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Transformers Writer's Roundtable Interview with Bob Budiansky, Ron Friedman, and Flint Dille
Interview conducted by Todd Matthy *
Bob Budiansky is providing content for Dynamite Entertainment's TRANSFORMERS trading card sets. He can be reached on Facebook Messenger.
Flint Dille's memoir,
THE GAMESMASTER: MY LIFE IN THE 80'S GEEK CULTURE TRENCHES is available on AMAZON.
Ron Friedman's memoir,
I KILLED OPTIMUS PRIME, is available on AMAZON.
* Todd Matthy is the writer/creator of ROBOTS VS. PRINCESSES for Dynamite Comics. He is currently writing ATLAS and ODYSSEY: NEW DAWN for Tidalwave Comics. He has self published titles with GlobalComix and his 80s cartoon inspired webcomic, TALES OF THE AURORA, is available on Webtoon.
BEGINNINGS AND LORE
How much information did Hasbro give you about the Transformers when you were hired to write? What did Hasbro provide you with? What did you have to create?
BOB: When I was first hired by Marvel Comics to come up with names and write bios for the Transformers in November 1983, 41 years ago this week, Hasbro provided me, via Marvel, a box of Transformers toys to look at. But they actually weren't Transformers toys, they were the original Bandai and Takara toys that Hasbro had licensed to repaint and rebrand as Transformers toys. I was told who were the good guys (Autobots) and who were the bad guys (Decepticons). Marvel Editor in Chief Jim Shooter also gave me the original Transformers treatment that he had written, which presented the Transformers mythology and described the long-running conflict between the Autobots and the Decepticons.
With this material in hand, I was tasked with coming up with names for 24 of the 26 toys in the original Transformers toy line and character descriptions for all 26, and I had about 4 days to do it. I got the job on a Wednesday or Thursday and turned it in on the following Monday morning to EIC Jim, right before Thanksgiving of 1983. He approved it and then he passed on my work to Hasbro. Upon review, Hasbro asked for a few names to be changed for legal reasons. I came up with replacement names for the toys in question, submitted them to Hasbro, and then Hasbro approved my work as well.
RON: I had a strange route to HASBRO via SUNBOW. Those entities thought animation writers lacked the creative skills to transform - yeah, that's the word TRANSFORM small, shrink wrapped action figures - which did not move - into well named and well designed 3 dimensional, recognizably human characters with idiosyncratic traits to make each one unique, noble and good versus evil and despicable , in action packed, fast moving adventures in a five part miniseries pilot BECAUSE THERE WERE SO MANY CHARACTERS EACH OF WHOM HAD SOME QUICKLY ESTABLISHED RELATIONSHIP WITH THE OTHER CHARACTERS THAT THERE WAS NO TIME IN A 22 MINUTE EPISODE TO GET ANY OF IT DONE WELL AND MEMORABLY. Groundbreaking at the time. Time - fun time for viewers - was of the essence which means I had to do what good writers and good reporters and communicators have to do clearly, quickly, and entertainingly which is to establish character fast IN ACTION ideally and deliver the 5 W's at the same time Where are we, When are we there, Who's doing what that grabs and holds us, and Why are they doing it and HOW. BY WHAT MEANS THAT GRABS AN AUDIENCE. And I had to deliver that in all five episodes with effective developments, creating and introducing new characters in action, (LADY J for one) and making assorted, cliffhangers, and progressive unfoldings and surprises in characters and story to make predictability unlikely. Not an easy gig because the cast of toys - characters - was about as large as the population of downtown Bangladesh, but it was great fun for me. I also modeled some voices for characters along the way and introduced the idea of a trio of motorcycle thugs in the service of COBRA that became the Dreadnoks. I went through the same process for the second and third miniseries., the third becoming G.I. JOE : THE MOVIE. One important element I had in all three five partners was MAGIC, SCI FI, THE OPERATIC TOUCHES such as Destro's contempt for the Cobra Commander, and COBRA TEMPLE headquarters. and the Transformation of Cobra Commander into a Cobra Humanoid
In the third miniseries, and more. I believe the G.I.JOE. live action films were bombs because NO MAGIC which left them as flat and familiar ass kicking between uniformed good and bad teams. Going on to THE TRANSFORMERS and rewriting the first 60 episodes and then writing the feature THE TRANSFORMERS:THE MOVIE comes next
Ron and Flint, did you recall receiving Jim Shooter's treatment? Also, did you receive Bob's biographies?
Next, did the three of you communicate during the show's and comic book's initial development?
BOB: No, I don't recall communicating with Flint or Ron about their respective projects. All my communication about Transformers was with various management people and execs at Hasbro.
RON: Bob's answer matches mine. I had zero meetings or interactions with anyone other than Tom Griffin and Joe Bacal until I was doing my second five-part GI JOE when I met with Tom and Joe at the show offices and met some delightful people doing the stripping (Daily Show).
Do you think this might have led to some inconsistencies like for instance, Spike being the name of the boy in the cartoon while in the comics he was named Buster?
FLINT: Ron and I were on the Sunbow track but a different track past a point.
