Car and Cable
When Hasbro approached Marvel Productions in 1983 to help develop an animated series to sell their new line of transforming robot toys, the company pitched Car and Cable: a goofy, Hanna-Barbera style show centered on a transforming Volkswagen named "Muffler" ("Muffy" for short), three young humans named Matt, Eddie, and Wendy, and their dog Burt. Fortunately for history, Griffin Bacal came up with a better title, and Marvel Comics editor Jim Shooter came up with a better premise, and The Transformers as we know them came to be instead.
Connection to Transformers
Images for Car and Cable were first seen in the January 1985 issue of Comics Feature magazine[1], but with no date provided, and no further information included in the article, it was believed that the series was simply an attempt cash in on the transforming robot craze that Transformers began, which had gone unproduced. It wasn't until the 2020 discovery of new art by Instagram user consumercollectables[2][3] including the Diaclone robot that would become Prowl (holding a weapon that is a composite of Prowl's acid pellet rifle and Optimus Prime's ion blaster) that it became evident the series was actually directly connected to the The Transformers, and represented an early effort to put the toys in an animated setting.
However, the exact timeline of the relationship between Car and Cable and The Transformers is presently unclear. According to Jim Shooter, Marvel Productions conceived the basic "robot, kids, and dog" premise in 1982, while collaborating with Knickerbocker Toys to develop a series for their unreleased transforming-robot toyline, Mysterians,[4] indicating that the idea was recycled for the Car and Cable. Furthermore, it's known that very early in the development of the Transformers cartoon, writer Jeffrey Scott penned a unique series bible and a pilot episode titled "A Robot's Best Friend Is His Dog" as part of a pitch to sell the series to CBS.[5] Scott's work has never been made publically available, but is known to have included human characters named Eddie Fairchild and Matt Conroy,[6] and obviously had a dog in the mix too, clear similarities to what little we know of Car and Cable. What we don't know is this bible and pilot were Car and Cable, or if Scott was again recycling ideas after Car and Cable had already evolved into The Transformers.
Gallery
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Muffy's transformation sequence -
"Personality drawings" of Muffy -
Muffy and co. are menaced by a robot with Prowl's silhouette
References
- ↑ Scans of Comics Feature at the "Starlogged" blog
- ↑ consumercollectables on Instagram
- ↑ AllSpark.com forum post collecting Car and Cable art
- ↑ "The Secret Origin of the Transformers - Part 1"
- ↑ Archive of Jeffrey Scott's official website
- ↑ The Transformers production bible, including internal correspondance from Bryce Malek and Dick Robbins, that refers to Eddie and Matt by name
