors (Part 2)".

While this apparently renders the Film Book's statement in error, it does seem like there was originally some intention for it to be true, given Primal's arrival and departure in the movie depicting him in his aforementioned ghostly form. But, while a neat idea, it raises too many questions and relies on too many assumptions in order for it to sensibly fit with Primal's onscreen resurrection. And since Rhinox and Rattrap claim otherwise, this would mean that Optimus was brought to the future from a different point during the Beast Wars, before the end of Season 1 due to Primal having his Season 1 body in the movie. Exactly when during Season 1, however, has never been disclosed.

Everything you know is a lie!

• The characters of the Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo cartoons hail from the same time-period as the cast of Beast Wars, at a point set prior to Beast Machines.

It's barely even correct to call this a misconception; by all appearances, this was the intent for the Japanese-original Beast Wars series. The first catalog packed in with the Beast Wars II toys presented Lio Convoy and Galvatron as contemporaries of Beast Wars Optimus Primal and Megatron, and this scenario was reflected in both the Beast Wars II comic and handheld video game.

But in the course of their run, the Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo cartoons introduced a few notable inconsistencies with the original Beast Wars series. Beast Wars II would introduce the idea that it took place at a point in time when humans hadn't lived on Earth for tens of thousands of years, when Beast Wars had previously established that its cast hailed from only three centuries after a time when Earth was still populated. Beast Wars Neo would also depict the Maximals and Predacons as having been at war for some time, which contradicted the American series, in which the two factions had been at peace for centuries. Neo also featured the computer Vector Sigma in a way that would go on to be completely contradicted by its appearance in the Beast Machines cartoon (though that one's more forgivable, as the Japanese staff could hardly predict the future).

These discrepancies were likely unintentional, rather than actual, intentional deviations from continuity; the "three centuries" statement from Beast Wars had even been omitted from the Japanese dub, so there was originally no issue there. But when TakaraTomy published a massive Generation 1/Beast Era timeline between 2006 and 2007, they chose to acknowledge and lean into the English version's "three centuries" statement, and used it to "correct" the other discrepancies by plainly stating that the wartime era of Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo did indeed take place tens of thousands of years into the future, long after the peacetime era of Beast Wars and Beast Machines that was set only three centuries into the future. This caused a bit of consternation among English-speaking fans at the time, as they hadn't even been aware of the continuity issues, due to the two series having not yet been translated in full.

This tactic did create a new discrepancy, though: In Beast Wars Neo, Cybertron was depicted with its traditional appearance as a metallic planet, while, at the end of Beast Machines, it was converted into a technorganic form. This last gap in the timeline was finally plugged in 2019, when a Transformers Legends pack-in comic explained how and why Cybertron was turned back into a metallic world eons after its technorganic reformatting.

While these efforts have helped to tidy things up, the original understanding of the timeline has influenced several pieces of American media over the years, with the characters and events of the Japanese series often being presented as contemporaneous with the original Beast Wars cast, perhaps most notably in the IDW Publishing comic series Beast Wars: The Gathering and its sequels and spin-offs. Even after the release of the Japanese Generation 1/Beast Era timeline, new media set in other continuities have knowingly chosen to continue depicting characters from the Japanese series as existing side-by-side with the American cast, with such series as Beast Wars: Uprising, Transformers Legends, and even IDW's second Beast Wars comic series each presenting all of them living together in societies and scenarios unique to those series.

• The characters in Beast Wars II travel forward in time to the future just like how the characters of Beast Wars travel back in time to prehistoric Earth.

Seemingly an offshoot of the above misconception, this appears to have been born out of a misinterpretation of a scene in the first episode. When the Maximal starship Yukikaze takes off into space, there is a shot where it vanishes in a flash of light and reappears elsewhere within the vicinity of Gaia. Some have mistaken this flash of light to mean that the Yukikaze traveled through transwarp space forward in time to arrive in the future, as if to echo the Axalon's own time-jump to the past in Beast Wars.

This feels like an attempt to hold on to the belief of the Beast Wars II cast originating from the same home-time of the Beast Wars cast, while also aligning with the revelation of Gaia being Earth several tens of millennia after humanity left the planet.

