« Transformers: Robots in Disguise ep 13 »
Behold... Galvatron!
"Hope for the Future"
Production company	TV Tokyo, NAS, Studio Gallop
Airdate	October 26, 2001
Written by	Tom Wyner
Director	Osamu Sekita
Animation studio	Studio Gallop

Prime views past events
Viewer suffers stock footage
Saban laughs at you

Synopsis

Optimus Prime orders T-AI to call in the Autobots. The Autobot Brothers respond, although Side Burn would rather be at the beach. The Spychangers are at the beach—fighting the Predacons. After a suspiciously similar battle, the Predacons are defeated and the Spychangers head in to base. Team Bullet Train also respond, practicing their link-up maneuver on the way.

Back at base, they discuss the advantage that having Dr. Onishi gives the Predacons. Optimus repeats his promise that they'll get Koji's father back, replaying the events leading up to Dr. Onishi's capture on the monitor. Optimus decides that if they examine the Predacons' past actions, they may be able to find clues to the location of the Predacon base. Koji thinks that there may be more information recorded on the chip they recovered from the ruins, leading them to replay the events leading up to its discovery.

Hey, remember that time we stayed in the base and watched old footage?

Optimus recalls the time when the Predacons went after a "device" hidden in a red sports car, and the time he fought Sky-Byte underwater. Koji suggests that the latter event may mean that the Predacon base is somewhere underwater. They switch to examining the Predacons' tactics and how they are able to use individual Autobots' weaknesses against them, such as when they used Side Burn's love for red sports cars to lure him into a trap. Optimus believes that Megatron's weakness is his ego making him believe he's infallible, such as the time he planted a bug on Mirage and believed the Autobot had turned against his comrades.

When Hot Shot is dismissive of the Predacons and their plans, Optimus points out that sometimes the Autobots only succeed through good luck, such as the time they were searching for Skid-Z and the Predacons almost took them out. T-AI wonders why Megatron is so persistent, but Side Burn insists that while they have Optimus on their side, Megatron doesn't stand a chance.

Finally, the Autobots remember their brilliant plan at the ruins, in which they chased away the Predacons and were able to recover the O-Part. Optimus says if Megatron is trying to find the O-Parts, then it's a race to find the rest of them before the Predacons do.

Featured characters

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Quotes

"Sky-Byte hasn't beaten us yet, but he's sneaky, clever and dangerous and he'll do just about anything to carry out a mission."

—Railspike, overselling

"Yes, and when he went after the device hidden in that red sports car, he almost succeeded."

—Optimus Prime talking about a device, definitely not a BOMB or anything

Notes

Production notes

• This is the first of three recap episodes created entirely by Saban Entertainment for the English dub, replacing the three recap episodes of the original Japanese version ("Gigatron's Ambitions Revealed!", "Assemble! New Troops", and "Gelshark's Blues"). As such, every single bit of animation in this episode is recycled from preexisting footage.
• Originally, the English dub wasn't going to have any recap episodes at all, with the initial episode count slated to be 36, three less than the original count of 39.^[1] However, when "Attack from Outer Space", "Landfill", and "Sky-Byte Saves the Day" were banned from U.S. broadcast due to censorship following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, that further reduced the episode total down to 33. To make up for the loss of the banned episodes, three brand-new recap episodes were created by Saban to restore the total back to 36 episodes. But then the three banned episodes ended up eventually airing in markets outside the U.S. anyway, bumping the total count back up to the original 39.
• This episode originally aired on Fox Kids on the Friday before Episode 29, "Fortress Maximus", would make its Saturday-morning debut the next day. When the series was later released on DVD in the United Kingdom, the episode was placed between "The Ultimate Robot Warrior" and "The Decepticons", in the same spot as the first Car Robots recap episode, "Gigatron's Ambitions Revealed!", which is a completely separate clip show focusing on entirely different footage. Nonetheless, this episode does best fit chronologically as the 13th episode of the English dub (see the next section below for more).

