Like... I REALLY want to know about
Hyperdrive. I want to know about the toy that never was, if there were any packaging samples or additional art mockups. It looks like a really fun toy design and I'd love to know more about what went into it before it was cancelled, and why it was cancelled. I'm sure that info is skulking around somewhere, and I'd love to learn.
But Jim Sorensen/AVP telling me he exists in some meaningless technobabble continuity that only exists
on Skyquake's Megavisor slide tells me nothing. Nothing actually meaningful is told. Just that someone's flimsy one-still image centric fanfic got a special universe stream because apparently that's what we do now.
For my part, I'd like to know if Hyperdrive was always meant to be his own character, or (as one fan theory has it) was an early design for what would become Thunderclash that got scaled down and renamed as Toei-G1 entered its Dying Days and Hasbro's European divisions were unwilling to commit to the higher price point the figure would have required.
All we currently have to go on is the design sheet and name. We can't be 100% certain, but it's likely that the process never got any further than that, at least for the character we "know". As a tail-end G1 Autobot Commander, we can surmise that Hyperdrive would have been super-duper-heroic (and his Toei variant would have had plenty of BURNING JUSTICE) -- but until AVP, we had no fiction to speak of. (And some would argue that we still don't, not really. Yes, we have a bio and quick rundown of all his super-duper-heroic deeds, but it's not
quite the same as actual televised or published stories, is it?)
At least "Giant Decepticon Warrior/Soldier" (the Japanese word can be rendered either way in English) had some fiction, though it took Juniper's translations of Toei's model sheet for the fandom to be sure that he wasn't just a miscoloured Scorponok.
My second objection is... ok even if you know all the jargon and how it works, sure, "Primax 514.3 Gamma" is an anchor. So tell me. What's the designation for the EarthSpark cartoon?
Challenge accepted!
Okay, so an animated series would be an Alpha stream, and Cybersnark provided the first stream/broadcast date. What we don't have -- and this is where we come full circle to when I launched this thread back in '22 -- is a cluster designation.
So, while it has "evergreen" designs, and used Toei-style animation for its flashbacks, the real distinctive point for the franchise (toy and cartoon) launch appears to be that this is "the cluster where Quintus Prime comes to Earth with the Emberstone, sentio metallico, and rarified Energon, and when the conditions were right, New Transformers were born on Earth from the resulting 'spot'". So... let's call it the Vitalix cluster, because Life Found A Way.
We have a Vitalix 1122.11 Alpha for the cartoon, and a Vitalix MYY.dd Beta for the toyline launch.
Now, astute readers will point out that I am not the Transtech (who are better than us). Nor am I Jim Sorenson, or Vector Prime, or in any way affiliated with Hasbro or TakaraTomy. I have no clout to speak of, and likely negative charisma when it comes to persuading people in the fandom. At
best, I could add this new-ish cluster to the fanon wiki and hope.
But as my mother once said, "Don't ask the question if you don't actually want an answer," and for what little it's worth, here's my "stupid BS" attempt at one.