User:Sabrblade/sandbox
History
The series's original incarnation, Car Robots, was created in response to the continually-declining sales of Takara's Beast Wars toyline. As Hasbro moved into Beast Machines, Takara opted instead to start anew—and tap into nostalgia as well—by bringing back the traditional modern Earth vehicle heroes with the classic Autobot big red face faction symbol. However, the villains of the series did not follow suit; while "Destronger" leader "Gigatron" was an all-new toy mold, his lackeys were all redecoed Transmetal 2 molds that had been developed for Beast Wars, and the team was given the Predacon symbol as had the villains from the prior shows. Further villain reinforcements, the Combatrons, were even older molds based on modern Earth vehicles, but got a black, upside-down Generation 2 Autobot symbol... apparently due to Takara's unwillingness to retool one of the toys to remove the faction symbol from it.
A year later in America, Hasbro decided it was time to end the Beast Era (which was also flagging in sales). Hasbro and Takara began work to co-develop the next series intended for both markets, Armada, but Hasbro refused to not have Transformers toys on the shelves despite Beast Machines under-performing. Thus, they quickly ported over Car Robots, re-branding it as Robots in Disguise, as a low-cost, low-work "filler" line. While the animalistic bad guys retained the Predacon logo (and faction name), all of the bad guys who turned into Earth vehicles got the traditional Decepticon emblem. Hasbro even expanded the product offerings with more redecos and minor retools of older molds, including a few previously-canceled ones. (Takara, meanwhile, apparently had no qualms about letting almost two years pass with no kid-aimed Transformers toys on the shelves.)
Where Car Robots sputtered in Japan, Robots in Disguise took off with a roar in America, thanks in no small part to the cartoon airing on the popular Fox Kids programming block.
The continuity kerfuffle
To put it bluntly, the continuity placement of the original Car Robots version of the series has been point of contention within the fandom, particularly in the West.
When the first television promo for Car Robots aired immediately after the final episode of Beast Wars Metals, said promo featured Fire Convoy thanking the Maximal Beast Warriors for preserving Earth's history and promising to keep the modern day safe from the Destrongers.[1] Preliminary information found on TVTokyo's website described Car Robots as "The next great entry in the Super Lifeforms Transformers: Beast Wars series" and even referred to the Great War of previous series by name. Said site and the first toy catalog also claimed the Destrongers had come to the 21st century through a dimensional rift, with Fire Convoy's team being a "Dimensional Patrol" sent to oppose them. With the first episode featuring a celebration for the new millennium, setting it in the year 2000, this led to initial speculation that the series would be set in the existing Japanese Transformers continuity, set during the at-the-time unexplored gap between the second season of the Generation 1 cartoon and The Transformers: The Movie, with its robot cast having time-traveled from the future à la Beast Wars.
As the series continued, however, it began to feel more like a fresh start, presenting itself as an autonomous story isolated from everything that had come before it. There were no obvious ties or references to the Generation 1 cartoon that it apparently was set within contemporaneously,[2] no guest appearances from any Generation 1 characters (who, logically, ought to have noticed the globally Earth-based conflict of Fire Convoy and Gigatron's forces), and Fire Convoy's team took a more covert role in their relationship with humanity, using their vehicle modes to hide themselves when not in battle, unlike the G1 Autobots who regularly, casually interacted with humans in their robot modes. What's more, none of the early information about the characters being time travelers was ever brought up in the show (save for one brief moment in episode 12 where Fire Convoy vaguely hinted at having come from another time), with no indication of the cast being anything but native to the year 2000.
Thus, some fans began to reconsider the series' original continuity placement and wondered if it might instead be an alternate universe—a sort of continuity reboot—dismissing the early time-traveling info as mere rumors or dropped concepts (or simply having never heard about it in the first place). But, as Car Robots entered its second half, the series had actually finally begun to do some real world-building by introducing concepts and lore originally from Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo, two Japanese series that the greater Western fandom had only sparse knowledge of at the time. Those who did catch these references (and hadn't fully dismissed the original continuity speculation) theorized if maybe the cast of Car Robots had come from a future set after Beast Wars Neo. But, the more vocal fandom belief of Beast Wars II and Neo taking place chronologically before Beast Machines (a belief that would eventually prove false) objected to any suggested connections between Neo and Car Robots.
