The Energon Pub

G1 pretenders, because i've seen them on ebay and all they reli are miniature tf's and some random guy, does somebody mind tellin the background story on this line of tf's?

cheers

It was a gimmick that was used in '88/'89. Basicly, you had this plastic outer shell that only had arm articulation. These shells were molded to resemble humans in armor for the Autobots(couple exceptions), and Monsters for the Decepticons(again, exceptions). These shells were hollow. The shells were also pretty big, taller than G1 Prime's toy.

The shells split apart, and "revaled" a Transformer inside. The transformer was usually just half-transformed and placed inside. These Transformers were smaller than the Pretender shell, and most had very futuristic looking alt. modes that you sometimes had to squint to tell what they were. I don't feel the robots were very distinctive myself.

Anyway, in the media, Marvel Comics portrayed the Pretneders as armor for the Transformers that could be mentally controlled, and fight alongside them. Japan however had a different perspective for the Japanese only series "Masterforce". The Autobots looked just like humans and were the same size as them, and they wore bracelets. Whenever the need arose, they put these bracelets together and "transformed"(or morphed similar to Power Rangers) into their Pretender form by shouting out "Pretender!". The Pretender form was slightly bigger than their human form. To turn into a robot, they again put their bracelets together, shouted "Pretender", and morphed into a Transformer that was roughly the same size as your average portayed Transformer, meaning they were quite larger than they're Pretender counterparts. The Decepticons had a similar transformation, but they had no human mode.

In the Japanese only series "Transformers Victory", the Dinosaur Combat Squad were portrayed similar to how Marvel did it, but the shells possessed a bit of animal like sentience. There were also a couple of other Prentenders that were in an episode of "Victory", but they were more like they were portrayed in Masterforce.

I hope I didn't confuse you .

Anyway, list and pics of I think all the Pretneders:

http://www.tfu.info/subgroup/pretenders.htm

Galleries of Pretenders on Seibertron:

http://www.seibertron.com/toys/index.php?f_series=5

http://www.seibertron.com/toys/index.php?f_series=6