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For the longest time, I was a cartoon's-only thinker. As a kid, I was under the false belief that whatever happened in the cartoons and movies mattered, and that the comics/books/video games/etc. were of little importance.

BOY was I stupid wrong! I missed out on SO MUCH thinking that.

But even when I thought that, I still knew that RiD and the Unicron Trilogy (the Movies weren't yet out at that time) were separate universes from the G1/Beast Era cartoons. I just took those three universe as being the main ones, despite their being three instead of one.

Now, I know wholeheartedly that that simply isn't the case. There isn't one or three or any specific number of true continuities in the Transformers canon (though, they've counted as high as 75,890,008 ), but millions and millions! And all of which hold weight to their validity in the canon.

Basically, anything made by or under the license of Hasbro and/or TakaraTomy is canon. There may be a few other exceptions to this, but that's how it is.

Delicon wrote:Transformers history is a wacky thing. In the 1980's it seemed pretty simple as there was only the one show, although the Marvel comic definitely had some major differences.

Especially consdering how it came first ad outlived the cartoon by four years.

Delicon wrote:I enjoyed the Marvel comic as well but between the 2 different writers and the fact that they had to tapdance around the animated movie, I felt the storyline spun into too many different directions at times.

It was well more coherent a story than the cartoon was.

Also, "tapdance around the animated movie"?

Delicon wrote:For instance, since when is Galvatron a totally different Transformer from Megatron? There are a lot more, but that's just one example.

Blurrz wrote:To me, everything is game... it's all part of the Transformers multiverse.

Not the Aligned stuff (WFC/Exodus/Prime/Exiles/FOC/etc.). It's "outside" the multiverse (but still canon).

Delicon wrote:I agree that in some instances you can just say "well, in an alternate universe it was like this" but some things, like who created the Transformers, etc. aren't exactly things that should be greatly varying from one to the other.

Different worlds can have differing mechanics. Though, Primus is still credited as being the TF's creator-god throughout the multitude of continuities. The Quints in the cartoon can still be the ones who built them, but also could have been unknowingly doing exactly what Primus wanted by building the TFs.

DrLegend wrote:I always like to consider the G1 cartoon/Beast Wars as the main story with everything else a veritable "spin-off" of it. And that's not to say a spin-off is a bad thing but so far all of the shows have pulled from the original G1 show as a source of inspiration for the newer version.

Having finally sat down and read all of the Marvel G1 stuff, I now see more references to it in later cartoons than I see references to the Sunbow cartoon. At least, in regards to the cosmological and religious aspects (i.e. - the Primus/Unicron myth and such).

DrLegend wrote:After watching all of the episodes of Transformers Prime, I was very pleasantly surprised. It reminded me of the G1 stories in a lot of ways and in others it stood on its own. For me, that's very validating because it almost feels like they took my childhood, updated it, and repackaged it all nice, new, and shiny.

Even though it seems to make more callbacks to post-G1 material?