Generic Autobot laser pistol
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This article is about a character or concept that lacks a name, but has an official term or designation. |
- The generic Autobot laser pistol is a Laser pistol from the Generation 1 continuity family.
What do you do when you find yourself in a firefight and you don't have your own handheld weapon with its own distinct design? If you're an Autobot, chances are you are going to fire a weapon that makes use of the generic Autobot laser pistol design sooner or later.
Conceptual history
Because some of the early Transformers toys didn't come with hand-held weapons, their character models were naturally designed without any armament as well. Thus, it became a standard practice for the cartoon's animators to improvise whenever an episode's script would call for one of these characters to wield a weapon: Alternatively, they would be given a duplicate of a gun from another robot's character model, the animators would create a made-up generic gun design on the spot, or the robots would just be depicted as shooting energy out of their hands. This situation was eventually fixed early on in season 2: The episode "The Insecticon Syndrome" saw the debut of a new model sheet, a generic Autobot laser pistol design, which would then be regularly (though not consistently) subbed as a sidearm for Autobots who didn’t have weapons of their own. Most memorably, both Ratchet and Ironhide used this weapon design during the famous shuttle attack scene in The Transformers: The Movie.
Starting in the 2010s, new toys of the Generation 1 characters would also be given weapons as accessories that were based on the generic Autobot laser pistol design. However, due to the somewhat inconsistent nature of the cartoon's animation, the screenshots available as reference, as well as the toy designers' personal preferences, those accessories would sometimes vary wildly in terms of accuracy compared to the design from the cartoon.
Fiction
The Transformers cartoon
Both Beachcomber and Bumblebee used a generic Autobot laser pistol when fighting the Decepticons at the Nova Power Plant. The Insecticon Syndrome When fighting Devastator, Cliffjumper fired his glass gas gun at him, which looked like a generic Autobot laser pistol with an additional barrel extension. The Master Builders Ironhide fired a generic Autobot laser pistol at Starscream. Later, Decepticons disguised as Ironhide and Sunstreaker fired generic Autobot laser pistols at Megatron and the Seekers. Megatron's Master Plan, Part 1