RON: Makes sense, but we'll never know. I know I worked on an independent column of thought, which other writers did as well, some in the same time frame unaware of the activities of the others. That the results were as good as they were is a tribute to the singular talents and vision all going at it in the wilderness.
BOB: When I wrote the Transformers comic, I worked within my creative bubble. Other than a Hasbro exec having one conversation with me before the beginning of season 2 of the animated TV show, in which he told me that the show was moving in a different direction from season 1, I was completely unaware of what was happening in individual episodes of the show. When the animated movie was nearing completion, Hasbro sent me the script and a rough cut of the movie so we could adapt it into a comic book mini-series. But I was never consulted on the movie or told to include its characters in the comic I was writing, so the storylines of the comics I was writing at that time and the movie are quite independent of each other.
The Buster/Spike split probably was a result of Hasbro receiving an early draft of Jim Shooter's treatment, which featured Spike in it, and passing it on to Sunbow for reference material in its development of the animated show. Jim changed Spike's name to Buster in a later draft, and, for reasons unknown to me, that change was not reflected in the show. But I was not part of disseminating information to Sunbow, so all I can do is speculate about what happened. You'd have to find the person at Hasbro who was the liaison to Sunbow at the time to ask him or her about this, and I don't know who that was.
RON: My ignorance of any of this is vast. I was told to write an animated feature, was happy to be allowed to kill off characters, including Optimus Prime, whom I said they'd have to resurrect in five or six months, and insisted on a female Autobot and Autobot interaction with human people, one of them a kid, and went for it. When finished I was told something like I made the Decepticons more interesting than the Autobots and wrote a second draft from page one, which was made. Here endeth my understanding and experience. I didn't meet Flint until I had the pleasure of doing so at my first TFCon.
FLINT: The full answer would be this. For G.I. Joe, we received a giant red binder with the backs of the cards for characters who were already toys and with line drawings, names, and brief bios for characters who would become toys. Sometimes, Voice Auditions came with them. These have been reproduced in large collector books. As the show continued, we had to write the audition dialogue (this was Steve and I). As I went from assistant Story Editor to Associate Producer, we'd write the actors' dialogue, which was tuned during auditions.
I watched Ron's pilot episodes, which are a master class in creating a property, to get a sense of the tone and main characters, and Steve and Jay Bacal filled me in on the other characters. In other words, I learned on the run. As I recall, Steve was up on the comic books; I rarely saw them and thought of them as a different expression of the franchise because there was much more violence in them than we could do in the animation. Also, in both the G.I. Joe and Transformers cases, we were moving much too quickly to linger on things. We had 65 episodes to do.
Transformers was a different experience for me. We had a notebook, but since the show already existed, there was much more material to watch. That having been said, my mission when I moved from Joe to Transformers was to 'give the show 'an edge.' So, I was encouraged to move fast and 'edge' things. This led to friction with Marvel because they had been controlling the Transformers scripts, and it was a shift over to Sunbow. Jay told me about anything I didn't know, and I made changes that made sense.
But my experience on Transformers was like jumping onto a moving train. Some episodes had approved scripts that could only be modified in storyboard or voice recording (which also annoyed the producers), and some were scripts and premises so we could have more effect on them.
Once I had some sense of what I was doing, Ron's Movie script came in—everything was about to shift radically—lots of new characters. Old ones were dying. So the goal was to 'bridge' to the movie with more 'lore, ' mythology, etc. Also, the very nature of the movie and by season 3 the very essence of the characters meant we would spend more time in space and on Cybertron. By that, I mean that most of the new characters didn't feel like inconspicuous earth objects. Spring can not just inconspicuously roll down a street. Nobody would think that Galvatron and the Sweeps were Earth jets. There was no more ‘Robots In Disguise" because after TRANSFORMERS THE MOVIE, Transformer activity on Earth was not credibly a secret.
So, yeah. Most of the information I got was verbal or in the form of drawings.
The most helpful thing to me was a long chart I had showing the relative size of the Transformers. Of course, as a practical matter, we were only bound to the sizes (remember, from the beginning, Megatron could shrink from a giant robot to a sniper rifle) with combiners and characters like the Omega Supreme. I tended to be more interested in the characters' 'game-ability' (the logic of their strength and abilities), while in practice, we used drama much more than logic for fights and combats. For example, Bumblebee was David to anybody's Goliath. We couldn't worry about whether Devastator would stomp him or Megatron would vaporize him with a single shot.
That's the basic answer, but feel free to follow up.
Flint brings up an interesting point, when it came to the fights, how much thought was put into the character's match ups? (Obviously Optimus would fight Megatron because they're the leaders) Like say, did you think about who Starscream's Autobot equivalent or rival was?
It's an interesting question. The dramatic reality of a fight is often in conflict with the physical, strategic and tactical probabilities of the battle when we were doing those projects I was also learning game design, and everybody else was more of a comic book writer and/or pure animation writer. I was the only person whose interest was Games.
In the back of my mind, I always wanted to see a G.I. Joe and the Transformers miniature game where you could fight out the battles. Nobody shared my enthusiasm for this, and even I was fully aware that the dramatic needs of the shows superseded my Game interest.
