Generation One Cartoon: A four season long shitpost. Really wants you to buy some toys.
Transformers The Movie: All My Friends Are Dead The Movie. Featuring a musical score by somebody with a serious hard-on for rock music.
Marvel Comic: A grand cosmic adventure spanning thousands of years and tackling themes of morality and faith, interspersed with the goofiest shit imaginable.
Headmasters: Only notable for the terrible dub. Fortress Maximus has come himself.
Masterforce: Things go off the rails. Wishes it was a Gundam show.
Victory: Things go back to normal. Starring BURNING JUSTICE. Probably the best of the animes.
Zone: A yaoi anime posing as Transformers. An utter enigma. Probably would’ve been hilarious if it got past the first episode.
Generation Two: The one everybody forgets. Contains dangerous amounts of 80’s and terrible rap music.
Beast Wars: The Transformers become furries in order to survive in the time of cavemen. Somehow manages to be awesome despite a bizarre premise.
Beast Machines: Also known as “Why You Don’t Fix Things That Aren’t Broken”.
Robots In Disguise: That guy at work who you don’t hate, but you don’t exactly like him either. Starring a shark that does poetry.
Armada: A wacky scavenger hunt for Pokémon leads to the deaths of hundreds. Everybody keeps forgetting everybody else’s names for some reason.
Energon: The screw-up the rest of the family hates. You expected nothing and you were still disappointed. Has weirdly good music.
Cybertron: Unexpectedly good. Doesn’t get as much respect as it probably should.
Dreamwave Comics: Professionally published fan fiction. Everyone pretends they never liked it to save face. All the characters have the Ctrl-Alt-Delete face.
IDW Comics: Professionally published fan fiction, except it’s actually good this time. Won’t stop until every character is gay.
Kiss Players: The actual WORST. Embodies every horrible stereotype about Japanese media. You’ll probably get arrested if you read it in public.
Bayverse: The red-headed stepchild. Makes a ton of money but is so obnoxious everyone else ignores it.
Animated: Was too good for this sinful world. More anime than the actual animes. Inspires a lot of really weird fanfics.
Transformers Prime: What Bayverse would’ve been if it was competently made. Dwayne Johnson is in the first episode for no readily apparent reason.
“For Cybertron” Games: The only video games in the franchise even worth mentioning. Gears Of War with robots.
Rescue Bots: Pure and innocent in every way.
Robots In Disguise: Has nothing to do with the first “RID”. Ostensibly a sequel to Prime, but feels like it didn’t really want to be one.
Some bits and bobs of information I gathered from comics and such, hopefully they might aid with writing or reference.
MARBS– Mobile Autobot Repair Bays.
The Regenisis Progam- Created by Shockwave with the intent of seeding many planets with energon so that, in the distant future, he could harvest them.
Soundwave also organized a number of Anti-Neutral Programs
NAIL– Non Alligned Indigenioud Lifeform. I.E, A Cybertronian who is neither an Autobot or a Decepticon
I/D Chip- Inhibitor/Deterrence chips that freezes the transformation cog- among other things. (Created by Wheeljack)
Both sides hoarded sparks during the war
Ambulatory System– Self explanatory
Inhibitor Claw- Form of restraint used by security and law enforcement on pre-war Cybertron. More effective than handcuffs or leg restraints.
Underbase– a collection of knowledge that underlies all databases; the combined knowledge of the Transformer race.
Solar Pool– What is does is unknown, only that it contains destructive energies within.
Energon Lake– A reservoir of energon located in the Sea Of Rust. Possibly the only major source of energon left on Cybertron.
Pious Pools– Rung was from the Pious Pools, living near the Vinvissius Canals during his youth. The Pious Pools we’re wiped off the planet in the rebirth initiated by Vector Sigma.
