A cartoon episode makes a lot of paper on its way to the screen. Premises that got turned down, outlines revised until the notes stop coming back, a storyboard drawn so that a studio on the other side of the world knows what to put on the cel: all of it is working material, and almost all of it gets thrown out once the episode is in the can. Paul Davids kept his. He wrote for The Transformers and, by TFW2005’s account, co-ordinated production across its second and third seasons. The folder he walked out with has been going online in pieces at the Sunbow Marvel Archive, a fan-run site with no affiliation to anyone who commissioned or made the show, and which says so on every page [1]. The newest batch is the file for show 110, “Grimlock’s New Brain,” and it runs from the first thing Davids pitched to the last panel Soo Young Chung boarded.

Eight documents sit under show 110, and the index lists them in this order:

  • The original premise, submitted at the start of Season 3 in March 1986 and submitted again that summer, with a covering memo to Davids’ Sunbow counterpart Elise Goyette.
  • A second premise titled “Autobot Park.”
  • A third document, “Creation Of The Technobots,” which the index describes as combining ideas from the first two.
  • The full outline in four revisions, carrying written feedback from Roger Slifer and Marv Wolfman.
  • The first-draft script, and the final approved script.
  • The dialogue script.
  • The full storyboard, scanned two halves to a page.
  • Early, more toy-faithful character models for Computron, Nosecone, Afterburner, Strafe and Lightspeed.

Every one of them opens [2].

So the Technobots reached this show as two ideas, and the index names them: a premise about Grimlock, and a separate premise about somewhere to put new Autobots, pitched apart and then brought together in a third document. The Grimlock material is the part that plays, from “Me, Grimlock, ready, but forgot which button” to the moment he severs the generator’s connections with his rear molars and starts speaking in full sentences, and Kup answers him with “You what?!” The five Autobots he builds afterwards arrive in a rush, and most of them are a name and a voice by the time the fight starts. Fans have long put that down to a script running out of minutes, and it may well be; but the paper shows the crowding was in the assignment before it was in the script, and the outline went back for notes four times while Slifer and Wolfman worked out how much room each half could have.

Four Dinobots stand in a pond of water in front of a Cybertronian dock, their heads lowered toward the surface, with a staircase and a green and grey hull behind them.

The model sheets are the other documents in the batch. The index describes them as earlier and more toy-based than what aired, so a design reached the show as a product and the model had been redrawn away from the toy by the time it went on air.

Sitting beside the episode file are series status memos dated 19 and 26 September 1986, the second carrying a handwritten update from 3 October. Those are not about Grimlock at all. They are a production co-ordinator’s running account of how the back half of Season 3 was going, written to be read that week and then filed.

Davids’ name is on two other episodes of this season, and the archive has been filling those in too. “Chaos” has its partial outline, both scripts, the final-revision storyboard and a run of models and backgrounds; “Thief in the Night” has its dialogue script so far. Our own page for “Grimlock’s New Brain” carries the episode as broadcast, with the air date, the credits and the notes on what first appears in it.

On the shelf, Takara Tomy’s Missing Link C-13 Grimlock is the one it sells as the Anime Color Ver., and BigBadToyStore had it in stock this morning at $124.99 [3]. The episode itself is free: the archive’s index points at a Hasbro Pulse YouTube playlist that runs Season 3 in production order rather than broadcast order.

Plenty of Season 3 still reads as a toy catalogue with dialogue over it, and eight PDFs do not change that; but the file does cut against something we have taken for granted, that the toy obligations and the good jokes were on opposite sides of the desk. Here they are the same writer’s submissions, and the same outline carried both of them through Slifer’s and Wolfman’s notes before anybody drew a frame.

Sources

  1. The Sunbow Marvel Archive, “MP 700 The Transformers, Part 2 1986 - 1987 (Sunbow Productions/Marvel Productions)”, read 27 October 2026, latest update stated there as 24 October 2026.
  2. All eight documents listed under show 110 were opened and checked on 27 October 2026: the two premises, the Technobots premise and outline, the first draft, the final approved script, the dialogue script, the full storyboard and the Technobots early models. The archive credits turbobluestreak with the scanning work and states that Paul Davids gave his permission.
  3. BigBadToyStore listing for Transformers Missing Link C-13 Grimlock (Anime Color Ver.), read 27 October 2026.
  4. Black Convoy, “G1 cartoon episode ‘Grimlock’s New Brain’ All Paperwork Available Online”, TFW2005, 27 October 2026. We picked the drop up there. It is also our source for Davids’ production role across seasons 2 and 3.

Key art and the closing still: “Grimlock’s New Brain”, Sunbow Productions and Marvel Productions, 1986, from our own episode archive.