Continuity notes

• The past events the Autobots observe on their monitors are from "Battle Protocol!", "The Secret of the Ruins", "An Explosive Situation", "The Hunt for Black Pyramid", "Sideburn's Obsession", "Mirage's Betrayal", "Skid Z's Choice", and "The Ultimate Robot Warrior".
• Koji notes that the Autobots still haven't fully decrypted his father's microchip, suspecting it has another layer of encrypted code. Since T-AI won't succeed in fully decoding it until "The Decepticons", this episode must take place before that one.
  • And since "The Ultimate Robot Warrior" is the latest episode this one recaps the events of, it must be set chronologically between that episode and "The Decepticons" as the 13th episode of the series. As noted above, the UK DVD release of the series placed this episode in that exact numerical spot, making it the only Robots in Disguise-original recap episode to be officially placed in its proper chronological placement in relation to the rest of the series (in contrast, "Lessons of the Past" and "Mystery of the Ultra Magnus" take place in spots different to those the DVDs placed them; see their respective articles for more).
• Since the O-Part found by the Autobots in Episode 12 was not referred to as such in that episode's English dub, the dialogue from the clips of the Autobots' finding the O-Part in that episode has been changed here to specifically identify the O-Part by name. This was likely done as an attempt to give the U.S. viewers some kind of formal introduction to the O-Parts after the fact, as the O-Parts' existence had (rather abruptly) been brought back into the story a couple weeks earlier in both "Ultra Magnus" and "Ultra Magnus: Forced Fusion!", and would soon have their story arc wrapped up in both "A Friendly Contest" and "Peril from the Past" just a few weeks later. Since the storyline of the O-Parts had already been touched upon so sparsely in the show's original Japanese version, the English dub ended up pushing the O-Parts' significance even further into the background, with the first episode to refer to the O-Parts by name in the dub, "Sky-Byte Saves the Day", having been one of the three episodes banned from airing in the U.S. by post-9/11 censorship. Thus, it was left to this episode, in its original U.S. premiere, to formally introduce the O-Parts to the U.S. viewers shortly before their story arc was to be all wrapped up.

Continuity errors

• Because the Spychangers' seafront battle with the Predacons is a wholesale recycling of the climax of "Spychangers to the Rescue", Gas Skunk can at one point be seen being blasted against the red-and-white Plutonium Energy Generator that formed the basis of that episode's plot. Its momentary presence here is, of course, unexplained.
• In addition to the aforementioned O-Part scene from Episode 12, several other moments in the recapped clips have also had their dialogue redubbed to have the characters say different lines from what they originally said in the episodes those clips were taken from, such as the scene from Episode 6 where the Autobot Brothers prepare to fire on Sky-Byte as he tries to steal an ancient box from the ruins.

Animation or technical errors

• When the episode is at 4 minutes, 49 seconds running time, during the footage from "Battle Protocol!", a voice can be heard in the crowd saying "Megatron's back!"... in response to Megatron's first attack. Potential Easter egg reference to previous shows?

Transformers references

• The Autobots use "sky spies", a reference to the Autobot satellite controlled by Teletraan I in the original The Transformers cartoon.

Trivia

• Midnight Express states the Autobot sky-spies are searching for Dr. Onishi 24/7. (Not very effective, were they?)
• The Autobots work out that the Predacon base is located underwater, based on the events of "The Hunt for Black Pyramid". Little do they realize it can actually move around to different locations.

Foreign localization

Italian

• Title: "Speranza per il futuro" ("Hope for the Future")

• Nobody pronounces Megatron's name when he arrives, which makes sense.
• When Side Burn tries to save the car, instead of saying: "My beautiful red sports car!" he says: "Oh, no! My beautiful friend!", making it look like he was talking about Kelly... as a "beautiful friend"! Is this a new romance ship?!

Portuguese

• Title: "Uma Esperança no Futuro" ("A Hope for the Future")

Home video releases

DVD

2004 — Transformers: Robots in Disguise — Three-Disc Box Set: Part 1 of 2 (Maximum Entertainment)
2007 — Transformers: Robots in Disguise — Season One (Maximum Entertainment)
2007 — Transformers: Robots in Disguise — Ultimate Collection (Maximum Entertainment)

References