Cybertronians: Are Transformers Aliens? Origins, Biology and the Allspark

The species began as a licensing deal. Hasbro bought the American rights to two Japanese toy lines by Takara, Diaclone and Micro Change, whose cars and cassette players turned into robots, and hired Marvel Comics to invent a story for them; the writers Jim Shooter, Dennis O'Neil and Bob Budiansky produced the names, the factions and the home world in a few weeks in 1983, and the toys, comic and cartoon all launched in the autumn of 1984. Cybertron, in that first account, was a metal planet where two factions of living robots, the peaceful Autobots and the conquering Decepticons, had fought for millions of years until their ship, the Ark, crashed on Earth four million years ago and lay dormant in a volcano until 1984. The name Cybertronian followed; the question of where living machines came from was left to later writers, who have answered it several ways.

The cartoon said the Quintessons built them, as consumer goods and military hardware, and were overthrown. The British comics of Simon Furman said the planet was the god Primus, who created the Transformers to fight his brother Unicron; the American comics later adopted it, and the Allspark, the Well of All Sparks and the Thirteen Primes descend from that version. The 2007 film reduced the theology to a cube, the Allspark, which brings machines to life and which Cybertron's war was fought over. Transformers One (2024) went back before the war to Orion Pax and D-16, friends who would become Optimus Prime and Megatron, and gave the species an origin in a lie told by its rulers.

The franchise's answer to its own question is a small blue light. A spark is the animating core of a Cybertronian, located in the chest, indestructible by ordinary damage, released at death and, in the theology, returned to the Allspark; a body without a spark is a machine, and a spark can in some stories be moved into a new body, which is how the toys' redesigns were explained. Energon is the fuel, mined as crystals or refined as a liquid, drunk and bled; a Cybertronian starved of it goes into stasis, which is what happened to the Ark's crew. Cybertronians are born from the Allspark or the Well in most continuities, though the films have shown them built, hatched from protoforms and, in one case, forged from a fallen leader's parts.

The biology is elastic because the toys are. A Cybertronian scans a vehicle and reshapes itself into a copy, which the cartoon presented as a disguise and the films as something closer to a species trait, the way a chameleon changes; Optimus Prime is a truck because he chose one on arrival. They range from Bumblebee's five metres to Omega Supreme's city block; they combine into larger beings, the Constructicons into Devastator; they are killed by having the spark destroyed and can otherwise be repaired indefinitely. The question of whether a race of machines can be a species is one the films ask through their human characters and answer through the Autobots, who are the only characters in them with consistent moral positions.

They came for fuel, or by accident, or for a cube. The cartoon's Ark crashed while the Autobots were searching for Energon, and its computer, reactivated by a volcanic eruption in 1984, rebuilt the crew in the shapes of the vehicles it scanned on the highway outside; the Decepticons, who had boarded the ship in the crash, woke up too, and the war moved to Oregon. The 2007 film sent the Allspark to Earth to keep it from Megatron, who followed and froze in the Arctic, and the Autobots came for it after the humans found both. Every version puts the war's decisive resource on Earth so that the story can be told in a suburb, and every version makes the Decepticons the ones who would strip the planet, and the Autobots the ones who will not.

The films, from 2007 to 2023, turned Earth into the war's permanent front. Chicago is destroyed, Egypt's pyramids hide a machine that eats suns, the Moon landing was a cover for investigating a crashed Autobot ship, and the human governments alternately ally with and hunt the Autobots; Bumblebee (2018) rewound to 1987 and one small robot hiding in a garage, which is where the cartoon had started. Optimus Prime's rule, that freedom is the right of all sentient beings, is the franchise's one sentence of philosophy and the reason the Autobots stay.

The 2007 film is a crash-retrieval story with the retrieval done right. Its backstory has Captain Archibald Witwicky find Megatron frozen in the Arctic ice in 1897; a secret agency, Sector Seven, founded by President Hoover, moves the body to a chamber inside Hoover Dam, keeps it frozen for a century, and reverse-engineers its parts, so that, the film says, the microchip, the laser and the spaceflight program all came from a Decepticon in a basement. That is the reverse-engineering claim of Philip Corso's The Day After Roswell (1997), which said the transistor and fibre optics came from the 1947 debris, with a robot in place of a saucer; the film's agents even wear the black suits of the Men in Black lore.

The Roswell narrative, as it has been told since 1980, is a body and a craft in a hangar and a government that decided not to say; the Area 51 narrative is the hangar. Michael Bay gave both a dam, and the joke of the sequence, that the government had a giant alien robot the whole time and used it to invent the microwave, is the crash-retrieval story's own logic taken at its word. The 2023 whistleblower testimony that the United States holds non-human craft is the same story again, now under oath, and the Transformers films, which never claimed to be anything but toys, remain its most complete dramatization.