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The true Transformers G1 timeline: what to watch and in what order

Discuss anything about the Transformers cartoons and comics! You can discuss anything from G1 to Cybertron as well as the comics from Marvel, Dreamwave, IDW and more!

Re: The true Transformers G1 timeline: what to watch and in what order

Postby william-james88 » Thu Oct 30, 2014 2:00 pm

Motto: "'till All Are One"
Sabrblade wrote:
Ironically, Hasbro's attempts to put it back in its proper place created a bigger middle finger to Energon than Japan's rebooting it did, since having the black hole created from the collapsing energon sun means that the first planets devoured by the black hole were Alpha Q's planets, the very planets that the whole of TF: Energon was trying to restore and preserve. Oops. :oops:

Sucks to be Energon. :lol:


I didnt watch the series so I dont have much of an opinion on either (I just have Protoman's opinion, ha!) so I judge the series more due to their toys. And funny enough but of all those 3 series, the one with the toys I despise the most is Energon when it comes to their autobots. If you thought Armada Hotshot was bad, wait till you get a load of Energon.
Ironically enough though, the Energon Decepticons are some of the best and most interesting transformer toys out there (Megatron, Divebomb, Sharkticon, Mirage, Shockblast)
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Re: The true Transformers G1 timeline: what to watch and in what order

Postby Sabrblade » Thu Oct 30, 2014 2:06 pm

Motto: "Can't do a job halfway. What's worth doing is worth doing well, I say."
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william-james88 wrote:I didnt watch the series so I dont have much of an opinion on either (I just have Protoman's opinion, ha!) so I judge the series more due to their toys. And funny enough but of all those 3 series, the one with the toys I despise the most is Energon when it comes to their autobots. If you thought Armada Hotshot was bad, wait till you get a load of Energon.
Ironically enough though, the Energon Decepticons are some of the best and most interesting transformer toys out there (Megatron, Divebomb, Sharkticon, Mirage, Shockblast)
The Energon Autobot toys improved after the first few waves. Inferno, Prowl, Downshift, Tow-Line, Cliffjumper/Beachcomber, Landmine/Landquake, Bulkhead/Quickstrike, Omega Supreme/Omega Sentinel, and the five Superion figures are all decent molds. As are the Omnicons.
"When there's gold feathers, punch behind you!!"

Shadowman wrote:This is Sabrblade we're talking about. His ability to store trivial information about TV shows is downright superhuman.
Caelus wrote:My wife pointed out something interesting about the prehistoric Predacons. I said that everyone was complaining because transforming for them mostly consisted of them just standing up-right. She essentially said, 'So? That's what our ancestors did.'
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Re: The true Transformers G1 timeline: what to watch and in what order

Postby Sabrblade » Sat Aug 22, 2015 9:18 pm

Motto: "Can't do a job halfway. What's worth doing is worth doing well, I say."
Weapon: Saber Blade
*Arise dead thread.*

Thinking more about how the original confusion of thinking that the Unicron Trilogy was in the same timeline as the G1 and Beast Wars stuff in Japan, I think I might know where this misconception might have originated.

Back in 2007, before the first live action movie came out, TakaraTomy had put up a new special section on their Transformers site called "World of the Transformers" that featured a ton of cool info on the lore of the Transformers as depicted in all the cartoons (and related media) that had come about prior to 2007 (a lot of which was written by Hirofumi Ichikawa). Among these was a page that contained two separate timelines for the various TF cartoons (and related media) that were laid out horizontally parallel to one another, one on the top of the page and one on the bottom. The top one was a G1/BW timeline, and the bottom one was a Unicron Trilogy timeline.

It is very possible that any uninformed individual could have looked at this page and mistook both timelines for being a single timeline that was simply divided in half so as to fit within the width of the page, leading to them to mistakenly think that the Unicron Trilogy timeline on the bottom was simply the next part of the timeline that came after the Beast Era. In actuality, though, as they were really two separate timelines, this was not the case.

Further complicating matters were things that were happening around that point in time with Takara trying to finally narrow down the components of their official continuities. Specifically, the aforementioned timeline page on this "World of the Transformers" site had included Car Robots in its G1/BW timeline, when Car Robots was previously thought to be a separate series on its own.

