TRANSFORMERS: THE BASICS - What is a Transformer?

[Music] What is a Transformer? Where do they come from? How are they created? What makes these robots alive? This special compilation episode of the basics will answer all these questions and more.

Let's start with the big one. How are new Transformers made? Well, back in the 80s, the answer was pretty simple. They were built by other Transformers. But as Transformers lore has grown and changed, the answer has grown and changed, too.

Today, it all starts with protoforms. Protoforms are the first stage of the Transformer life cycle. The form in which new Cybertronians normally begin their lives. Featureless mannequin-like robots composed of a liquid metal that hasn't yet been shaped in accordance with an alternate mode. Protoforms were introduced into Transformers lore in the 1996 cartoon Beast Wars, and today they're a staple of the franchise.

Transformers don't sexually reproduce, so there are two major ways protoforms come into being. They can be constructed by other Transformers or they can emerge spontaneously from the substance of their metal home world, Cybertron itself. For the last 15 years or so, this has generally been presented as the natural way Transformers are created, but which has died out as a result of the Great War requiring manual construction to take its place.

The exact nature of a protoform is variable. In some stories, they're depicted as a sort of pre-life state. The act of scanning an alternate mode and taking its shape is what brings them online and they awaken as fully formed Transformers. But in others, they're more like a developmental stage in which the protoform is a conscious online robot even before their metal has adopted an alt mode. And they may even temporarily resemble a baby or a child before they grow to full size, emphasizing the Transformers' nature not as simply machines to be built and programmed, but as true living beings.

Such protoforms are sometimes depicted as being born with an alternate mode naturally encoded in their systems, which they'll automatically adopt as they go through this maturation. But in other stories, they'll need to scan an alt mode for themselves, and they'll remain walking, talking protoforms until they do so.

But like I said, this wasn't always the case. In classic media, such as the original Transformers cartoon and the Marvel comic book, all new Transformer life was shown being built by others. A robot's physical appearance and alternate mode were determined by their creator as part of the construction process. And after their body was built, they would be brought online, usually through the use of a mystical lifegiving relic such as the Autobot Matrix or the mega computer Vector Sigma.

But this origin invited the question, if Transformers could only be built by other Transformers, then who built the very first Transformers? Different media had different answers. In the cartoon, the Transformer race was originally created by the evil aliens, the Quintessons, and forced to serve them as slaves until the robots rose up against their oppressors, forced them off Cybertron, and established their own civilization.

But the Marvel comic offered a different, more fantastical origin. In it, the Transformers were the creations of Primus, the god of light, a cosmic being who dwelled within Cybertron, who created them to aid him in his battle against his evil counterpart, the dark god Unicron. Primus' creations were not built, but born, emerging out of the fabric of Cybertron itself, as blank skeletal liquid metal robots that quickly reshaped themselves into fully formed Transformers.

Now, only the very first generation of Primus' creations were made this way. These first robots multiplied by dividing their bodies over and over until the Transformer race reached a predetermined size programmed into them by Primus, whereupon the process stopped and came to be replaced by the familiar method of building new robots and using the Matrix containing the power of Primus to bring them to life.

As Transformers lore has expanded in the decades since the end of the original cartoon and comic, the Primus origin story has come to be depicted as the standard origin story for the Transformer race in new series. But the idea that the original Transformers had been born out of Cybertron didn't come up often, being touched on only briefly in a few places. For instance, Dreamwave Productions comic books identified the spot where the first Transformers emerged from the planet as the Well of All Sparks. While Tyin Comics for the live-action film series showed the first Transformers being created out of Cybertron through the power of another life-giving relic known as the All Spark.

But that's jumping ahead a little. Long before that, there was Beast Wars. This series was set centuries after the era of the Autobots and Decepticons after a technological quantum leap had seen the Transformers develop the ability to adopt organic alternate modes as well as mechanical ones. Rather than being built with their appearance and alt modes already decided upon as past generations had been, the new robots created from this technology, the Maximals and Predacons, began life as protoforms, featureless robots composed of nanotechnological liquid metal proto-matter that could be shaped into anything.

Beast Wars didn't give a detailed origin for protoform technology, but in subsequent years, various pieces of spin-off media have offered a variety of different possible explanations, ranging from it being a creation of the alien race, the Vok, to the product of an experiment by the scheming Tripredacus Council. Whatever their precise origin, protoforms were manufactured on Cybertron, infused with a life-giving spark, programmed to be either Maximals or Predacons, and stored in stasis pods that kept them inert until such time as they were to be activated.

