Finally got around to listening to the episode and have gotten to both the RID 2015 cartoon discussion and the multiverse discussion. A few comments on what all was discussed in each:
RID 2015 cartoon talk* Though is pretty much an eccentric manchild (but at heart, aren't we all?), he has had his share of moments of competence.
* Whoever it was who asked for a gif of Chip breaking the floppy disk, I have no gif but here's a jpeg:
* Optimus did not go back to the Realm of the Primes at the end of season 1. He's now a member of Bumblebee's team on Earth.
* I don't want TF: Prime back.
* The comparison of how RID is to Prime like how Beast Machines was to Beast Wars is, I think, kind of a fair comparison, but for different reasons. With RID, a lot of the same creative team that worked on Prime is heading RID, while Beast Machines had a different group of people behind it than Beast Wars had, and whom Hasbro essentially told to ignore Beast Wars and start anew with Beast Machines, hence why some of the characters acted differently in the second show than in the first show (Optimus being spiritual and Zen-like, Rattrap being cowardly and will to bargain with Megatron, Megatron practicing honor and hating beast modes, Silverbolt being dark and brooding, etc.). For RID, it's a spiritual successor to Prime, being far enough into the future from Prime to be a jumping on point for new viewers rather than feeling like the midway point of a larger story that might confuse people. Beast Machines was kinda the same with it letting us know that stuff happened before it, but that stuff wasn't so important to the present series that it needed to be watched to know what all was going on (it helped to watch it, sure, but it wasn't required). The same was also the case for Energon being a sequel to Armada.
* Beast Machines had two seasons.
Multiverse talk* I see now that the notion of the multiversal singularity concept being destroyed was mentioned in the podcast.
* RiD 2001 is still by itself on its own. The Japanese version Car Robots, however, is what was retconned into the big Japanese G1 timeline, and having watched it and compared it to the English, it's very different in many ways, containing a fair amount of the same continuity elements as the Japanese Beast Wars cartoons and the Japanese G1 cartoons, all of which were changed or erased by Saban and Hasbro when they dubbed Car Robots into RiD 2001.
* The idea of there being only one Unicron originated with Simon Furman in his writing both the Dreamwave Armada comics and the BotCon Universe comics in which he got to explore that idea. Later, Hasbro copywriter Forest Lee would flesh out and cement Furman's idea, while making the same true for Primus, Vector Sigma, and the Thirteen, in the early TCC magazine comics. And at the time, almost everything seemed to jibe with singularity concept as far as fictional depictions of all these characters went. But then would come several works of fiction with depictions that
didn't jibe with this idea, ignoring it altogether. ROTF created its own take on The Fallen, HasLab wanted the Aligned Continuity and its versions of Unicron/Primus/VS/13 separate from the multiverse, and even the original G1 cartoon had its own unique origin for Unicron. The singularity concept that Simon and Forest had crafted never gained ground with anyone outside of the niche fan-oriented media that they had created it in. Thus, all the clashing depictions of these characters who, in theory, were all supposed to be the same persons necessitated a retraction of the singularity concept, which was done in the TCC magazine issue #65 story written by Jesse Wittenrich & Pete Sinclair. So even though it started with Simon and Forest, since none of the movies or other cartoons wanted or cared to adhere to that idea, Jesse and Pete ended it to end all the headaches it was causing.
* The Classics universe was destroyed in the BotCon 2012 comic story "Invasion", but its planet Earth was spared by having it pulled into the Shattered Glass universe (and any Classics characters who were on Earth at the time survived their universe's destruction), so for a time there were two planet Earths in that universe. But then the final chapter of last year's magazine comic story took of that.
