Robots in Disguise continuity family
From Transformers Wiki
The Robots in Disguise continuity family encompasses all of the fiction produced under the umbrella of the 2001 Robots in Disguise franchise, which chiefly ran from 2001 to 2002 in the United States. At its core is the 39-episode cartoon imported from Japan, which tells the story of Koji Onishi as he joins Optimus Prime and the Autobots to protect Earth from Megatron.
In the worlds of Robots in Disguise, the Decepticons as they are traditionally known do not exist, and the Autobots instead battle the Predacons: a faction of malevolent (though somewhat incompetent) Cybertronians with beast modes. The Decepticons of these realities are merely a specific subgroup of Predacons who possess vehicle-based alternate modes. The Robots in Disguise franchise began as a stopgap "filler" franchise meant to buy time between the end of Beast Machines and the beginning of Armada, and as a result its characters and concepts occupy a complex, if not outright bizarre, place in the Transformers mythos and even on this very wiki (but keep reading for more on that).
In the decades since, Hasbro has largely forgotten about Robots in Disguise; it has its fans, however, and its comparative obscurity allowed works like Ask Vector Prime greater leeway to mess around in the margins of the universe and consolidate a number of obscure side universes under the Robots in Disguise banner.
Within the fictional Transformers multiverse, the TransTech classify every Robots in Disguise continuity as a part of the "Viron" universal cluster.
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Conceptual history
The Robots in Disguise continuity family has its origins in the Transformers: Car Robots cartoon. First broadcast on Japanese television in 2000, Car Robots marked the final installment of a run of five Transformers cartoons that had aired consecutively in Japan since 1997, beginning with the Japanese broadcast of Beast Wars and continuing with Beast Wars II, Beast Wars Neo, Beast Wars Metals, and finally capped off by Car Robots. However, while it was meant to be set in the same world as all of the shows that came before it, Car Robots initially presented itself as a largely standalone series. As a result, most of the fandom came to view Car Robots as a sort of continuity reboot, separate from its predecessors instead of connected to them.
While more references to past series (meant to tie Car Robots back to what all had come before) were introduced later in the series' run, these little references were insufficient in fully changing the fandom's majority perception of Car Robots being a reboot. Thus, when the series was imported over to the West by Hasbro, this perception paved the way for how Car Robots was presented in the Western World. Rebranded as Robots in Disguise, the English version went all-in on fully embracing the reboot notion. Characters were given different names in the English version, with new leaders Fire Convoy and Gigatron reinterpreted as new versions of Optimus Prime and Megatron, respectively.
Several characters likewise received familiar names from Generation 1, and some of them were even reimagined as new versions of familiar Generation 1 characters (like Prowl, Ironhide, Mirage and Ultra Magnus). Other characters were instead given wholly original names that were uniquely their own (like Side Burn, Sky-Byte, Dark Scream, and Ruination). Episode scripts were rewritten to make Robots in Disguise completely incompatible with either the Generation 1 cartoon or the Marvel Comics continuity. While additional references to Generation 1, Beast Wars, and Beast Machines were added into the English dub's scripts, they were added in ways that tended to make Robots in Disguise even less compatible with any previous series.
Following the show's conclusion in the West, the series' legacy went in radically different directions between Hasbro and Takara's markets. In Japan, Takara made multiple additions to the Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity in the mid-2000s that doubled down on emphasizing the original intended placement of Car Robots as part of the Generation 1 continuity family (picking up the slack from the show's own lax efforts of making that clear). In the West, meanwhile, Robots in Disguise remained its own, distinctly non-G1 entity, unconnected to any continuity family to come before or after it. The first major acknowledgement of this outside the show came in the 2002 toy bio of Axer, a Hasbro-original addition to the Robots in Disguise toyline. Axer's bio insinuated that he was the very same Axer from Generation 1, who had joined the Robots in Disguise Decepticons after a mission into a black hole had—short of stating it outright—sent him across dimensions into a different universe.
Since then, while Hasbro proper has mostly left the series untouched and only called back to on rare occasion, Hasbro licensees have explored more of the world of Robots in Disguise and its offshoots, even creating a few new ones in the process. The first of these came from Dreamwave Productions in their Transformers Summer Special, which featured the Robots in Disguise comic story "Ultra Magnus...to the Rescue?", written and drawn to directly tie into the world of the cartoon. During the mid-2000s, 3H Productions' Transformers: Universe comic series began to really explore the concept of the Transformers multiverse, using Robots in Disguise as one of several alternate universes whose native Transformer characters had crossed over to the comic's post-Beast Machines setting.
A profile for Robots in Disguise Optimus Prime expanded on the cartoon's events after the final episode, even bridging the gap between the cartoon and Universe by explaining how Optimus had crossed over into the Universe War from his home dimension. This carried over into Fun Publications' Balancing Act comics, with Robots in Disguise Omega Prime crossing over from the Universe War into the world of Transformers: Cybertron, teaming up with other dimension-hoppers like Vector Prime and Sentinel Maximus—the latter of whom originally hailed from the G1/Beast Era world of Universe but never knew Omega Prime since Omega himself originally came from a non-G1 universe.
