Quote:The "series events, movie designs, movie is a movie IC" evolution is a nice trick, but for sheer number of official continuities under a single name it's hard to beat Transformers. Let's see if I can remember them all...
You know, between the explanation here and the website Offsides linked to, I think I took SAN damage...
* US cartoon, G1/G2
* US comics, G1/G2 (though how well the G2 comics really fit with G1 is open to question...)
* US comics, Generations and War Within
* CG Beast Wars/Beast Machines (again, questionable, but official)
* US Beast Wars comics (at least, I think there were... official ones, I mean, not just fancomics or con material)
* UK comics
* Japanese G1 cartoons, diverging after TF:TMP - 2010, Headmasters, Victory, Zone, all as coherent as sequels as any other kids' show
* Japanese Beast Wars post-Transmetals are fairly obviously alternate universes rather than continuations, that's BW Second and BW Neo, each their own world.
* Car Robots/Robots in Disguise cartoon
* TF: Armada cartoon
* TF: Armada comics (the ones packaged with the toys)
That's only twelve, so I've forgotten one. I do remember that anything in the G1 comics that crosses over with other comics besides GI Joe officially does not exist, as those titles are supposed to be seperate from the rest if the Marvel Universe.
If you count tech specs, then you have US G1/G2, UK-only G1, and Japan G1, but I'm not at all sure about which later toy lines still had a character blurb and when it was switched to a generic series blurb like they are for Armada. At least part of Beast Wars still had character descriptions...
Anyway, my point here aside from showing that Macross doesn't have it so bad as all that in terms of continuity complexity is that for a proposed Transformers step, you're as well off to pick your favorite character designs for good guys and bad guys, call them by the faction names that most of them fit with, and wing it, as trying to closely match any particular prexisting interpretartion.
Dave VanDomelen has compared Transformers to Greek Mythology - you know the major characters, you know the basic storyline, but the details will change from one play to another. Here Optimus Prime (or is that Convoy?) is a big red tractor cab with a box trailer, here he's a fire truck, here he's a flatbed artillery piece, here he's a gorilla. Here Megatron is a handgun, here he's a tank, here he's a dinosaur, here he's a dragon. For all of them, bad guys attacked the good guys in space, causing them both to crash on earth, and now the good guys are trying to stop the bad guys from gathering the resources to escape and take over the galaxy.
- CD