The Skyfire Adventures: The Lost Episodes

Back in 1997-1998 I wrote a series of Transformers fanfics called The Skyfire Adventures.  The inspiration was I had created a little patch for the Doom video games where your weapons and face would look like a character I came up with:  Skyfire, a Beast Wars version of the Autobot Jetfire (himself a copy of the Veritechs used in Macross/Robotech.)  Instead of a jet fighter, I made Skyfire a bald eagle.  Maybe I have a picture of it somewhere.  I don't, but here's a cover I threw together.  Just imagine Jetfire with brown feathers over most of his body and an eagle head instead of a plane nose and that's basically how he'd look.

Anyway, the first story I wrote was a Beast Wars/Doom crossover where Skyfire finds the crashed Maximal ship from the TV show that's then attacked by Doom monsters.  In saving the Maximals, he winds up beamed across the galaxy to some other planet.  In the second story then Skyfire finds a crashed Autobot shuttle.  Inside are a lot of his old comrades:  Wheeljack, Grapple, Beachcomber, Skids, and Perceptor--all engineering/science types.  They were on an exploratory trip after the war with the Decepticons was won when their ship was attacked by Shockwave and crashed.  Or whatever.  They're all offline but with some help from the planet's inhabitants, he's able to get them functioning again

Eventually Skyfire and the Autobots get a new ship and start to head back to their home of Cybertron, but like Star Trek Voyager it would be a trip that would take a long, long time.  Fortunately they're all robots who can essentially live forever.

In the third story I introduced this thing that allowed Skyfire to not just change into an eagle, but also into Jetfire--and Jetfire's Veritech mode.  Which would have been awesome if the toys could do that but I think it would be really hard.  They've come close with Punch/Counterpunch but this was more advanced.  There was also the Predacon Scarecrow (who turned into, wait for it, a crow) who merged with Shockwave and so he could be either Scarecrow or Shockwave depending.

The fourth story then is where it picked up with a three-story arc.  In the movie there was the evil Unicron, a giant Transformer who ate worlds.  And in the comics Unicron's brother was called Primus and he became Cybertron and created the Transformers.  But who created them?

In the fourth story Skyfire and company arrive at a planet to find another race of Transformers there.  Their leader was named Hippolyta (like the character from Greek mythology and also Wonder Woman's mom) and she and Skyfire fell in love.  Meanwhile Skids had been thrown forward into the future by a few days, where he found everyone dead.  How?  Why?

It turns out the planet is actually the body for Primus/Unicron's daddy.  He finally awakens and transforms to kill all the offspring he thinks are unworthy or whatever.  In the next two stories Skyfire and his crew work with Hippolyta and her people to kill the bad guy.

The crux of this storyline was that there wasn't just one Matrix like in the cartoon/comics where it was the Matrix of Leadership or Creation.  Long, long ago there were 12 Matrices and each one had its own special ability.  (Hasbro sort of usurped this for the Power of the Primes toys where there were 12 Primes, each with some different skill.)

One Matrix was the one from the movie/TV/comics that was on Earth or Cybertron or whatever.  A second Matrix was held by Hippolyta as the leader of her people.  She used that to destroy the bad guy.  Hooray!  She should have died, but like Hot Rod in the movie she got a new body--an Autobot body so she could go with Skyfire.

The plan was that there would be six more stories that would involve Skyfire and company looking for the rest of the Matrices.  They would separate into a few different groups with at least one story focusing on each small group to give some of the more neglected characters a chance to shine before coming together for the finale.  Buuuuut, I only wrote one story and then just threw together a final thing that wasn't very good.

What happened?  Life, mostly.  I was in college and working part-time and so there wasn't always a lot of time for writing stuff.  And that old bugaboo:  not many people seemed to be reading what I had already written.  And this was long before Amazon KDP and they were fanfics, so I couldn't make money off them.  When push came to shove in life, what do you think got left by the wayside?  Yeah, exactly.

And since it's been 21 years it's not likely I'm going to go and finish those.  Really I'd have to start over from scratch.  But again they're fanfics so I can't really make money off them.  Thus, what would be the point?

I do think one of the main reasons I liked IDW's Lost Light series was because it was in some ways similar to The Skyfire Adventures.  There were even some of the same characters like Skids!  Also in the IDW comics there was another planet of Transformers led by a female (Windblade) so I think they pretty much usurped all of my best ideas.

BTW, this was just one of at least three abandoned stories/series in this time period.  The rest of the week we'll cover the other two!