Bio

Pay attention to the bios, or you'll make baby Megatron cry.

The bio, short for "biography", has been a staple of Transformer characterization from the very beginning. The public first saw them on the back of toy packaging: Rather than needing to watch the show or read the comic, a customer could read the write-up on the box and know who the toy was supposed to be. In fact, this practice eventually gave "life" to hundreds of characters who would never play a part in any story. It also spread beyond the packages to comics, trading cards, and magazines, continuing to this day.

Bios are often combined with Tech Specs and a small version of the toy's package art to form a single collectible card.

History

Generation 1

If you watched only the cartoon, you would never know of his inner angst!

In Generation 1, the on-package bios followed the format seen in the image above: Up top are the character's allegiance and function, describing his or her role in the military hierarchy. A characteristic quote (often incorrectly called a "motto"; see Notes below) follows, then a block of text describes the character's personality, weapons & abilities, and weaknesses (in that order). These were actually abbreviated versions of longer bios given to the writers of Transformers fiction; Marvel Comics editor Bob Budiansky crafted a lion's share of these. The expanded versions were eventually published in Marvel's Transformers Universe comics.

The bios formed the basis for most portrayals of the characters in Generation 1 fiction, though oftentimes the bios' complexities and details were sadly underutilized, especially in the cartoon. Occasionally, portrayals would outright contradict bios, such as the cartoon version of Shockwave's servile loyalty to Megatron, as well as the Marvel version of Blaster's rogue stoicism.

As Generation 1 entered its waning years, the bios became shorter and less personality-focused, probably due in part to the vast number of new characters. Rather than unique and fleshed-out characterizations, increasingly enthusiastic descriptions of characters' weapons and capacity for destruction became the norm.

Center-of-gravity problems plagued these guys when they came back. Maybe they ran out of Cybertonium again?

When Generation 1 enjoyed a nostalgia-fueled rebirth in the early aughts, Dreamwave Productions published a massive profile-comic series featuring a new bio for every Generation 1 character who had gotten a toy in North America. Written to jibe with Dreamwave's concurrent Generation 1 comics, these bios were the first time many of the characters were described with any kind of real personality.

Generation 2

Turbo-charged bios with dual cam turbine exhaust sizzle readers with searing-hot flaming prose! High buzzword content allows entire paragraphs to be devoid of meaningful content. Prefer stockpiling ultra-tech weaponry over describing personality. Multiple-adjective blaster overwhelms consumers with redundant verbage! Attempts at faux-scientific sophistication often elicit laughter instead of respect.

Beast Era

In Beast Wars, bios became noticeably less character-driven. Rather than describing personality, history, or character quirks, they frequently amounted to a bit of purple prose describing the animal mode in the wilderness and maybe a brief weapon or power call-out. The bios for the European releases were even worse. While the American releases at least had some sense of story, the trilingual nature of the bios meant that they were confined to little more than the character's name, function, and "secret weapon location".

Also notable is the disconnect between the first wave of bios and their eventual cartoon portrayals. In both their bios and their pack-in comic, Optimus Primal and Megatron were implied to be their Generation 1 namesakes in new bodies on modern, human-inhabited, post-Generation 2 Earth. When the Beast Wars cartoon began, the bios abandoned this micro-continuity in favor of the cartoon's continuity. But even aside from blatant continuity issues, there were still more subtle disparities. Tarantulas was portrayed in his bio as a ninja that preyed on humans, while Rhinox was portrayed as a security officer, yet both characters were later revealed to be scientists of incredible skill. Even so, some hints of the original bios did still make it through. For example, Rhinox was often the one updating and maintaining the Sentinel defence systems on the Axalon, and Tarantulas was often seen preying upon the wild animals and proto-humans on prehistoric Earth.

By the end of Beast Wars, the bios had returned to a more fleshed-out state, especially since they had a lot of raw material to work with in the form of cartoon plotlines. The Beast Machines bios continued this trend.

Like Generation 1, Beast Wars was revisited in comic form some years after the franchise had ended, and this included a series of profile comics featuring new bios for nearly every character, even Japanese-exclusive ones. They were kinda not that great, though.

BotCon exclusives

3H invested much work into its BotCon-exclusive toy bios, tying them directly into storylines in accompanying comic books. Their incentive to do this was quite high, since they were being marketed to discriminating older fans and not just kids who wanted neat robot toys.

