Rare, never-before-seen concept material from years past

[Sabrblade]

A few days ago, the Facebook pages for both BotCon and their soon-to-be-former merchandise partner Night Shining, Inc. posted never-before-seen concept material from years past.



The first is a pitch that was made by Fun Publications back in 2010 for a sort of Rescue Bots type spinoff of G.I. Joe, called "Adventure Team", with art provided by Evan Gauntt.

An internal pitch that was made to Hasbro back in the mid 2010’s. With the brand having direction issues, the current team at Night Shining (who use to work for the official G.I.Joe licensee) made this pitch. It brought together 1970’s Adventure Team G.I. Joe with the concept of the 1980’s ARAH. This concept was pitched as a mix of appeal to the Rescue Bots and Transformers Prime audience. Basically, what cartoons use to be in the 80’s!

Obviously it was not used by Hasbro, but what do you think? Would something like this have been a hit? A young Cobra Commander, Destro, and Baroness? Future G.I. Joe’s making weekly guest appearances? Guess we’ll never know. (And never knowing is… the other half of the battle?)

The amazing art for the pitch was done by Evan ZeroMayhem

The second is the earliest concept PDF for what would ultimately become Transformers: Prime, laying out the earliest intentions and goals for what fans would term the "Aligned Continuity", unifying video games, novels, comics, cartoons, packaging blurbs, and web content into one conglomerated universe.

At this point, the movies and G1 were still the biggest influences. Animated's influence had not yet been added to the mix, while Revenge of the Fallen was the most recent source of influence.

Much of the artwork in this pitch was made for the "Binder of Revelation", the production bible that served as the creative backbone of the Aligned Continuity. While none of these designs actually made it into the final version of Transformers: Prime, several of these pieces made it into the books Transformers: The Ultimate Pop-Up Universe and Transformers: The Covenant of Primus.

NEVER BEFORE SEEN concepts for the series Transformers: Prime! (August 2009 WIP - Not Final)

It’s been 13 years since Transformers Prime debuted. For better or worse, this franchise was the series intent on transitioning the characters from the big screen to the small.

Like many media projects, the initial idea is often somewhat to quite different than what is finally seen on the screen.

So, with that seems now is the perfect time to show off a little something we have been holding on to for the last 14 years - The original official working pdf pitch for what would eventually be known as Transformers: Prime. The series had a working title of ‘Robots in Disguise’ and as you will see, the design and character selection was initially much more aligned with the live action movies.

So take a look! We are showing off around 20 pages of the pdf here. Some amazing never before seen looks at the Prime series!

 

[Sabrblade]

There were too many pics for one post. Had to split it in two:

 

[Cybersnark]

Ooh, that concept of Optimus having different trailers is in line with an idea I had years ago.

My version also included different arm-guns for Megatron (Megs himself would come with a dressed-up laser-pointer, but other [smaller, sub-Legends-class] figures would be packed with pressure-fired missiles, air/water bellows, spring-loaded launchers, Mechtech-style transforming guns,, etc).

 

[Sabrblade]

Some more concepts that I forgot to post before.



Back in 2021, one year before BotCon would return in its current iteration, it was originally planned for it to return that year instead of 2022, but the continuing pandemic pushed those plans back a year. But because it was supposed to return in 2021, the first BotCon exclusive toy since 2016 was produced and released online during that year: Wasp Raider.

Produced by Valaverse as part of their Action Force line, Wasp Raider was a direct homage to Waspinator from Beast Wars, and was supposed to be the first of three such figures, but was the only one to see release.

Now, thanks to the BotCon Facebook, we have pics of two more Beast Wars-homage concepts for Valaverse's Action Force, Aracknid (Blackarachnia homage) and Scale Face (Dinobot homage).

As you may have heard, our partner Night Shining is closing up shop at the end of the year. With only 10 days left in 2023, we thought we’d take a look at some of the other TF inspired exclusives they had planned/proposed.

