Celebrating the 10th Anniversary of Transformers: Prime - Dark Energon Optimus Prime (2012)

Ten years ago, on November 26th, 2010, the first episode of Transformers: Prime aired. It was the centerpiece of what came to be called the "aligned continuity family," stemming from comments by Hasbro at the time that suggested they were attempting to "align" all of the disparate representations of the past then-quarter century of Transformers fiction into a single continuity. Almost immediately after this announcement was made, it became clear that it didn't extend as far as such a statement would seem to have suggested. The live-action movies, still in their heyday at the time, were clearly separate, and however much the character depictions in Prime drew inspiration from Generation One counterparts of the past, they were clearly not the same characters, either (despite Generation One voice actors Peter Cullen and Frank Welker returning to voice the new versions of Optimus Prime and Megatron, respectively). Also, although there were a couple of non-G1 influences on Prime (most notably the character of Bulkhead, who came from Transformers Animated), they were fairly minimal, with Generation One being the obvious primary influence (which ultimately made Prime similar in this regard to all other non-G1 continuities before it). For better or worse, the "aligned" name stuck.

Trailbreaker (1984)

Back when I did 30th anniversary entries on all of the original series of Transformers characters, I covered Trailbreaker, but used a more modern toy rather than his original, and find myself surprised to not have covered the original toy at all before now. Since I discussed the (relatively few) distinctives of Trailbreaker's character in my previous entry, I'll focus instead on the story of how I came upon the specific toy and brought it to its current state.