All the protoforms featured in Beast Wars were Maximal ones, which had been assigned to the exploration ship Axalon. The ship's mission was to drop the pods on alien planets where they would scan local life forms to serve as alt modes for the protoforms within who would then come online to explore the new world. But the Axalon's protoforms never got to fulfill their intended function as the ship was shot down over Earth by a gang of Predacon criminals in the cartoon's first episode. As it fell, the Axalon ejected its stasis pods into orbit around the planet to keep them safe.

Over the course of the series, pods would periodically fall from orbit, and the Maximals and Predacons stranded on Earth would race to recover them and activate the protoforms within to add to their ranks. The evil Predacons, often using shell programs to overwrite the protoforms' heroic Maximal programming.

Following their introduction in Beast Wars, protoforms rapidly became a fixture of Transformers lore. New stories were quick to drop the idea that they were a new technological innovation, though other ways of creating Transformers would still be shown to exist, including the old construction method and a variation on the idea that saw the Allspark reformatting ordinary machines into Transformers by infusing them with life.

In the 21st century, the majority of new series, comics, cartoons, and films, both brand new continuities and reboots of Generation 1, have come to depict protoforms as the standard first stage of a Cybertronian's life. This widespread adoption of the concept and with it the very idea that Transformers had a life cycle that involved them advancing from one distinct physical stage of existence to the next was a big step in furthering the depiction of the race as more like living organisms than pure machines. Something that the movie universe in particular would add to with its depiction of protoforms as being not so much built as grown. Starting out as small hatchlings nurtured in Energon sacks who grew from infantlike forms to full-size protoform robots.

Additionally, the 1998 Japanese spin-off series Beast Wars II introduced the idea that it was possible for a Transformer to regress their body back to a protoform-like state, devoid of an alternate mode. This idea would also carry forward into new series, most prominently showcased by the films in which Transformers would shed their alt modes and revert to a stripped-down protoform base state to travel between planets. As protoforms, they could assume comet-like shapes that they used to journey through space, plummeting down onto new worlds where they would scan new modes.

Then in 2010 came the Aligned Continuity, a new universe which combined ideas from all past series to build a unified vision for Transformers lore. This continuity brought together the concept of protoforms and the concept of Transformers being born out of Cybertron and united them to establish a definitive modern origin story for Transformer life. In the Aligned Continuity, all Transformer life was born within the Well of All Sparks. This giant pit was the resting place of the Allspark, which was a conduit for the power of Primus and which generated new protoforms out of the substance of Cybertron as it saw fit. The Well was brought online in Cybertron's ancient past by the Primes, the original 13 Cybertronians created by Primus, who each submitted their schematic data to it. Thus, each new protoform born from the Well was made up of some random combination of the different archetypes each of the Primes represented, different genders, Minicons, Combiners, Beasts, and more. As a result, the protoforms were born with alternate modes already encoded in them, and they would mature into their fully grown forms in the time it took them to make their way out of the Well.

When the Transformers later founded colonies on other planets, they used the energy of the Well to ignite copies of it on these worlds so each colony could give birth to its own native Transformers. However, when the Great War between the Autobots and Decepticons began, it became necessary for the Autobots to launch the Allspark into space to put its power beyond the Decepticons' reach. And so, Cybertron lost the ability to generate new life until Optimus Prime found and restored the Allspark to the planet as seen at the climax of the Transformers Prime animated series.

Like most of the lore established by the Aligned Continuity, these ideas about the origins of Transformer life would go on to influence multiple subsequent series. Chief among them, IDW Publishing's comic books, which put their own spin on the concept of the natural protoform birth. Rather than the singular Well of All Sparks, in IDW's universe, protoforms emerged from various locations around Cybertron named hotspots. Sparks would ignite in the ground and the metal of the planet around them liquefied to form the protoform which matured from childlike to fully grown forms in a short space of time. In this version of the story, when Cybertron ceased generating new life, the Transformers devised a substitute method. As in the Marvel comic, they manufactured new bodies and brought them to life using sparks generated by the Matrix. For a time, Transformers built in this manner, dubbed "constructed cold," were considered to be inferior to natural-born forged protoforms. But by the present day of the series, these prejudices were largely a thing of the past.

Natural protoform births were also prominently showcased in 2022's Transformers EarthSpark. Though the newborn Transformers featured in this series were formed not out of Cybertron, but from the matter of the Earth through the power of yet another ancient life-giving Cybertronian relic, the Emberstone of Quintis Prime.