Further fueling the idea of Car Robots being a reboot was the fact that, when it was brought over to the West as Robots in Disguise, the cartoon's English dub was absolutely treated as such by its production team (though, likely based on the same fandom belief in the first place), with episode scripts written in ways that made the dub completely irreconcilable with either of the major Hasbro-backed Generation 1 continuities. This caused no end of confusion among the fandom since the idea of a total continuity reboot in Transformers was still new and took some time to settle in... which was not helped by the English dub adding in numerous references to Generation 1 concepts and characters (which typically made things less compatible), nor the toy line having two characters from prior series (Axer and Optimus Primal) actually cross dimensions into its new continuity.
Eventually, the fandom got used to the idea of this series (both its English and Japanese versions) being on its own, helped along when Armada would similarly reboot the continuity one year after Robots in Disguise in the West and three whole years after Car Robots in Japan. This tactic of starting things over every year is common in long-running Japanese franchises, but had not yet been applied to Transformers. Subsequent series would later follow suit, creating more and more non-G1 continuities with each new reboot, making Car Robots/Robots in Disguise less of an anomaly and more acceptable as just the first of many non-G1 cartoons to come about after the Beast Era.
BUT THEN...
In 2007, Takara actually provided some full clarity on the subject of Car Robots's continuity. The Kiss Players series had begun a time-jumping story with the series' protagonists traveling in Brave Maximus... a Car Robots concept. One of their time-jumps even took them to the first episode of Car Robots without any dimension-hopping, only time-hopping. The series even ended with Brave Maximus crashing into Planet Master before its refugee inhabitants had developed the Headmaster technology, stating that Brave Maximus's wreckage would provide the catalyst for not just the technology but also the construction of the physically identical Fortress Maximus. Other printed materials and even a new website then produced a long, highly detailed timeline that mapped out just how the hell this all worked.
Yes, Takara had stuck to the original intent of the preliminary series info by officially declaring Car Robots to have been part of the massive, sprawling Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity all along, and hand-waving the cartoon's original lack of previous-series Transformers on Earth as the result of a rather obscure Generation 1 based manga that not only took place in the latter 1990s but also conveniently ended with virtually the entire cast being accidentally swept away from Earth in a huge space bridge accident. Subsequent Japanese media would likewise adhere to this decision.
Hasbro, however, had NO such plans to align the English version with any of this. To this day, the Robots in Disguise cartoon remains its own little separate, distinctly non-G1 thing, and Hasbro has shown little inclination to revive its characters or concepts; most of the callbacks have come from licensees Fun Publications and IDW Publishing, but a few characters and ideas have persisted in toy form from Hasbro proper. Thus, Car Robots/Robots in Disguise is in the unique position of being simultaneously part of Generation 1 and completely separate from Generation 1... depending on which side of the globe you're looking at.
In order to keep things simple for readers and cut back on redundancies, TFWiki.net has opted to roll Car Robots character and cartoon information into the Robots in Disguise counterparts' pages. Just know that any Robots in Disguise character who appears in the "Category: Car Robots characters" category has a nigh-identical Generation-1-timeline doppelganger with a different name and who did pretty much all the same stuff in the cartoon, only they did all that in a Generation 1 timeline. Though some modern Western fiction has introduced distinctly Generation 1 versions of Robots in Disguise characters, such as Sky-Byte, Side Burn, and Gigatron. These versions of the characters are covered on the same pages as their Robots in Disguise counterparts since, it turns out, the original Car Robots versions that started all this were G1 characters anyway.
Head hurt yet? Good!
- ↑ Though, this information was largely lost on larger English-speaking world due to a lack of widespread knowledge that this obscure promo had even existed, let alone what was said in its Japanese dialogue.
- ↑ Though, the Autobots' base and underground transit system were strikingly similar to ones first introduced in Issue #4 of the Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers manga; a series that not many Westerners were familiar with at the time.
