At TFNation 2022, Jim Sorenson and Chris McFeely hosted a panel giving details and showing off fanart interpretations of Ron Friedman's first Transformers The Movie script.



This was the first script written for the movie, outlined in late summer 1984 and finished by February 1985. Copies of which were sold by Ron Friedman in 2010 and eluded the group fandom effort that was underway to buy them up and scan:



In Autumn 2020, while clearing out his storage, Flint Dille found another copy of this script. He invited Jim to fly over and scan as much production material from his time at Sunbow as possible before being sold off (a great deal of which has been made available online). At present, this Movie script must remain under wraps, though it will be made available online at some point.


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For those who missed out on the convention panel, Chris McFeely has retold the story across three twitter threads. Strap in for one crazy ride at the links below:

Part 1: Chris McFeely on Twitter: "Last weekend, @jimsorenson and I unveiled the never-before-seen FIRST DRAFT of "The Transformers: The Movie" at @tfnationltd! If you weren't there, settle in, because tonight, I'm doing it all again, right here on Twitter! (1/22) (Lineart by @EdPirrie, colours by @Drivaaar) https://t.co/ShY5Y1MZEr" / Twitter
Part 2: Chris McFeely on Twitter: "Let's pick up where we left off yesterday with the first draft of "The Transformers: The Movie"! (1/21)" / Twitter
Part 3: Chris McFeely on Twitter: "And now, the third and final part of the first draft of "The Transformers: The Movie!" (1/25)" / Twitter

 

Was such a treat to be there for Chris and Jim's presentation at TFN, highly recommend everyone catching up via Chris's Twitter threads!

 

Thanks for sharing. Wheeljack went from primary cast to cameo death.

 

Very awesome stuff.  

 

This is the stuff that reminds me I need to attend one of these, some day soon.

I was just catching up this weekend with some of the Transformers:Animated presentations from last year, their Season 4 “Trial of Megatron” reading.
Fantastic stuff!!!

Can’t wait to dig into this!

 

Should also share they art done.




I want a figure of Rails now.

 

This NEEDS to be a comicbook series AT LEAST! 
LOVE Chris McFeely. If you\'re not watching his YouTube channel you\'re crazy! A fountain of knowledge! 
P.S. Thew Adams is just as great too! 

 

This is SO awesome! I love the fact that new things about the Transformers from the 80scan still pop up now, even after all this time. Considering this is 37-38 years old and we’re only just seeing it now is pretty wild.

Is this script the mythical ‘Secret of Cybertron’ movie treatment do you know? I know Fint Dille and Ron Friedman both wrote treatments for the movie, but Flint’s wasn’t used in the end - Last I heard he can’t remember much but he’s been searching for a copy for years!

 

IIRC the chronology is this draft, then secrets of Cybertron, then the movie we got.

 

It’s almost like they decided that Wheeljack is better off dead than misogynistic, he survived in all drafts up until production, wonder why

 

Ah, Kup had a way cooler design than what he got.

Give me Kup who turns into a WW2 Sherman post-haste!

 

If I recall from Flint Dille's interview with Rodimus Primal, Flint's ideas were ones used more later in Five Faces of Darkness. Which I always thought gave the original and best origin to the Transformers as tied to the Quintessons.**

Looking at TFTM as an adult interested in writing things and the production of this kind of stuff, it's easy to see the committee re-working. They originally were going to have Cybertron itself as the living planet, of course, and Unicron as some kind of external entity. But the compromise they went with kind of left any mystery of Cybertron itself out of it.

Clearly, Unicron should have been tied in more with the Quintessons and Cybertron itself. Instead they wrote it out in Season 3 that he was supposedly made by some chimp alien? Meh.

**Even as a little kid, I thought the idea that the Cybertronians were robots first that learned to transform into things was completely backward. They should have been built as machines for a purpose, and then later evolved into being able to take more humanoid alternate modes. G1 toys actually emphasized the alt modes more than the robot modes. Nostalgia made us value the robot characters more.

 

I agree. I had heard that most of Flint Dille’s ideas had been put into Five Faces of Darkness, but I do know there were other things - I think in his version, Optimus goes deep into Cybertron and actually transforms it into a robot to take on Unicron?

I’ve heard bits and pieces over the years but he himself says most of his memories of it have been lost to time, so he wanted to find this script when going through his archive to jog his memory as much as anything else - I think this was actually the thing he was looking for most!

 

Tank Kup, please

 

So... I skimmed it; are Optimus and Megatron the only major deaths in this one? I guess Magnus too (I didn't see him brought back after Galvatron takes the Matrix)?

I wonder at what point it became the absolute slaughter-fest the final movie was.

 

I think I prefer Wheeljack being dead over being depicted as a misogynistic.

 

That was a fun read and I love the artwork. That said 100% happy they changed up so much and gave us what we got. Also I would be down for some of these "new" faces to turn up as toys. TF's of late have gone hard into the alternate time line stuff so the idea that a long scrapped concept could get a toy in 2024 some 3+ decades later would be funny to me.

 

wow,there are many interesting designs..

 

Boy howdy do I love me some conceptual work, but this is exactly why first drafts exist. Outside of a scant few things not in the finished movie, none of this is great.

 

Stuff like this is why I hope Studio Series expands to "concepts" so we can get random toys based on previously unused designs.

Probably when marketing stepped in and said "Hey we've got a whole new wave of toys to promote. Can you make some room on the roster?"