Interview: 'Transformers: War for Cybertron' Creators Talk Inspirations Ahead of New Artbook

gamerant.com:

For almost 40 years, Transformers has been one of the most iconic entertainment franchises in the world. Entertaining generations of fans with its own different generations of content, the iconic toy series is also an incredible success story between both its Japanese and American incarnations.

With the recent War for Cybertron anime trilogy on Netflix, the synergy between both the series’ international roots and different incarnations was made more apparent than ever. With the upcoming art book dedicated to the War for Cybertron coming out this fall from Viz Media, GameRant talked to series showrunner F.J. DeSanto and producer Mike Avila about the inspirations and creation behind the show.

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GameRant: Looking over some material for the upcoming art book, you can definitely sense the passion the War for Cybertron anime had for Transformers, the different eras of the property and the way these different phases and characters could be brought together. When you were adapting a property with so many different phases and eras to draw on, what were some of the biggest influences over the years and how did you hope to add on to that tradition?

War for Cybertronshowrunner F.J. DeSanto: It’s really simple, in that the freedom we were given with the project was based around what Hasbro was doing with the toys. We knew what the framework of where they were taking it in terms of the tone and the direction was, and then the big sucker punch was getting the characters from the Beast Wars era to eventually come in. We knew it was gonna be a prequel to G1 Transformers, so we carefully studied the original Transformers, as well as the anime that kind of came on the tail-end