Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity

The Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity is a great and terrifying beast.

In America, Transformers had multiple continuities right from the very beginning, with the cartoon and comic going off into very different directions. In Japan, on the other hand, they didn't have those comics—they just had the cartoon, and of the copious amounts of additional media that have come out of Japan in the last twenty-five years, nearly everything has taken place somewhere in the timeline of the cartoon universe—either by design or as the result of retconning—creating one mighty behemoth of a chronology that reaches from twelve billion years in the past to thousands of years in the future.

As of 2008, Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity includes:

• The original American cartoon series
• It's numerous Japanese sequels and spin-offs:
• Scramble City
• The Headmasters
• Super-God Masterforce
• Victory
• Zone

• Assorted manga:
• Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers
• The Transformers
• The Great Transformer War
• The Headmasters
• The Battlestars
• Generation 2

• TV Magazine story pages for all of the above, plus:
• Return of Convoy
• Operation Combination
• Generation 2

• The cartoons of the Beast Era:
• Beast Wars
• Beast Wars II
• Beast Wars Neo
• Beast Machines

• The storylines of numerous 21st century cartoons, mangas and toylines:
• Car Robots
• Micromaster Collection
• Star Gate War
• Robot Masters
• Binaltech and Binaltech Asterisk
• Kiss Players

• Numerous story points plucked from assorted toy bios

And some other stuff the guy who wrote this timeline made up to make it all work.

Phew.

Generation 1

Things were pretty straightforward in the 1980s. In addition to creating assorted manga storylines that slotted into and around the continuity of the American series, the Japanese went on to continue to the story of the cartoon universe after the show's cancellation, with its original animated series The Headmasters, Super-God Masterforce, Victory and Zone. Even after these series came to an end, the storyline continued through TV Magazine story pages for subsequent toylines Return of Convoy and Operation Combination, and pack-in mini-comics for the Japanese release of Generation 2.

Beast Era

In America, Beast Wars does not explicitly follow on from either the cartoon or comics, picking and choosing select elements from both to form a “mythological” Generation 1 background for the series. Not so in Japan, where the series was treated as part of the cartoon timeline. As with Generation 1, the Beast Era was also expanded through the creation of exclusive sequel series, in this case Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo. Each of these series had companion mangas, although these were explicitly not part of the same continuity as the cartoons. And thus did the cartoon timeline continue to grow in a linear, sensible fashion, until...

The 21st Century

With the dawning of the 21st Century, Japanese cartoon continuity went crazy as a bag of starving cats in heat.

In 2004, Takara copped on to the worldwide resurgence in the popularity of Transformers, and began producing numerous series starring the Generation 1 characters, setting them in the built-in intermezzos of the cartoon universe which had up until this point gone undetailed. This year saw the commencement of Robot Masters and Binaltech, which took place in the twenty-year gap between the conclusion of the second season of the cartoon, and the movie. Then, two years later, Kiss Players slotted itself into the five-year interval between the movie and the beginning of season three (an interval that does not exist in the American timeline, owing to the Japanese moving season three from 2006 to 2010).

And that's when things went flat-out nuts.

In 2007, a paperback collection of the Kiss Players manga available exclusively at the Japanese convention Wonder Festival included an extensive timeline chronicling the ins and outs of the cartoon universe, incorporating all of the material covered above, while in the process propagating several dramatic changes to things as fans knew them. The timeline integrated series and stories that had previously been either discreetly separate from the Generation 1 cartoon timeline, or at least apathetic on their relationship to it; infamously, Car Robots (the Japanese version of Robots in Disguise) was retconned into being part of the cartoon timeline, along with obscure manga “Star Gate War” and many small story points from assorted toy bios. On top of this fusion of numerous existing sources, the timeline committed several extensive retcons to existing stories, mostly centred on reinterpreting Primacron's assistant and tying him into several other characters from various different series.

You may read this timeline here.

At your own peril.