In truth, however, what really happens during the scene in question is that the Yukikaze simply travels to Gaia with no time travel involved. The ship's disappearance and reappearance in a flash of light was merely the ship going to warp speed, just like many other spacecraft of science fiction.

• In Beast Wars II, Apache is a drunkard as part of a Native American stereotype.

Apache did indeed get drunk in the first episode of the Beast Wars II cartoon, but only in grief, erroneously believing that his earlier actions had caused the death of Lio Convoy. He did not get drunk again for the duration of the cartoon, nor did he ever do so in the manga. Outside of that, the Native American stereotype "common" to Japanese fictions is a stoic, silent, and often mystical warrior—none of which could be used to accurately describe Apache at all.

Amusingly enough, in the sixth installment of the Beast Wars II comic, Lio Convoy gets drunk for no apparent reason and ends up trashing Apache's room.

Looks can be deceiving.

• In Beast Wars Neo, Unicron was resurrected by possessing the corpse of Galvatron.

This misunderstanding is pretty understandable. In Episode 29, the coveted Angolmois Energy is revealed to be the lifeforce of Unicron, who is successfully resurrected in the very next episode. Yet, when he makes his debut, he appears in the form of Galvatron, who had seemingly perished in the final episode of Beast Wars II. At first glance, it looks as though Galvatron's corpse had been recovered and used as a vessel to house Unicron's Angolmois Energy, and those who did not understand the Japanese dialogue simply assumed this to be the case.

However, the Japanese dialogue actually states otherwise. Unicron's resurrected form is not Galvatron's physical body, but is actually a body made of Angolmois Energy that Unicron has deliberately shaped into Galvatron's likeness in an attempt to trick Magmatron into thinking that he is Galvatron, before revealing his true identity. After which, Unicron simply decided to keep using Galvatron's likeness as his default appearance, even using Galvatron's name when transforming between dragon and robot mode.

Ironically, the misconception of Galvatron's body absorbing the Angolmois Energy as a resurrection vessel is almost exactly what Unicron wanted Magmatron to think, with the difference being that Unicron wanted Magmatron to think that the absorption was specifically for Galvatron's revival instead of Unicron's.

Beast Machines

• A Beast Machines writer said, "Real heroes don't use guns."

Beast Machines was the first (but not the last) Transformers series to explicitly avoid all hand-held projectile weaponry. While the villains still had traditional "blasters" mounted on their bodies, some of the heroes' weapons were more esoteric (such as Blackarachnia's energy-web attack, activated by putting her hands on the ground, or Optimus Primal's gauntlets, powered by absorbing enemy fire). According to story editor Bob Skir, this creative decision was agreed upon between the story editors, Fox Kids, Mainframe Entertainment, and Hasbro, and it is indeed reflected in the toys as well.

Note that many Maximals had weaponry that was functionally no different from a "gun"—compare Botanica's hip-mounted energy cannons, Nightscream's back-mounted sonic blaster, or Optimus Primal's chest-mounted energy disc launcher to Jetstorm's shoulder-mounted ray guns or Strika's wrist-mounted energy... tossing thingies.

On his website, Skir also elaborated on his own position as a writer choosing if or how to portray gun use, including this statement: "Our heroes use their wiles and resourcefulness, plus a few cool weapons. Guns? I've never been a fan of them myself, and do not write heroes who need them." Some fans interpreted Skir as condemning all gun use, even in the real world, no matter the circumstances. This led to the misquote, "Real heroes don't use guns," which remains a notoriously persistent error in the fandom. Skir, responding to the controversy, said on his site that "there are heroes who do need guns (such as the Punisher). Spider-Man doesn't need guns. Neither does the Hulk. And neither do Optimus, Cheetor, Black Arachnia[sic], et al."

Notably, the series immediately following Beast Machines did return to classic hand-held gun use among both heroes and villains. However, the later Animated series once again eschewed guns, probably because of its younger target audience.

2001 Robots in Disguise misconceptions

Toys

Do you see a "2000" anywhere in this logo?

• The Robots in Disguise toyline was known as "Transformers 2000" in Japan.