One of the best experiences I had in that era was taking a big box full of Joe's and Transformers to the Dungeons and Dragons mansion and making a miniatures game that existed for one very long afternoon outdoors on the front lawn with gin fizzes and Mojitos And various Dungeons and Dragons Entertainment Corporation Employees with tape measures.
All of that being said, the correct answer was to have a fight in which Megatron would appear to have a significant advantage over Optimus and figure out circumstances in which the weaker hero could prevail or at least fight to a draw. In most of our shows, the fights ended with somebody running away. Very rarely didn't anybody die and when they Did it caused many problems. But that's another conversation.
The tricky thing about fights like Optimus versus Megatron is that you didn't want to evaluate Optimus by making him appear that much weaker than Megatron. At some level, this was the old playground of who could take who. At the same time, it's more if Optimus is fighting somebody who is a superior opponent, so we did our best to balance it.
BOB: I created the various power ratings for the initial 26 characters and the additional characters I helped create over the next several years. So I had that information as guidance as to how characters matched up. Here are the original 26 characters' power ratings:
![Transformers News: Inside the Minds Behind Transformers: Exclusive Roundtable with Budiansky, Friedman & Dille]( "Transformers News: Inside the Minds Behind Transformers: Exclusive Roundtable with Budiansky, Friedman & Dille")
RON: All fascinating, and how best to choreograph an Optimus Megatron clash observations brilliantly valid but not always easy to develop exciting variations on that theme. What an incredible effort to codify "performance" and potential for dramatic "impact," Maybe similar to what Jack Warner and other Golden Age stars did with their contract players.i'm glad it wasn't my assignment to do your daunting job.
How did you determine those rankings? Did that help you create match ups in the fights?
Ron and Flint, did you get this in your briefing binders?
RON: Never had a briefing binder as such for G.I. JOE because I was supposed to create a show before there was one. Shrink wrapped toys and thumbnail bios with general HASBRO wishes that it be great was it.
BOB: I made 'em up! Certain things were obvious--a jet fighter would be faster than a car, for example. And yes, on occasion I referred to these ratings when matching up certain characters against each other. Don't ask me which match-ups prompted me to check the ratings--I don't remember.
RON: Right. That is what we do. We make it up. On demand. Usually for less money than we'd get doing it for human actors
BOB: Ron, thank you. And it wasn't actually an assignment. I offered the idea to Hasbro and they ran with it. The power ratings were featured on the back of every toy package. It's amazing what you can do with a sheet of graph paper--my original ratings chart:
![Transformers News: Inside the Minds Behind Transformers: Exclusive Roundtable with Budiansky, Friedman & Dille]( "Transformers News: Inside the Minds Behind Transformers: Exclusive Roundtable with Budiansky, Friedman & Dille")
RON: I admire your creatIve chops and your use of them.
FLINT: Bob does great stuff. Wish I'd seen that back in the day.
When we were messing around with the game, as it was just for the fun of it and not a product, we were way more ad hoc. We decided as a game conceit that Transformers weren't programmed to shoot humans; humans were more or less invisible to them until they posed a threat (fired on them, etc). Without that rule, the humans wouldn't have lasted more than a turn. Even then, they were quickly disregarded in combat if they stopped firing It's kind of like the way in a ‘stealth game' the guards would see you and then forget all about you in 30 seconds. This would not happen in the real world, so not all game decisions make dramatic sense, and things that are conventional in drama are hard to simulate in games unless you have a serious RPG component to it. They're different mediums. They inform each other, but you must remain aware of the boundaries.
And, of course, there was the Buried Megatron on the sand table, but that's another story.
How important were the human characters to the Transformers? How did you come up with your various human characters? What were they supposed to mean in relation to the Transformers? Which human was your favorite?
BOB: Most of the stories I wrote featured Transformers finding themselves in very human situations on Earth and how they coped in, what was for them, these very alien environments. For me, that was at least half the fun in writing these stories. So humans were very important characters in the stories I wrote. The humans I introduced into these stories came about as a result of the situations the various Transformers found themselves in. Initially, soon after the Transformers awoke from their millennia-long comatose state to find themselves crash-landed on Earth, they crossed paths with Buster Witwicky and his father and friends. When an Autobot found himself in the woods, he came across a group of college students camping there. When Decepticons tried to take over an oil platform, that got the attention of a high-powered energy company executive. And so on.
The humans in my stories were the means by which I tried to connect the stories to my readers. I sought to put the Transformers into situations that my readers could relate to. And I wanted them to understand the Transformers, both good and bad, through the eyes of the humans who had to deal with them. For example, when a few Decepticons set about vandalizing national monuments across America, I wrote a family into that story who happened to be touring those same monuments while on summer vacation. So their reactions echoed the reactions I would expect my readers to have if they found themselves in the same situation. Another human found himself drawn into a life-and-death video game battle between Megatron and Optimus Prime. I figured playing a video game was something most of my readers had experienced and so they would feel a connection to the human at the center of that story. So the Transformers that were featured in my stories didn't operate in a vacuum--their actions on Earth had consequences, and humans were very aware of these consequences and were often deeply affected by them.
