Since debuting over thirty years ago, the Transformers franchise has been one of pop culture's goofiest sci-fi draws. Growing from the original toy line to encompass numerous animated shows, a global smash-hit film series, and countless robots in disguise, Transformers has evolved into one of the world's biggest franchises. The latest installment Transformers: BotBots, now streaming on Netflix, takes a different approach. Instead of focusing on the galactic war between the Autobots and the Decepticons for the fate of multiple worlds, BotBots is more concerned with a batch of unassuming robots, the interplay between them, and their home in a middle-America mall.
During an exclusive interview with CBR, Transformers: BotBots Executive Producers Kevin Burke & Chris "Doc" Wyatt discussed the trick to crafting a Transformers that's indebted to sitcoms like The Office as much as the original franchise. The pair also spoke about the modern state of animation and what it's like to make an unabashed Transformers comedy.
CBR: The Lost Bots are such a fun group of characters to center the show around. They're the perfect level of a goofball. You don't want somebody who's too over the top silly just because that can take away the stakes and tension. These guys are the right level of, "well, no matter what adventure they get into, it's going to be fun." How did you zero in on these personalities?
Kevin Burke: We definitely wanted to have... We're creating a whole new world here, right? This is the first Transformers comedy, and these are not existing Transformers characters that are made into a sort of cute form. This is a different little corner of the Transformers universe... so we needed someone to guide us through here. [We needed] some characters that would be, in some ways, like going to the first day of school. Since the Lost Bots come to life in the lost and found, and they don't know anything about the greater mall or these other squads that are out there... We get to see the world through their eyes.
They're misfits. Ultimately, this show's about finding family and whether family can be found in strange places. The Lost Bots were such a great place to start because they're learning. What they're going through is what we're experiencing. Plus they're all slightly misfits. They're all different. They all occupy some sort of different space. Some are sillier than others. Some are more pompous than others. Some are just bizarre. So we think that's a lot of fun and a fun, relatable group to kind of go through this world with.
Burger Bot is a really fun character to center the show around. I can imagine that character being a little bit tricky to really figure out the right balance for. He has to be confident but not enough to be unappealing. What was it like to really hone in on that character?
Chris "Doc" Wyatt: He was definitely the keystone character to figure out. He was the character that you, in a certain sense, see them all through his eyes. You get the introduction to the mall through him. We spent a lot of time thinking about [and] talking about what he would be like. We looked at Michael Scott from The Office as a prototype for somebody who's in charge and maybe thinks they're more in charge than they are.
We looked a lot to '80s teen movies and high school movies because of the way the products were aligned in squads. I mean, that was something that came out of the BotBot toy line. They were divided into these squads. As soon as we looked at it, we started to think about it almost like a high school environment. So '80s teen movies presented great sources of inspiration for that kind of stuff because they're fun and they're silly, but they also have a lot of heart.
Unlike most versions of the Transformers series, BotBots doesn't necessarily have global stakes or epic battles. It's much more of a fun show about friends and squads that younger audiences are going to have an easy time identifying with. Why was it important to have that element of the show so much at the forefront?
Burke: Well, I think that [there are] a couple [of] things that are important about it. One, this is not a preschool show. It's a kind of all age show. We want to show that parents can watch with their kids, something that falls into that Pixar category where it's really enjoyable for everybody. We also wanted to make it something that if you've never heard Transformers or never tuned into Transformers, you can start here. You can absolutely start on this show. If you've loved Transformers for over 30 years, you can also love this show because it doesn't negate anything you've already loved about the series.
What was important to us was simply relatability. We wanted to go back to the original Transformer concept that got me excited as a kid, which is that robots were in disguise. Anything could be a robot. Before you get into Cybertron and the All-Spark and all of that, the core idea is that [a] truck could be a robot, that [a] plane could be a robot. Now we're saying that a coffee cup could be a robot, that [a] pizza could be a robot. So it's the idea [that] there are secret robots everywhere. To the reliability... The BotBots are pretty brand new. They weren't born yesterday, but they were born pretty close to yesterday.
There's an aspect that I think every kid would feel... You're finding yourself, finding the things you like, finding your personality. That can change sometimes. So in a lot of ways, the show's kind of like the first day of school, but it's also like a workplace. It's like the first day at a job. You start seeing what groups hang out with who, and what types of people -- like that's the I.T. group or this is these people. You just find out everyone's got their own crowds, even in your neighborhood.
We took the Transformers idea of robots in disguise and moved it into a very relatable space where they're just trying to live their life. It's not about a war that's gone on for centuries. This is about social problems. This is about being your own worst enemy sometimes. This is about... It's Transformers meets sitcoms -- getting yourself into situations that you can't believe you got yourself into and don't know how to get out of. That's something that we find very relatable.
Wyatt: You mentioned the stakes in a lot of Transformers shows are global stakes, and worlds could be destroyed and things like that. For us, for the BotBots, the mall is their world. They're vaguely aware that there's this thing outside the mall called "the rest of the world" but for them, the mall's the universe. So if everyone at the mall finds something out, that's the biggest possible stake. We're going to get kicked out of the mall or put on a truck and taken away from the mall. There's no bigger stake than that because the mall is their world.
That actually segues really well into talking about Dave, who's the almost prerequisite "human who keeps almost stumbling onto the truth" character. He's a fun version of that, without losing his inherent threat to the cast -- I mean, he almost eats Burger Bot! Was there ever an impulse to make him sillier? What was it like crystalizing him?
Burke: We wanted to walk a fine line where we had a character that was going to be an antagonist. His knowledge of their existence is one of their biggest threats, but we didn't want to do the thing you sometimes see where it's the same beat over and over again. He's about to catch them, [then] doesn't catch them. Dave is an antagonist, but he is also sympathetic. By the end of it, there's a long story and a character arc here. We start to see things from his perspective and you start to relate to the way that he is. You start to see that there isn't that much different from him, who's their sworn enemy, and them, to some extent.
Everyone's trying to find where they belong in this world, and Dave is definitely one of those people as well. Yeah, it would've been easy -- and I think simplistic and honestly not as much fun -- to just do a mean guy, who's yelling after them, trying to catch them, and always ending up with pie in his face or something. We wanted something a little richer than that, something that you would be intrigued with. And as you watch the whole season, you start to see that there's more to Dave than we realized.
Both of you have such experience in the world of animation, which has radically changed in the last decade. Animation as a medium is always inherently evolving, but it's really gone through a metamorphosis, especially in terms of animated television. From your perspective inside the industry, what has been the most interesting development in animation?
Wyatt: Well, I think streaming has made a major impact. We have watched in the last decade as animation has sort of broken the chains of what people expect it to be or expect it to do. It's sort of broken the chains of what audience it's supposed to be intended for. There are a lot of reasons for that, from imported animation doing really well, where the same sort of perceptions about what animation can be don't apply. With major blockbusters expanding creatively, that theatrical animation sort of affects what we do in television animation.
Also just with streaming, the audiences can be so targeted and so niche that you can get animated series that are for adults in ways that we haven't had in America, that other parts of the world have been doing for decades. For America, we're just sort of realizing the power of the medium. Also [we're realizing] that they can become major fan events and big family events in ways that even ten years ago would've been hard to imagine. So yeah, as someone who's telling stories in an animated medium, there is so much unexplored horizon out there now. I love the way the medium is growing and expanding.
Transformers: BotBots is streaming now on Netflix.