Transformers started in 1984 with the release of the first comics and toys for the G1 line. Hasbro started out by releasing in North America toys which had been available for a few years in Japan but had previously sold poorly in the the USA. The following year, the line was launched in Japan, where the American year one and two toys were smooshed into just one year of releases. Later in its life, the Transformers G1 line began producing new products which were specifically designed for it, ending (in North America at least) in 1990 amidst an avalanche of Micromasters and Action Masters.
In late 1992, Hasbro relaunched the franchise as "Transformers: Generation 2". In Europe, where Transformers had never disappeared, the new name simply started appearing on the boxes. Meanwhile, in Japan, 1992 was the last year of G1, with Operation: Combination wrapping things up. Japan saw no more Transformers until they started releasing toys under the G2 banner in 1995.
Like its predecessor, G2 began by re-releasing old toys. This time, they were toys and characters from G1 with new -- usually flashy -- color schemes and electronic sound gimmicks. TF:G2 gradually began introducing new product and introduced design innovations that are now often taken for granted such as ball-and-socket joints and lightpiped eyes. Some of the most well-reviewed Transformers of all time were created for this line. The Japanese version of G2 was much smaller, and included only new-mold toys.
Just a bit earlier, in 1991, Hasbro had finally achieved something it had wanted to do for many years: It bought out competing toy-maker Kenner. (Hasbro actually bought Tonka, of which Kenner was then a subsidiary.) It has been theorized (ie. it's not certain) that Hasbro took this action because, at the time, Transformers was on its way into the crapper and GI Joe was doing similarly poorly. Kenner had just won a bidding war for the Star Wars license, and Hasbro felt that they basically needed the license to avoid obselesence in the boys' toys market. So, they simply bought Tonka/Kenner out. As part of the restructuring that followed over the next few years, Hasbro in 1995 moved their lucrative boys' lines from their Pawtucket, Rhode Island headquarters to the Kenner offices in Cincinnati, Ohio. (This happened just in time to throw BotCon '95 into chaos.) With this move, TF:G2 somewhat suddenly disappeared, and in January 1996 the first BW toys hit store shelves.
Beast Wars was a huge hit, and when you include the followup Beast Machines, the "Beast Era" lasted for five and a half years, starting at Kenner and then moving back to Pawtucket in 2000. After the Beast Era, Hasbro began what staffers have compared to a "Final Fantasy" approach to Transformers, whereby every few years a new line will be released which has similar themes to previous incarnations, but also exists as an independant entity, and the franchise has been going strong since then. The first line in this post-Beast regime was Robots In Disguise, running from about July 2001 until June/July of 2002. Armada was next, with the first toys appearing at retail early in the summer of 2002. This was followed by Energon, which continues the story from Armada, and then Cybertron, also in the same "universe" as the last two, which began hitting stores in June 2005. Additionally in the early 2000s, sales of TFs were strong enough that Hasbro began offering side toylines such as Universe and Alternators.
Sometime around early 1983, Takara began selling some of their popular Japanese robot toylines in the United States, including marketing Diaclone under the name Diakron and parts of New Microman under the name Kronoform. Shortly afterwards, though, Takara and Hasbro representatives met at the annual Toy Fair trade show in New York. Takara was trying to find US-based partners to help them sell their brands, and struck a deal with Hasbro. The two companies already had some business history together, as described elsewhere in the FAQ. (See II/C/1.) Once this deal was struck, Takara naturally stopped marketing the toys on their own, hence the rather short-lived lifetime of those lines in America. Hasbro, for whatever reason, felt they needed to develop a new story for the toys rather than sticking with the established stories from Takara, and approached Marvel for help. (Marvel had previously done development work on the 80's G.I. Joe franchise for Hasbro, to great success.) The backstory and characters were created by Marvel, and of course Marvel released the comic and Marvel Productions -- their animation branch -- did the cartoon series under contract from Sunbow.
As noted above, basically all the development was done at Marvel. According to an old article in Marvel Age, the first two Marvel staffers brought onto the project were Jim Shooter (who was then Marvel's EIC) and Denny O'Neill. An interview with Bob Budiansky from early 2003 indicates that Bob, too, had a hand in these early stages. It appears that Jim and Denny developed the scenerio and a few characters, then handed the project off to Bob, who wrote profiles for the rest of the initial cast of 28 over the course of a weekend. Bob's memory of this was incomplete, understandably, but he did state that O'Neill created the name and character bio for Optimus Prime. In the introduction to the collected volume, New Order, Bob stated that he came up with the name "Megatron", and presumably developed the character as well. So, the treatment was by Shooter and O'Neill, along with a few specific characters, but most of the characters were Budiansky's. After the development was done, Marvel Age says that Shooter passed things off to another writer named Bill Mantlo. Mantlo was given partial writing credits for the first two issues of the comic series, but his name never appears again in Transformers lore, so it's hard to say exactly what he did. So, if you ever want to know who to thank for creating the Transformers franchise, look to Shooter, O'Neill, and Budiansky.
