To sell toys
To understand Transformers fiction, it is important to understand that it exists to sell toys. Hasbro and TakaraTomy are toy companies, and they are primarily interested in continuing to sell toys to children and adults. The cartoons, comic books, etc., mostly exist to make this happen. To be sure, they normally make a profit in their own right, but this is regarded as mere gravy.
The "to sell toys" effect often distorts the fiction in interesting ways. Primarily, since you can't usually sell someone the same toy twice[1], HasTak constantly introduces new toys, and often requires the creators of the fiction to introduce the new characters into ongoing storylines. Older characters (whose toys are no longer being sold) are shoved aside to make room.
Another effect of "to sell toys" is when the toys have gimmicks which must be explained in the fiction. Sometimes (Mini-Cons) this is relatively easy, while other times it requires a lot of imagination on the part of the writers (the in-comic explanations for the Headmasters and Targetmasters are kinda wonky).
Blatant examples of "to sell toys" in the fiction include:
Generation One cartoon
- The Transformers: The Movie: Numerous main characters were killed or changed, including Optimus Prime and Megatron, and replaced by a slew of new protagonists, such as Hot Rod and Cyclonus. Indeed, the poster for the movie shows only new characters.
- The Rebirth abruptly introduced the Headmasters, Targetmasters, Clones, and Doublespy.
Generation One comic
- The Underbase Saga: A super-powerful Starscream killed literally dozens of characters; some place the count over fifty. The survivors were mostly from the Pretender, Headmaster, and Targetmaster ranks, those being the then-current toy lines. Those characters would eventually get their own turn to die two years later, during the climactic battle with Unicron.
- A similar phenomenon can be witnessed in the Marvel UK comics saga Time Wars, where the body count at the hands of Megatron and Galvatron is similarly high. Albeit a little subtler than the Underbase Saga in characters shuffling off their mortal coils (and from the toy shelves), older, more obscure characters such as Roadbuster, Topspin, Twin Twist, and even Cyclonus and Scourge nonetheless met their ends—in some cases, in decidedly more grisly ways than their US counterparts. And once again, the Grim Reaper seemed to spare either popular characters (to wit: Galvatron and Megatron) or newer characters (Carnivac, Catilla, Scorponok, and all of the Terrorcons, for example.)
- Many issues of the Marvel comic had cover blurbs in the form "Introducing the _______!", where the blank was whatever the latest line of toys was. (The following issues specifically introduce new toys on the cover: 8, 10, 11, 19, 21, 29, 30, 40, 46, 47, and 60. Throw in a few covers where new characters were pictured but not named, and that's 1/5th of the series.) Sometimes the storyline had to jump through hoops to explain these new characters. (In particular, for both the simultaneous introduction of the Aerialbots and Stunticons, and the introduction of the Pretenders, there was a lot of rigamarole involved in explaining why both the Autobots and the Decepticons had new members with identical gimmicks at the same time.) Other times, the characters were simply there, with no explanation for why we'd never seen them before.
- An even more extreme example of the above point came in 1987, when Hasbro released too many new toys at one time to be sensibly fit in the existing storyline. The result was the Headmasters miniseries, which existed to introduce the Headmasters, Targetmasters, Technobots, Terrorcons, and Monsterbots (sixty-two characters total), and provide a semi-rational explanation for "little guys who turn into heads and guns", without having to shoehorn all that into the regular comic. (Amusingly, after the minseries concluded and all the above characters journeyed to Earth, it only took two issues before another dozen characters (the Pretenders) had to be introduced . . . )
Beast Wars
- Hasbro would repeatedly interject its own marketing priorities into the development of series scripts, resulting in some characters having a very odd and confusing history. Tigerhawk was introduced and then killed off within three episodes, due to corporate uncertainty about whether the toy would actually be produced. Inferno was pretty clearly shown being killed--being disintegrated--but in the next season appeared to have just been bruised and cracked, because Hasbro was not ready to have a Mega-scaled toy removed from the series. The expense of creating and animating a CGI body model meant that the character roster had to remain fairly constant: pre-existing characters could gain new bodies that replaced their old ones (itself a conspicuous marketing device that was used many times throughout seasons 2 and 3), but the introduction of all-new characters usually required the removal of an equal number of pre-existing characters. And so, Scorponok and Terrorsaur die just in time for the arrival of Quickstrike and Silverbolt; Dinobot was killed off one episode after the debut of Rampage.
Unicron Trilogy
- The Unicron Trilogy was noted for its gimmicks in all three toylines: Power-enhancing Mini-Cons in Armada, powerlinxing and hyper-modes in Energon, and cyber keys in Cybertron. The gimmicks shaped the cartoons as well, with powerlinx training in Energon and quests for keys in Cybertron. The Mini-Cons of Armada practically defined the plot of the cartoon, with both factions out to recruit or capture all the Mini-Cons, thus encouraging viewers to emulate their heroes, and buy 'em all. All three series were also marked by lengthy transformation sequences which highlighted the gimmicks in very toy-accurate animation (and also made production cheaper, thanks to recycled footage).
Post-Marvel comics
There's also an interesting exception: The Dreamwave and IDW comics. The two recent holders of the license to publish Transformers comic books sometimes produce comics using whichever toy line is current (e.g., Dreamwave's Armada comic or IDW's 2007 movie tie-ins), and sometimes publish comics using whatever characters they please (e.g., The War Within and Escalation). The characters in their "discretionary" comics are often not currently available in toy form (Hardhead, a current character in IDW's G1 continuity, has not had a toy in 20 years), and sometimes are drawn with bodies that have never been toys (most of the War Within characters). While the details of the licenses these companies received from Hasbro are not available to us, they apparently require the licensee to produce some comics "to sell toys", while also allowing them to do other comics with carte blanche.
