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.