Of all the humans I introduced, the two most important and my favorites to write were Buster Witwicky, who appeared in several storylines, even acquiring the power of the Creation Matrix temporarily, and Circuit Breaker, who had the misfortune of suffering a crippling accident because of the Transformers, and then used her scientific genius to turn herself into a living weapon and become a persistent nemesis of the Transformers.
Circuit Breaker is a stand out. For a while she was the only superpowered human antagonist. Bob, what inspired you to give her powers?
BOB: I wanted to create a human who posed a threat to the Transformers. Whether they were good guy Autobots or bad guy Decepticons, from the point of view of most humans the Transformers represented a threat to our existence. They were powerful alien invaders. It made sense to me that at least some humans would do something to combat them. Some picked up weapons to use against them. In the case of Circuit Breaker, she made herself into a weapon, which, in the comic book world I came from, was far more interesting than having her pick up a big gun to shoot at them. I didn't want all of humanity to decide that they could rely on the charitable instincts of these monstrous alien robotic life forms to guarantee their safety. That would be foolish. At least some people would want to take measures to defend humanity against them. Some would attempt to destroy them or at least drive them off our planet.
RON: Good thinking. That's THE WAY to do that.Then there's PREDATOR'S way. The Human figures out the Predator's MO and exploits that to defeat it.
Ron and Flint, did you ever have ideas for a Powered Human? Also, had you known about her would you have incorporated her into the show?
RON: Crossing the line between human and robotic organism with human emotions was what I did when I created The Bionic Six ( the Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman being the "parents") and years before creating a disabled hero with a bionic exoskeleton of power which I tried to sell but got no takers because of disabled aspect.
Here's a topic, I know all three of you have an opinion on. Female Transformers. What was your reaction to their not being female Transformers? All of you pitched them, how did Hasbro react? And how did they eventually get approved? Did you get push back?
RON: I just said I want to create a female Autobot (Arcee). They said girls don't like sci fi and robots., I said my daughter is a very smart girl and she loves all of that and that was that.
BOB: I believe that as early as the first batch of 26 Transformers that I wrote bios for I pitched, including a female Autobot, perhaps Ratchet. The Hasbro product manager quickly responded to me about my idea: she said that Transformers is a boys toy and as such could not include a female character in the product line. So that was the end of that idea. I never asked Hasbro again if I could include a female Transformer in the toy bios and the stories I wrote.
Thinking about the topic now, I am of the firm belief that Transformers should not be identified as male or female. To the best of my knowledge, they are asexual beings. Their mechanical bodies contain no sex organs. Other than being warriors to varying degrees, Transformers do not fit traditional, stereotypical gender roles, which, thank goodness, are becoming less and less of a factor in our society. The vast majority of humans are identified as male or female based on the gender they are born into. There is nothing about Transformers and how they come to exist that require them to be identified as male or female.
That doesn't mean that some Transformers can't be designed to look female, like Arcee, for example. Their various designs can suggest the entire spectrum of male to female shapes. But looking obviously male or obviously female doesn't have to mean they are male or female.
So if I were still actively writing Transformers I would advocate to Hasbro that Transformers have no gender and so are neither male nor female. Who knows if anyone there would listen or care. But if they did agree, that would potentially create another problem: what pronoun to use to refer to them.
RON: I got no pushback. Further, I believe TRANSFORMERS should have sexes, and human style biographies - birth, aging, death or better yet transformation to a higher plane to be more identifiable and relatable. I suggested A YOUNG OPTIMUS as an online teacher to ROBOSEN but have not heard back. The emotional response to the death of OPTIMUS CONVINCED ME I AM RIGHT about following the human identity path.
FLINT: Frankly, writing the sex scenes was tricky. You had to have them transform, and that was tough both to conceptualize and for the animators to execute.
By the way, that was a joke.
Seriously, since all of the episodes I wrote for G.I. Joe (I only wrote episodes when we needed one fast) had a romantic element, I liked the idea of female Transformers because it added a dimension. However, nobody thought to explore this in the hustle and bustle of the third season.
RON: Their loss. And their admirers and buyers loss of a chance to watch successful navigation through the battlefield of the sexes. Fans LEARN GOOD LESSONS when connecting to THE TRANSFORMERS, transcendental lessons about character, nobility of purpose, kindness and self sacrifice for the common good. I tried to get that in there, and the generational affection for what I did across so many years makes me believe I did that. And I'm sticking with that fantasy now that I'm way older than Taylor Swift and need all the goodwill I can scrape up
The Matrix. The cartoon and the comic book had different takes on what is a key part of the lore. What were your interpretations? How did you come up with it? Would you have incorporated other ideas had you known about them?
BOB: Jim Shooter's treatment contained the initial batch of Transformers within a very limited ecosystem--they all arrived on the same spaceship, the Ark, that crash-landed on Earth millions of years ago. Within months of Marvel's launch of the Transformers comic, Hasbro realized they had a hit on their hands and planned the release of a new line of toys, which meant that I had to figure out a way to introduce them as characters in the comic book.
