So I just finished up season one of Transformers: Prime and I liked it quite a bit. I recently sat down and re-watched all of G1 (inlcuding the movie) for the first time since my childhood and it completely reawakened my interest in the franchise. I've even started collecting figures. Think I'm sitting around thirty or so at the moment. All are Generations Thrilling 30 and onward but I did recently pick up Make Toys Cross Dimension Striker Manus and MMC Reformatted Zinnia. I digress. Right before I started watching Transformers: Prime I had also picked up IDW's Transformers: Collection 1, Volume 1. I haven't gotten particularly far in it, probably somewhere in the last issue of Megatron Origins. But while watching the ending story arc for season one of Prime the stories between the two were clearly one and the same or, at the very least, Prime was heavily influenced by the IDW materiel. The exposition that Ratchet goes into for the sake of Jack, Miko, and Raph was pretty cool. How intertwined and related are these two properties? I've also heard the term "aligned" thrown about but I really have no idea to what, exactly, it refers to. I presume this is some level of canon akin to Star Wars' old G level stuff (material laid down by George Lucas himself)? Or is it murkier than that?
Transformers is constantly being completely re-imagined, but the idea behind what the fans have dubbed the "Aligned Continuity Family" was for Hasbro to create a more unified era of TF media. They created a production bible called the Binder of Revelations that provided a general background, and character info, that all new TF media moving forwards had to abide to, with pre-existing media, like the IDW comics, and Bay's movies, remaining free. A big idea that Hasbro had for "Aligned" was for it to be an amalgamation of all the best ideas of TF's history, which is why the backstory provided in Prime's season 1 finale was so similar to IDW's Megatron Origin. The term "Continuity Family" was created by TFWiki.net to describe different parts of TF that are closely related, like how G1's Sunbow cartoon and Marvel comics are two different universes, yet are both G1. The "Aligned Continuity Family" is named as such, since Hasbro has brought so many different pieces of fiction into one nameless continuity, although many fans here have debated that doing so was never Hasbro's intention, and that they're all separate continuities, all based on the same production bible, but unrelated to each other. Whatever Hasbro's intention was, the fact that they allowed each creative team to mostly do their own thing, has resulted in it being impossible that all the fiction is in one universe.
I don't think that's the case at all. I seriously doubt the writers of TFP ever read a single IDW comic issue. If I was a betting man, I'd put money on it. And there's definitely no connection between the two. You'll see as you get further into Prime.
No relation. IDW specifically refused to shove Prime into the ongoing G1-based stuff because it would wreck everything.