Fun Publications would further create the multiversal hub world of Axiom Nexus in their TransTech series, in which several characters from across the multiverse would appear as dimensional travelers. Robots in Disguise characters who appeared in Axiom Nexus would be established by the tangentially-related AllSpark Almanac II book (via hidden Ask Vector Prime text) to have originated from the "Viron" cluster of universal streams. One such individual of note was the Predacon Sky-Byte—the undisputed breakout star of the Robots in Disguise cartoon—who went on to be a guest columnist in the Ask Vector Prime Facebook column, answering several questions written in by fans.
Ask Vector Prime itself also established a few more Robots in Disguise universes of note. One was the universe of the Dinobots and the Destructicons, bringing together various store-exclusive toys released in 2003. The other was the "Spychanger universe", a world in which most of the cast had all downsized into Spychanger bodies, which was cobbled together from a few minor sources. Ask Vector Prime also declared the originally-standalone OTFCC 2004 one-shot comic "Shell Game" to be a Robots in Disguise universe, and even told a lengthy epic story that served as an expansion to the Hasbro-original Robots in Disguise Air Attack Optimus Primal toy bio.
Major continuities
Cartoon continuity
- Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2001-2002)
- Transformers: Universe (2003-2004)
- "Ultra Magnus...to the Rescue?" (2004)
- "Transformers: Cybertron: Balancing Act" (2005)
Car Robots was created in response to the continually-declining sales of Takara's Beast Wars-based toylines. As Hasbro moved into Beast Machines, Takara opted instead to start anew—and tap into nostalgia as well—by bringing back the traditional modern Earth vehicle heroes with the classic Autobot big red face faction symbol. However, the villains of the series did not follow suit; while "Destronger" leader "Gigatron" was an all-new toy mold, his lackeys were all redecoed Transmetal 2 molds that had been developed for Beast Wars, and the team was given the Predacon symbol as had the villains from the prior shows.
A year later, with Beast Machines sales slumping, Hasbro canned its proposed Beast Machines sequel and went back to the drawing board with Takara to sketch out an entirely new take on the Transformers brand. That reinvention would eventually evolve into Transformers: Armada, which roared onto shelves in mid-2002... but Hasbro wanted something to keep toys on shelves, and hastily ported over Car Robots to fill that gap. The Robots in Disguise cartoon debuted in September 2001, and follows the adventures of Koji Onishi as he joins forces with the Autobots to rescue his father from the clutches of the Predacons—a battle that leads to the discovery of the mighty Fortress Maximus buried underneath Metro City. Despite a number of last-minute cuts, edits, and even a few outright banned episodes as a result of the September 11th terrorist attacks, Robots in Disguise performed reasonably well, but the impending release of the Unicron Trilogy, pushed this "filler line" aside for good.
In 2004, Dreamwave Productions returned to the continuity with a one-shot comic set roughly around the middle of the cartoon, to give readers a taste of what a full Robots in Disguise comic series might look like. Not too surprisingly, the accompanying reader poll swung in favor of a Beast Wars miniseries instead—and Dreamwave itself went out of business at the start of the next year anyway! Ask Vector Prime would later position this short comic as its own universal stream, presumably closely related to that of the cartoon, inventing further events in that timeline and others to expand the so-called Viron cluster.
3H Productions also featured Robots in Disguise Optimus Prime and Ultra Magnus as major characters in their Transformers: Universe comic; in 2005, they guest-starred in Fun Publications' Balancing Act comic, where they crossed dimensions into the Unicron Trilogy cartoon universe to fight Nemesis Prime.
Minor continuities
Toy bios
Although Hasbro imported Robots in Disguise as a cheap way to keep the brand alive, the franchise did well enough to garner a number of redecoes and even entirely new molds. Owing to the comparatively small size of the toyline, this phenomenon was somewhat more limited than previous outings, although a very high number of these toyline-exclusive characters and redecoes went on to feature in Transformers: Universe-related fiction. One notable bio had a time-travelling Optimus Primal serve as Optimus Prime's "spirit guide", a bizarre premise that Ask Vector Prime would elaborate on.
Shell Game
- "Shell Game" (2004)
In 2004, 3H Productions published "Shell Game" as part of the lead-in to OTFCC 2004, a story set in a dystopian timeline where the tyrannical Megazarak had killed his universe's Optimus Prime and conquered Cybertron. The short story freely mixes characters and concepts from both Robots in Disguise and the Generation 1 continuity family (the pitch for "Shell Game" being that it was "Generation 3"); in 2015, Ask Vector Prime would establish that this universe was part of the Robots in Disguise continuity family.
Spychanger continuity
- "Worlds Collide, Part 4 of 4" (2003)
- "Voice Actor Drama" (2004)
- Ask Vector Prime (2015)
In 2015, Ask Vector Prime stitched together another amalgamated timeline based on a number of different sources. In this timeline, the Autobots on Earth all downsized into energy-efficient Spychangers after an accident contaminated all of Earth's energon. Notably, the Optimus Prime and Scourge of this universe are both female.
Dinobots versus Destructicons
- Ask Vector Prime (2015)
In 2003, just after Robots in Disguise had wrapped up in favor of Armada, Hasbro released several U.S.-exclusive toys with the Robots in Disguise title in Armada-style packaging. Concurrently, Hasbro also released the small Transformers: Dinobots toyline. None of the packages had bios, leaving it ambiguous where or how they might fit into any one continuity. In 2015, Ask Vector Prime tossed these misfits into an original Robots in Disguise universe based loosely on, but not related to, the "Shell Game" reality. This reality seems to lack any true Autobots, Predacons, or Decepticons in favor of the Dinobots versus the Destructicons.