As information about the then-new Car Robots toyline began to trickle out of Japan in 2000, early rumors purportedly from Japanese sources indicated that it was officially named "Transformers 2000". It's possible those Japanese sources were also going by early, inaccurate rumors or perhaps a soon-to-be-discarded working title for the line. The idea persisted with many Western fans well after the true name of the show was revealed, encouraged by online import retailers (who were equally misinformed) using the title to promote pre-orders on their sites.

Fiction

He's got only one voice in his head, not six.

• Unlike the English version, Gigatron (Megatron) has multiple personalities, a different one for each of his modes.

This originates from a statement given in the first Car Robots toy catalog, wherein text describing Gigatron's six-mode transformations speculates that he has developed multiple personalities from transforming too much. However, this was only loosely reflected in the Japanese version of the cartoon, in that Gigatron's bat and dragon modes each had their own unique-sounding voice and mannerisms. The Gigabat voice was higher-pitched, a bit dim-sounding, and spoke like how older people used to speak during Japan's Edo period, ending most of its dialogue with "deansu" (であんす). For the Gigadragon mode, Gigatron's voice became much deeper, angrier, and overall more aggressive-sounding. Both of these differed from his much calmer and more "normal" sounding voice in robot mode (which he also used in each of his other modes), and were most noticeable in the first episode, in which Gigatron made heavy use of both his Gigabat and Gigadragon modes. But without the necessary context provided by the catalog, the notion of his having multiple personalities doesn't come across as clearly by Gigatron's cartoon portrayal alone, as only his voice changes between those two modes rather than his entire persona. And only for the bat and dragon modes rather than all of his modes; when he later becomes Devil Gigatron, his new modes likewise all retained the same ordinary voice used for his robot mode.

By contrast, the English Robots in Disguise version gave Megatron one voice for all of his modes, and rewrote his personality to be much more theatrical and ill-tempered. This in turn made his English voice sound like a combination of the two unique Japanese voices, combining the over-the-top aspects of the Gigabat voice with the seething aggression of the Gigadragon voice. But despite both having unique ways of speaking in the Japanese version, neither form had its own separate personality. All of Gigatron's forms in Car Robots had the same single personality, just as Megatron did in Robots in Disguise.

Interestingly, the later Transformers Animated cartoon would go on introduce the concept of a multi-changer with multiple personalities in the form of Blitzwing, who had three modes and three personalities: His "Icy" persona controlled his jet mode, his "Hothead" persona controlled his tank mode, and his robot mode was shared more equally between those two and his third "Random" persona.

Live-action film series misconceptions

Transformers (2007)

Look! No 2007 movie!

• The movie series takes place in the Generation 1 timeline in Japan.

This is another one of those instances where one TakaraTomy thing, very early in the life cycle of a new Transformers franchise, will say one thing about said franchise, and then literally everything else ever will say another.

When the live-action film series was getting started, TakaraTomy added a new continuity timeline to their official Transformers website. Said timeline appeared to make the rather bizarre claim that the 2007 live-action movie also somehow took place in the Japanese Generation 1 continuity, between The Transformers: The Movie and Transformers 2010 in the year 2007. However, this was not reflected in the flow-chart featured in the then-contemporary "World of the Transformers" website, and was established to not be the case by the Kiss Players timeline (which noted that the movie-verse Autobots and Decepticons came from another universe when they appeared in Beast Wars Diorama Story). And of course, nothing else ever attempted to make the connection.

• Transformers was nearly rated R by the MPAA.

In the spring of 2007, it was reported that Disturbia, a then-upcoming DreamWorks film starring Shia LaBeouf and produced by Steven Spielberg, had received an R rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. That film's rating was eventually lowered to PG-13 on appeal, but in the meantime some Transformers fans became confused and believed that it was Transformers that had been rated R, leading to some heated discussion on Transformers message boards.

Invisible credit.

• Brawl is named in the credits.

The Decepticon tank, who was named "Devastator" in a subtitle in the movie, ended up being named "Brawl" in Hasbro's toy line. Both Hasbro and the screenwriters, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, have expressly favored the toy's name, referring to the name in the movie as an "error".

Since the character has a "speaking" line in the movie, some fans claim that the voice actor is named in the ending credits, and the character's name is stated as "Brawl" there. In fact, however, there's no credit at all for the character, under either name, as he has no voice actor, his "speaking role" being little more than echo-y electronic gibberish.