First up. The Action Force BotCon exclusive Wasp Raider. This was the FIRST new BotCon exclusive in nearly 5 years when BC Productions acquired the BotCon trademark. Produced by Night Shining, the thought was to actually do THREE BW homages.

Wasp Raider (Inspired by Waspinator)

Aracknid (working name) - a Blackarachnia inspired toy

Scale Face (working name) - a Dinobot inspired toy.

Despite Wasp Raider being one of Action Forces most popular releases, and doing extremely well for Night Shining having sold out completely, for whatever reason Valaverse decided just to keep all their releases in house. A shame for sure. But it’s always good to see the BotCon brand expanded out in to other fandoms, at retail, and in homages such a Gridman. So for that, we can say we are happy that this item got released and is out there for BotCon fans to enjoy!

Next, Night Shining, Inc. has posted to Facebook a whole slew of prototype designs for the Beast Wars toyline's second-year packaging.

Some of these designs are pretty close to what we got back in 1997, while others are wholly different from anything we've ever seen before.

Many feature the name "Dragonfire", which was a preliminary name for the Predacon Jetstorm. The use of both Maximal and Predacon labels for him were likely just to demonstrate the differences between Maximal and Predacon packaging variants. The cross sells on the back even show that certain figures didn't even have proper names yet at all.

Another fun little "never before seen" update. Concepts for Beast Wars series 2? Series 3? Packaging from way back in the day. Some of these are pretty wild. These are scans of the concept proof cards we use to have, but have all been long since sold minus a couple. What is your favorite design?

 

[Sabrblade]

Once again, too many pics. Had to split into two posts.

 

[Sabrblade]

A point of clarification regarding the Aligned material. Aaron Archer has clarified that these date back more to 2007, around the time of the first live-action movie, rather than August 2009 as the original Facebook post states. This matches up with previous statements that initial work on the Aligned continuity first began in 2007 after the initial success of that first movie.

 

[Superomegaprime]

Honestly, I would like to see that conspect Megatron made into a toy, it looks awesome!

 

[ssg 4 life]

dragonfire was a way cooler name for jetstorm

 

[CoffeeHorse]

You know who else had cool names? Shark, Falcon, Tiger, Crab, and Fire Ant.

 

[ZacWilliam1]

"Did someone call for Shark Falcon?"

ZacWilliam, would definitely have bought a Tiger Crab Fuzor.

 

[Sabrblade]

ZacWilliam, would definitely have bought a Tiger Crab Fuzor.

Would you have taken a Buffalo Crab triple-changer instead?

 

[CoffeeHorse]

I really like that rhino dino.

 

[Andrusi]

I really like that rhino dino.

 

[Sabrblade]

Back in September, a lengthy thread was posted on Twitter by former members of Fun Publications in which several toy concepts (both for made and never-made exclusives), pieces of comic art, and other behind-the-scenes information was posted. I asked @SHIELD Agent 47 if he could grab the contents of this thread for safekeeping (after what happened with all of Joe Moore's Tweets getting nuked after he left Twitter), and he went above and beyond the call of duty, grabbing everything and then some and saving it all to an Imgur gallery.

He not only grabbed all of the images, but also screen-capped all of the Tweets (text and all) and even included every Tweet's URL between certain images in the Imgur gallery. As the total number of images in this gallery is 213, I'll be spreading the image embeds across twelve posts (due to the image embed limit being 20 pics).

But rather than post them all at once, I felt it would be more fun to spread them out over the next few days, posting them from now until New Years, as both a fun way to close out the year 2024 and to let more people take in all the images one batch at a time day-by-day. Of course, since there's only six days left until New Years, some days will have two batches instead of just one, but I'll try to space those out by a different hours of the day.

So, without further ado, here is the first batch of images:

 

[CoffeeHorse]

The Human Alliance idea is my favorite so far.

I say it every time a new collection of unproduced FunPub ideas gets revealed, but I hope this continues to be an annual tradition long past the point of plausibility.