All that said, other series have continued to offer different takes on how new Transformers come into being. For instance, in the new universe introduced when IDW rebooted their comics in 2019, protoforms were created when the Transformers took sparks naturally released by the Allspark and implanted them in vats of liquid metal harvested from Cybertron. In perhaps the oddest example, 2018's Transformers Cyberverse showed the Allspark creating new Transformers quite literally out of thin air. Thus, the answer to the question of how exactly new Transformers are made continues to vary from series to series, and it remains to be seen what new answers future series will give.

That covers how Transformers bodies are made. But there's a whole lot more to them than that. They aren't just cold metal acting out pre-programmed directives. They're living beings with thinking minds and feeling hearts, possessing cybernetic souls that persist after their physical bodies die. Now it's time to look at that mysterious spark of life that exists in all Cybertronians and makes them more than just robots. These are the basics on sparks.

[Music] Every Transformer has a spark, a sphere of energy held in a special chamber inside them that serves as their heart and soul, providing the mystical life force that animates their body and mind and makes them truly alive, able to think and feel for themselves. The concept of the Spark was introduced in 1996's Beast Wars cartoon, and ever since then, they've been a universally accepted part of Transformers lore, featured in every subsequent series, comics, cartoons, movies, games, and much more as the core of Cybertronian life.

In that time, they've come to typically be depicted as tiny fragments of the essence of the Transformers god, Primus, the cosmic being who created the Cybertronian race, composed of a rarified form of Primus' living energy, Energon. The means by which Transformers are imbued with their sparks vary, but usually involve one of several ancient life-giving Cybertronian artifacts that channel them into the world. In a natural Transformer birth, a spark is released directly into the fabric of Cybertron, and the metal of the planet then forms into a body around it, the appearance of which is determined by genetic instructions within the spark itself. It's also possible to implant a spark into a pre-built body or even into a normal machine or other object, which will be instantly reformatted into a Transformer by the infusion of life.

Sparks are fragile. They can't survive outside a Transformer's body for long unless contained in some kind of special storage medium. And if a bot is damaged to the point that they can no longer safely contain their spark, then it'll be extinguished and the Transformer will die. However, it is possible to extract a spark before the point of death and transfer it into a new body, ensuring the bot will live on. Direct injury to the spark itself though is almost always fatal.

When a spark is extinguished, it departs the physical world, taking with it all the memories the Transformer amassed in life and reunites with the primal wellspring from which it came, a sort of extra-dimensional Transformer afterlife where it becomes part of a vast collective consciousness made up of the knowledge and experience of every spark that's ever lived. It's rare, but it is possible to bring a dead Transformer back to life if their spark can be recovered from this afterlife realm.

But of course, it wasn't always this way. Before Beast Wars introduced sparks, older Transformers media took a few different approaches to the inner workings of Cybertronian life. Both the Marvel comic book and the original Transformers cartoon depicted a Transformer's brain as their most essential component containing the programming that made up their mind. In the comic, these components were named "brain modules." The only thing that could infuse these tiny clusters of microchips with a living personality was the ancient talisman, the Matrix, which contained the life-giving power of the god of light, Primus.

In the cartoon, on the other hand, the supercomputer Vector Sigma was credited with programming all Transformers with their personalities. It was said that the computer was the only thing capable of doing this, but the series would contradict this several times when the Dinobots, the Technobots, and Trypticon were all created without its use. Two significant vital components were mentioned in the cartoon: the brain-like personality component containing a Transformer's mind and the laser core, a vital organ that when extinguished meant the Transformer's death. Primus wasn't part of the cartoon story, and the show's version of the Matrix had no life-giving powers. Instead, it was depicted as the resting place of the life forces of dead Autobot leaders whose combined memories formed a vast repository of wisdom from across the ages.

But then came Beast Wars, which in contrast to the very mechanical ideas of brain modules and personality components, introduced sparks as metaphysical supernatural things akin to a human soul. Sparks prominently factored into many Beast Wars storylines and starting in 1999 were even incorporated into the toy line with figures sporting translucent colored spark crystals that showcased their faction symbols, a gimmick that would be revisited in several subsequent toy lines.

Now, Beast Wars didn't explain how Transformers received their sparks, but it did establish that they came from something called the Matrix, not an object as in the original cartoon and comic, but a place, an other-dimensional realm to which they returned when they died. This was expanded on in the 1999 sequel series Beast Machines, which further revealed that this Matrix was a vast collective consciousness of which individual sparks were just tiny fragments, an "all spark" made up of the shared knowledge and experience of every spark that had ever lived or ever would. Putting it simply, the Matrix was Transformer heaven. "We are all but fragments of the Matrix which releases each of us in order to struggle and grow and evolve. So when we return to it, it may grow and evolve. Thus do we serve the Matrix not just by battling but also by acquiring knowledge, wisdom, and experiencing love."

