Fortuitous Canon.

[Sky Shadow]

I was just thinking about examples of accidental throwaway ideas in Transformers that later became important plot points. For example:

In 'The Icarus Theory' (a Marvel UK comic story) it was mentioned that Swoop's name on Cybertron had been Divebomb. It is most likely that this was because Furman knew this was the originally-intended name for the Swoop toy, not because he was aware that the Predacons would be released (albeit - like Swoop himself - not in the UK.) Then, ninety-issues-and-one-and-a-half-years later, Furman uses this throwaway line to fuel two Dinobot-Predacon stories - "Grudge Match!" and "What's In A Name".

Mainly I'm wondering about ideas that prodigiously became important later on, not ones that were planned. Any thoughts?

[Cat]

Ratchet teaming up with Megatron early on in the Marvel run.

Works beautifully with what Furman did later.

[GoktimusPrime]

How about the Matrix? Originally conceived in the comics as a way to introduce new toys^create new TF life and in the animation as a Cosmic MacGuffin to kill Unicron... then the whole back story/mythos was built around that... now it's a freakin' Multiversal Singularity!

[UltraMarginal]

or sparks as introduced in Beast wars, that has become a pretty popular part of the canon now.

[Hursticon]

or sparks as introduced in Beast wars, that has become a pretty popular part of the canon now.

Exactly what I was going to mention dude ; whilst they were given very passing mentions with differing labels (Laser-Cores, etc.) they ended up becoming a staple fixture to the whole Transformers mythos.

[GoktimusPrime]

Yeah, as a terminology "Spark" has definitely stuck as a lexical legacy from Beast Wars.

What about the Autobot and Decepticon logos? The Autobot logo seemed to be based on Prowl/Bluestreak's head and the Decepticon logo based on Soundwave's head -- and of course all the 1984 TFs were carry-overs from Diaclone and Microman; but since then it's been canonically established that the Autobot logo is an image of the god Primus, and the Decepticon logo is an image of The Fallen! (which I guess means that either the makers of Prowl, Bluestreak and Soundwave designed their heads as homages to Primus and The Fallen, or it's all a series of coincidences ).

Unicron was introduced in TFTM as a giant robot that eats the other robots. Later became a Dark God/Chaos Bringer and universal singularity! Also, didn't the original cartoon writers play around with the idea of Cybertron being a massive Transformer, but then ditched it? Cos obviously this idea came to fruition is Transformers Galaxy Force/Cybertron.

[Ode to a Grasshopper]

The BW throwaway line about Tarantulas being 'Unicrons spawn' seemed to take off a bit.

[UltraMarginal]

beast wars also introduced the concept of Protoform . it was just a simple plot device back then.

[Hursticon]

How about Alpha Trion going from some old 'know it all' who built/rebuilt Prime, to being one of the fabled 13 original Archetype Transformers? - Quite the promotion I should think.

[griffin]

Speaking of which, Orion Pax was a single episode plot device in the Gen1 cartoon (not even in the comic), that is now the norm for pre-prime Optimus, and even had a toy made. Even after Dreamwave tried to create their own version, called Optronix.