So, faced with this creative challenge of adding new Transformers to the very finite group that had arrived on the Ark, I came up with a way for new Transformers life to be created. I figured that the Transformers had a process that worked in a similar way to our DNA, which is basically a biological blueprint for creating new life among us organic creatures. In the case of the Transformers, their process would be a super-sophisticated computer program that, when downloaded into the neural network of a Transformer, would imbue that mechanical construct with life. I named this program the Creation Matrix; in today's world, we might call it AI. I limited its usage to only those rare beings who had "unquestioned bravery and wisdom" to handle it. So Optimus Prime was its primary repository during my run on the comic, and used it to give life to a Transformer or two. For a short period, Buster Witwicky was the Creation Matrix's caretaker. The way I looked at it, whoever possessed the power of the Creation Matrix had near godlike powers--he or she could take a bunch of nuts and bolts and make a living army out of them if he or she so desired.
My Hasbro liaisons were so taken with the Creation Matrix concept that they asked me to write it out, which I did, so they can have a paper copy of it, perhaps to share with other licensing partners. Here it is:
![Transformers News: Inside the Minds Behind Transformers: Exclusive Roundtable with Budiansky, Friedman & Dille]( "Transformers News: Inside the Minds Behind Transformers: Exclusive Roundtable with Budiansky, Friedman & Dille")
As noted at the bottom of this document, there are other ways as yet undefined to create new Transformers. Realizing that even more Transformers would likely be added to the cast, I didn't want to limit myself as a writer to always falling back on the Creation Matrix to create new characters. I figured that using that same trick over and over again would get tired real fast.
RON: I had zero connection to the franchise but did enjoy the feature films despite the murky Sci Fi overlays.
Ron, what was your idea for the Matrix of Leadership? Flint, you had an idea for the Matrix that wasn't used but has been shared. What was it?
FLINT: Oh yeah. The Matrix of Leadership was the centerpiece of the whole franchise. In the Lost SECRET OF CYBERTRON, it was the key to the giant Robot that was Cybertron (referred to in TRANSFORMERS ONE). The Autobots did a daring 'charge of the light brigade' attack to insert the key. Most of the '85 Product line was killed. Joe and Tom couldn't wrap their heads around it, so it sort of backdoor-snuck into Season 3 (the SECRET OF CYBERTRON lore) and the movie.
I just wanted to see two giant planets fight, and I figured Cybertron had to be a Transformer despite it being covered with Rock (they did that in some Star Wars movie- concealed Death Star).
Unfortunately, Joe and Tom didn't agree. I had a tantrum, got over it, and went back to mission, but SECRET OF CYBERTRON informed the third season, and I was fascinated to see that people who couldn't have read it channeled it in later comics and shows.
RON: Leadership. An interactive Matrix TEACHER because it'd be cool and effective with animation and comics fans. I mean I'd have been crazy and thrilled to learn Russian with Superman, Batman, or Captain Marvel, when I was 9, 19,25 and the same from Optimus Prime or Bumblebee when they came out. AI makes that eminently possible NOW. Witness ROBOSEN's group has programmed ALL OF ALBERT EINSTEIN'S LECTURES, WRITINGS, RECORDED SPEECHES, WRITINGS into a Cyber 3D Albert who can deliver it all interactively in EVERY KNOWN LANGUAGE. If you were a physics or math or engineering major or just an interested individual how would you react to get that opportunity?
It made it to the design stage. Did any of you see this?
Bob and Ron, did you ever consider making Cybertron a Transformer?
![Transformers News: Inside the Minds Behind Transformers: Exclusive Roundtable with Budiansky, Friedman & Dille]( "Transformers News: Inside the Minds Behind Transformers: Exclusive Roundtable with Budiansky, Friedman & Dille")
BOB: I saw model sheets of designs for Cybertron, but I don't think I ever saw this version showing its transformation to a Transformer. I think it's a great idea--wish I had thought of that!
RON: Oh yeah. Wow. I was long gone after the animated feature film came out, and back writing live actor scripts.
One thing we can kind of piggy bank off this topic is the Origin of the Transformers.
Bob and Ron, you never touched on the Transformers origin. Was it something you ever considered?
BOB: I remember that occasionally I had an idea about the possible origin of the Transformers, but I never pursued it to the point of actually fleshing out a full origin story and writing it into a comic.
Do any small details come to mind?
BOB: I figured sentient machines didn't evolve the same way organic creatures like ourselves did. So that led me to think of possible ways the Transformers could have gotten to where they are today. And... I'm not gonna say any more about it. If it's an idea that is worthy of a potential story, I'd rather keep it to myself until I write that story, if ever.
Flint, you famously are responsible for the Quintesson origin. How did you come up with that?
FLINT: There was a store called Quintessence in Westwood. Seemed like a cool word. I could not testify that I came up with it, but anybody on the team might have, but that's how I thought of them. It meant Fifth Essence, a kind of magic, spirit, creation thing.
