Now that all the anime fans reading this have that opening stuck in their heads from reading the title it’s time to look at  a subject that somewhat ties back into a few of the other talks. Titans!

Titans as a concept primarily means two things in Transformers. Titans as in the city transforming robots and Titan the size classification. Now all Titans are Titan sized, but not all Titans sized are Titans. To explain lets go back as we so often do, back to G1 (and keep doing so unless I get a topic that starts in the Unicron trilogy or after since I already did the Beast Era, wait for RiD fans to get at me for skipping them).

As talked about in the Beast Era articles, Beast Wars was when Transformers got standardized into different sized classification, and until then their prices usually related to how big they were. Cue 1985 (few know it was the Transformers that stopped Big Brother, they just couldn’t compete with Soundwave) and released was a very large Transformer Omega Supreme who turned not into a vehicle, but a whole rocket base. Though often in both the cartoon and comics, characters were not to scale with their toys. Omega was shown to be huge compared to other Transformers, basically a Kaiju. Now compared to what we are going to read about later, Omega wasn’t a Titan as what we will come to know as Titans appeared later but he was the first large Transformer that turned into a base rather than a vehicle. Omega’s origins (which made some continuity errors in how it portrayed the Constructicons) revealed he was one of the legendary guardian robots of ancient Cybertron.

What we now call Titans these days first appeared in the 3rd season and 3rd year of the toy line. These were a duo since often with Transformers major characters are best paired against one another and came in the form of Metroplex and Trypticon. These both were shown Transforming from entire cities to absolutely massive Transformers… which would have been impressive if it wasn’t right after we saw a planet turn into Unicron. Now in “reality” they more turned into a base that served as part of a city.

The “4th” season of the Transformers also had 2 new city transforming robots with the Headmasters Fortress Maximus and Scorponok though interestingly in the comics these two were often shown to be regular sized ( maybe a bit larger than normal) Transformers compared to the massive city transforming bots the toys and cartoon showed them as.  And massive indeed as on his release Fortress Maximus was the largest Transformer they ever released and would remain so for some time.

As mentioned many times before, the Transformers fandom will make a name for something if one is lacking, and for the Titans, the fan name was City Formers which doesn’t sound as good as some of their other explanations like Mass Displacement, so it’s no wonder that eventually in The Transformers: Robots in Disguise Annual 2012 they would be given the name that we now use for them Titans.

But that’s jumping ahead a wee bit. After G1, Titans for the most part vanished. They were completely absent for the Beast Era. You got big sized toys like Automaton Optimus but nothing really on the scale of the Titans. 2001’s Robots In Disguise did make use of a recolour of Fortress Maximus and the Unicron Trilogy did give toys to Unicron and Primus, as well as Cybertron using the idea of a giant race of Transformers. Even used were some of the Titans’ names but these were not the huge base mode Transformers of G1. Omega Supreme also appeared in Animated and was big but no toy made to many people’s annoyance. There were also cameos of the actual Titans but these were not huge.

Titans proper began to return with the aligned continuity and the game that started that era, War for Cybertron (which I would love to review but 360 red ringed). While Omega Supreme served as the final boss of the Decepticon campaign, as mentioned he wasn’t a Titan. However at the end of the Autobot campaign was Trypticon here shown as the robot mode of a Deception space fortress you actually explored in the penultimate stage. The sequel game went one further by bringing in Metroplex and even highlighting him in the games second trailer.

With this renewed appearance they began to appear in the IDW comics first referred to as a race called Metro Titan, as mentioned before, the name being shortened in 2012 to just Titan. And a year later in 2013 a brand new size of toys for Transformers was released, and with Metroplex as its first entrant, there was only one thing to call it. TITAN size.

Titans from then on became a major element of the lore of the IDW comics revealing them to be ancient giant Transformers that were used as ships by the Legendary 13 Primes to colonise other worlds. Here also there were only a select few who had the ancient skill to communicate or understand the language of Titans, a skill called Cityspeaking, a signature ability of up and coming female Autobot Windblade (in the sense she’s a brand new character).

The toy sized continued on with each major generations line receiving a new entrant in that category whether they were a Titan or not, such as Combiner Wars’ Devastator. But in the 2016’s line it was made one of the major elements in Titans Return, this time Fortress Maximus getting a brand new toy to reclaim his throne as the largest Transformer. Also that line’s voters choice was for a second Titan and winning it was Trypticon resulting in him receiving a new toy at the end of that line.

The Titan as a size and concept seems to be here to stay now. WFC Siege received a brand new Titan sized toy of Omega Supreme (hence why I kept bringing him up) while its sequel line Earthrise is going to finish the process of new moulds of the 4 original Titans with a new toy of Scorponok, an interesting point on what will come next with all them done. Transformers Cyberverse also featured 2 brand new Titans with Croaton and Iaconus and even murmurings of Iaconus having a toy in the works.

WFC Siege Omega Supreme Transformer Base mode

Though I feel I should tell you, Titans are expensive and the Titan sized ones are usually over £100 so… think ahead if you want to get one, though some like my friend Omega are considered amongst the best Transformers toys out there.

WFC Siege Omega Supreme Transformer Robot mode with Hound for scale