Now, a lot of the ideas these two shows put forth surrounding sparks were based on ideas from older media. For instance, they use the term "Matrix" for a realm that was both the source of life like the comic's Matrix and the resting place of the souls of the dead like the cartoon's Matrix. They showed that this source of all life could be accessed by Vector Sigma. And the very idea of a place where all Transformer spirits were united as one was directly linked to the Autobot mantra from 1986's The Transformers: The Movie, "Until that day... till all are one." "Where'd you go anyway? Where all are one?"

Consequently, within a few years, an assortment of media, including stories from official convention BotCon and Dreamwave Productions comic books, built on these connections to introduce a series of retcons, expanding the lore of sparks to both explain how they came into the world and fully reconcile the concept with the original comic and cartoon. Together, they established that the Matrix of which all sparks were part was in fact the life force of Primus himself, and that the life-giving objects from the older series, the Matrix and Vector Sigma, were actually conduits for the power of this realm through which they could channel sparks into the world or allow Transformers to communicate with the spirits in the afterlife.

This basic idea of sparks as pieces of Primus' energy channeled into the world by ancient Cybertronian artifacts has remained the definitive interpretation of the concept ever since. While not every single series has directly credited Primus as their creator, with some preferring to leave the higher power behind the artifacts as an unspoken mystery, sparks themselves have been accepted into Transformers canon so completely that even new stories set in the original comic and cartoon universes have retroactively shown sparks to exist in those continuities, with old terms like "laser core" and "personality component" being retconned into simply being the names of larger arrays or units that house the spark itself.

Perhaps the most significant addition to this mythos came in the 2007 live-action movie which introduced a third life-giving relic, the Allspark. Named after one of the terms used for the afterlife in Beast Machines, this relic has come to replace the Matrix and Vector Sigma in most modern media as the primary source of new Transformer sparks, normally depicted as residing at the bottom of a huge pit on Cybertron from which all new life emerges known as the Well of All Sparks.

But still, the Allspark isn't the only method of creating new Transformer life. Others introduced over the years have included the Emberstone of Quintis Prime, which in 2022's Transformers EarthSpark proved able to create new Transformers out of the matter of the Earth. And as new additions to Transformers lore have established that the energy of Primus is an exotic version of the Transformers' fuel Energon, some stories have shown that a simple Energon infusion is enough to ignite a spark within a new robot, which, if you think about it, provides a retroactive explanation for characters from the original cartoon like the Dinobots.

As the lore surrounding sparks has grown, they've come to be considered responsible for many aspects of a Transformer's nature. The information encoded within them determining a bot's appearance, alternate mode, and special abilities. Some sparks have more unusual attributes than others. Some give their bearers the genetic potential to combine or triple-change. Others are "mitotic," able to divide and recombine, allowing a Transformer to split their consciousness across multiple bodies. One rare variant, green in color instead of the usual blue, known as ".1enters" for how uncommon they are, bestows bots with incredible physical power, while others feature unique mutations that grant Transformers individual superpowers like Skywarp's teleportation or Soundwave's mind-reading. Perhaps most famously, Starscream's spark is indestructible, a mutation that allows his spirit to survive the death of his body as a ghost.

Now, as the story of Starscream's ghost helps to illustrate, sparks are often treated as if they contain a Transformer's consciousness. Many stories have shown that if a spark is extracted from their body, the Transformer's mind will go with it and can be implanted in a new body. But digging deeper, it's not really as simple as that. Even in human beliefs and philosophies, the soul and the mind aren't always necessarily considered to be the same thing. And that's true for Transformers as well. Their minds, their identities, their personalities, and all their memories are usually depicted as computer data programmed into and governed by their mechanical brains. Throughout Transformers history, there are multiple examples of a robot's personality or memories being altered by having this mental data reprogrammed or overwritten, or in more extreme cases of a spark being taken from one Transformer and placed in a new body whose brain has been pre-programmed with its own unique identity, resulting in a new robot who considers themselves to be a different person from the one whose spark is giving them life.

One of the most dramatic examples of spark and mind being depicted as separate things was in 2014's Age of Extinction, in which Megatron was able to resurrect after his death by transplanting his mind into a new body that didn't have a spark at all, leaving him a truly soulless monster. "You have no soul. That is why I have no fear."