THE DEATH OF OPTIMUS PRIME AND A CHANGE IN DIRECTION
The Death of Optimus Prime. You all knew this topic was coming. How did you find out Optimus Prime was being discontinued? Did Hasbro order him killed off or were there options? How did you react to this? What made you choose to kill him off the way you did?
BOB: The movie had no impact on the direction of the comic while I wrote it. As for the death of Optimus--which death? His movie death had no impact on my stories. Separately, I had Op temporarily die in the comic, and that lasted for a bunch of issues until he returned.
RON: I told JOE AND TOM AND HASBRO that I wanted and was all for killing off some characters because it was good enough for Walt Disney in SNOW WHITE and BAMBI because having the real world yin yang life death of existence on the table summons the strongest emotions because it is life and it is real. When I asked about killing off Optimus Prime I was told that was in their plan so a new leader could arise. I said something like, Great, but you'll have to bring him back in six months because you can't kill off ODIN IN NORSE MYTHOLOGY , OR JUPITER OR ZEUS because you can't kill BIG DADDY in a continuing family. They said, no, Optimus was history. He was back in what, 90 days or less. And I wanted his death to be both heroic and his TRANSFORMATION TO ABSENTIECE BY MEANS OF A CONTINUING ' RELIC' SO HIS SHADOW PRESENCE AND NOBLE MISSION WOULD CONTINUE ON. I THINK I did that well, and asking that color vanish as he passed sold it powerfully
Ron, why did you turn Megatron into Galvatron as opposed to killing him like you did Optimus?
Bob, you did kill off Megatron. But you didn't turn him into Galvatron. Why?
BOB: While I wrote it, the comic didn't include any of the continuity of the movie. So having Megatron become Galvatron would have required me to bring in the movie storyline, which took place 20 years in the future while my stories took place in the present. That wasn't my inclination, and Hasbro never asked me to do that, so I kept writing the stories the way I wanted to write them, not constrained by the movie continuity.
And while Hasbro used the movie to clear out many of the older Transformers in order to make way for the introduction of a bunch of new characters based on its new Transformers toy line, I had plenty of different new characters based on other new toys to introduce in the comic. As long as I kept doing that, Hasbro really didn't care if I included the movie characters in the comic.
So the short answer to your question of "Why?" is "Why should I?"
Do you think Hasbro saw the comic book as a "safety net" in case the new direction backfired?
Was it ever floated that you do a separate comic with the Movie characters in the future?
BOB: Hasbro thought of the comic as a means to sell toys. Beyond that, I have no idea what Hasbro thought.
So Hasbro never went "Hey Bob, we have these leaders and they're some of our more expensive toys so they need a push."
BOB: To the best of my recollection, that is correct.
Flint, you had to deal with the fallout of the movie. How involved were you with the creation of the new leaders? What was the explanation for making Galvatron insane?
FLINT: I was still on the show after the movie and very active when we outlined Season 3. I probably wrote Five Faces of Darkness before the movie came out. We knew that nothing could be the same after the movie, and the very nature of the toys dictated more space and cybertron and less Earth. It seemed natural to make Optimus a Zombie, Starscream a Ghost and Galvatron a lunatic. I mean, it's got to be tough to be re-forged and have Unicron Die. Wouldn't leave you the same. And part of me thought that Megatron might come back and Unicron could be his own character.
Another famous character who bought it in the Movie was Starscream. Ron, why did you do it?
Flint, did you think Starscream's death left a dramatic void on the show? Who pitched him returning as a ghost?
Bob, did you see Starscream as a key character in the comic?
FLINT: Yeah. I hated killing Starscream. To me he was the character who defined the show. In fact, I could make an argument that while Chris Latta (aka Collins) was the least experienced and professional and was also the most erratic of our voice actors, he defined our shows because he brought a unique, wonderful, manic demented energy to our shows that nobody else had (he was also Cobra Commander and Auger and I can't remember who he was on Visionaries). Of course, that doesn't work if everybody else wasn't the best of the best.
As an interesting trivia note, check the cast of Robo Force (1/2 prime time toy show) done a year earlier.
Joe Bacal 'discovered' Chris Latta at a comedy joint in Greenwich Village.
Back to Starscream. In the 3rd season, we opened a lot of doors. One of them was the idea that robots could have ghosts. I mean, why not, they're A.I. anyway. They also have corpses. It was a great way to bring horror in. I also wanted them to fight monsters and aliens. There's a whole thing about it in my book. The very nature of Season 3 was that the toys were more 'space' oriented in general and we wanted to expand into the Universe and the paranormal zone.
That explains why Season 3 was set in the distant future of 2005.
FLINT: Yeah. That's a long time in the future. Frankly, that's what I pitched to Lorenzo for the G.I. Joe crossover (or sort of pitched). He didn't want to hear it) Not really.. But yeah. The old Joes are the Expendables, Marissa Fairbourne is at the center of it, and it's 2005, which is almost ripe for Nostalgia. War on Terror. Decepticons. And I'd find some Gods and Monsters.
However, I get to do something similar in Subterraliens, we're playtesting a module if anybody is up for it. It was conceived right after Sunbow.
