JaAm
MMm jaAm!
HoT sHot liKs jAM. yuM!
Ahem.
Just before the Armada toyline's imminent release in 2002, scans of the first pack-in mini-comic were put online both at Transformers.com and at Ben's World of Transformers, the latter of which received early production samples from Hasbro for review. The original comic was trilingual, forcing the writer to fit three languages worth of dialogue into tiny word bubbles, resulting in short and often stilted prose. Because of these limitations, many found the mini-comic to be a bit lacking. The British fan Yartek took it upon himself to rewrite the dialogue as nonsense, portraying Hot Shot as a mentally-challenged, tortured freak of nature. (This was, perhaps, Yartek's commentary on the art.)
The rewritten mini-comic proved to be wildly popular in the fandom and grew to be one of the most persistent memes through the duration of Armada and beyond. When Ben Yee overhauled his toy review system, he commissioned Hot Shot fan David Willis to create a series of images based on the mini-comic. Ironically, the Hot Shot toy itself rated poorly on Ben Yee's scale.
Hot Shot's love of jaAm has not been acknowledged yet by any official material. The first Dreamwave Energon mini-comic did include both Hot Shot and a pool of yellow-green liquid energon, however. Some take this as a visual reference to the jaAm parody, but no overt reference was made.
