Scramble City (toyline)

The name or term "Scramble City" refers to more than one character or idea. For a list of other meanings, see Scramble City (disambiguation).

When Hasbro introduced the 1986 combiner "Special Teams" into the Tranformers toyline, it was with comparatively little fanfare. Not so for Takara: when the time came for the Japanese toy company to debut these new characters, they went all out, shining the spotlight on them in subline imprint of sorts named Scramble City.

The Scramble City storyline, set in the late 1980s, between the second season of the Generation 1 cartoon and The Transformers: The Movie, centred on the Autobots' construction of a new mobile battle fortress, and the Decepticons' attempt to counter it with one of their own. It became the focus of TV Magazine's Transformers coverage; the accompanying manga published in its pages centred nearly exclusively on the new characters and their powers. The manga in turn led into the direct-to-video exclusive episode, "Scramble City: Mobilization", the first piece of Japanese-exclusive Transformers animation, which put the combiners and their abilities to the fore to an extent not seen in any Hasbro media. Furthermore, the entire Scramble City scenario involved not only the Special Teams, who had already appeared in the late stages of the cartoon, but also featured the introduction and heavy promotion of Metroplex (whose city mode was the titular "Scramble City"), Trypticon, Ultra Magnus, and to a lesser extent, Ratbat and the Autobot Mini-Cassettes. As a consequence, all these characters took their first bow in front of Japanese audiences well in advance of their Western fictional debut in the future era of the movie and the subsequent third season of the cartoon. A short-lived attempt was made to also incorporate Galvatron (whose toy was also sold under the Scramble City banner as an opposite number to Ultra Magnus) into this fiction, with the character making brief appearances in TV Magazine story pages and an extended stop-motion advert for the line, but this was quickly dropped, presumably because Takara soon learned who the character actually was.

The reason for this increased attention? Well, all four combiner teams and Metroplex were originally designed for an aborted 1985 Diaclone line named Jizai Gattai ("Free Combination"), which was shelved when Transformers proved successful in America and Takara elected to import it instead. Given this history, when the figures were pulled out of mothballs for inclusion in the Transformers line, it's not unlikely that Takara really wanted to make a big deal out of them due to their design history, while Hasbro was content to just introduce them into the series fairly normally.

Toys

Autobots

Aerialbots

• Air Raid
• Skydive
• Fireflight
• Slingshot
• Silverbolt
• Superion (giftset)

Protectobots

• Streetwise
• Groove
• Blades
• First Aid
• Hot Spot
• Defensor (giftset)

Technobots

• Scattershot
• Strafe
• Lightspeed
• Afterburner
• Nosecone
• Computron (giftset)

• [[Autobot City Commander
• Ultra Magnus

Autobot City

• Metroplex (with Scamper, Slammer and Six-Gun)

Decepticons

Stunticons

• Dead End
• Breakdown
• Wildrider
• Drag Strip
• Motormaster
• Menasor (giftset)

Combaticons

• Brawl
• Swindle
• Vortex
• Blast Off
• Onslaught
• Bruticus (giftset)

Decepticon City Commander

• Galvatron

Decepticon City

• Trypticon (with Brunt and Full-Tilt)

Notes

• Despite debuting in, and being consistently promoted by, the Scramble City fiction, neither Ratbat nor any of the Autobot Mini-Cassettes were sold with the Scramble City logo on their packaging.
• "Scramble City combiner" has become a catch-all piece of terminology in Transformers fandom to refer to the five-man style of combination affected by the teams sold under the title, in which one large 'bot forms the torso, and four interchangeable smaller ones become limbs, and is used to refer to every team that utilizes it, even those who did not appear in the Scramble City storyline.