BotCon 2006 Transformers Creating Cybertron Panel

Day 3 of BotCon 2006 and first up is the Transformers Creating Cybertron Panel with David McDermott and Aaron Archer. Discussing the reserch and development of recent Transformers Cartoons like Transformers Cybtertron.

TFormers.com and The Allspark covered the event Live. You can see what Tformers had to report here and The Allspark here

Summary

- The Japanese wanted all male characters in Cybertron, but Cartoon Network asked for female characters too.

- Originally there was only going be one key per planet, but Takara wanted force chips/keys for everyone.

- The accents in Cybertron were used because they wanted people to be able to differentiate all the characters from one another.

- Archer blames the death of Megatron in every Transformers series since RID on Takara. In Car robots when they did Devil Gigatron (RID Galvatron) it sold really well. So they repeated that in future series.

- The reason there are so many episodes is that the Japaneese design thier series to air just once. They dont do reruns so they need 52 episodes to fill 52 weeks in a year.

- Archer is over all happy with the way Cybertron turned out but had imaged it to be alot more elaborate. Due to time, animation and such it felt short of his imagination.

- The 'Decepticon' army of monsters that appeared mid-series were purly a Japaneese idea. Archer and McDermott were kind of confused by that to.

- It was Cartoon Network's decision to break the episodes up and have long periods of time between episodes. The reason being they kept starting over so people were brought up to speed.

- McDermitt talked of how one of the things that didn't turn out the way he expected Lio Breaker. Originally he was going to take over Jungle Planet and wouldn't want to leave the planet. They also planed to make it a one off episode but Japanese request they make it a serial

- Archer said they plan to continue the trend of new molds for characters that get upgrades instead of straight repaints.McDermitt claims to be pushing for a figure of the Stoplight guy (Signal Lancer).

- Archer was responsible for Kicker appearing in the end credits of the last episode.

- For the new cartoon, IF they partner with Takara. They will be have to do more serial episodes. If they don't parntner, they would like to go back to a pattern more like the way Beast Wars was done.

- Archer also seemed to be hinting that this new series will be done with fewer charcters and more like Beast Wars.

These next two bits come from The Allspark.

- Optimus Prime had to do battle in almost every episode, and had to go "super" every time he did so. That was to move the bigger toys from the Japanese shelves.

- The Coby Scrapmetal as seen in the show was actually the original design for the Scrapmetal! However, Hasbro found the head too herioc and redesigned it. But before the new head design was finished Takara had already created the mold. The decision was made to use the head for the exclusive Coby Ramble (the one in the Sonic Convoy giftset).

Check out all the BotCon 2006 News Coverage here at SEIBERTRON.com