Project Bodyshop
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| "Project: Bodyshop" プロジェクト：ボディショップ
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| Published in | May 2005 | ||||||||||||
| Story | Hirofumi Ichikawa | ||||||||||||
| Continuity | Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity | ||||||||||||
| Packaged with | Wheeljack | ||||||||||||
With the threat of the future hanging over his head, Wheeljack vows to find a way to safeguard both the lives of his friends and the security of the timeline.
Synopsis
When Wheeljack's shuttle is hijacked by Ravage on its return trip to Cybertron, Ravage delights in taunting the Autobot engineer by showing him a glimpse of the future, including the death of Wheeljack and many of his comrades during the Battle of Autobot City. Barely escaping Ravage's clutches, Wheeljack is rescued by the Autobots, and then bears witness to Ravage's use of the Kronosphere to alter the flow of time. This leaves Wheeljack facing a terrible dilemma: should the Autobots attempt to restore history to its correct state, even if it will mean the deaths of many of his comrades?
Seeking a way to circumvent this apparent Catch-22, Wheeljack dives into his work, and begins experimenting with the Genetronic Translink System with the aid of Chip Chase. Using the system, Wheeljack rations that when history is corrected, his comrades can be saved from death: the bodies he saw die in the vision shown to him by Ravage can indeed still meet their end, but thanks to the GT System, his friends' sparks can live on in subspace. Using himself as a guinea pig for the process, Wheeljack successfully develops two new bodies that the GT System allows him to control: his original body is labelled his "Alpha Unit", while a Binaltech body modelled after Grimlock's becomes his "Beta Unit", and the third "Omega Unit" is left shrouded in secrecy.
Notes
- This chapter of the Binaltech story was printed in the pack-in booklet included with the Wheeljack Binaltech toy. The story of his transformation into a Binaltech warrior is covered in the bio and Tech Specs also published in the booklet, rather than in the story chapter itself.
- The visions shown to Wheeljack by Ravage are of the events of The Transformers: The Movie. Due to the fact that the movie did not make it to Japan until 1989, Japanese production staff were not aware of precisely which characters met their end during its events, and as a consequence, Wheeljack appeared alive and well in the Victory cartoon that same year. The plot introduced in this chapter involving the GT System is Hirofumi Ichikawa's attempted explanation for how Wheeljack could both appear to die and yet still show up alive later. However, the whole "parallel universe" thing, coupled with the even more convoluted time- and space-bending events that will occur later in the Binaltech storyline, make it hard to know if the explanation actually applies to the mainstream cartoon universe.
- Wheeljack's Binaltech weapons include a "Laser-strafer rifle" (wielded by Wheeljack's Action Master toy) and a sword with an Immobilizer field (referencing the titular invention of Wheeljack's from the Generation 1 cartoon episode "The Immobilizer").
