Jim Shooters original treatment for The Transformers Part 2
A dive into the initial ideas for The Transformers franchise
In part 1 we briefly looked at Jim Shooter, editor-in-chief of Marvel and how he came to write the first treatment for The Transformers. In part 2 we shall take a deep dive into this initial treatment and examine just how much of it was retained when the Transformers became a comic and a cartoon.
A Treatment for transforming robots
“Civil war rages on the planet Cybertron. Destruction is catastrophic and widespread, and yet no life is lost. None, at least, in the sense that we know life – for the inhabitants of Cybertron are all machines.”
Thus begins Jim Shooter’s treatment for “The Transformers”. Obviously, this was an internal document to be shared between Marvel and Hasbro. Therefore, very few people had seen it until relatively recently. Indeed, its contents only came into the public domain when Bob Budiansky (the original writer for the Transformers comic) shared them in a presentation at the 2010 BotCon convention.
Budiansky showed the audience all 8 pages, containing the original text by Shooter and various annotations (written in various hands, including Budiansky himself). As noted above, Shooter began by naming the Transformers as the inhabitants of a planet called Cybertron and that the planet is in a civil war. He would later provide glimpses of what this world might look like: the Autobot citizens, for example, would trade and travel using ‘broad turnpikes, through the winding transit tubes, and across the soaring skyhighways of Cybertron’. The planet itself is described as ‘Saturn-sized’ (which ends up in the first issue of the comic) and orbits Alpha Centauri (also noted in the first issue), it is separated out into a series of city-states (one of which is called Iacon), and the Decepticon’s plans for the planet is to turn it into a cosmic dreadnaught (a thread Simon furman would later pick up on in the comic).
From there Shooter explained that the war was fought between intelligent mechanical creatures – Autobots and Decepticons - and that Cybertron itself was also mechanical. Intriguingly he elaborated further:
“Perhaps there was once a “real” world upon which Cybertron was built on, into, under, and through until no trace of the original planet can be found, but the origin of the planet is unknown, lost in antiquity.”
We would need to wait until Beast Machines before that aspect of the story became a reality telling us that Cybertron was built over an organic world. Before then, though, Simon Furman would hint at an earlier pre-Transformer race hidden within deeper layers of Cybertron, first in his UK three-part storyline “Underworld”, “Demons!”, and “Dawn of Darkness”, and then in the US comic as part of his post-Unicron story, in “Still Life!”. In addition, Furman’s origin story for Unicron explained that the Transformers creator, Primus, was at the heart of Cybertron.
Shooter was also forward-thinking in another way, in this original treatment:
“Similarly, it is unknown whether the robotic “life” of Cybertron was originally created by some mysterious, advanced, alien race in the dim, distant past, or whether these strange metallic beings somehow evolved from bizarre, basic life forms beyond human comprehension.”
Here lies a semblance of Furman’s’ Primus origins, but also the original cartoons’ counterclaim that the Quintessons were behind the Transformers original ‘manufacture’.
The origins of the Decepticons as living amongst the Autobots in seemingly perfect harmony, whilst secretly developing their capabilities, mirrors issue 1 of The Transformers comic almost perfectly, even down to the words ‘Finally ready, they struck’.
There is a feeling in the way that the treatment is written that Hasbro had already decided that their transforming toys would be divided into two fractions: one side would predominantly be aircraft and weapons, the other side cars. Shooter carefully explains these facts, as well as noting that the Decepticons have some amongst them who transform into seemingly ‘innocent communications devices’ and act as spies (aka Soundwave).
Fast-forward a thousand years and the war still rages. Much of what Shooter writes next is familiar from the first issue of the comic. Cybertron has shaken lose from its orbit and is now nearing an asteroid field that puts it in danger. The mightiest of the Autobot warriors launch a space vessel (no name for this yet) to blast a path through the asteroid belt. When done the Decepticons attack. Outnumbered and outgunned the Autobots have no choice but to crash the ship into the third planet of the solar system.
There are some other details here that are not included in the comic. When attacked, the Autobots attempt to flee and the chase between spaceships takes them millions of miles through space. Eventually the Decepticons manage to hold it in their tractor beam for a mere few seconds, but this is enough for them to send a boarding party onto the Autobot ship. When the ship, with all combatants on board crashes into the Earth, those who remained on the Decepticon ship ‘turn homeward toward Cybertron, which is already hurtling out of the solar system and onward into the black reaches of space’.
What happens next takes four million years, but for this brief history, it will continue next week in part 3 of Jim Shooters original treatment for the Transformers…