Cyber Planet Keys

Transformers television series
Logo of the franchise
Country of origin	United States Japan
Original language(s)	English Japanese

Launched in 1984, Hasbro's Transformers toyline was promoted through both a comic book by Marvel Comics and an animated series produced by Sunbow Productions and Marvel Productions. Although the comic outlived the animated series by a number of years, it was the animated series that truly captured the hearts and minds of children worldwide. With the original show's conclusion in 1987, original series exclusive to Japan were created which ran until 1990, and the franchise was later re-imagined with the fully CGI Beast Wars in the late 1990s. The 21st century saw a total reboot of the Transformers universe (first being Takara's produced Car Robots, imported and called for Western release as Transformers: Robots in Disguise), as Hasbro collaborated with Japanese Transformers producers Takara to create a new storyline with Transformers: Armada and its sequels, produced in Japan and then dubbed for English-speaking audience. In 2008, Transformers Animated saw Hasbro take control of the franchise once more through collaboration with Cartoon Network, bringing writing duties back to America, with animation being handled by Japanese studios. Hasbro also reacquired the distribution rights to the original series from Sunbow finally giving them the complete rights to the series based on their Generation 1 toy-line.

The term "Generation 1," or "G1," is a retronym, coined after the advent of 1992's Transformers: Generation 2. Although frequently used to simply refer to the original 1984 comic, 1984-1987 animated series, the term encompasses all Transformers fiction from 1985 to 1993.

After the Federal Communications Commission did away with regulations that prohibited toy companies from broadcasting cartoons based on their products in 1985, The Transformers began with a three-episode miniseries that introduced audiences to Optimus Prime, Megatron and their armies, as they travelled from the metal world of Cybertron to Earth in search of new sources of energy. The final episode ended on an open note, should the series prove popular enough to continue, which it did. A standard season's worth of 13 more episodes was commissioned, expanding the Transformers universe in which the Dinobots, Constructicons and Jetfire (then later called Skyfire in the series) made their debut. With popularity rising, the second season soon followed in 1986 at a mammoth 49 episodes (in order to bring the total up to 65, for syndication). Dozens of new characters were introduced throughout the season, including the Triple Changers, the combining teams the Aerialbots, Stunticons, Combaticons and Protectobots, and more new Autobot cars and Decepticon planes, while many new ideas and concepts began to establish the history of the cartoon universe.