I found out about the Soundwave thing a few years ago. Don't remember where.

I always figured the Autobot symbol was not based on anyone we knew about, From reading the Marvel run, I always assumed the Last Autobot was the basis of the symbol, and maybe it was a bot that wasn't used in the original toy run. Maybe some obscure Diaclone figure we didn't see.

 

That's a REALLY good point too. The names were much more..."mature?" or something as opposed to gobots as well.

Don't get me wrong..I didn't just toss my gobots away..I still picked some up. Hell..couple of the Super gobots was some of my all time FAV toys..

 

Nicely done SF  

 

1984 was just a great year all around! I feel really lucky to have been a child of the 80's. The Transformers started up and made it better!

 

I remember seeing the commercials long before the cartoon showed up, and I remember seeing Go-Bots commercials early in 1984, but I can't remember if the GB show had come out earlier or not. I remember seeing both lines in the stores well ahead of the show, the packaging and the character names for Transformers were so much cooler than the Go-Bots. I wound up with a few Go-Bots as well and always liked them, but it seemed like TF's were just so much cooler because of all the fiction attached to them. I remember during the spring/summer of '84 it seemed like the TF commercials were relentless, and every time one aired we would stop what we were doing and just drool at the screen.

I remember the cartoon taking me by surprise, up to that point there weren't many toy lines intertwined with tv shows, unlike today where you expect any successful toy line to have a tv show or vice versa. Even GI Joe had the miniseries in '83 and then I didn't see any more episodes until the TF cartoon was into season 2. That was also about the time that we first got a VCR, so it's possible I just missed a lot of cartoons before that point.

We moved to NJ in the summer of '84, the first kid I met on my street had an Optimus and a Wheeljack, both with Diaclone drivers. I never found out if they were some of the early release TF's that had the drivers, or if his dad had picked them up from outside the country. Sometimes it sucks knowing what pieces of history we miss today because we ignored it or didn't know about it at the time, but that's life I suppose.

Yup - Leader-1 was still an awesome toy, even the small figure. I thought the cartoon was dumb, the names were just goofy, and those cars with windshield faces were silly, but I couldn't deny that some of the toys were better than TF minibots. It may have been a bit hypocritical or capricious, but then again I thought Ratchet and Ironhide's toys sucked for the same reason those Super Go-Bots toys sucked  

 

This article took me back to when I was 5 and reading the transformers for the first time and seeing these fool cars that turned into robots and how 30 years have gone so fast!
Looking forward to the next 30 in a amazing hobby and passion which everyone on here can appreciate
Long may it continue  

 

Ha ha in the end Bandai's Machine Robo (Go-Bots) lose out to Takara's Diaclone & Microman (TFs) line.

 

To me it seemed like it all hit at the same time. I remember the cartoon debuting, and getting my first TF and first comic all in rapid suscecion.

First toy was Bumblebee. My brother got Huffer at the same time, got them during a trip to a drug store. I still have most of that Bumblebee, minus tires and feet somewhere. My next Transformer was Brawn. My brother made me learn to pronounce the name right. Lost him after a few months. Probably at school, but I spent 20 years searching the house for him. Our parent's didn't buy us many toys so I think the next few where at christmas with my brother getting Optimus Prime, and me getting Sludge. And correct me if I'm wrong, but was Sludge and 85 release? Anyways we'd sit at the catalog and call dibs on the toys. My brother got to call the two thirds he wanted first, and anyone he didn't want I could get.

As for the comic, I'll admit, I've always preferred the cartoon. I do remember the first issue I read ended with Rachet coming home to the Ark and finding everyones corpses hanging from the ceiling. Bud sure didn't candy coat it when writing for kids, did he?

 

I grew up in the unicron trilogy era, but I had a few g1 episodes on tape and all of my older brother's g1 toys so g1 was a huge part of my initial transformers experience. Love the article and all of the stories about the origin of my favorite franchise. This gets me excited for mp wheeljack and bee.

