Lost media
From Transformers Wiki
Lost media is a term for media that is no longer available to the public or has been completely lost or destroyed over time. Some reasons for this can include limited distribution of the original material, copyright disputes regarding its publication, the shutdown of the service through which it was originally hosted, or sometimes just an outright loss of all available copies.
As a 41-year-old franchise covering just about every possible medium—much of it exclusive to different regions separated by linguistic barriers—it is inevitable that there's a staggering amount of lost Transformers media: thus, the content in this page is hardly comprehensive, and there's almost certainly more beyond what's listed here.
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Lost Transformers media
Film
- The IMAX edition of Transformers (2007) features two minutes of additional footage. This footage has never been included in any home release.
- At the 2011 Transformers Hall of Fame ceremony, in lieu of any cartoon or movie footage to play as a music video for fan nominee Erector, a short mockumentary about Erector was played instead. This very tongue-in-cheek video gave a fictitious account of Erector's long history with the Transformers brand, with many people interviewed talking about how much the character meant to them and how, time and again, he had nearly made it into the next big piece of Transformers media only to be cut out at the last second (none of which was at all true, of course). This short film has never seen the light of day since its original screening. However, a few pieces of "concept art" have since surfaced online, including a Beast Wars-themed Erector who transforms into a beaver.
Cartoon
- Various dubs of different Transformers cartoons have been partially lost:
- The European French dubs of 16 episodes of the original cartoon have been lost, mainly in season 3.
- The Canadian French dubs of 33 episodes of the original cartoon have been lost, mainly in season 1.
- Three quarters of the French dubs of the Unicron Trilogy have been lost. Around 20 episodes of Armada and 10 episodes of Energon and Cybertron have been released on DVD. According to several voice actors from the shows, all the episodes have been dubbed and broadcast at the time.
- The Latin American-Spanish dub of Cybertron episodes 28 to 52 is lost. Some clips with the dub have resurfaced over the years, but no full episodes.
- The Indonesian dubs of the last nine episodes of Transformers: Prime have been lost.
- The Indonesian dubs of the original cartoon have been completely lost. Only the "Starscream's Brigade" episode can be found.
- "Primeval Dawn II" was a 10-minute motion comic that debuted at Wizard World Chicago in 2002. While a short introductory animation exists, the full episode has never been published online or distributed in any other medium since.
Video games
- Battle for the Allspark and its sequel, Battle for the Allspark v2, were browser-based multiplayer games that went offline sometime around 2009. No archives of their content remains.
- Transformers Online (2012) was a Chinese MMORPG based on Transformers: Prime that was shut down after just six months and is currently unplayable.
- Transformers Universe was another Prime-based online game. Similar to Online, the game spent six months in open beta before being permanently shut down in January 2015.
- Transformers: The Last Knight VR Experience was a VR game developed for the HTC VIVE which was only playable as a promotional tie-in to the eponymous movie in a select few theaters across the US. It hasn't been released to the public since.
- Transformers Online (2017) was an online team shooter based on Generation 1 and the live-action film series developed for the Chinese market. The game spent around 2 1/2 years in open beta before being shut down in February 2020, leaving it fully unplayable.
- Transformers: Heavy Metal was a mobile game that was launched in a beta form in a handful of countries starting in June 2021, only to be shut down a little over a year later in August 2022 and is no longer playable.
Comics
- A promotional BotBots comic book was released exclusively to 40 South Africa influencers with children in 2019. Each comic was printed to feature the children of the influencer interacting with the BotBots at night in the mall. While some pages have been recovered by fans, so far no complete scans of it have been found.
Online content
- While many videos on SectorSeven.org (the main website for the Sector Seven ARG) have been reposted elsewhere, the website itself has since gone offline and with it a large portion of its content. The landing page can still be accessed through the Wayback Machine, but only its first revealed password ('takara83') seems to work.
