Griffin Bacal

Griffin Bacal, Inc. is (was?) a New York City-based advertising agency which played a major part in the development of the original Transformers series.

History

Griffin Bacal was founded in 1978 by Tom Griffin and Joe Bacal. One of their first One of their first clients was Hasbro, who employed their services for coming up with advertising campaigns for several of their toy lines. Together with Marvel Comics, Griffin Bacal retooled G.I. Joe into its 1980s incarnation, "G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero". Following that, Griffin Bacal participated in the development of Hasbro's My Little Pony series.

In 1983, Griffin Bacal were asked by Hasbro to adapt two two Japanese toy lines, Diaclone and Micro Change, for the American market. Griffin Bacal suggested to merge the two into one single series, and Jay Bacal, Joe's son, suggested the name "The Transformers". Griffin Bacal also had the idea of making the robots the main characters of the series (the Diaclone backstory had portrayed them as piloted mecha) and make them sentient alien machine lifeforms. Lastly, Griffin Bacal divided the robots into two groups, "Autobots" (good) and "Decepticons" (evil) and designed faction logos for them, based on the heads of the robot toys that would later become known as Soundwave and Prowl.

Following this, Hasbro and Griffin Bacal asked Marvel, whom they had previously worked with on G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero]] to flesh out the backstory, give the robots names and personalities and develop a comic series and an animated television show. The cartoon was produced by Marvel Productions and Sunbow Productions, the latter of which was owned by Griffin Bacal.

In 1994, Griffin Bacal was bought by DDB Worldwide and eventually merged with Moss Dragoti in 2001.