Giving this its own thread since it ended up ballooning to astronomical proportions (in other words, spread across five posts).
I have a new theory that pertains to the existence and history of Cybertron, as depicted across the sprawling Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity (or "JG1" for short), and it's quite a doozy.
Introduction
In the beginning, Planet Cybertron (or セイバートロン星 Seibātoron-sei "Planet Seibertron" in Japan) was presented in the G1 cartoon as a metallic planet, which would become its traditional iconic appearance.
But then, in the tenth episode of The Headmasters, "Planet Cybertron in Grave Danger, Part 2" (which was set in the year 2011), Cybertron was blown up and destroyed, leaving behind only a ruined husk of its outer shell.
For the remainder of the 1980s-early 1990s Japanese Generation 1 fiction (Super-God Masterforce, Victory, Zone, The Battlestars, and Operation Combination), Cybertron was never seen again, nor mentioned in the context of the planet ever existing again.
That is, until the Japanese version of Generation 2. In "G-2" (as it was known in Japan), a political body known as the Cybertron Alliance (セイバートロン連合 Seibātoron Rengō) was introduced as a peaceful union between the Autobots and Decepticons, having finally ended the eons-old conflict between the two (only for war to soon break out again, but I digress).
While the term contained the same name as the planet, there wasn't yet any evidence that the planet had returned to the story.
Then Beast Wars rolled around.
For the first time since its destruction in The Headmasters, Cybertron was back, shown infrequently but fully intact in the Beast Wars cartoon, with no explanation.
Now, of course, this was because the Beast Wars creators weren't going off of any knowledge of the previous Japanese Transformers fiction, as they obviously weren't aware of anything that happened in it.
The same was true of the creators of the Beast Wars sequel series Beast Machines, which likewise depicted Cybertron in one piece with its traditional outward look.
And, from the perspective of the English version, both Beast Wars and Beast Machines didn't actually take place in the exact same continuity as the original G1 cartoon, but in a world up made of elements taken from both it and the G1 Marvel comics, which were merged together to create a new universe that was similar to both but still different enough in its own right.
But, that was not the case in the Japanese dubs. In Japan, both Beast Wars and Beast Machines—renamed "Beast Wars" (season 1), "Beast Wars Metals" (seasons 2–3), and "Beast Wars Returns" (Beast Machines)—were part of the same universe as the G1 cartoon and its various Japanese-original sequel series (The Headmasters, Super-God Masterforce, Victory, Zone, The Battlestars, Operation Combination, and G-2). This meant that Cybertron was somehow restored back to its original form at some point in the distant future long after it had been blown up in the year 2011. Yet, no explanation for this was ever given at the time.
It wouldn't be until 2015–2016 when the Unite Warriors manga rolled around that we'd finally get some real information about Cybertron's restoration. In the first chapter, it was revealed by Unicron that Cybertron had finally been rebuilt by the year 2021, ten years after its destruction in 2011. The second chapter then revealed that not only was its restoration recently completed in that year, but that the ones mainly responsible for rebuilding the planet were a special team consisting of Sky Lynx, Hound, Ratchet, Wheeljack, and Trailbreaker. And the fourth chapter saw Hound confirm that it did indeed take the whole ten years (2011 to 2021) to rebuild the planet.
Here is the page from the second chapter showing Sky Lynx's team being tasked by Vector Sigma (who miraculously survived the Cybertron's explosion) with the planet's restoration:
<<<<Reads right-to-left<<<<
And here is a collage of the relevant parts of the other aforementioned chapters:
And yet, while this told us when in the timeline Cybertron was rebuilt, and which individuals were personally involved in its reconstruction, the exact means through which the restoration was performed still remained undisclosed.
Some guesses and speculation did exist, though. But before we get into those, I feel it would be best to first explore some of the history of Cybertron's physiology.
Physiological history
In the G1 cartoon episode "The Key to Vector Sigma, Part 1", we were introduced to Vector Sigma, which Megatron described as "The megacomputer deep in the core of Cybertron... which gave us all life!"
While the episode didn't give us a full view of the Vector Sigma Chamber which housed said computer, interior shots showed the chamber's walls and floors to be just as metallic as the rest of the planet.
The only real look we got of the chamber's exterior was this shot:
It wouldn't be until The Headmasters that we'd finally get a complete look at the exterior of Vector Sigma's chamber, providing us a full view of the very core of the planet.
By the show's third season, the episode "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 4" revealed Cybertron to have originally been "a factory, built by the Quintessons to manufacture..." the "lineal ancestors of the Decepticons and the Autobots." The episode also showed that, even back then, the planet looked like this:
So for all those millions of years, it was a world made of metal.
Fast forward to the Beast Machines cartoon, wherein some new revelations about Cybertron were given. While the planet's exterior was its traditional look, what lay beneath the surface was something else entirely.
Vector Sigma was brought back into the series, but in a totally new form.
By this series's time, Vector Sigma had evolved into the Oracle, which was now found within a brand new chamber no longer located at the planet's core.
Why? Well, because this is what the core now looked like:
That's a pretty stark contrast from how the very metallic, very-much-not-organic Vector Sigma Chamber was the planetary core in both the G1 cartoon and The Headmasters.
Yet, Beast Machines remained adamantly certain that the Cybertron in that show was the very same planet it had always been since the time of Cybertron's initial creation so many eons in the past. And the show's Japanese dub would have likely reflect that stance.
