User:Fanofcoolstuff27/sandbox/WIP
| Autobots | Decepticons | |
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| Autobots | Decepticons | |
- ↑ Testing 1 2 3.
References
- ↑ Blah Blah Blah.
Several episodes have moments where dialogue in the Energon version of the cartoon was either poorly translated or made up on the fly without proper translations. To help alleviate some of the confusion and to accurately convey what is actually happening on-screen contrary to the what the English dub's dialogue says, some of our episode summaries have minor key moments or details from Super Link inserted into them (with a note at the top of the "Synopsis" section to let you know which ones), to paint a better picture of what's really going on, as some of these missing pieces of dialogue from the English dub are alluded to in future episodes, despite them "never happening".
Repurposing box sample
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Character model overhaul
Creation
In the developmental stages of The Transformers franchise, pre-dating the original cartoon and ongoing comic series, the very first Transformers character designs were created by Takara artist Shōhei Kohara based on the Takara products Hasbro was given licensing rights to reproduce. It is unclear just how many designs he was responsible for creating, but he is credited as the creator of the original eight designs, these being: Optimus Prime, Sideswipe, Jazz, Prowl, Megatron, Soundwave, Laserbeak, and the shared Seeker body-type. These eight designs would later be refined by Floro Dery for the original 1984 Transformers commercials and subsequently refined several more times before being utilized in the animated series itself.
Floro Dery's modifications included the removal of wheels and the enlargement of the characters' heads, and the more extreme redesign of Megatron to better resemble his toy. Dery went on to become the primary named designer for the majority of the cartoon, with evidence that he created a few of the remaining 1984 character models using the toy's package art for reference.[1] All of the 1984 character artwork for both the cartoon and package art were designed using photos of the toys themselves, often times being in the original Japanese decos, which were compiled into briefing binders that were given out to just about every company involved in the initial steps of developing the franchise. Among these companies, aiding in the creation of all character models for the cartoon, were Marvel Productions and Toei Animation. Most steps to developing character models from this point onwards consisted of Floro Dery and Marvel Productions creating the majority of initial designs with Toei requesting or making tweaks to these designs and having several moments of handing material and notes back-and-forth between the companies until the desired final design was reached. As Toei dealt with the bulk of animation duties, they often times had the last say. It also appears that there was quite a disconnect between the two companies and when a set of models would be finalized for animation, as all character models given to Marvel Comics' staff for use in the original ongoing comic series were never final models, suggesting that Toei would make drastic alterations at the last minute and never provided the finalized set to Marvel. Evidence would also suggest that Toei was largely incharge of rear-view models, this became more apparent as time went on.
In 1985, model production for season 2 was largely the same as before, only this time Hasbro evidently provided less photos of toys in their briefing binders, with toys taken on front-facing 3/4 angles in both robot and vehicle mode, leaving Dery and the other designers to try to interpret what they could with these visible details, often leading to kibble that is supposed to be on their backs being attached to random places such as their arms and legs. While these models adhered closer to toy-accuracy when compared to some of the models from the previous year, the lack of rear-view photos of the toys also led the designers to make up entire rear-views for the characters that were often times completely wrong (see "Design oddities" below). A fair amount of models for season 3 also suffered from these same issues.
In 1986, The Transformers: The Movie, flipped the sequence of events around, with all the new cast members being developed by Dery, with his designs subsequently translated into toy form. While Dery got to pour his heart and soul into all of these original character designs, Toei would ultimately once again have the final say as to what would appear in the film and the then-upcoming season of the cartoon. Not even one of Dery's initial designs appears in the final film. While the previous cartoon seasons saw Toei providing minor tweaks to Dery and Marvel Productions' designs (e.g. a new head design, maybe some details removed, etc.), Toei would ultimately use his models as more or less a basis and design entirely new models from scratch, often times with a much larger mecha-style influence, similar to the character models for the ever-popular Gundam franchise cartoons of the time, an aesthetic that would become much more apparent in the Japanese series' continuations (more on that below).
By season 3, Floro Dery had ultimately left the franchise, and the bulk of character model designs for the remaining 1986 and early 1987 toys were being heavily reworked based on Marvel Productions' designs, much like the cast of the movie were with Dery's designs. Like the movie, a noticeable shift in aesthetics started to become more apparent in some of the season 3 model designs too; namely the Predacons and Sky Lynx, who featured squared hands and had their rear-view models drawn on some hard 3/4 angles that looked up at them from the ground, with massive black comic-like shadows cast under them and inside their vent-like greebles on their bodies—both aesthetics being entirely absent in all previous Dery and Marvel Productions designs. From this point, the status quo really gets a shake up.
In 1987, the US cartoon's three-part episode "The Rebirth" was entirely animated by AKOM, as Toei had split off and started working on Transformers: The Headmasters, a Japanese-only spin-off of the US cartoon. Much like previous seasons, the models were first designed by Marvel Productions—but unlike the seasons before it—Toei didn't have a say in the design process, so everything that appeared in "The Rebirth" was solely US-based and no major overhauls ever took place. Toei did still have access to some of the first few Marvel Productions' model designs for the Headmasters and Targetmasters, but ultimately created their own original model designs to fill in the missing models they received from Marvel. As mentioned further up in this section regarding Toei seemingly being the sole designers of rear-view models, this became more apparent in season 3 and "The Rebirth" as none of the Marvel Productions-only materials ever had rear-view models drawn in any of their modes. In season 3, characters like Octane and the Terrorcons lacked rear-views altogether, and so animators made up rear-views as they went, leading to no two episodes having the same rear designs for these characters. The same happened with "The Rebirth". If you pay close attention, the majority of newly introduced characters in the short-lived "fourth season" face the front almost the entire time!
With The Transformers cartoon being completely over at this point, the Japanese side of the franchise continued producing loosely-tied sequel cartoons, with Masumi Kaneda and Ban Magami taking over on a lot of the character design for both the subsequent Japanese cartoons and its related and semi-related media (see: Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers). On the US side, however, Marvel Productions continued producing some character models for toy and Marvel comic commercials up until around 1990, but the Marvel comic artists themselves seemingly started producing their own character models where necessary, and taking concept art from Takara designers such as Masakatsu Saito, to use as character models for characters such as the 1988 Decepticon Pretenders, likely to save on time and money. It was pretty clear by around 1988 that all design collaborations between Marvel Productions and Toei had ceased entirely, with Toei only working on the toy commercial animations with whatever was provided by Marvel.
