Lost media

Lost media is a common term for media that existed at some point but either isn't currently available to the public or has been completely lost over time. The reasons for this can be the result of factors like limited distribution of the original material, copyright disputes regarding its publication, the shutdown of the service through which it was originally hosted, or sometimes just an outright loss of all available copies. Online searches and preservation efforts dedicated to this category of media have led to the term being popularized in the turn of the 2020s.

Being a franchise spanning four decades of content in just about every possible medium—much of it exclusive to different regions separated by linguistic barriers—it is inevitable that there's a staggering amount of lost Transformers media: thus, the content in this page is hardly comprehensive, and there's almost certainly more beyond what's listed here.

Lost Transformers media

Film

• The IMAX edition of Transformers (2007) features two minutes of additional footage. This footage has never been included in any of the many home video releases that the film has received throughout the years.
• At the 2011 Transformers Hall of Fame ceremony, in lieu of any cartoon or movie footage to play as a music video for fan nominee Erector, a short mockumentary about Erector was played instead. This very tongue-in-cheek video gave a fictitious account of Erector's long history with the Transformers brand, with many people interviewed talking about how much the character meant to them and how, time and again, he had nearly made it into the next big piece of Transformers media only to be cut out at the last second (none of which was at all true, of course). This short film has never seen the light of day since its original screening. However, a few pieces of "concept art" have since surfaced online, including a Beast Wars-themed Erector who transforms into a beaver.

Cartoon

• "Primeval Dawn II" was a 10-minute motion comic that debuted at Wizard World Chicago in 2002. While a short introductory animation exists, the full episode has never been published online or distributed in any other medium since.

Video games

• Battle for the Allspark and its sequel, Battle for the Allspark v2, were browser-based multiplayer games that went offline sometime around 2009. No archives of their content remains.
• Transformers Online (2012) was a Chinese MMORPG based on Transformers: Prime that was shut down after just six months and is currently unplayable.
• Transformers Universe was another Prime-based online game. Similar to Online, the game spent six months in open beta before being permanently shut down in January 2015.
• Transformers Online (2017) was an online team shooter based on Generation 1 and the live-action film series developed for the Chinese market. The game spent around 2 1/2 years in open beta before being shut down in February 2020, leaving it fully unplayable.

Comics

• A promotional BotBots comic book was released exclusively to 40 South Africa influencers with children in 2019. Each comic was printed to feature the children of the influincer interacting with the BotBots at night in the mall. While some pages have been recovered by fans, so far no complete scans of it have been found.

Online content

• While many videos on SectorSeven.org (the main website for the Sector Seven ARG) have been reposted elsewhere, the website itself has since gone offline and with it a large portion of its content. The landing page can still be accessed through the Wayback Machine, but only its first revealed password ('takara83') seems to work.
• In early 2007, in conjunction with their concerted efforts to organize the sprawling Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity, TakaraTomy published a timeline on their main Transformers website that charted the full chronology of the Japanese G1 and Japanese Unicron Trilogy continuities. In the years since, however, this timeline had been removed from Takara's website and all attempts to retrieve and archive its contents have been met with failure, due to said contents having been made using Adobe Flash software, which was discontinued in 2020, and the Flash files themselves being long gone.

Audio

• The Operation Combination Telephone Audio Adventures were brief recorded messages available to Japanese fans in 1992, and have not subsequently been located.
• While the first 38 episodes of the Kiss Players radio drama were collected and released on CD, episodes 39–51 have remained unavailable since their original broadcast in 2007.

Recovered Transformers media

Some formerly lost Transformers media has since been recovered or restored, often through extensive fan efforts.

Cartoon

• The fourth episode of the 2001 Robots in Disguise cartoon, "Spychangers to the Rescue", originally aired on American television mere days after the September 11 terrorist attack. Due to increased sensitivities brought about by said attack, the episode had to be temporally removed from broadcast rotation and re-edited to change the episode's subject from the potential danger of an energy generator exploding to said generator cracking open and releasing a corrosive gas instead. Additionally, certain scenes of battle and panic from the original broadcast version were also removed for the later rebroadcast version. When the series released on DVD in the United Kingdom, it was the later rebroadcast edit of the episode that was included, while the original broadcast edit has never seen official release. For over a decade, the original edit of the episode was considered lost until a VHS recording of it was uploaded to YouTube on November 15, 2013.
• A total of 16 animated shorts were produced during the first season Transformers Animated, but only 14 of them were publicly released online. The remaining two, "Logo" and "Starscream's Fantasy", were screened during BotCon 2009 and BotCon 2012, but otherwise never made available in any other format. It wasn't until 2022 when, after a sudden surge of interest and fan requests, Marty Isenberg allowed the two shorts to be published online unofficially.

Video games

• Transformers Battle Universe had been rendered unplayable since 2009, as a result of the online service it relied on shutting down, but it was again restored into a playable state by fans in 2017.
• The Hoover Dam exterior level for the PC and home consoles version of Transformers The Game was long assumed to be lost, until it was successfully datamined from the Wii version during 2018 in a surprisingly complete state. A much more unfinished version of the level was also later discovered in the PS3 port.

Online content

• 2007 marked a turning point in the Transformers brand with the release of the first first live-action movie. With the sudden newfound interest in the brand, TakaraTomy created a new website called "World of the Transformers", which gave an overview of Transformers lore and its many different facets. However, much of this website's content was made using Adobe Flash software, and when the site closed down some years later, its contents were thought to be lost for good once Flash was discontinued in 2020. However, many of the site's original Flash files were actually retrievable via web archiving software, and so a recreation of its contents (complete with a full English translation) has been made and kept intact here.

See also

• Unproduced scripts