Comtinued below...
I have a new theory that pertains to the existence and history of Cybertron, as depicted across the sprawling Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity (or "JG1" for short), and it's quite a doozy.
Introduction
In the beginning, Planet Cybertron (or セイバートロン星 Seibātoron-sei "Planet Seibertron" in Japan) was presented in the G1 cartoon as a metallic planet, which would become its traditional iconic appearance.
But then, in the tenth episode of The Headmasters, "Planet Cybertron in Grave Danger, Part 2" (which was set in the year 2011), Cybertron was blown up and destroyed, leaving behind only a ruined husk of its outer shell.
For the remainder of the 1980s-early 1990s Japanese Generation 1 fiction (Super-God Masterforce, Victory, Zone, The Battlestars, and Operation Combination), Cybertron was never seen again, nor mentioned in the context of the planet ever existing again.
That is, until the Japanese version of Generation 2. In "G-2" (as it was known in Japan), a political body known as the Cybertron Alliance (セイバートロン連合 Seibātoron Rengō) was introduced as a peaceful union between the Autobots and Decepticons, having finally ended the eons-old conflict between the two (only for war to soon break out again, but I digress).
While the term contained the same name as the planet, there wasn't yet any evidence that the planet had returned to the story.
Then Beast Wars rolled around.
For the first time since its destruction in The Headmasters, Cybertron was back, shown infrequently but fully intact in the Beast Wars cartoon, with no explanation.
Now, of course, this was because the Beast Wars creators weren't going off of any knowledge of the previous Japanese Transformers fiction, as they obviously weren't aware of anything that happened in it.
The same was true of the creators of the Beast Wars sequel series Beast Machines, which likewise depicted Cybertron in one piece with its traditional outward look.
And, from the perspective of the English version, both Beast Wars and Beast Machines didn't actually take place in the exact same continuity as the original G1 cartoon, but in a world up made of elements taken from both it and the G1 Marvel comics, which were merged together to create a new universe that was similar to both but still different enough in its own right.
But, that was not the case in the Japanese dubs. In Japan, both Beast Wars and Beast Machines—renamed "Beast Wars" (season 1), "Beast Wars Metals" (seasons 2–3), and "Beast Wars Returns" (Beast Machines)—were part of the same universe as the G1 cartoon and its various Japanese-original sequel series (The Headmasters, Super-God Masterforce, Victory, Zone, The Battlestars, Operation Combination, and G-2). This meant that Cybertron was somehow restored back to its original form at some point in the distant future long after it had been blown up in the year 2011. Yet, no explanation for this was ever given at the time.
It wouldn't be until 2015–2016 when the Unite Warriors manga rolled around that we'd finally get some real information about Cybertron's restoration. In the first chapter, it was revealed by Unicron that Cybertron had finally been rebuilt by the year 2021, ten years after its destruction in 2011. The second chapter then revealed that not only was its restoration recently completed in that year, but that the ones mainly responsible for rebuilding the planet were a special team consisting of Sky Lynx, Hound, Ratchet, Wheeljack, and Trailbreaker. And the fourth chapter saw Hound confirm that it did indeed take the whole ten years (2011 to 2021) to rebuild the planet.
Here is the page from the second chapter showing Sky Lynx's team being tasked by Vector Sigma (who miraculously survived the Cybertron's explosion) with the planet's restoration:
<<<<Reads right-to-left<<<<
And here is a collage of the relevant parts of the other aforementioned chapters:
And yet, while this told us when in the timeline Cybertron was rebuilt, and which individuals were personally involved in its reconstruction, the exact means through which the restoration was performed still remained undisclosed.
Some guesses and speculation did exist, though. But before we get into those, I feel it would be best to first explore some of the history of Cybertron's physiology.
Physiological history
In the G1 cartoon episode "The Key to Vector Sigma, Part 1", we were introduced to Vector Sigma, which Megatron described as "The megacomputer deep in the core of Cybertron... which gave us all life!"
While the episode didn't give us a full view of the Vector Sigma Chamber which housed said computer, interior shots showed the chamber's walls and floors to be just as metallic as the rest of the planet.
The only real look we got of the chamber's exterior was this shot:
It wouldn't be until The Headmasters that we'd finally get a complete look at the exterior of Vector Sigma's chamber, providing us a full view of the very core of the planet.
By the show's third season, the episode "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 4" revealed Cybertron to have originally been "a factory, built by the Quintessons to manufacture..." the "lineal ancestors of the Decepticons and the Autobots." The episode also showed that, even back then, the planet looked like this:
So for all those millions of years, it was a world made of metal.
Fast forward to the Beast Machines cartoon, wherein some new revelations about Cybertron were given. While the planet's exterior was its traditional look, what lay beneath the surface was something else entirely.
Vector Sigma was brought back into the series, but in a totally new form.
By this series's time, Vector Sigma had evolved into the Oracle, which was now found within a brand new chamber no longer located at the planet's core.
Why? Well, because this is what the core now looked like:
That's a pretty stark contrast from how the very metallic, very-much-not-organic Vector Sigma Chamber was the planetary core in both the G1 cartoon and The Headmasters.
Yet, Beast Machines remained adamantly certain that the Cybertron in that show was the very same planet it had always been since the time of Cybertron's initial creation so many eons in the past. And the show's Japanese dub would have likely reflect that stance.
Comtinued below...
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