But if they are separate things, then why does the mind so often seem to be held within the spark? Such mysteries of life were examined in IDW Publishing's comics, which highlighted how the spark and the brain are intimately linked to the extent that sufficient damage to either one could cause the other to shut down, but also made clear that even the Transformers don't fully understand the relationship between them. Transformer scientists say that information is known to leak between the two, which allows a spark to share the brain's mental data. But really, that's just an attempt to scientifically explain the unexplainable. The truth is, sparks are just as unearthly and unknowable as the intangible concept of the human soul with properties far beyond the understanding of the material world. All we can say for sure is sparks are proof that Transformers are far, far more than walking collections of metal and circuits, but rather are and always have been more than meets the [Music] eye.

So, we've looked at body, mind, and soul. So, now let's talk about something different, but just as fundamental to the Transformers' existence. The very thing that gives them their name. These are the basics on transforming.

The ability to change shape is the defining attribute of the Cybertronian race. Every Transformer is created with an internal mechanism known as a transformation cog, which allows them to transform from a robot into some kind of alternate mode. These alt modes are most often vehicles or animals, but Transformers are endlessly varied in form and can turn into unconventional objects of all shapes and sizes. There are usually two main purposes for transformation: utility, why drive a vehicle when you can be a vehicle, and disguise, allowing a Transformer to hide in plain sight as an unassuming machine or creature, sometimes even using holographic drivers to further the illusion.

Some Transformers, either through natural ability or some form of upgrade, can assume multiple modes in addition to the normal two, can change their size as well as their shape, or can even split their bodies into multiple forms simultaneously. A Transformer's alternate mode is often tied to their personality, their function, or their place in society, but it's not a fixed attribute. A Cybertronian can change their alt mode by reconfiguring the living metal of their body using data scanned from other subjects. An ability that comes in especially useful on alien planets, where they can copy the forms of native machines or life forms and operate as robots in disguise.

When transforming was introduced in the original Transformers series in the 1980s, it wasn't presented as a natural ability the Cybertronian race had been born with. And both the Marvel comic book and the original Transformers animated series told different stories about how the technology was invented. According to the first issue of the comic book, transformation was invented by the Decepticons before the war. They modified their bodies to convert into powerful war machines and weapons and used these new forms to launch their first attack on the Autobots, who then copied the technology in order to fight back.

In the cartoon, on the other hand, transformation was invented by the Autobots during the war. Not built for combat and no match for the Decepticon superior strength and firepower, the Autobots instead fought using stealth, devising the ability to transform as a means of disguising themselves so they could strike at their enemies when they weren't expecting it. The cartoon explored the mechanics of transformation a little more than the comic, establishing that a Transformer's ability to transform was controlled by a mechanism within their body called a "transformation cog" or a "transforming cog," without which they couldn't change shape. While Japanese original sequel series The Headmasters showed the struggles of Transformers learning how to transform, illustrating the effort and concentration the process required as bots got stuck between modes when they tried to convert for the first time. And of course, it was also the cartoon that made famous the iconic transformation noise, which has been used again and again down through the franchise's history.

[Music] In keeping with the idea that transformation wasn't a natural Cybertronian ability, changing alternate mode was generally not presented by classic media as something that a Transformer could do on their own. Instead, requiring external machinery to rebuild their body. This was most famously displayed when the Transformers first came to Earth and had to be reconstructed with new native alternate modes by the Autobots' computer using data it had scanned from Earth's machines.

However, towards the end of the decade, a new third origin for transformation was revealed in the pages of the United Kingdom's version of the Marvel comic, retconning the first issue's telling of events. This story stated that the Transformers had indeed been created with the ability to transform by Primus, the god of light, who specifically gave them this power to mimic the abilities of his enemy, the dark god Unicron, who could convert from metal planet to huge robot.

Transformation underwent an upgrade in 1996's Beast Wars. By the time of this series, set centuries after the original, Cybertron had undergone a technological quantum leap that allowed the Transformers to convert their bodies into organic forms as well as mechanical ones, enabling them to authentically replicate the outward appearances of living creatures, though they still required external mechanisms to scan for animal DNA and modify their bodies for them. When teams of Maximals and Predacons traveled back in time to prehistoric Earth, they were able to use these organic-skinned modes to shield their robotic components against the planet's dangerous levels of Energon radiation.

Unlike their ancestors, this new generation of Cybertronians had onboard computers in their bodies that automated the process of transformation for them, which they triggered with a spoken command code. "Cheetor, maximize!" "Megatron, terrorize!"

