JelZe GoldRabbit wrote:Sabrblade wrote:Windsweeper wrote:Love the artwork in these comics.
I like how they make RID part of G1.
Car Robots, you mean. Car Robots is part of the Japanese G1 timeline, but the English RiD version is still its own non-G1 series. The English translation just went with the English names instead (save for Brave Maximus and Fire Convoy).
You can kinda blame FunPub for that. They put RiD in its own cluster (Viron), separate from G1 (Primax) without considering what TakaraTomy might do. It's quite possible that Takara has always considered Car Robots to be part of G1, and that their first proper reboot is Micron Legend (aka our Armada).
If that's the case, would that mean Hasbro jumped the gun?
The Viron thing came from the AllSpark Almanac II book first before Fun Pub started using the Viron term. The book was written by Jim Sorenson (and Bill Forster), who has done and still does TF work for Fun Pub. At the time that Car Robots and RiD 2001 were airing on TV, Jim was living in Japan back then (as he's mentioned to folks a few times on another board) and, according to him, the Japanese originally did not view Car Robots as part of the JG1 cartoon timeline, instead seeing it as a reboot series.
However, in my own watching of the Japanese Car Robots cartoon in recent years, I noticed that there were some elements in the cartoon's Japanese version that seemed like attempts to tie the Car Robots cartoon with the other Transformers cartoons that had come before it in Japan (such as Fire Convoy possessing an Energon Matrix like the JBW Maximal leaders, and Vector Sigma being treated as the "god" of Cybertron like in Beast Wars Neo). But, a lot of these elements were either so vague or so unexplored that I suspect many Japanese fans at the time of the show's airing didn't seem to catch on to these elements' importance, and either ignored them or just took them as fanwank nods instead of continuity points, as the Japanese fans were very much surprised to see Car Robots be considered part of the JG1 timeline, according to Jim.
When I had my big Japanese continuity talk with Hayato Sakamoto at BotCon this year I learned that he was one of the people involved with making the big JG1 cartoon timeline that officially declared Car Robots to have been part of that timeline, and when I asked him about why Car Robots had been included, one of the reasons was because of RobotMasters Wreck Hook indeed being an amnesiac Car Robots Wrecker Hook (and the RobotMasters line consisted entirely of Primax character toys, with Double Face possibly being the lone exception), and that Brave Maximus showed up in RobotMaster as well (in his having returned to Earth after the Car Robots cartoon), and that the 2004 e-HOBBY G1 GoBots set toy bio said that when the GoBots in the set came to the Transformers universe (referring the Japanese G1 universe) their technology was used to create the Spychangers (and back in 2004, the only Spychangers that existed in Japanese TF lore were the Car Robots ones).
So maybe Takara might have possibly had it in the back of their minds to make Car Robots be a Primax series all along, but because of how little obvious effort was put into their actually doing so when the show was airing in Japan, the Japanese fandom didn't see it that way and saw its later inclusion in the JG1 timeline as a retcon (so says Jim).
And because any attempts to tie Car Robots back in with its predecessors were so subtle, both Hasbro and Saban were able to completely miss or ignore Car Robots' little continuity elements entirely, and succeeded in dubbing RiD 2001 as the first rebooted non-Primax cartoon, seemingly unaware of any G1 relation the show may or may not have had in its Japanese version at the time.
Kurona wrote:To be fair, it's not like it fits comfortably into G1. It takes place in 2000 even though all sources at the time indicated the G1 Season 1/2 Autobots and Decepticons should be there (it took this comic to finally give an explanation),
The explanation for the G1 seaons 1-2 characters' absence came originally from the big JG1 timeline of 2006/2007, which used The Battle of the Star Gate manga (awesome series, btw) to explain their absence. This Baldigus comic simply reiterates it.
Kurona wrote:people are shocked at the appearance of transforming robots even though they've dealt with that for the last decade and a half,
I kinda feel a lot of this shock was mostly circumstantial. In some cases, they were shocked by there mere appearance of the robots since they simply weren't expecting to see them pop up before them. Other times, the shock came from the surprise appearances of the Destrongers, whom the humans knew to be scared of. And in some other cases, there were humans who did know of the robots, as episode 3 had some train operators immediately recognize Fire Convoy as an ally.
Kurona wrote:it's a bit bizarre that Brave Maximus, the Commandos etc all look exactly like other characters sans colours;
Not quite. As this series took place in 2000, Fortress Maximus hadn't shown up yet, and none of the Car Robots Autobots or Destrongers even knew of Brave Maximus at first (the dub changed this so that everyone instantly knew who and what RiD Fort Max was). And the Combatrons may have been redecos of the G1 Combaticons, but their cartoon models were drastically different from each other. And, since the Car Robots cast originally all came from the future, did any of them even know or know of the G1 Combaticons?
Kurona wrote:and in the dub especially there's characters like Optimus Prime, Prowl, Megatron and Fortress Maximus who are... well... explicitly sharing names with important characters from G1.
Well, that's the dub. It can get away with that by its being a non-G1 continuity.
Kurona wrote:And there's absolutely no indication in the show or whatever that this is a part of G1 at all.
Like I said to JelZe above, there were some continuity elements in the original Car Robots version, but that they were so subtle may them easy for people to overlook.
Although, ironically, the RiD dub had a ton of G1/BW/BM references in it (many more than the original Car Robots version, and far more noticeable than those in Car Robots) that were enough to send the English-speaking fandom of the time (such as those on the old alt.toys.transformers Usenet newsgroup) into a frenzy with people futilely trying to figure out how the dub could fit into G1 continuity before coming to understand how the concept of a reboot series worked.
Kurona wrote:It can technically work but it took a lot of later explanation; one can easily see why someone could see this as a completely new continuity. Hell, I'd argue that at the time of each show's airing, it being in the G1 timeline would be as plausible as Armada fitting into the G1 timeline.
I think you mean as "
implausible".
At the very least, the G1 cartoon had that huge gap between 1985 and 2005 to slot things like Car Robots into. But it sure is a good thing for Car Robots' sake that its characters all ended up originating from the future, and that the later-published Battle of the Star Gate manga offered an opening for Car Robots to slip in to the timeline with little-to-no intrusion.
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