Transformers: BotBots (cartoon)
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Transformers: BotBots is an animated series based on the franchise of the same name. First announced on February 25, 2021 alongside Transformers: EarthSpark, the series is produced by Entertainment One and animated by Boulder Media Studio, with Kevin Burke and Chris Wyatt showrunning and executive producing. The show premiered on Netflix on March 25, 2022, with a first season of ten episodes; each one includes two 11-minute stories.
| “ | When energon struck a mall nearby, We became more than meets the eye We’re everyday objects, motionless parts, We burst to life to let the party start! |
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—The theme song. | ||
Storyline
When a shopping mall is struck by lightning from an energon cloud, the various ordinary objects within it are given life and become the race of tiny transforming robots known as BotBots. By day, they hide in plain sight, but by night, they emerge from hiding to have all kinds of fun. These tiny bots have organized themselves into squads based on their stores of origin, but some were left in the lost-and-found when the surge occurred. After accidentally revealing themselves to the night shift security guard, breaking the BotBots' most sacred rule, these Lost Bots are shunned and treated as outcasts by the others. Now, seeking to find where they belong, these misfits must work together to reingratiate themselves with the other BotBots in hopes of being taken back by their true squads, all while preventing the security guard from exposing their existence. As they adventure together, however, they might just learn that they've already found where they belong...
Characters
| BotBots | Humans | ||||
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Episodes
- Mall Than Meets the Eye / (Never) Be Yourself
- Escape from Snackatraz / I, Cheeseburger
- Phoning It In / The Lost Bots and the Claw Crusade
- Live and Let LARP / Lone Bot and Carb
- Dimlit in Love / On the Bot Prom Dance Floor
- The Ruckus Rally / Crime and Bun-ishment
- Spirit of Halloween / Rage Against the Karaoke Machine
- Scanned Out / The Science Alliance
- Agent Smartlit / Shopping Brawl
- The Goldrush Games - Part the First / The Goldrush Games - Part the Second
Notes
- BotBots is the first Transformers cartoon to feature a Canadian voice cast since 2006's Cybertron cartoon, though based in Toronto rather than Vancouver.
- The show has almost no on-screen English (or any other existing written language), with virtually all the text replaced with a new set of made-up symbols. These map to the standard ABCs and the text translates to standard English. In a new twist however, there are separate symbols for capital letters.
Continuity, schmontinuity
The showrunners have been purposefully vague on where BotBots fits in the grand Transformers mythos. In numerous interviews, they've shied away from calling it any form of reboot, and stated that all that other Transformers stuff was happening elsewhere outside the mall. Their focus was to make this show a "jumping-on" point for new audiences young and old who might not be already vested in the minutiae of Transformers lore, limiting themselves to the odd nod and easter egg for previous fans, and focusing on the "universe" of the mall, the only universe the BotBots know. And this is 11 billion percent a valid approach to the show, helping it stand on its own merits (and for many fans, something of a relief given the prior decade of nostalgia-sodden fiction).
But we are TFWIKI.net, and we wouldn't be us if we didn't tug on those strings just a little bit, and at least note where this series probably can't be happening.
- First of all, "all that other Transformers stuff" consists of a massive multiverse with nearly four decades' worth of fiction. Technically, yes, it's all happening elsewhere/when. Can't call them liars there. That doesn't narrow things down much.
- That the humans (besides Dave the security guard) do not think "robots in disguise" are a thing that exists eliminates a fair few realities/time periods where the Autobots and Decepticons are very well-known, like the original "G1" cartoon and comic, the overwhelming majority of the 2005 IDW continuity and live-action film series timelines, etc. It also takes it out of the latter portions of a few others, like the Cyberverse cartoon.
Of course, all this jibba-jabba is pretty much just that. This series is functionally its own little universe until explicitly said/proven otherwise, and the showrunners seem pretty uninterested in tying it to something specific we already know, and it's probably best to just leave it at that.
