The Energon Pub

It's been many, many years since I have seen a G1 cartoon--how did the Transformers get their forms? Can they change forms whenever they want?

Now, in Beast Wars in an episiode (I believe it's called Agenda) Megatron visits the Ark--am I mistaken or did Optimus and Crew have a vehicle form?

Are the Maximals and Predicons programmed with beast forms at their release from protoform?


Deep questions that I need answered...that and when the hell is Rhino going to re-release G1 on DVD!?

In the original cartoon the Transformers had vehicle modes before coming to Earth, but they were spacy cars and jets. When they got to Earth Teletran-1 rebuilt them into earth vehicles. No one ever changed forms much after that except maybe Hot Rod into Rodimus Prime, which was done by the Matrix.

Later incarnations of the Transformers series had stasis pods, computers, or other things reformatting the transformers into new forms. By the time we got to RiD they had the Transformers merely scanning with onboard scanners and reformatting themselves at will - this was carried on through Armada and Cybertron. In the new movie they can reformat themselves at will.

It sounds like in G1 changing their form was a very big deal, and with Telatraan-1 doing it was like major, major surgery. I guess if the new form offers a major advantage over the old one they might do it, but if not, forget it. The Teletran-1 reformatting might have taken only a day to do, or it might have taken as long as a month.