In the 1999 sequel series, Beast Machines, these computers were lost after the Maximals were reformatted into revolutionary new techno-organic forms. Beast flesh and Transformer metal fused at the cellular level. And like their ancestors, they had to learn how to transform all over again. It was in between these two series that the 1998 Japanese spin-off Beast Wars Neo became the first Transformers cartoon to introduce the idea of Cybertronians having built-in scanning and replication capabilities, able to scan alternate mode and reformat their bodies on their own. Soon after, Beast Machines also independently introduced this idea, establishing that a planetwide upgrade had integrated scanning technology into every Transformer's body.

Following the introduction of this concept, virtually every new Transformers continuity in the 21st century has depicted the power to scan and change alternate modes as a built-in ability of the Cybertronian race. Perhaps most prominently showcased in the live-action film series, in which Transformers have repeatedly changed modes as quickly and casually as a human might change their clothes. The only notable exception was 2007's Transformers Animated, in which the Decepticons possessed the built-in ability, but the Autobots still required external mechanisms to reconfigure themselves, as in classic media.

Transformation cogs, rarely mentioned since the original cartoon, were prominently reintroduced in 2010's Transformers Prime under the abbreviated name T-Cogs and were established to not only control transformation, but to also be the mechanism responsible for scanning and adapting Transformers' bodies to new modes. The origins of transforming weren't really explored in any new series during the 2000s, but the general implication across the board was that, as in the Marvel Comics Primus origin story, it was a natural ability that the Cybertronian race had always had.

In the 2010s, Hasbro expanded on this idea while developing the new Aligned Continuity of which Transformers Prime was part and devised a definitive modern origin story for transformation. According to this story, transforming originated with Amalgamus Prime, one of the first 13 Cybertronians created by Primus in Cybertron's primordial past. A mercurial jokester, Amalgamus was the ninth member of the group to be created and the first and only one with the ability to transform. Amalgamus wasn't limited to two modes. He had no fixed form and could assume any shape he wanted. His body constantly shifting and changing from one minute to the next. An ability Primus had conveyed upon him via his personal artifact of power, the transformation cog.

The 13 Primes were responsible for igniting the Well of All Sparks, the font of life from which the rest of the Cybertronian race would be born. Amalgamus submitted the pattern of the transformation cog to the Well, making it so that all Cybertronians who would come after him would have cogs of their own, granting them a diminished version of his shape-changing abilities and an alternate mode already encoded into their genetic makeup from the moment they came online. Initially, the Cybertronians weren't aware of their ability to change shape until the alien Quintessons came to Cybertron and taught them how to transform as part of a plan to ingratiate themselves with the Transformers and conquer the planet.

The Aligned Continuity story also introduced the idea that transformation was tied to social standing on Cybertron and was the root cause of the war itself. In the days before the war, corrupt leadership on Cybertron resulted in the planet operating under a caste system in which the alternate mode a Transformer was born with locked them into a certain job and societal class. The prejudice and inequality propagated by this system would ultimately lead to Megatron forming the Decepticons as a revolutionary army to topple the corrupt regime and seize power for himself.

These themes of transformation being connected to social injustice, in turn leading to the rise of the Decepticons and the outbreak of war, have influenced most major series produced since. Notably, IDW Publishing's comic books explored the system in more detail and gave it the name "Functionism," even offering a look at a dystopian alternate universe where it was never dismantled. While the 2024 movie Transformers One presented a simplified take on the idea in which Cybertron's ruling class removed outright the transformation cogs of a portion of the planet's population at birth, robbing them of their ability to transform and forcing them into lives as an underprivileged working class, marginalized and abused by the transforming elites.

In terms of real-world history, the Transformers weren't the first transforming robot toys. That honor is thought to belong to the Space Explorer, released in 1959 by Japanese company Yanuzawa Toys, which converted from a TV set into a robot via a battery-operated motor. The first true manually convertible robot-to-vehicle toy, meanwhile, was Brave Ryan, released by Popy in 1975. Based on the title character of the anime of the same name, a robot created by an ancient civilization who transformed into a bird-like aircraft. Ryan was followed by several more Japanese lines of reconfigurable robot toys like Popy's Machine Robo and Takara's Diaclone and Micro Change until Hasbro decided to import the latter two and turn them into the Transformers in 1984. Other toys would be released in the US before them with Tonka notably importing Machine Robo to create GoBots and beating Hasbro to the shelves by several months. But the Transformers were the toys that turned shape-changing robots into a phenomenon in the Western world, defeating the GoBots at retail and inspiring countless imitators. To the point that the word "transformer" has become cultural shorthand for any robot that can turn into something else.