One of these is not like the others.

• The Decepticons' hologram is Tom Banachek.

Several Decepticons in the movie are seen using a holographic "pilot"/"driver" based on the same short-haired, mustache-clad human with an intense stare, only wearing different clothes to match their respective alternate modes. Since Tom Banachek, the head of Sector Seven's Advanced Research Division, also sports a mustache, a short-cropped hairstyle and a pretty intense stare, many fans mistakenly believe that the Decepticons' hologram is meant to look like him.

There are two problems with that. One, the Decepticons' hologram, dubbed "Moustache Man" in the credits, is played by real-life United States Air Force Major Brian Reece, whereas Tom Banachek is portrayed by established actor Michael O'Neill.

Two... how would the Decepticons know who Banachek even was to model a hologram after him?

Revenge of the Fallen

• Barricade's return?

A common misconception among fans is that Barricade's Saleen Mustang alternate mode was spotted on the set of Revenge of the Fallen, possibly as part of the alleged "disinformation campaign" director Michael Bay repeatedly insisted he had initiated. In fact, however, a truck transporting three "Barricade" prop vehicles was spotted in Culver City, California, in March 2008, more than two months before principal shooting for Revenge of the Fallen started. There's been no indication that this had any significance other than moving the prop cars... someplace. Barricade would not make his reappearance until the next movie, Dark of the Moon.

• Decepticon [blank space] popsicle!

Our ice cream is uncensored.

This rumor claims that a censored version of Revenge of the Fallen exists in which the rude " suck my popsicle!" decal on the side of Skids and Mudflap's ice cream truck alternate mode is edited to remove the words "suck my", resulting in the somewhat nonsensical version "           popsicle!" This version was supposedly shown in some theaters in several countries, even though other theaters in the those very same markets apparently showed the "uncensored" version.

In reality, the most likely explanation for this is much more mundane: Whereas the Decepticon insignia and the word "popsicle" are both rendered in white, resulting in a high color contrast with the dark background of the decal, the words "suck my" are instead kept in dark red. Depending on the specific brightness and color contrast settings of a particular theater, this, combined with the overall darkness of the scene (which was shot "day for night"), could easily lead to those two words becoming pretty much "invisible" by pure coincidence, with no actual intention of "censorship" behind it.

Dark of the Moon

• There's an animation error where Megatron's CG model clips through the base of Lincoln's statue

During Dark of the Moon (and in a clear nod to past Transformers media), Megatron blasts the statue of Abraham Lincoln in the eponymous Lincoln Memorial and sits on its remains. It's commonly stated that, during one of the shots, there's an overlooked error with the CG animation where the track tires on his feet clip through the base of the statue — however; upon closer inspection (and perhaps with the aid of photographs from the real-life statue for reference), it becomes clear that the tires are resting around the base, not really clipping through it. As with the previous presumably censored " suck my popsicle!" message in Revenge of the Fallen, brightening up the image can help to elucidate this.

Bumblebee

• Bumblebee and Rise of the Beasts are reboots that are separate from the rest of the "Bayverse".

Bumblebee was initially conceived as a straight prequel to the Transformers films, chronologically falling between the World War II flashback sequences seen in The Last Knight and the 2007 Transformers film. However, the movie was hastily retooled relatively late into production, tweaking the film's opening to show Bumblebee arriving on Earth in the 1980s, and, as a result, became more-or-less irreconcilable with both the information given by the The Last Knight and the various prequel comics that had gone before. Due in part to these reshoots—which were almost certainly added as a way to distance the film from the financial and critical failure that was The Last Knight—some fans jumped on the idea that Bumblebee was now a "hard reboot" of the film series as a whole, similar to the Marvel Cinematic Universe's interpretation of Spider-Man vs. his prior two cinematic outings. Around the time of Bumblebee's release, both Hasbro and Paramount Pictures were fairly mum on just how it and the five prior Bay films would fit together moving forward: the closest we were given to a conclusive answer was that the film represented the start of a "new storytelling universe,", but Di Bonventura explained that this only meant that the creators had freedom to tell new stories that didn't necessarily follow the rules of the other films. Other fiction, such as the Sector 7 Adventures: The Battle at Half Dome comic included with the home media release of the film, continued to tie the events of Bumblebee to the 2007 movie, putting another notch in the "prequel" column.