Vinvissius Canals– Landmark
Other places wiped off planet by Vector Sigma: Mesmerica, Warriors Gate (also a saying, ‘What in the Warriors Gate), Fragmented Whole, The Vaulted Heights Of K’th Kinsere (also a saying, ‘By the Vaulted Heights Of-‘), Pess Pess, The First City, The Transeptum of Infinte Reach and Subterrania.
Hydrax Plateau– An island in the center of the Rust Sea. It holds Cybertron’s primary spaceport, where planetary visitors must check in first.
Sonic Canyons– Located on the southern side of Cybertron, the deafening sound of underground machinary wells up from their depths and echoes up from the surface. The noise causes the constant falling of scrap metal to come tumbling down, making the canyons direct environment inhabitable.
densely populated settlements do, however, live there, including the Autobot Siren. (People who live their often have loud voices)
The Canyons function as Primus’s sensory organs, their resonating structures allowing him to collect data from across the galaxy, which is then proscessed into a more meaningful format by the Vecta Sigma supercomputer.
Moon Alpha– The main spacesport of Cybertron’s moon Alpha.
Deterrence Chips– Usually used by Autobots with their prisoners. Administered to the head, and, when activated, blow up, killing the prisoner.
Electronic Jammer- composed of crystal rod wound with copper wire. Capable of interfering with Transformers circuits and incapting them.
Ion- Neautralisers– Autobots who wander into an ion-neautraliser will be disabled in a flash of green light.
Anti-Grav manicales–
Detention Sphere– when activated, creates a force field around the beings nearest.
Ultra Prison– A Decepticon invention for holding and killing Autobots. Creates an impenetrable domb of ultra-refined energon, which slowly wipes the mind of any Mech imprisoned in it.
Noisemaze– Mesothulas created the Noisemaze, a portal doorway that leads the prisoner with a ‘small pocket dimension assembled from harvested matter-gaps in the fabric of our universe’
Ethics Committee– any new weapon created by the Autobots must past a Protocal of the non conventional weapons act before it can be used in battle. Brainstorm liked to terrorise the committee with weapons so awful that ‘nothing short of the moment destruction of Cybertron and the universe would justify their use.’ He coined them ‘the unmentionables’.
Cerebro-sensitive-bullets– bullets that lock onto the targts neural processor when the bullet is fired. Anyone using them is gaurented a headshot.
The Clampdown– A time in Cybertron history when the planet was essentially put under martial law. Heightening security measures to protect its citizens and weed out potential terroists.
Milant Monofrom Movement- Monoformers who made a symbolic rejection of Adaptis by removing their t-cog
Solar Barge– either towed by a smaller ship or solar sails to move with its own power. Used to transport prisoners.
MAABs– Mobile Anti-Assault Battlesuit.
Grand Cybertronian Taxonomy– All Cybertronian life is classified in one great system, the Grand Cybertronian Taxonomy, determining the placement of transformers in its heirachy based on Alternate modes.
Rust Sea– Crystalline growths grow along the bayous edge from the Rust Sea’s energon particles
Five Dark Epochs– five significant periods of the Great War that almost brought the Transformers race to extinction. Includes: The Uprising, The Exodus, The Remote Age, The Cataclys and The Surge.
Omniglobe– Sphere shaped cells which can feed massive amounts of data to their occupants.
Cluster Bomb– Explosive Weapon
Data Slug– Small, rectangular object that stores significant amounts of information
Death Cloak– a medical scanning device that monitors the rate in which a Cybertronians spark is shrinking, allowing it to calculate time remaining before death. People like Drift aren’t fond of them.
Axis Cradle– Technology that allows Cybertronians to imprint their will onto another being.
The thing about older comics like Marvel’s Transformers series is, they don’t tend to break down into neat, small arcs like modern books do, with defined start- and endpoints. Any such delineation would be fan-conceived and contentious, so that’s why we don’t have articles for something that doesn’t really exist. Loosely speaking, the various periods of the book’s history would best be described as follows:
Issues #1-4 – the original mini-series, telling the story of the Transformers’ arrival on Earth, and the Autobots triumph over the Decepticons with the aid of the Witwicky family.
