Remember when we told you about UNIT:E, the mystery project that Hasbro was working on? Well, we finally know more about it, but don't get your hopes up.
Last weekend at TFCon Charlotte, Hasbro writer Rik Alvarez hosted a panel where he talked about his experiences working on the Binder of Revelation, which was supposed to be the guiding production bible that made all of Transformers fiction into a single unified continuity. yo go re has talked about this project before, when Hasbro was trying to align the (quite obviously G1) War for Cybertron continuity with the (quite obviously not G1) Prime continuity.
Despite Hasbro's best efforts, the all-in-one continuity was, for various reasons, not a success (the cartoon creators didn't want to follow it, the comics would have had to basically nuke their entire line and start over [think "New 52"], the planned MMO changed into a MOBA then never made it out of beta, Hasbro stopped making tie-in toys in favor of the movie, no one had The Hub channel anyway, etc. etc. etc.), and the Binder of Revelation, meant to be a 10-year plan, turned into a quarter-million custerfluck that is now shoved in a drawer somewhere, dead.
At any rate, TF: Prime was supposed to be the Iron Man 1 to UNITE:E's Avengers: it would have led into the massive crossover team-up, designed to help reinvigorate all the brands. Here's a little of what it would have entailed:
- Beast Wars Dinobot
- Prime Ratchet
- Duke (unknown which continuity)
- Matt Trakker
- destroyed Autobot base would have become M.A.S.K.'s Boulder Hill
- New Primordia character
- Primordia was considered an update of Inhumanoids
- Acroyer and Biotron from Micronauts
- Biotron was to be reprogrammed with Destro's mind
- Popular Micronauts character Bug is owned by Marvel, so the Sectaurs would have taken his place
- Stretch Armstrong
- Prime's Agent Fowler would have been injured and rebuilt as C.O.P.S.' Bulletproof Vess
- Synergy, the computer from Jem, would have been the team's Jarvis
- Action Man - rogue GI Joe
- Princess Lollipop would become a badass princess with a dark back story, with Candyland destroyed by monsters
- Rom's appearance on Earth would have been the event that brought the team together
- Leoric from the Visionaries
And now none of it will ever come to pass, because of the failure of the Aligned continuity. What a crying shame!
The failure of the aligned continuity? Que?
Merely failure to catch on and grow the way Hasbro hoped, not failure in any financial or artistic sense.