The vaguery only continued in the lead-up to the subsequent film, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, which is set in 1994. Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura was fairly adamant about its prequel status, claiming that Rise of the Beasts charts Optimus's growth into the character seen in the 2007 film. Director Steven Caple Jr. was more on the fence; in one interview, he called it a "reboot for sure," only to moments later backpedal and instead call it a "refresher" and a "new direction," adding that you "could call it a reboot" but that that there were still aspects of it that could be tied to the existing films. The film itself splits the difference, with several allusions made to the other films, but the whole "Unicron is Earth" thing from The Last Knight going wholly unaddressed, despite Unicron playing a major role.

When asked point-blank about this after the film released, Caple stated that while they tried to hew as close as they could to not mess up the Bay movies' events, knowing Bumblebee had previously taken its own liberties meant that he felt okay changing things in service of telling a better story and helping the prequels find their own way, something which Hasbro and Paramount fully agreed with. In particular, Caple stated he largely treats the original trilogy as gospel when it comes to continuity, but less so with Age of Extinction and The Last Knight, feeling like the creative teams behind those movies had less idea where they were actually going with their stories at the time. Rassoul Edji, the VFX artist responsible for redesigning Optimus Prime's head for Rise of the Beasts, stated on Twitter in November 2024 that he received instructions to make Optimus's face resemble its appearance in the 2007 film, specifically referring to the new movie as a "soft-prequel" to the original film.

So basically, despite all the incongruities, Hasbro and Paramount are still treating Bumblebee and any subsequent films as being in continuity with the preceding entries, which makes total sense, as it means not alienating the audiences who did enjoy those movies. Plus, by continuing to set films before 2007, it not only minimizes the amount of prior knowledge the audience requires to enjoy the movie, but it means that they simply don't have to deal with the implications of the prequel timeline and the Bay movies' timeline intersecting. Indeed, di Bonoventura has described continuing to use the prequel setting as "kicking the can down the road" when it comes to confronting the pre-existing continuity, acknowledging that they've "maybe" contradicted things despite their best efforts. Ultimately, it's best just to enjoy the films on their own and not to sweat the continuity hiccups; after all, it's not like the Bay movies' stories were internally consistent with each other anyway. (If anything, just ignoring The Last Knight pretty much fixes most of the issues on its own.)

Rise of the Beasts

• All of the generic Terrorcons are named "Freezer".

When Freezer was first revealed during the marketing campaign for Rise of the Beasts, it was initially believed that he was simply a type of mass-produced drone, similarly to the various types of Vehicon from past Transformers series, with the name belonging to both the two smaller Terrorcons deployed by Scourge and the vast horde of generics seen in the final battle. This was seemingly supported by a note in Scourge's character profile on social media and was generally believed to be the case for the first few weeks after the film's release. However, when the film was released on home media, it was revealed in the "Villains" behind-the-scenes featurette that all of the generic Terrorcons were actually named "Sweeps", in a homage to the original Scourge's minions, and that the name "Freezer" actually only belonged to one of Scourge's smaller minions, with the second being named "Novakane".

This misconception may have also been the result of an animation error regarding the Sweeps' designs. The CGI models indicate that Freezer and Novakane were meant to have unique head designs, with Freezer having two scars on his forehead and Novakane having his left antennae cut off. However, for one reason or another, the two designs wound up being used interchangeably, not only between the two smaller Sweeps, but also between many of the larger Sweeps as well.

Interestingly, the tie-in book "Mission at the Museum" actually referred to the pair as Sweeps, but this was initially dismissed as a preliminary working name for Freezer, especially with the next book, "The Search Is On", using his finalized name instead. However, the difference between the two Sweeps was later confirmed by the aforementioned featurette, a set of Chinese trading cards, and the eventual release of Novakane's Studio Series toy, long after the reveal of Freezer. Based upon this information, it can be deduced that Freezer is the Sweep who chases the humans and dies in the Peruvian cave, while Novakane is the Sweep who survives until the final battle before meeting his end in the lava.

