Car and Cable

Car and Cable was reportedly an unproduced Marvel Productions animated series, development artwork for which was included in the January 1985 issue of Comics Feature magazine. However, decades later, more pieces of artwork would be found that indicate a connection between this supposed series and the development of the the original Transformers cartoon.

Backstory

In 1983, Hasbro approached Marvel Comics to help develop the story and characters of their new Transformers toyline, and to produce a comic book series. At the same time, the development work the company did would also be used as the basis for a cartoon, to be produced by Marvel's media arm, Marvel Productions. However, in 1983, Marvel Productions and Marvel Comics did not get along. According to then-editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics Jim Shooter, Marvel Productions head Dennis Marks had a very low opinion of the comics' company's work; in a lengthy blog post, Shooter recounted how, during the development of the (also unproduced) series Mysterians, Marks wilfully ignored the work that Shooter had created and come up with his own, entirely separate premise for the series, which opted for a goofy, Hanna-Barbera-esque tone largely centred on kid supporting characters and a dog.

Something similar would also happened with The Transformers. Very early in the cartoon's development, writer Jeffrey Scott penned an original production bible and a pilot script titled "A Robot's Best Friend Is His Dog," which deviated significantly from the backstory Shooter had already developed from the series, adding original female Transformers to the cast, featuring new human characters named Matt Conroy and Eddie Fairchild instead of Shooter's Witwicky family, and (as clearly evidenced by the title), also including a dog. When story editors Bryce Malek and Dick Robbins were appointed to develop the series for syndication, though, they reviewed Scott's work and opted to discard the concepts he had introduced.

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, fans were left to believe 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 that it became clear the project was directly linked to Transformers. Not only did text attached to the pictures identified two of the humans in the pictures as Matt and Eddie, proving a link to Scott's work, but one of the pieces also featured the silhouette of the Diaclone robot that would become Prowl, holding a weapon that's a composite of Prowl's acid pellet rifle and Optimus Prime's ion blaster.

While the presence of the Prowl-looking robot strongly suggests it, it's not 100% clear whether these images were actually developed in 1984 alongside Scott's work. Plus, it's extremely unlikely Marvel Productions would have gone so far as to propose renaming the series "Car and Cable" instead of "The Transformers". So, perhaps, by 1985, Marvel Productions really had considered reworking Scott's story of Matt and Eddie as a series of its own under that title to ride the Transformers hype wave... but for now, we really don't know for sure.

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