Hey all, a new episode of Triple Takeover is out and we have none other than the legendary Bob Budiansky on for a chat!
I met him a few months ago at a small local convention. Super nice guy. Signed my copy of the trade of the G1 profiles. Thanked him for his hard work and he was so humble and said it was a team effort, but he was happy to hear I enjoy it so much.
Genuinely just a lovely chap, and very easy to shoot the breeze with. It was hilarious when he reminded us of Spoiler the old rumours that he was some kind of recluse !
He sure have come around from the early 2000s when he really didn\'t want to be associated with the TF franchise much - being more proud of other comics he wrote and worked on. I think things changed after the Bayformers, and when he got invited to re-write the 1986 movie novelization.
Great interview! You guys did a great a job, and it’s always fascinating to hear the lore straight from one of the founders.
Thank you! Appreciate that. We have some more amazing interview chats on the way, including next week's ep with Lorenzo di Bonaventura & Josh Cooley! Yep! Bob created about 250 names & profiles in total. Incredible. I carried this book everywhere with me as a kid. In many ways, this might be Bob's most important contribution to the franchise from my perspective. Cannot overstate how much I adored it and still do.
Yup indeed. This is the one. Shame there weren't more resulting in a second volume trade. I mean there are characters on the front and back covers who don't have profiles in the book. Rewind and Eject, Broadside, Sandstorm, Pipes...
Yeah, I love character profiles, and the TFU ones are some of my favorites. Come to think of it, it’d be really cool if Skybound took the profiles from the backs of #47-#79 and reprinted them as The Transformers: Universe II (or something like that). (Granted, there’d still be tons of missing profiles, but it’s better than nothing lol)
Lorenzo next week?! Wow... from one of the most beloved of the fandom to one of the most hated... this show has range!
Wait, the TPB is missing characters? Because those characters were absolutely in the individual issues. IDW inserted them into the alphabetical order of the original profiles when they reprinted them (for better or worse, with varying degrees of success). So instead of starting with Air Raid, Astrotrain, etc, it starts with Afterburner, Air Raid, Apeface, Astrotrain…
Oh yeah. It's absolutely missing characters. I mean none of the -master characters are in it, Steeljaw (yet strangely Ramhorn has a profile page).
Heads up, @Black Convoy Bob's name is misspelled in both the news article and the title of it. "Budianski" instead of the proper "Budiansky".
The *masters are excused because they didn’t exist when the original Universe book was done, but Steeljaw, Sandstorm, and Eject WERE in the original limited series, so it’s strange to find they’re excluded from the TPB.
I'm enjoying these podcasts. Listening to these guys who were ever present names in my childhood. When BB was good, he wrote some of the most memorable Transformers G1 lore. But I could tell even as a kid he got burned out. Random thoughts: As I got older, I realized the specific complaints that people in the comic industry had. They were young creatives who probably felt embarrassed to be writing comics that were toy advertising. When they maybe imagined themselves as glamorous, sneering, counter-culture creatives living like Picasso or Bukowski. Because licensed comics paid less to artists and writers, a lot of creatives did not want them if they could easily get something else. Which, one realizes, is pretty insidious in retrospect. Considering how much both Larry Hama and Bob Budiansky did to make those brands lasting and profitable for the companies involved. One of the best decisions Hasbro made was to allow the Sunbow cartoons and the comic to exist in different simultaneous continuities. Which allowed Transformers to have absolutely loose canon from the start. Which has always helped in how many iterations and reboots it has. It let me enjoy both while also making my own canon in my own head, which later leaked into my own fan-fic. Gave me inspiration to make my own stories. I really wish there had been a higher threshold for the art in those comics. I know that comic book artists sometimes are great at drawing human bodies in motion. But not always experts at backgrounds (like Bob was saying.) And many of them vocally hate having to draw cars and other real-world items which are difficult to keep in perspective. Transformers is a whole book of drawing robots and vehicles, less humans. Only a few artists in the pre-digital era were able to do that well with enough speed. Herb Trimpe was one, but he wasn't on many of the Hasbro books for long. And someone like John Byrne wasn't going to do them. No shade on Jose Delbo and Don Perlin. But I bet both of them went to art school to draw beautiful women. Thumbing through their books, it's easy to see them indulging in every human (and especially female) shape they could. (That also was memorable to my younger self.) If I could see some of the creatives felt that working on toy advertising was beneath them, I could also tell that Simon Furman embraced it because he seemed to love doing it.
I've always wanted to ask Bob about Sideswipe and Sunstreaker. We know when he was creating them based on the toys, the toys he was looking at were the ones we know today as Spinout and Tigertrack. When Hasbro swapped their bios and colors after he turned in his work, they caused the bios, stats and abilities he wrote to no longer make much sense. He's always quick to point out that he "did his job, and Hasbro could do whatever they wanted after that." But in the early days, Bob was writing these characters every month, and therefore was subject to Hasbro's whims, and especially in this case the alterations made it potentially difficult to write those characters. And I've always wondered if that's why Bob chose to kill off Sunstreaker right away and just never use Sideswipe as more than a walk-on.
