Yeah, if the next license holder fancied adapting this into a mini series I'd definitely buy it, it would be a neat What If.
TFNation 2022 (First Draft of TF:TM explained)
- Thread starter MrBlud
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I'd like a mini series, but not too mini. This is a significantly longer story than we got in the finished film, and I would want to see an adaptation take its time and do it right.
Even if Hasbro required an adaptation to use the familiar film characters instead of these early concepts (which would be sad, but I'd understand) there's still usable material here. Unicron is a better villain here. The Junkions are tied to the Unicron plot rather than just being a wacky wayside tribe. Galvatron sounds like more of a maniac here. Killing a few of the new characters was bold and never would have been approved for a movie that existed to sell new toys, but in a comic series today it would be fine.
The thing that ultimately surprised me most from all this unearthing of older apocrypha is mostly that they were raring to go with a movie before the first episode of the G1 cartoon even aired. Like before they even knew they'd be out of whatever Japanese shape changing vehicle robots, they were like "make us some new characters, also kill off Optimus". Before tv watching kids even knew his name. Like damn, that's some commitment that they knew they had a big seller on their hands.
Funny enough to me I had always interpreted the vintage TV spots touting the film as "two years in the making!" as just hyperbole because the show had been running for two years at that point, not that the film literally was being workshopped in that very same timespan.
Funny enough to me I had always interpreted the vintage TV spots touting the film as "two years in the making!" as just hyperbole because the show had been running for two years at that point, not that the film literally was being workshopped in that very same timespan.
That assumes that Hasbro wanted a movie at that point and I think we make that assumption at our peril. Yes, in the animation world, things rarely get beyond a basic premise unless they've been greenlit for production. But Ron Friedman was from the live-action Hollywood system, where people do write scripts with no guarantee of being approved. One thing that all parties involved have agreed upon in interviews and conventions is that his agent got him a deal where he was locked in to write movies arising out of any TV shows he worked on. With him slathering black marker all over the season 1 scripts, he had guaranteed that if there was a Transformers movie, he would write it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that Hasbro had decided there would be a Transformers movie at that point in August/September 1984
I guess we need to see if we can find similarly early scripts for Hasbro's other 'The Movie' projects.
The Heritage Auctions material in 2010 tells us that he started work on GI Joe The Movie immediately after his second TFTM script. According to Buzz Dixon when he was interviewed in Marvel Age in late 1986, the process went thusly: Ron Friedman wrote an outline, Hasbro didn't like it and with every revision he then did, it just made the problem worse. Then Steve Gerber was brought in off story-editing the main series to try and fix the problem. That didn't work either, so they looked to Buzz, who said "Let's just start over". So the Joe movie was effectively taken away from Friedman. He would be sent drafts and make his revisions, but it was definitely Buzz Dixon's framework.
The My Little Pony movie, there is absolutely zero information on production timeline. But with George Arthur Bloom at the helm, I'm willing to bet things went a little more smoothly.
The Jem movie was a sad tale. By early April 1986, Christy M a r x had submitted a round of premises for the movie, saying to the office she was uncertain of what the overall point and direction of the movie was going to be. Before the Spring was over, she had an outline ready. That outline was never approved as the movie was axed due to low doll sales out of the gate (The series beyond season 1 would probably have been axed if they hadn't already sold a full 65 to syndicators). By early June, she was looking at ways of salvaging as much of the movie ideas and incorporating them into the series as she could.
I'm so ready.
Take your time. This is history in the making.