A Ghost In The Machine

The Mystery Of White Optimus Prime

It is the nature of any long-running media property to leave no mystery alone. God forbid our imaginations fill in the gaps. It has to be official! It must be canon!

There is even a short story to explain the secret origins of the red R2D2-like whose head explodes near the start of the first Star Wars film. Even the most chokingly narrow of avenues must have a bright light shone along it.

Transformers, a 40-year old nerd mainstay, is no different. Gaze upon the works of the (excellent) TFWiki, and despair at all the minute detail about even the most obscure of robotic Glup Shittos.

It is, however, a mystery that was left unaddressed for almost two decades - before the Explain Everything paradigm really began - that has proven one of the most enduring elements of Transformers for me personally. It’s this guy:

No, not Ultra Magnus, the Autobot New Leader from 1986. Look a little deeper, beyond those yawning voids that are supposed to be eyes. See behind the mask.

Spooks! There he is. White Optimus Prime, the ghost in the shell. The wee man who wears Ultra Magnus’ big blue hat and red onesie. (You may recognise him from this newsletter’s email banners - he really is one of the keys to All This).

From its earliest days, Transformers was no stranger to recolouring one toy and cheerfully selling it as an entirely different character - see iconic jetbot Starscream and his many ‘brothers’, or a legion of Soundwave and Blaster’s various cassette minions released in every colour of the rainbow over the years. But it was always brazen about it: same toy, new guy, new name, new bio on the back of the box, you’re gonna love him, buy buy buy.

Not so with our bleach boy here. The toy that was Ultra Magnus transformed into a car-carrier lorry, consisting of a blue trailer towed by a white cab. As far as cartoon (including the cult favourite 1986 animated movie), comic and any number of books and merch was concerned, this truck transformed directly into a large red, white and blue robot, with no interstitial Little White Dude mode.

In other words, outside of the toy’s instructions, the White Prime hiding in Magnus’ gut effectively didn’t exist. We were all expected to pretend that he wasn’t there - that Ultra Magnus was not built around an ivory incarnation of the most famous Transformer of all. The toy so popular in 1984 and 1985 that desperate parents almost came to blows in the aisles of Woolworths, but its manufacturers didn’t make any kind of deal that it was here again, in a new hue.

Had White Prime been almost any other colour, I don’t think the mystery would have been anywhere near as compelling. It’s because he’s essentially colourless, as though life or identity (or both) has been drained from him. He may be white as snow, but he implies a coal-black history.

However, Inner Magnus is not in truth colourless. Earlier versions of the toy generously applied silver, cyan and red (for the eyes) paint, along with rubber rather than cheap plastic wheels. Later runs were down-graded to save money - and because White Prime was not considered the important part, so why bother with bells and whistles? I do love that flash of colour on the spectral canvas of the Fancy Version, but the sheer blankness of the unpainted version and its lifeless eyes is fascinatingly unsettling.

With no internet and no overlong and painfully self-aware newsletters to speak of, there was simply nowhere for curious kids to turn for answers. Playground gossip stepped into the breach, background radiation of childish lies snowballing across the country to ensure that, in every school, was some kid who absolutely, definitely knew the truth because he’d seen a secret cartoon episode or his Great Uncle Derek worked for Hasbro or there was this comic you could only get in Japan or—

No-one knew, and yet there was always someone who would claim, with complete confidence, that it was the ghost of Optimus Prime, or his reanimated corpse, or his brother/clone/dad, or the bastard had faked his own death, or it was a secretly a baddie version of Prime Trojan Horsing the goodies, or—

At least some of this was born of the essential truth that Optimus Prime really had just died, in the aforementioned 1986 movie, with Magnus made interim (and desperately unsuccessful) leader until garish jock-bot Hot Rod took the reigns instead. Hence, a deceased or ghostly Prime inhabiting Big Magnus made a certain sense. But to be clear, this was never the case, and never stated to be.

For most kids, this was a fortnight-long mystery at best. Toys fads were horrifyingly regular and vanishingly brief in the early-to-mid 1980s, so most boys my age simply moved on to the next fleeting hit of plastic crack. Not I, obviously.

Ultra Magnus was a major player in the Marvel UK Transformers comic that I so adored (see the previous post), so I turned up doggedly for each weekly issue, convinced that this time it would explain why Optimus Prime was hiding inside Magnus’ tummy.

But once again, there would be no answer for this bone-white conundrum. Just pretend he’s not there, kids.

The answers, when they came, were two-fold. On the one hand, the early noughts Dreamwave comic, which was instrumental in restoring the original 80s Transformers characters and aesthetic into nerd-public consciousness. Mid-way through its run, it had a fatally-wounded Magnus shed his hulking outer armour and stand revealed as no less than Optimus Prime’s snow-white sibling.

It was a staggering moment for People Like Me - the first time that Inner Magnus / White Prime had ever even been acknowledged in official fiction. Almost two decades of waiting, to the point we might even wonder if we’d simply imagined it. Then, suddenly, there it was.

And, sensibly, there was no more explanation than that - how and why a robot would have a brother, why he hid his true face away, whether he was a lesser or equal sibling to The Greatest Transformer Of Them All... The comic died before it could answer this, so we are still free to wonder, after all these years.

The other answer is altogether more prosaic. It’s one that’s always existed, but I myself was not aware of until Transformers fandom spread increasingly online in the early 2000s. It turned out that Ultra Magnus, the toy, was never really Ultra Magnus after all.

He was Powered Convoy - simply a different version of the non-sentient mech troopers known as Diaclone, whose Japanese toyline was one of the major sources Hasbro licensed when creating the gestalt Western brand that would become Transformers.

Powered Convoy was a striking but muted blue, grey, black and red - these colours were abandoned for Ultra Magnus in favour of more head-turning Captain America hues, to match the 86 Transformers movie’s very of-the-era bright and brash aesthetic.

Its hallowed inner bot, meanwhile was a smart blue and black rather than white and silver. (I’m fortunate enough to possess a limited run reissue of Powered Convoy, as pictured here - as it happens it is the most valuable Transformer I own, due to the fandom’s increasing preoccupation with the line’s early Japanese origins. I promise you I did not pay anything like the current going rate).

In short, the red truck-bot we nowknow as Optimus was Battle Convoy; the blue one (later white) was Powered Convoy. In Diaclone’s loose fiction, these were mass-produced, piloted war machines, not singular characters. It didn’t matter that Powered’s inner bot was identical to Battle’s, in the same way it doesn’t matter that one Ford Mondeo is red and another is white. It wasn’t even a question - until Hasbro rereleased it as Ultra Magnus but pretended that White Prime didn’t exist.

Answering every mystery isn’t always satisfying, eh? I was happier when I didn’t know. But the power of Not Knowing has stayed with me, which is why I have a sub-collection of White Primes. An unhealthy sub-fixation of a wider unhealthy fixation,

By now, this is a mainstay of Transformers repaints, given that it’s a laughably easy way to make more money from each new Optimus toy . I don’t object in the slightest, for I adore the strangeness of having this colourless, blank-faced clone of Transformers’ poster-boy, but at the same time still declining to say who he really is.

Oh, they put ‘Ultra Magnus’ on the box for each one these days, but he isn’t, not really. He’s White Prime, and he’s nobody.