Animated misconceptions

Toys

• Hasbro can't make new toys based on Animated characters without Cartoon Network's approval.

This set should not be possible.

While not rooted in any specific source, there has been a longstanding misconception that because they produced the cartoon and collaborated with Hasbro on the toy designs, Cartoon Network maintains partial (if not complete) ownership over the character designs in Transformers Animated, and is thus the reason why no new toys of the characters were released for almost 15 years.

In truth, Hasbro owns Animated lock, stock, and barrel. A quick glance at the legal jargon on the back of any Animated toy packaging will show Hasbro as the sole copyright holder listed. In fact, the only legalese mentioning Cartoon Network is the trademark for their own name and logo, due to printing "AS SEEN ON CN!" on the box. A handful of Animated toys were also released after the show ended via Fun Publications, which also listed Hasbro as the sole copyright holder. Furthermore, toys of several Animated characters were also sold under different Transformers toylines concurrently with the Animated line itself, such as the Legends Class Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Prowl and Starscream sold under the 2008 Universe line, or the Deluxe Class Bumblebee sold as part of the 2007 Transformers movie toyline's "The Legacy of Bumblebee" three-pack. Again, Cartoon Network is mentioned nowhere on the packaging. Similarly, Cartoon Network goes unmentioned in the copyrights for other merchandise like DVDs and tie-in comics. In Japan, the Animated Blackarachnia toy was even retooled years after Animated ended to create the Legends toy for Beast Wars Blackarachnia, again with no mention of Cartoon Network anywhere.

The only place you'll find a Cartoon Network copyright is in the credits of the episodes themselves, but Hasbro appears to have long since bought out whatever rights Cartoon Network retained, hence their ability to freely upload Animated episodes for streaming alongside their other Transformers cartoons on services like YouTube and Tubi (very much unlike the one show we know they don't have all the rights to). And in either case, as mentioned above, it wouldn't prevent them from making new toys using those characters or designs. A much more likely explanation is Hasbro simply wanting new toys to fit a certain aesthetic, one that Animated's designs don't quite fit. So instead, they simply choose to adapt the characters to fit the new medium, such as with Prime Bulkhead or Cyberverse Clobber. The most overt case of this is the 2015 Japanese release of the Legends Slipstream toy, retooled by TakaraTomy from the non-Animated Generations Windblade toy to be more Animated-like, and explicitly spelled out to be the Animated character via the accompanying issue of the Legends comic, which itself likewise featured multiple cameos by Animated characters.

At San Diego Comic-Con 2022, Hasbro designer Evan Brooks confirmed that any rumors of Animated characters not being available for Hasbro's use are incorrect, and that Hasbro has all rights to all Transformers characters. This was proven pretty definitively with the release of Prowl's Legacy toy the following year (followed by even more in later years), once again absent any sort of Cartoon Network related branding, and thankfully seems to have put the misconception to rest for good.

Fiction

• The Japanese dub of Transformers Animated presents it as a prequel to the live-action movies.

This appears to have some basis: back in March 2010, the then-recent edition of TV Magazine published some early pre-release information about the Japanese dub of the Animated cartoon. Among the details announced was the name-change of Bulkhead to "Ironhide", and changing his character to be closer in personality to Ironhide from the live-action movies. The article allegedly also claimed that because Optimus Prime was not Supreme Commander of the Autobots in Animated, the cartoon would be "set chronologically before the live action movies".

In actuality, however, not much of this has been reflected in the dub itself: aside from the aforementioned renaming of Bulkhead into "Ironhide", there's nothing in the Japanese dub that ties the Animated cartoon any closer to the live-action movies than its American counterpart.

While TakaraTomy chose to use the movie-style branding for Animated products, rendering the "Transformers Animated" logo in the gray steel look used for the movies, this appears to simply be a matter of wanting to associate the brand with the big successful money-making movie franchise rather than any reflection of fictional details.

Aligned Continuity misconceptions

Toys

• Transformers: Prime was not initially planned to have any toys.

