Porsche
| This article is about the company. For the character, see Porsche (Eletrix). |
Porsche is a popular German sports car manufacturer, being highly desirable amongst young humans who just got out of 10th grade or are struggling with precarious living conditions in 1990s New York.
Sadly, your father will probably not give you one as your first car.
Overview
Porsche AG was originally established in Stuttgart by the titular Ferdinand Porsche in 1931, serving not as a car manufacturer but instead as an engineering consultancy company for other brands in the automotive industry. One of their earlier design hits was the Volkswagen Beetle, conceived under the orders of Adolf Hitler, which has since become one of the most successful cars in the world (and of course, also one of the most popular Transformers characters). Porsche's first proper badged car was the Porsche 356, released in 1948 and beginning the brand's legacy of high-performance sports cars that would continue until today.
Porsche AG has had a complicated and surprisingly interesting relationship with Transformers. For starters, a multitude of iconic Generation 1 Transformers characters featured Porsche vehicles as alternate modes: this includes Jazz, Cliffjumper, Dead End, Hubcap, Minerva, Nightbeat, and Rabbicrater, just to name the ones with the most notable media appearances. Still, despite the close resemblance of these vehicle modes to their real-life counterparts and the original Diaclone and Microman versions of Jazz and Cliffjumper even featuring the Porsche name in their packaging (and with Jazz retaining "Martini Porsche" stickers in his Transformers release, as well as Estrela's 911-derived Porsche character evidently being named after the company), these were all actually unlicensed, as customary with toy cars in the 1980s.
Enter the turn of the millennium, however, and car brands become much more stringent about the enforcement of intellectual property laws - which means that, when Hasbro decided to produce a series of highly-accurate transforming 1:24-scale automobiles with Transformers: Alternators, it became inevitable that these would have to be licensed. The first toy planned for the Alternators toyline was actually Jazz (probably to be named "Autobot Jazz" for trademark reasons), intended to be a licensed Porsche 986 Boxster. A prototype was made, but Porsche openly refused to grant Hasbro and Takara the license, stating that "Transformers are not worthy [of] carrying the Porsche trademark. They are war machines and the toyline in no way represents the lifestyle and ideas which Porsche represents." [1] As a consequence, the toy ultimately never went into production. Photos of the prototype were first depicted in the Japanese book The Transformers: Binaltech & TF Collection Complete Guide and Hasbro later displayed the prototype during the BotCon 2007 Hasbro Tour; TakaraTomy subsequently displayed it as part of Transformers Expo in 2014. This is similar to Volkswagen, who also refused to license Bumblebee as a Volkswagen New Beetle under the similar concerns of not wanting to associate their cars with "war toys", but later gave in to having a licensed figure almost a decade later.
Much like Volkswagen, Porsche ultimately changed their mind on this issue with Mirage featuring a Porsche 911 (964) Carrera RS 3.8 alternate mode in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, even proudly exhibiting prominent "PORSCHE" decals on both sides of the car that were not originally present from the factory (similar stripes were introduced in older 911 models and became commonplace in special editions of Porsche vehicles again in the 2010s, but have never been featured on the 964). They licensed a Studio Series toy featuring his alternate mode and were heavily involved with the marketing for Rise of the Beasts, even releasing the teaser trailer for the movie through their official YouTube channel and producing an official die-cast model of Mirage under their in-house Porsche Lifestyle brand!
Fiction
Transformers
After learning that Sam Witwicky got an A- on his family genealogy report, his father took him to buy a car. He went through the driveway of a Porsche dealership to tease Sam about the possibility of getting one, but alas, it was just a mean prank. Transformers
Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
In 1994, Noah Díaz was convinced by his his friend Reek to steal a Porsche 911 (964) Carrera RS 3.8, but the "car" turned out to be the Autobot Mirage in disguise. After getting embroiled in the Autobots' mission and going on an adventure across Peru where Mirage was critically injured, Noah later repaired his alternate mode with spare Porsche parts. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts
Toys
Porsche 911
Porsche 930
Porsche 935
Porsche 964
Porsche 924
Porsche 928
Porsche 959
Porsche 962
Porsche 986
- Jazz (Alternators) (Unreleased)
Notes
- Most native English speakers will mispronounce the company's name. Just accept this as a fact.
- Contrary to common misconceptions, the relationship between Porsche and Volkswagen is a lot more complicated than one being the parent company of the other one (which wasn't true until the 2010s). Here's the cliff notes version: As previously mentioned, company founder Ferdinand Porsche designed the original "Volkswagen" ("people's car"), later also called the "KdF" car ("Kraft durch Freude", "power through joy"), which later became known as the "Volkswagen Type 1", or "Volkswagen Beetle", or "Bug". However, Volkswagen and Porsche officially remained two separate companies, even though they collaborated on several projects, Each company held stock of the other one, and members of the Porsche family as well as the Piëch family, which is related to the Porsche family, have been members of on the boards of directors and the supervisory boards of the two companies for decades. It's all very complicated, really. In 2005, the much smaller Porsche AG tried to take over the larger Volkswagen AG but eventually failed. Instead, Volkswagen began taking over Porsche in 2009. The takeover was completed in 2012.
- The vehicle mode used for Generation 1 Cliffjumper and Hubcap was originally called a "MC-04 #01 Porsche 924 Turbo" per his Micro Change release - this is, however; slightly erroneous, as his rear fender flares are distinctively based on the later Porsche 924 Carrera GT model instead.
- Interestingly, Hubcap's "flat" spoiler, which is often innacurately described as a spoilerless variant of the Cliffjumper mold, is actually more accurate to the real-life wrap-around spoiler that was used on some models of the Porsche 924 like the Turbo and the Carrera and later became standard on the 944.
References
External links
- Porsche at Wikipedia