 

Great write up Sol! Thanks for doing this. I'm looking forward to the next 29 days  

 

I'd not heard the part about Denny O'Neil being involved. Colour me intrigued… I'm a huge fan of O'Neil's work.

I'm guessing there must be additional information regarding the ideas of his that were rejected, anyone know where I can find this info?

 

I doubt Hasbro UK cares one jot about the 30th - despite how much the UK has contributed to the brand in many ways (i.e. Simon Furman and Co) They simply don't care.

I suppose I should be blaming Hasbro USA for either hogging all the stock, or TRU for being useless at distribution too though.

Who the hell thought it was a good idea to make no new toys for UK release for months then make a Huge chunk of your product exclusive to a store that has a less than broad footprint.

If they were Tesco exclusive - fine - there hundreds of Tesco stores - but no they pick TRU-UK - and I'm still not even certain that Movie Generations isn't still Exclusive too - which means the only Age of Extinction toys the UK might get in supermarkets is Constructbots and 1-step changers etc...

So in short 30th Anniversary = total disaster in the UK.

Time to throw more money at the 3rd parties I guess.

 

That is certainly true in the UK most of the stuff was a 1985 start there is a hint that something showed up in 1984 - but i've never been sure if it did it was quite late. but I think Megatron showed up around easter 1985 and Soundwave had been out before that - but t might have been new year or the previous Xmas. I vaguely recall in the UK the majority of stuff about early was Cassettes, Minibots and a few Autobot cars like Sideswipe, Jazz or Ratchet (Maybe Inferno & Sunstreaker a little later).

I think others like Prowl, & Ironhide were really hard to find at all. Optimus is a tricky one I recall he was "The must have toy of Christmas 1985" which suggests they were thin on the ground earlier in the year... which wouldn't be strange as they had the concept of "Christmas toys" back then where your higher price items were usually released at either Easter-into the summer Holidays or at Christmas.

Machine Robo was out a long time before hand and there were a lot of other things about too - if you knew where to look - especially Bandai stuff.
Bandai had loads more robot toys out in the middle/early 80's than Hasbro did. The Hasbro had seemingly more after a while 1986 perhaps... That was perhaps due to new CE safety regs killing the UK import market.

I would guess the US still had a lot of what I'd call "Pre-Power Rangers" stuff like Godaikins.. (ah Dan Cougar, Bismark, darn cool stuff).

There was a lot of Product bleed into the build up to the 1986 Movie so I think Transfomer big year was 1985 - after all the cartoon was not even out until 1984's end and I have no idea how much of a gap there was between the pilot and the series.??

I think Transformers seems to have Mainly 'happened' in 1985 - but that the "Robot" thing can be pushed back a bit due to Machine Robo / Gobots and other lines being distributed better and sooner.

I think it's possible the UK might have even got Machine Robo from Bandai before America got Gobots from Tonka and that was before Transfomers by some way.

Maybe even more so than the 4 month gap in America... (not sure but it's possible).

I'm pretty sure the toys pre-ceded the Marvel UK version of the Transformers Comic by some months... but what did precede it was in small amounts. (mainly Minibots)

 

Interesting, though I was just referring to the pictured toys having the 1985 rub symbols. I saw plenty of bots on the shelves in 1984.

 

Thanks Sol that was wonderful. My first TF memory was seeing the animated commercial for the Marvel comic. Didn't know it was a toy line just new it looked bad ass. Also thought Megatron was a tank for some reason. Kept building him out of clay & would parts form that into a tank lol.

 

i grew up on the unicron trilogy and beast wars video tapes... i wish i grew up on g1

 

here is actual video of that fateful day
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqiQdw1zmuM

 

Here's to another 30 years! 'clink'!

 

I was 9 years old when Transformers debuted and instantly fell for 'em! This is awesome to read and relive those childhood memories. Great to read some TF facts that I didn't know about the franchise either.

 

Damn! I just watched that whole thing and MAN did the Japanese have way more stuff than we did back then.