RON: More unknown and fascinating history and attribute to the artistry and daring of the creative gunslingers who defied time by just doing it.
FLINT: Ron, I think that both you and I thought there was an imaginary line between Joe and Transformers, but the corporate guys didn't agree. Maybe they were right. A lot of times brand interests supersede creative interests.
Marvel did a GI Joe/Transformers mini-series. I don't believe you wrote it but do you recall any stories about how it came about?
Also Flint, Cobra Commander was famously featured in an episode. How did that come about? Also was EDC supposed to be the Joes in 2005?
BOB: Either Hasbro brought the idea of doing a crossover to Marvel or the Marvel Editor in Chief looked at the healthy sales figures of the Transformers and GI Joe comics books and proposed it. Or maybe I came up with it. Or maybe GI Joe writer Larry Hama came up with it. Whoever came up with it, based on the popularity of Transformers and GI Joe, it was an obvious choice. Probably the Marvel EIC pitched the idea.
I was asked to write it and turned it down because I was too busy. Larry Hama was asked to write it and gave the same response. So Michael Higgins, a Marvel staff editor with a few writing credits, got the assignment. Larry and I reviewed all plots to make sure he got the characterizations of all the various Joes and Transformers that he included in his stories correct and that his stories were consistent with what was going on in the two monthly comics we were writing.
FLINT: We were always trying to do crossovers and sneaking them in. Sneaking Cobra commander was obvious and criss was around, anyway.
Eventually, Optimus Prime made his triumphant return. Was this a case of Hasbro realizing they'd made a mistake? How quickly were you asked to bring him back?
Bob, how did you feel about resurrecting Optimus Prime? Were you aware of how important he was to a whole generation of kids?
Flint, the show resurrected him TWICE? How was each circumstance pitched?
Ron, I know you were off Transformers at this point but was Optimus' voice saying "Arise Rodimus Prime," an "out" you gave Hasbro to bring him back?
BOB: I told Hasbro I would eventually be bringing Optimus back after I supposedly killed him off in the comic. Any attentive reader of that particular issue could figure out that, at the end of that particular story, I left an obvious way to resurrect him in some future story.
Hasbro never ordered me to bring him back. That was always my plan.
As for how I felt about resurrecting him, well, I knew Optimus Prime was a big deal character. Killing him off would have a tremendous impact on the readers and resurrecting him would have a tremendous impact on the readers. As a writer, my goal is to always concoct stories that have an impact on the readers, so here were two stories that I felt would do that. Plus, with Optimus Prime off the stage for a while, it gave me other opportunities to come up with more stories that hopefully would have an impact, particularly stories about the power vacuum that Optimus's absence would create among the Autobots, and the potential new leaders who might fill that void.
And yeah, I knew Op was important to a lot of kids. But if all I did as a writer was play to the expectations of my audience, then my stories would lose the element of shock and surprise, and that would be to the detriment of my stories and to those readers who like shocks and surprises.
And as long as Hasbro wasn't selling new Optimus Prime toys, and I believe there was a period in the late 1980s when that was the case, it didn't care if Optimus Prime was in the comic. Hasbro's chief concern was that the comic featured the newest toys that Hasbro was selling. If a character wasn't currently on the shelves of Toys 'R' Us, then, as far as Hasbro was concerned, it may as well be dead.
FLINT: Totally separate events. The Zombie story was just us doing horror and sci-fi and the second one, and that was Marv's deal after I was mostly off on Visionaries and Garbage Pail and maybe even Tiny Toons. I had nothing to do with that, really. Maybe in kick-off meetings, but I'd mostly moved on by Return of Optimus Prime.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Let's wind back to the eighties. Hasbro wants "synergy" between the comic book and the cartoon, could you (or would you have wanted to) work together to make it happen?
BOB: "Synergy" is another word for "how about we make your life more complicated." If Hasbro asked me to do it, I would certainly give it a shot, since Hasbro was the boss and I was merely a hired hand. But a lot of it would depend on how much of a burden I felt was put upon me to be sufficiently synergistic. If all that was required was a casual phone call between Flint and me every month or two, that would probably be manageable. But if Hasbro demanded a lot more effort on my part to make the synergy work, well, at some point I probably would have walked sooner than I did. While I was writing Transformers I also had a full-time job at Marvel, so other freelance options were available to me if I wanted them, or so I would like to believe.
FLINT: Frankly, I think they had great 'synergy'. The comics did what comics do well, and the cartoons did what cartoons do well. I'm all for 'Transmedia (save for the loathsome word), but mediums all have different strengths and weaknesses. 'Synergy doesn't change that. It's just a word marketing wieners like to say. And, for the record, nobody anywhere in the chai in the day, were 'wieners' or synergists.
As seasoned writers, what advice would you give aspiring writers about writing large casts of characters with new characters constantly being added?
Why do you think TRANSFORMERS has endured?