According to a 1990 AP article which cites the book, Toyland: The High Stakes Game of the Toy Industry, the Tonka's GoBots had a lead time of five months. This is, presumably, a specific statement about GoBots, and not its predecessor, Machine Men.
Although GoBots were marketed by Tonka, they were a reinvention of Bandai's Machine Robo, much as TF started as a second pass at Diaclone and Microchange / New Microman. Just as parts of Diaclone had already been released in the US by Takara under the name Diakron, parts of Machine Robo had been released by its creator, Bandai, under the name Machine Man. (I've seen very, very little talk of the American incarnation of MM, though, so it may have been a pretty small release.) The familiar GoBots slogan -- "Mighty robots, mighty vehicles" -- is cribbed directly from the Machine Man commercial jingle. And again, similar to the way things unfolded for TFs, Bandai struck a deal with Tonka not long after they had started selling the toys Stateside on their own. At this point, Machine Man disappeared from the US and was replaced by GoBots. In other world markets, however, Bandai remained in control. Worldwide, the names Machine Robo, GoBots and Machine Man were all used for these toys.
As Tonka's GoBots franchise continued to develop, aspects of it began to appear in Machine Man marketing as well. In Australia, for example, the Machine Man toys' names suddenly changed from Machine Robo-esque names like "Tank Man" into the more pun-ish GoBots names, and the "Challenge of the GoBots" cartoon by Hanna Barbara aired with a simple title change.
This isn't an easy question to answer, especially since the "death" of G1 wasn't global or simultaneous. Although the North American TF line slowly lost sales until Hasbro felt it was no longer worth financing, the Japanese line survived for another year (with drastically different toys than late in the US line), and the European line never died at all. When Hasbro US introduced TF:G2, the European line simply changed its packaging to include a "G2" logo. So, the real question is why sales declined in North America to the point that Hasbro discontinued the line.
And for that question, of course, there is no real answer. Nothing lasts forever. The G1 line ran from 1984 until 1990, which is an unusually long run for any toyline. The quality of the toys didn't really change all that much; Hasbro just seemed to be offering toys that kids didn't want to buy anymore. This may have been a lack of adaptation to changing tastes, or simply a loss of "freshness" that any long-running line is destined to encounter from time to time. As younger kids reach the target age for Transformers they are, in general, more likely to be attracted to a new fad than an old one, and in the meantime the old fad's customers are going to be outgrowing it. The net result is that almost every franchise has a limited lifespan, or at best, will go through cycles of popularity. At around the same time that Transformers was disappearing, Micro Machines, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and -- perhaps most importantly -- Nintendo were coming into prominance.
Aside from what I've already said, the best I can do is list a few of the criticisms that longtime TF fans have made about late G1. I want to stress, though, that these complaints are not even remotely universal, and some of them don't even make a lot of sense. These are simply some of the things that some G1 fans have sometimes said:
When Hasbro brought Transformers back in 1992 for G2 they were taking a risk. Despite a slow start G2 matured into a line with some very sophisticated toys, but it never sold well. In 1995 Transformers and Hasbro's other Boy's Toys lines were transferred from Pawtucket to Kenner in Cincinnati, and it was decided to shut G2 down and try to salvage the franchise by going in a completely new direction. What isn't known is the level at which this decision was made. It could have been mandated by Hasbro as part of Kenner's mission ("remake Transformers"), or it may have been completely internal to Kenner. That is, they knew they had to shake things up a little to keep Transformers viable, and decided to go whole hog. Whoever came up with the idea, though, they managed to do exactly what Transformers needed at the time. If it had not been for Beast Wars, it is unlikely that there would be new TF toys being released today.
Transformers (and Hasbro's other "boys' toys" lines) moved to Kenner in Cincinnati during the middle of 1995. After this move, no Transformers were released until Beast Wars hit stores in early 1996. These were the first Transformers to bear the Kenner logo. In early 1999 Hasbro began eliminating the Kenner brand name, turning the Kenner office into simply Hasbro's Cincinnati office. 1999 was also the final year of Beast Wars (BM toys were actually available near the end of the year), populated by the TransMetal 2's. The Kenner logo disappeared between the year two and three BW toys. So, Fuzors and Transmetals are Kenner, Transmetal 2's are Hasbro. But of course, that's not quite the same thing as being "made" by Kenner vs. Hasbro. TF remained at the Cincinnati office even after Hasbro eliminated the brand name, so "spiritually" it was still Kenner, if not in name. As noted elsewhere, the Cincinnati office was shut down at the end of the year 2000, and the boy's toylines moved back to Rhode Island at that time.
What appears to have happened is that Hasbro made a late decision not to go ahead with the TransTech line they had been developing, and realized that they needed time to put together something new (ie. Armada). So, Car Robots was adapted into Robots In Disguise. Developing a whole new line after dropping TransTech would have taken too long and left a large gap between the end of Beast Machines and the start of something new. Adapting CR to RID was much quicker. This is why people sometimes say RID was a "filler" line.
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