The toy line for Transformers: Prime was very delayed, debuting roughly a year after the associated cartoon had premiered. Previously, at a BotCon 2010 panel about the then-upcoming Prime cartoon, a Hasbro representative had made a statement that they weren't talking about toys just then. Transformers fandom being what it is, a widespread belief developed that Hasbro was never going to make Prime toys at all. As additional information gradually surfaced, this evolved into a rumor that Prime would only have a small number of toys, with some further speculating that they would also be limited to the Deluxe size class (since initially only Deluxes had been seen). The eventual revelation of a full Prime toyline caused the belief to evolve once more, with the new theory being that there wasn't originally going to be a Prime toyline, but Hasbro changed their minds due to demand.

The reality, as usual, was much less apocalyptic. The statement from the Hasbro Studios panel was never intended to refer to anything except the panel itself—the people in that room weren't going to be discussing toys at that panel. (In fact, Eric Siebenaler expressed excitement about Bulkhead's toy at the very same panel.) As for the delay in the line's launch, put simply, this was for appearance's sake. Hasbro wanted to establish Prime as a strong fictional franchise, rather than merely a glorified toy commercial, and reasonably concluded that launching a toyline immediately would detract from that goal. There was a point when a few Prime toys were planned to be released under the Transformers: Generations banner, but since Generations was at that time exclusively Deluxes, the aforementioned Bulkhead (a Voyager) indicates that this idea had already been abandoned when the rumors started.

In short, this is just a matter of fans jumping to conclusions based on misinterpreted statements.

Fiction

• The High Moon Studios games are part of G1.

We really did look very closely at Generation 1 stuff and tried to capture what for us was the essence of the characters.Sean Miller, Director Character and Animation, Gameinformer interview (Wayback Machine link)

It's the prequel to that version of G1 which never existed!

With its designs aiming at a video gamer audience who grew up with Generation 1, the development team for War for Cybertron took a great deal of inspiration from the original cartoon for such things as characters and the design aesthetic for Cybertron. A commercial even depicted Shockwave ordering Soundwave to play a song made famous by the original animated movie. Furthermore, War for Cybertron toys were sold as part of the Generations toyline that featured Generation 1-styled characters. These factors led many to believe the game was actually part of Generation 1.

To be fair, there was and is virtually no information available to the average fan that War for Cybertron is not part of Generation 1. Hasbro essentially folded War for Cybertron into the aligned continuity, and informed dedicated fans of this fact through question and answer sessions. The War for Cybertron comic adaptation and online timeline actually are adaptations from Transformers: Exodus, which is the basis for the new modern continuity fiction.

Canonically, both WfC and its sequel Fall of Cybertron are in the Aligned continuity, but beyond suggestions and mandatory changes from Hasbro, High Moon Studios didn't seem to care about Hasbro's declarations of canon. In the art book for the sequel to WfC, The Art of Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, the only influences of the concept art and designs mentioned are G1 related. Dreamwave, the original cartoon, and other concepts and ideas from Generation 1 are cited, but the fact that Cliffjumper's head is based on Prime Cliffjumper's is not mentioned, nor are the modifications to Optimus Prime's gun, Megatron's new body, Tox-En, or the other assorted influences from Prime.

High Moon Studios often described the games as prequels to the G1 cartoon. More savvy fans would recognize that the game is generally irreconcilable with the cartoon (or any other Generation 1 continuity for that matter): the circumstances of Optimus Prime's rise to power would contradict "War Dawn", and Optimus's predecessor does not possess the Matrix, unlike his cartoon counterpart. The Autobots left Cybertron because the Core shut down, not because energy sources were depleted, and characters like Jetfire, Breakdown, Cyclonus, the Aerialbots, and Trypticon wouldn't be on Cybertron or even exist. Additionally, the game draws inspiration from other continuities, including characters not from Generation 1 like Slipstream and Demolishor. The game does share a lot of similarities with Dreamwave's War Within series (where Jetfire and Trypticon are present), but it cannot take place in that continuity either.

Companies

Marvel Comics

• John Romita designed the Generation 1 character models.

The rumor here comes about through a misreading of the credits to The Transformers Universe. Legendary Marvel Comics artist John Romita, Sr. was listed as "Art Director", leading readers to assume that he was in charge of designing or developing the various character models used in the series (and reprinted in said comic). However, Romita was actually the Art Director for Marvel Comics as a whole at the time, which means he was being credited for the art direction done when making the Universe issues themselves. The majority of the character models were in fact done by Floro Dery, who went uncredited.

