Cybertronian Hovercar and Pre-Earth Modes

The 1984 cartoon's first episode opens on Cybertron, where none of the cast looks like an Earth vehicle. Optimus Prime is a boxy armoured hauler, Bumblebee a small wheel-less runabout, Ironhide and Ratchet hovering transports, Megatron a futuristic artillery piece. Only after the Ark crashes and Teletraan I scans passing Earth traffic do the familiar alt modes appear, which is the show's explanation for why a Japanese sports car and an American semi are fighting each other in Oregon.

The designs came from Floro Dery and the Marvel and Sunbow production team, working from character models rather than toy engineering, which is why they are stylistically consistent in a way the toy-derived Earth modes are not. They share a visual language of smooth wedges, exposed thrusters, six small wheels and no visible glass. Nothing about them needed to fold into a real product, so they do not.

That is also why almost none of them existed as toys during G1. The commercial logic ran the other way: Hasbro sold the Earth modes because those were the moulds it had bought from Takara. Cybertronian modes only became a product category decades later, when War for Cybertron (2010), Fall of Cybertron and the Siege and Earthrise lines built whole ranges around pre-Earth designs, partly for nostalgia and partly because an invented vehicle needs no licence at all.

None. These designs postdate the Takara toy lines entirely and were created for the animated series, not for a toy.

Fan lore about these vehicles is unusually unreliable. Where a popular claim does not survive checking, it is recorded here rather than repeated.

• Attribution of specific Cybertronian vehicle designs to individual artists is inconsistent across sources.