It's precisely for this reason that in the 21st century, Hasbro doesn't actually like to use the word "transform" to describe what Transformers do anymore. Today, toy packaging and marketing uses the word "convert" instead, which helps the company to protect their trademark on the name Transformers by preventing the word from becoming overused and genericized. But let's face it, "convert and roll out" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Now to wrap up this video, let's take a look at the substance that powers all these different parts of Transformer life. Protoforms, sparks, cogs, they all run on Energon.

[Music] In the 1970s, conflict in the Middle East precipitated a shortage of petroleum in the Western world, triggering a period of skyrocketing prices, recession, and a stagnant economy that lasted much of the decade, known as the energy crisis. The world was still in the process of rebounding from the experience in the early 1980s, and it was into this era that the Transformers franchise was born. Informed and inspired by the events of the past decade, both the original Marvel comic book and especially the animated series centered the Autobot and Decepticon struggle around their own energy crisis. Both sides battling for the resources of Earth in need of energy above all else if they were to claim victory in their eternal war. Using Earth's resources, they created what today is known as the primary fuel source of all Transformers, Energon.

Energon has a complex history. In the decades since its introduction, many different series have expanded on the concept, building on one another to redefine its place in the Transformers universe as we understand it today. It's gone from being simply a kind of fuel to being absolutely ubiquitous in Cybertronian culture. It powers Transformers' bodies, their machines, their weapons. It flows through their veins. For a race of robots, it's food, drink, fuel, blood, and medicine all-in-one. Valued more than anything else to the point that they even use it as currency, even though it has a tendency to explode if mishandled.

Energon is the creation of Primus, the cosmic being who is God and creator of the Transformer race. It is pure energy given physical form. And in its most rarified state, it's the basic molecular building block of both the living metal of Cybertronian bodies and the sparks that give them life. Energon occurs naturally in various raw states: liquid, gas, and solid, most commonly as crystals, bursting with unchecked power. Raw Energon is unstable and easily detonated and has to be processed into a form safe for Transformers to use. Processed Energon typically takes a liquid form which Transformers either inject directly into their systems or consume as a beverage. Energon is stored in containers known as Energon cubes. The events of the war usually result in Cybertron's supply of natural Energon being drained, forcing the Transformers to search for deposits on other planets or to create synthetic Energon by converting other sources of energy.

The story of Energon began with the first episode of the Transformers cartoon in 1984, which introduced Energon cubes as a kind of fuel cell used by the Decepticons to collect and convert energy stolen from the resources of Earth into a concentrated form. After a while, the show began using Energon as the name for this concentrated liquid energy itself. In this series, the search for energy was specifically the reason the Transformers left Cybertron. And the Decepticons' quest to plunder Earth's resources and convert them into Energon was the focus of many stories in the show's first two seasons. Early episodes depicted the filled cubes as iridescent compressed stacks, but this would later be changed to single cubes that glowed a purplish pink, which became the standard color of Energon for much of Transformers history.

Initially, the cartoon presented Energon as being an invention of the Decepticons, which only they used, the empty cubes famously being generated by Soundwave, while the Autobots instead powered themselves using recharging chambers. But as the show continued, the continuity got kind of blurry and it started to show the Autobots using Energon too, even setting up Autobot City on Earth to generate it by harnessing renewable natural resources. By the third season, the notion that Energon was or had ever been a Decepticon-only innovation was abandoned, and the fuel was shown to be in use even by alien species all across the galaxy.

As a creation of the cartoon, Energon wasn't featured in the Marvel comic book. At first, the Transformers hadn't specifically come to Earth to look for energy in the comic, but the acquisition of fuel was still a key element of those early stories, which involved a search for a way to convert Earth's gasoline into a form they could use, which Sparkplug Witwicky helped them develop. However, Energon cubes were quickly introduced into the comic in late 1985 and just like the cartoon were created through the conversion of other energy sources, including geothermal power and even the sonic energy of a rock and roll concert.

The first piece of media to present Energon as something other than a synthetic fuel created by converting other resources was surprisingly the short-lived 1987 comic book Transformers in 3D by Blackthorn Publishing, which debuted the idea that true Energon existed as a naturally occurring element. By coincidence, this same idea would also be hit upon by 1996's Beast Wars animated series, through which it would go on to much greater fame. The two series took very different approaches, though. In Blackthorn's comic, true Energon was a liquid that was uh, well, it was being pooed out by aliens. But Beast Wars introduced the enduring concept of raw natural Energon crystals. Beast Wars saw the Predacon criminal Megatron travel back in time to prehistoric Earth in search of Energon, only to discover that the planet was so rich in raw crystals that the amount of Energon radiation in the atmosphere would overload a Transformer's body after only a few minutes exposure. To protect themselves, both Megatron's Predacons and their pursuers, Optimus Primal's Maximals, were forced to adopt beast modes with organic skins that screened the radiation out.