BOB: 1) Always keep in mind while you're writing that your number one goal is to please the client. If the client wants you to introduce new characters, everything else about your writing is secondary to introducing them into your stories. Other than that, there is no one way to write a large, expanding cast of characters. Do whatever you can get away with to fulfill the client mandate, and then choose a few of the characters to focus on in your story so you have a chance to make your story interesting. The rest of the cast can be background window dressing or sidelined after you've introduced them unless your client specifically asks you to play up a particular character, in which case you should. In my experience, as long as I fulfilled job #1--introducing new characters--Hasbro pretty much let me write whatever else I wanted.
2) Certain obvious things factored into the initial success of the Transformers: the appeal of the toys, the storyline and characterizations that brought them to life, and the multi-media marketing of the brand through toys, animation, comics, etc. that penetrated the consciousness of a lot of kids back in the 1980s. Hasbro has successfully built on that foundation over the years--expanding the toy line in new directions and allowing creative partners in animation and print to expand the mythology. And, perhaps the biggest boost for the brand, Hasbro brought the Transformers into the world of live-action, blockbuster movies beginning in the mid-2000s. All of this has been met with widespread approval by much of the Transformers original fan base who have remained loyal to the brand as a result, and brought in many new fans over the years.
FLINT: It's like music. Improvise, but follow the chord change. I don't remember it being all that challenging, because we either knew the characters and the new characters were, at that point, easy to figure out. Only problem was when there were massive scale differences between the ones being subbed in and the ones being subbed out.
It's a little like Coke and New Coke. Killing Optimus was a shocker. Made people realize how much they loved the character. Also, the toys are great, Joe and Transformers were both phenomenons and I think they helped each other.
I guess my last question is for Flint. "The Skuxxoid, you created him. How do you feel about his new found popularity (along with the greater TF universe you helped create) as part of Robert Kirkman's VOID RIVALS?"
FLINT: This is the kind of thing you don't talk about until somebody asks.
Skuxxoids... If there was one thing that summed up the spirit I wanted for Season 3, it was the Skuxxoid.
I felt that there was no going back after TFTM. We had had two seasons of mostly Earth-based adventures, and the movie had uncorked possibilities like a Pandora's box or a champagne bottle.
Pick your metaphor.
The Skuxxoid, which was probably a re-purposed name initially made up for some agent or producer in the real world, (probably started as Skuzzoid), is one of the bubbles that popped out. He was precisely the kind of losaire the Quintessons would hire to do their dirty work, given that they'd pretty much alienated everybody else and the Sharkticons were way too stupid to execute anything with nuance.
I had a lot of fun with the treacherous Quintessons stiffing him, and the Rockeroid was probably something I snagged from the Buck Rogers game I was working on at the time (never made it into the game). Still, the idea of a Skuxxoid in a Rockeroid was irresistible.
He shows up, predictably in Starscream's ghost, and probably, at one point, we would have had Starscream leading a group of criminals, conmen and mercs like Skuxxoid while sorting out the Galvatron and Unicron of it. I envisioned a group like that commandeering Unicron's head as a flying pirate island or something, but that never happened.
Point is, the Skuxxoid was to be our ambassador to Transformers low life world. This, of course, never happened, and the deeper we got into the season, the more I split my time with Visionaries, which is an excellent monument to the final madness of the Sunbow days.
If people like Skuxxoids, I'm doing a lot more things like that in Subterraliens and RPG, and we're 'sneaking' at TF-CON in a couple of weeks.
I've always had a lot of fun with the characters who slither around the cracks but can connect to the main characters.
If you know Kirkman, I'd love an introduction.
RON
Just a parting but indelible thought. How lucky I was to have been in at the birth of brilliantly realized, lovable and unique and ultimately legendary superheroes with my younger brother, Al, so I had a knowing peer as dazzled as I was by SUPERMAN, BATMAN, THE SUBMARINER, BLUE BEETLE, PLASTIC MAN, FLASH GORDON, LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, et al and their "real world" brilliantly drawn tales of exotic adventure like TERRY AND THE PIRATES, and history, PRINCE VALIANT, scary mysteries like THE SHADOW, and sob story soap operas and "human" comedies like GASOLINE ALLEY, MARY WORTH, REX MORGAN M.D. and MUTT AND JEFF. It was our immensely personal festival of pleasure backed up by exciting radio adventures and Saturday Morning movie serials, and cartoon festivals lasting for hours and featuring drawings for free Depression Glass dishware, five dollar bills, and during World War II American flags, and sometimes army patches. I am who I became because of the lasting and beautiful influence of those all American, always good guy heroes, and the equally well drawn bad guys who always got their appropriate comeuppance. I am grateful now and always shall be for the visual, intellectual and moral signposts rendered beautifully and memorably by REAL ARTISTS, as real as Rembrandt, Rubens, or Tintoretto, but always far more moving and exciting for me. Having had the great good luck and extreme pleasure of being given the thrilling opportunities to write, rewrite, develop and/ or establish the G.I. JOE and TRANSFORMERS franchises and see them flourish through so many years turns out to be one of my more lasting accomplishments as a writer and I shall always be delighted to have participated along with so many wonderfully creative and skilled writers, artists, and animators who keep enlarging and extending those worlds of adventure. To whomever is listening THANK YOU ONE AND ALL.
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