Re: Transformers: The Last Knight
Just a thumbnail gestalt of what cna be gleaned from the G1 cartoons and comics, with inclusions from the Japanese continuation after the series ended here in the States...
Primus and Unicron are disembodied, anthropomorphic personifications of the abstract concepts of order and chaos. They existed from the beginning of the universe. Primus realized their struggles were so devastating they threatened to destroy the young universe before it had a chance to get going. He plunged into a coalescing planetoid, imprisoning himself, and knowing his adversary. Unicron thought this was a ploy and immediately did the same, lest he find himself in a weaker position. Thus entombed they drifted apart into the great cosmic dark. Over the eons, each learned how to rework their prisons in subtle ways. Primus was eventually able to generate powerful subspace turbulence to shield himself from outside approach, a maelstrom of wormholes and spatial eddies. He also influenced the elements of his planetoid into generating life, which, over time, evolved into an elegant non-carbon-based ecosystem, minutely directed toward a form that could act to thwart Unicron on a scale that wouldn't lay waste to the universe. Unicron took a less imaginative approach, transforming his planetoid into a new physical body for himself.
Somewhere along the way, another race of inorganic beings, the Quintessons, stumbled across the rogue planet Primus had become, figured out how to navigate an approach through the subspace turbulence wall, and conquered it. They so thoroughly subjugated the populace, they came to believe the Quintessons had created them and that they were reliant on the Quints to perpetuate their race. The Quints, meanwhile, were trying to find how these beings had arisen on such an unlikely world. There was a strange energy source emanating from the planet core, but their attempts to reach it kept being thwarted. They had just succeeded on their eighteenth approach vector -- Vector Sigma* -- when the enslaved populace finally rose up in rebellion. The fragment of the coalesced energy matrix they found there that they managed to contain and bring to the surface had a curious effect on one of the laboratory servitors when he picked it up, altering him into a more powerful and commanding form, the first Prime.
[*Generally, the computer on the Ark translated the different stages of Cybertronian language evolution based on what it gleaned from our history -- with the most ancient form of the language represented as Greek, the middle period represented as Latin, and the "modern" stage of the language as English. Thus the names we get.]
In the ages folling the expulsion of the Quintessons, the planet, now called Cybertron, went through several more ages, each defining and being defined by its Prime, a leader who was both political and quasi-religious. And, when needed, military commander as well. Some short time after the Great Revolt, a movement started that felt the only way to avoid being conquered again in th efuture was to go out and conquer, themselves. They called themselves the Destrons and won many eager adherents. Those who opposed them adopted the old brand logo and name the Quintessons had used -- Autobots -- as a rebuke. The Destrons used cyber-medical methods to alter their power consumption, augmenting their offensive capabilities at the expense of "less essential" systems (one notable aesthetic effect was that lowering the cyling rate of their sensory systems resulted in the spill light from their optics often shifting to the longer red wavelengths). Always on the defensive, the Autobots focused on guile and innovation to keep abreast. They invented transforming as a way to hide in plain sight among the many semisentient creatures and drone vehicles populating Cybertron. The Destrons found out and eventually acquired the technology for themselves (their tendency to use it for covert information-gathering led many of the civilian population to begin disparagingly calling them "Decepticons").
After a civil war lasting for an entire age, the planet had seen it's once-sufficient energy sources nearly exhausted. The Prime of that era, Optimus Prime, launched a daring expedition though the turbulence wall to find new sources of energy. The Destrons found out and intercepted them. The resulting interference with the ship's course plunged them both into a wormhole that dumped them out over Earth several million years ago. The ships separated in atmosphere, the Destron ship crashing in the Pacific Ocean, the Autobot ship crashing into Mount Saint Helens. The occupants went into stasis-lock (equivalent to a coma) until successive eruptions of the volcano finally pushed the ship close enough to the surface that the 1980 eruption exposed it to sunlight once more and it reawakened.
In the intervening time, back on Cybertron, the lieutenant the Destron leader had left in charge had managed to finish imposing Destron rule on the planet, while the Autobots maintained a valiant underground resistance. The nascent technology to merge more than one Cybertronian onto a gestalt being had matured, and the de facto leader had sent out probes to find planets that could be mined for energy. The probes had protoforms that would take shapes appropriate to the worlds they landed on, set up an energy collection station, and activate a retrieval beacon. If something larger or mor epowerful than initial scans detected threatened, the expeditionary team would be able to merge together into a giant robot that could repel the threat and protect the energy-collection station. This would be the origin of the Predacons, Seacons, and Horrorcons. A probe would actually land on Earch after the ships had, but it was damaged in the landing and only three protoforms remained viable (the Insecticons). The Destrons had also developed the transforming technology further into the triple-changers -- being as they were somewhat subconsciously obsessed with threes.
That's not even getting into post-Awakening events. That's a hell of a backstory to mine for some pretty epic storytelling. It amazes me that absolutely none of that made it into Bayformers. Hasbro originally just licensed the comics and cartoons to hawk their toys. The comics were originally just supposed to be a four-issue miniseries, and anyone who's watched the three-part "first episode" of the G1 cartoon can see how self-contained it was. Hasbro had no idea it would catch on, let alone to the extent it did. And the people who subsequently got involved with the property gave it a depth and richness that I don't think Hasbro themselves ever realized, understood, or cared about.
--Jonah