Energon began to take on more fantastical, almost magical abilities in the various Japanese original Beast Wars spin-off cartoons, which introduced Energon Matrices, personal Energon sources carried by high-ranking Maximals and Autobots, which responded to emotions and instilled incredible transformations in their wielders, powering them up into new forms and inducing combinations. Energon also exhibited these powers in 2004's Transformers Energon. As you can likely tell from the title, the fuel played a key role in this series, which saw the Autobots work with humanity to mine deposits of raw Energon on Earth and around the solar system, only to face attacks by the Decepticons, who sought to obtain enough Energon to repair the monster planet Unicron. Subgroups specially bred to handle raw Energon, the Autobot Omnicons and the Decepticon Terrorcons, processed and sculpted the dangerous element into various usable forms, including power-enhancing Energon stars and modular Energon weapons for their comrades, which were packaged as accessories with the figures in the Energon toy line. Though rather than the classic pink, in this series, the refined Energon used by the Autobots was red, while the Decepticons used an unrefined green.

This series was the first to link Energon with the Transformers god Primus, furthering its increasingly unearthly nature, depicting it not simply as a fuel, but as the mysterious source of life itself, its energy giving life to stars and planets. This concept was mirrored in 2007's live-action Transformers movie in which Cybertron and the Transformers were given life by the Energon-generating relic known as the Allspark, which was originally named the Energon Cube during production of the film. The Energon radiation of which could even bring ordinary machines to life. The same year, stories from the Transformers Collectors Club established the Transformers' bodies and sparks were made from a rarified form of Energon itself.

All these different scattered ideas were united in the new Aligned Continuity that debuted in 2010, cementing our current understanding of Energon. Beginning with the War for Cybertron video game, this continuity popularized the depiction of Energon as glowing blue, which became the standard color of the fuel in the 2010s. Though in the 2020s, the original pink coloration has been appearing again more regularly. The Aligned version of synthetic Energon was green in color. As seen in Transformers Prime, the formula to create synthetic Energon, or "Syn-En," had been lost for eons until Autobot medic Ratchet rediscovered it in the present day. Though his early experiments to recreate the fuel yielded a dangerously addictive brew that increased both the performance and aggression of users.

The Aligned Continuity also introduced Energon's evil counterpart, Dark Energon. Just as Energon springs forth from Primus, Dark Energon is the so-called blood of his evil brother Unicron, the lord of chaos. Though a powerful fuel that boosts the strength of any Transformer who uses it, like Unicron, Dark Energon is poisonous and corruptive, and it has the ability to reanimate dead Cybertronians as feral zombies.

Other notable variations of Energon that have been featured in Transformer stories over the years have included Toxic Energon, or Tox, a poisonous green offshoot refined into a biological weapon by the Decepticons; Red Energon, or Hyper-En, which grants super speed to its user; and various super-enhanced versions that are capable of boosting the strength and abilities of users like Super Energon and Ore 13. The latter of these was one of a series of Energon-derived ores featured in IDW Publishing's comic books, grown on other planets by the Decepticon scientist Shockwave as part of an effort to develop an alternate fuel source. While Ore 13 grew on Earth, the 12 Ores on other worlds inexplicably developed unique powers over space, time, and matter, which granted users abilities like teleportation, time travel, mind control, and more.

Energon continues to appear throughout new Transformers media. Newer stories like IDW's 2019 reboot of their comic books or the 2024 movie Transformers One have depicted the scarcity of Energon and the social pressures caused by rationing it as one of the inciting factors in the outbreak of the war in the first place. While the BotBots toy line and cartoon showcased its life-giving abilities when a burst of Energon brought to life all the various products in a shopping mall. Most recently, the pursuit and power of Energon has been the central feature of the new shared comic book universe from Skybound Entertainment, linking the stories of the Transformers, G.I. Joe, and more in a world they've named the Energon Universe.

From just a fuel to the mystical stuff of life itself, Energon is quite simply one of the most important concepts in the world of the Transformers. And just as it was when it was created in the 80s, a real-world reminder of the material cost of war and the fact that some resources don't last forever.

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