As a minor I initially misunderstood the depiction of various Transformers characters (in my case all G1). Usually my misunderstanding arose from limited information - either I had only seen the character flash by in a cartoon episode or had only seen the toy in package or shown in a catalogue. My imagination filled in speculative gaps, with the following results:
- Megatron turned into a rifle, not a gun with extensions.
- Shockwave turned into a fixed position cannon, not a handgun.
- Rumble's only alt-mode was not a cassette, but rather those pile-drivers.
- Wheeljack and Ratchet were the same character. Wheeljack clearly appears as a van in the first episode, and the lights flanking his face were presumably his ambulance mode emergency lights.
- The hood-like structure over Huffer in robot mode looks like some kind of shovel so he must have been a construction vehicle.
- Some years later, I read Scourge's tech-spec as saying he literally lead a 'wolf-pack' and imagined the Sweeps as a group of domesticated cyber-wolves.
- Rodimus Prime and Hot Rod were something like uncle and nephew, a common relationship depicted in cartoons.
Did anyone else make these sorts of mistakes, for whichever generation or toy line?