Robots in Disguise

Robots in Disguise's trilingual packaging left no room at all for bios for many of the characters. Apparently Hasbro saw no drawback in doing this, because it set the trend for the first toylines that followed, none of which would have on-package bios at all.

Unicron Trilogy / Universe

Armada and the concurrent Universe omitted on-package bios altogether. Most of the main Armada characters did get Hasbro-written bios, but they were only available on the infrequently-updated Transformers.com. Dreamwave eventually wrote bios for all the Armada characters, which were published in a profile-comic series. The Universe characters, meanwhile, got no love from either Hasbro or Dreamwave; it was 3H that took up that bio-slack in the Universe comics and Collectors' Club magazine. These bios were, in the 3H tradition, very much tied into the comic storylines, but unfortunately there was only time and space for a fraction of the Universe cast to get this treatment.

The Energon bios were published online like Armada's, with the same problems of update-frequency and incomplete character-spread. The bios themselves were often riddled with errors and discrepancies, especially when compared to their own accompanying Tech Spec stats. For example, Grimlock and Swoop were stated to be "primitive in thought and simple in speech" and to "lack in intelligence", yet their stats gave them a "7" in "intelligence". In contrast, Six Shot, a "cunning Decepticon warrior", was given a mere "4" in "intelligence". Furthermore, Galvatron was stated to have "undergone an intense reformatting", even though he looked exactly like he did when he was still calling himself "Megatron" except for the new colors. Storm Jet was described as a "precision marksman", even though the toy came without any sort of weapon, be they built-in or included as accessories. To make matters worse, the website bios contained a lot of name and spelling errors: Shockblast was referred to as "Shockwave" in Six Shot's bio, Scorponok was spelled "Scorpanok", Sharkticon was spelled "Sharticon", Wing Saber was referred to as "Superion Maximus" in his own bio... and capitalization of trademarked names was far from being consistent.

Fortunately, Hasbro improved things with Cybertron, dropping the trilingualism and returning on-package bios as a standard.

Live-action film series

Toys in the live-action film series often feature multiple releases of the same character either in different color schemes or in multi-packs with other characters. The bios for these toys often give explanations for the new appearances that are difficult to reconcile with other fiction. This has happened often enough that toy bios in the live-action film continuity are considered by some fans to be micro-continuities by default.

Notable discrepancies

• Anything to do with Jazz! In the toy bios, Jazz fought Bonecrusher in the battle of Mission City,<ref>Autobot Jazz vs. Bonecrusher two-pack bio</ref> was rebuilt by Ratchet after the events of the movie, and also came back by the power of the AllSpark. All Spark-Enhanced Autobot Jazz's bio In fact he was dead before then, Ratchet specifically states he couldn't save Jazz Transformers, and he's still dead in the sequel. (The AllSpark idea was used in an alternate timeline story though.)

• In the toy bios, Hardtop disabled Bumblebee's ability to speak with a shot from his rifle. Hardtop toy bio It is not revealed how Bumblebee was injured in the movie itself, but in the comics, Megatron crushed his voicebox with his bare hands. Movie Prequel #1

• Sector Seven remained around after the first film in the toy bios, buddying up with Ironhide and helping send Optimus Prime to Mars to fight Decepticons. Premium Ironhide bio Fire Blast Optimus Prime bio

• A number of dead movie Decepticons, especially Brawl nee Devastator, were both alive and highly active in the toyline.

Battle Bios

Hasbro maintains Battle Bios for select characters in their current toy lineup on their website. The Battle Bios list information in categories such as "Key Weapon", "Personality", "Friends and Enemies", "Bio", and "Stats", which corresponds to the character's Tech Specs. You can also find out how tall they are.

Notes

• The quotes that accompany bios are called "mottos" by the Transformers A-Z feature in the Generation 1 UK comic. However, the actual bios of Ironhide and Cliffjumper describe those characters has having mottos that are different from their quotes.<ref>Cliffjumper's original on-package bio (scan at BotchTheCrab.com)</ref><ref>Ironhide's original on-package bio (scan at BotchTheCrab.com)</ref>

References

<references />

External links

• TRANSFORMERS Battle Bios
• TRANSFORMERS War For Cybertron Bios

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