Simultaneously, a couple of other Japanese G1 timelines released with some Kiss Players media from that era likewise included Car Robots, and also confirmed that Beast Wars Second and Beast Wars Neo really took places "tens of thousands of years" after Beast Wars and Beast Machines instead of during the same home-time as those two; a notion that many fans had believed up to that point thanks to a catalog that came packed with Japanese Beast Wars toys claiming such, when the Beast Wars II cartoon itself would give its proper time-setting within the show itself. Us Western fans simply did not know this due to never having had any proper access to either Japanese Beast Wars cartoon at the time.

More confusion came from the "World of the Transformers" timeline page also seemingly including the first live action movie within its G1/BW timeline, placing it in the year 2007 of said timeline (which would have put it after Transformers: The Movie in 2005 and before G1 season 3 in 2010 -- the Japanese dub of season 3 moved the show's setting from 2006 to 2010).

However, as this did not come to pass (and was contradicted by a different page on the "World of the Transformers" site itself), there are two plausible explanations as to why the 2007 movie was included in the timeline. Either...
A) Someone at Takara jumped the gun on thinking that the movie could take place or fit into this timeline without knowing enough about the movie to think otherwise, or
B) Since the other pieces of the timeline were in black while the 2007 movie was in red, it's possible that the timeline wasn't really saying that the movie took place in the G1/BW timeline's 2007, but was instead just advertising to the fandom that the movie would be coming to theaters later that year in the real world 2007.

As for this "World of the Transformers" site itself, sadly, it no longer exists, having been taken down years ago with all the upgrades that Takara has since made to the site. Only a few remants remain:

This is the opening of the site - http://web.archive.org/web/20071019121212/http://www.takaratomy.co.jp/products/TF/bible/index.html

This was the post-opening site entrance screen:
Image
Image

Going by what I can remember (and some guesses based on said memories), the various pages on the site focused on all of the following per page:
  • The Quintesson-made origin of the TFs according the G1 cartoon
  • The events of the G1 cartoon, the 1986 movie, and the three Japanese G1 cartoons
  • The Japanese G1 post-cartoon series like Zone, Return of Convoy, Operation Combination, and G-2
  • The events of Beast Wars and Beast Machines (Beast Wars Returns)
  • The events of Beast Wars Second and Beast Wars Neo
  • The Primus/Unicron/Thirteen origin of the TFs according to the Unicron Trilogy and other media like the Marvel and Dreamwave comics
  • The events of Armada (Micron Densetsu), Energon (Super Link), and Cybertron (Galaxy Force)
  • The page with the two aforementioned timelines
  • A page about "God Items", special objects of TF lore that were related to the creation processes of TFs, and would at some point all become connected to Primus. The three in particular that the page talked about were Vector Sigma of the G1 cartoon, the Creation Matrix of the Marvel Comics, and the AllSpark Cube of the 2007 movie.
  • A final page that contained a large web-like flowchart that depicted the chronology of all the main TF fiction (both Japanese and English) that had been released up to that point.
Other surviving images from the site are as follows.

Artwork by Yuji Kaida of the Thirteen from the Primus/Unicron/Thirteen origin page:
Image

This Shockwave-related symbol from the G1 episode "Divide and Conquer", which a page on WotTF identified as meaning "Cybertron Guard"
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The "God Items" image from their respective page:
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An English translation of the text from the various pages that pertained to Transformer creation origins - http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Talk:World_of_Transformers/Section5_src

And the continuity flowchart from the site's final page. BUT, the image seen below not the actual image from the site, but is instead an edited version of the image with all of the Japanese text semi-translated into English (I say "semi-translated" since some things weren't actually translated but were instead rewritten into their English names to be easier for casual viewers to understand). Also note that several of the paths in this flowchart are dead ends as Takara hadn't yet fully cemented where everything would wind up going in the long run:
Image
"When there's gold feathers, punch behind you!!"

Shadowman wrote:This is Sabrblade we're talking about. His ability to store trivial information about TV shows is downright superhuman.
Caelus wrote:My wife pointed out something interesting about the prehistoric Predacons. I said that everyone was complaining because transforming for them mostly consisted of them just standing up-right. She essentially said, 'So? That's what our ancestors did.'
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