Car and Cable

In 1983, Hasbro approached Marvel Comics to help develop the the story and characters of their new Transformers toyline, and to produce a comic book series. A cartoon, meanwhile, would be produced by Marvel's media arm, Marvel Productions—but in 1983, Marvel Productions and Marvel Comics did not get along, and Marvel Productions decided to ignore the treatment Marvel Comics had produced for The Transformers and come up with their own, original idea for a cartoon based around the toys. They proposed 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. Images of this proposal were later featured in the January 1985 issue of Comics Feature magazine, which did not connect them to Transformers, instead labelling them as belonging to a project titled Car and Cable.

Connection to Transformers

As the Comics Feature article provided no date for the art, and contained no further information about "Car and Cable" beyond the images themselves, it was believed that the series was simply an attempt by Marvel Productions to cash in on the transforming robot craze that Transformers began with their own knock-off concept, which had gone unproduced. It wasn't until the 2020 discovery of new art by Instagram user consumercollectibles 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 Transformers, and represented an early effort to put the toys in an animated setting. It's unknown where the title in the magazine, Car and Cable, came from; it seems unlikely that Marvel Productions would have proposed their own title for the series when Hasbro had a name for their toyline in place already, so perhaps the possibility exists that by 1985, they really had considered reviving the proposal and producing the series as its own distinct entity, unconnected to Transformers, under that title, but honestly, we really don't know.

Something else we don't really know is the exact timeline of the relationship between this early proposal and the finished Transformers cartoon. 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, indicating that the idea could have been recycled for the pitch that became known as 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. Scott's work has never been made publicly available, but is known to have included human characters named Eddie Fairchild and Matt Conroy, and obviously had a dog in the mix too, clear similarities to what little we know of Car and Cable. Were this bible and pilot actually Car and Cable? Or was it a third, transitionary version somewhere between Car and Cable and the finished version of The Transformers?

Gallery

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  Muffy's transformation sequence
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  "Personality drawings" of Muffy
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  Muffy and co. are menaced by a robot with Prowl's silhouette