Issues #5-12 – Shockwave overthrows Megatron as leader of the Decepticons and Ratchet is left alone to rescue his captured fellow Autobots from the villains. Introduces the Dinobots, Construticons, and Jetfire.
Issues #13-26 – Megatron and Shockwave vie for Decepticon leadership as the new 1985 range of toys are gradually introduced. A two-part story in #17-18 revisits Cybertron and looks in on the Autobot rebellion there. The Scramble City combiner teams are introduced, and Megatron and Optimus Prime die after a video game duel.
Issues #27-37 – Grimlock becomes Autobot leader. Goldbug and Blaster reject his tyrannical leadership and go it alone, becoming wanted ‘bots.
Issues #38-46 – Spinning out of The Headmasters #1-4 mini-series, the Headmasters and Targetmasters arrive on Earth and help restore Optimus Prime to life.
Issues #47-50 – “The Underbase Saga”. A four-issue deck-clearing exercise in which Starscream attains cosmic power and kills everyone who doesn’t have a toy on shelves anymore.
Issues #51-55 – Writer Bob Budiansky runs out the clock on his time on the comic with silly one-shot adventures starring Pretenders and Micromasters.
Issues #56-61 – New writer Simon Furman comes on board. The Classic Pretenders are introduced, and the Primus/Unicron origin story is related for the first time in the US comic, setting up the plot that will run to the end of the series.
Issues #62-66 – “Matrix Quest.” A four-part story in which the newest toys search for the lost Matrix to combat the approaching threat of Unicron.
Issues #67-75 – Decepticon in-fighting causes trouble as Optimus Prime tries to unite all Cybertronians in preparation for Unicron’s coming.
Issue #76-80 – Wrapping up the loose ends post-Unicron.
Wow, thank you!
I was gonna read some of this to get context for Regeneration One. Now I’m not sure if I should just read some choice bits or try and skim read the whole thing.
In G1 – both comic and cartoon – you could restore a Transformer to life just by rebuilding their damaged body, even after the introduction of the Matrix. Check out one of the very earliest examples of Transformer death and resurrection, from issue #3 of the Marvel comic:
Not that it was always this easy, of course; only the advanced skills of a Quintesson could bring Optimus Prime back to life in the cartoon, while in the comic, Ratchet had a real tough time of it repairing the many Autobots who were offlined by the cosmically-empowered Starscream:
It ultimately took the use of highly-advanced Pretender technology to repair a few of them, and infusions of the rare and powerful Nucleon to restore the rest.
It was with the introduction of sparks in Beast Wars, and their continued use in media after that, that resurrecting a Transformer has usually come to require some “mystical” intervention, to one extent or another. This generally makes it a bit tougher to resurrect someone, as it usually requires that a ‘bot actually voyage into the afterlife and essentially “guide” the spark of the deceased back to the material world – as Rhinox did for Optimus Primal in Beast Wars, the Mini-Cons did for Optimus Prime in Armada, Sam Witwicky did for Optimus Prime in Revenge of the Fallen, Alpha Trion did for Ultra Magnus in the Transformers Legends manga, or Scarlett did for Optimus Prime in G.I. Joe vs Transformers:
That usually – but not always – requires access to some kind of sacred implement like the Matrix or Vector Sigma, which can’t be used by just anybody; and in the cases where these items don’t come into play, it’s usually some even more complicated and arcane way of doing things (like Rhinox’s use of a fortuitous transwarp explosion, or Scarlett using the brainwave scanner to induce transcendental mania.) The resurrections you mention in “Heart of Darkness” were done through the power of the titular object, so they were really “undead” rather than alive again. It was only thanks to an energy surge from Vector Sigma/the Matrix that Cyclonus was fully restored to life.
Cybertronian Database 