- In early 2007, in conjunction with their concerted efforts to organize the sprawling Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity, TakaraTomy published a timeline on their main Transformers website that charted the full chronology of the Japanese G1 and Japanese Unicron Trilogy continuities. In the years since, however, this timeline had been removed from Takara's website and all attempts to retrieve and archive its contents have been met with failure, due to said contents having been made using Adobe Flash software, which was discontinued in 2020, and the Flash files themselves being long gone.
- My Transformers: Rescue Bots Adventure is an interactive multipath adventure game that served as a tie-in with the Rescue Bots cartoon. It combined brand new original footage and dialogue with preexisting footage recycled from the series itself, and allowed the viewer to engage with the story by choosing different options of actions for the characters to perform in both fire-themed and water-themed rescue missions. Each option would lead to a different YouTube video that continued the story in each path taken. All of the videos for this adventure were originally uploaded to YouTube in August 2017 in the time between the end of the TV series and the start of its sequel, Rescue Bots Academy. However, the videos were all taken down at some point afterward, with only the first part reuploaded to a new channel in October, but without the in-video links that would lead to the next parts of the adventure. As of 2025, all that remains of this game are the aforementioned first video and its original announcement trailer.
Audio
- The Operation Combination Telephone Audio Adventures were brief recorded messages available to Japanese fans in 1992, and have not subsequently been located.
- While the first 37 episodes of the Kiss Players radio drama were collected and released on CD, episodes 38–51 have remained unavailable since their original broadcast from December 2006 to March 2007.
Recovered Transformers media
Some formerly lost Transformers media has since been recovered or restored, often through extensive fan efforts.
Cartoon
- The fourth episode of the 2001 Robots in Disguise cartoon, "Spychangers to the Rescue", originally aired on American television mere days after the September 11 terrorist attack. Due to increased sensitivities brought about by said attack, the episode had to be temporally removed from broadcast rotation and re-edited to change the episode's subject from the potential danger of an energy generator exploding to said generator cracking open and releasing a corrosive gas instead. Additionally, certain scenes of battle and panic from the original broadcast version were also removed for the later rebroadcast version. When the series released on DVD in the United Kingdom, it was the later rebroadcast edit of the episode that was included, while the original broadcast edit has never seen official release. For over a decade, the original edit of the episode was considered lost until a VHS recording of it was uploaded to YouTube on November 15, 2013.
- Starting from episode 38, the Latin American-Spanish dub of all Transformers: Energon episodes was lost for several years. In November 2020, the Facebook page Transformers The Golden Age, along with the group Transformers: Ñ Posteo, launched a search to find the missing episodes. As a result, seven were recovered. Later, between June 2021 and August 2022, the remaining episodes were recovered thanks to a rebroadcast of the series by Canal 9 in Nicaragua.
- A total of 16 animated shorts were produced during the first season Transformers Animated, but only 14 of them were publicly released online. The remaining two, "Logo" and "Starscream's Fantasy", were screened during BotCon 2009 and BotCon 2012, but otherwise never made available in any other format. It wasn't until 2022 when, after a sudden surge of interest and fan requests, Marty Isenberg allowed the two shorts to be published online unofficially.
Video games
- The Hoover Dam exterior level for the PC and home consoles version of 2007's Transformers The Game was long assumed to be lost, until it was successfully datamined from the Wii version during 2018 in a state surprisingly not too far from completion. A more unfinished version of the level was also later discovered in the PS3 port.
- Transformers Battle Universe had been rendered unplayable since 2009 as a result of the online service it relied on shutting down, but it was again restored into a playable state by fans in 2017.
Online content
- 2007 marked a turning point in the Transformers brand with the release of the first first live-action movie. With the sudden newfound interest in the brand, TakaraTomy created a new website called "World of the Transformers", which gave an overview of Transformers lore and its many different facets. However, much of this website's content was made using Adobe Flash software, and when the site closed down some years later, its contents were thought to be lost for good once Flash was discontinued in 2020. However, many of the site's original Flash files were actually retrievable via web archiving software, and so a recreation of its contents (complete with a full English translation) has been made and kept intact here.