TakaraTomy

• Takara was taken over by Tomy.

We are one.

In 2005, it was announced that Takara, longtime Japanese manufacturer/distributor of Transformers toys, and former competitor Tomy would merge into a new company, named TakaraTomy, as of March 1, 2006. Some fans misinterpreted the media coverage, believing that Takara had been bought out by rival Tomy. This was not helped by official press releases declaring Tomy the "surviving company", Tomy having the majority of shares, and the merged company simply going by the name "Tomy" outside Japan.

The name issue is easily explained, as it was done for purely pragmatic reasons. "Tomy" is an internationally established brand, since the company already had divisions in many other countries prior to the merger, and distributed their toys under their own name there. Takara, meanwhile, had mostly abandoned its ventures into international markets years ago, and had its products distributed through other companies (such as Hasbro) instead. Therefore, the merged company decided to use the better-known name for its international business, while it would continue as "TakaraTomy" within Japan itself.

Now, as for the specifics of the merger... Although the merger ratio was set at 0.356 of a Tomy share for each Takara share (including a split of Tomy's stock), and the companies announced a layoff of 15% of their combined workforce mostly on the Takara side, the term "merger" (as compared to "take-over") was prominently used in all the official announcements by the two companies, and twisting tiny details into a de facto "takeover" of Takara by Tomy is effectively splitting hairs.

• e-Hobby is owned by Takara (TakaraTomy).

The e-HOBBY shop is owned by Part One, Ltd. Although the company has had close ties with Takara for decades, the online store also sells toys by other companies, primarily TakaraTomy's rival Bandai.

The online store directly owned by TakaraTomy, meanwhile, is TakaraTomy Mall (formerly Toy Hobby Market).

IDW Publishing

• The Hasbro Universe was pushed on IDW by Hasbro.

While Hasbro is mostly hands-off with IDW's comics, one of the terms of the license is that IDW needs to work with Hasbro to do occasional promotion for new and upcoming toys; this most obviously took place with events such as Dark Cybertron, Combiner Wars and Titans Return — and, if we're being honest, has resulted in some of the less popular arcs from "phase 2" of IDW. As such, when IDW announced that they were bringing several other Hasbro-owned franchises into their acclaimed Transformers universe, a lot of fans assumed that this was the result of another Hasbro mandate, especially given their stated desire to have a "Transformers Cinematic Universe." It also bore a startling resemblance to the shuttered plans to use the Aligned continuity family to launch a shared universe, even sharing the name of Unit:E. However, the creative teams involved were open from the start about the decision being an internal one that IDW had to ask Hasbro for permission to do.

Reportedly, the decision stemmed from IDW obtaining multiple additional Hasbro licenses, and Chris Ryall and Christos Gage suggesting that G.I. Joe appear in their ROM comic; this led to John Barber bringing up Andrew Griffith's suggestion that IDW's G.I. Joe universe could fit "between" big Transformers events, which led to all of them suggesting to Cullen Bunn that the Earth that the Micronauts visited be the ROM/Transformers/G.I. Joe one... and, well, it all spiralled from there. Hasbro were apparently very on board with the idea, but it was far from something that they pushed onto unwilling creators.

• The Hasbro Universe comics are responsible for the ending of the 2005 IDW continuity.

Given that IDW announced that they were concluding their main continuity less than two years after the VERY controversial Hasbro Universe was first announced, a lot of fans were under the impression that the shared universe, and the relaunch of The Transformers and More than Meets the Eye into Optimus Prime and Lost Light, were responsible for tanking sales to the point that IDW decided that it would be more profitable to reboot.

However, the reason that those titles were relaunched in the first place is that their sales were on an unsustainable downwards spiral; and, other than a brief sales spike for the first issues of the relaunched series, the relaunch did pretty much nothing to the sales trends, which continued to decrease at the same level as they had from around the 51st issues to the relaunch. While the Hasbro Universe titles generally didn't sell great, they didn't affect the sales of the ongoing Transformers series.

External links

• Ten popular but incorrect rumors about Japanese Transformers, retrieved November 16, 2012 (archived)