Launched in 1984, the Transformers toyline by Takara and Hasbro was promoted through both a comic book by Marvel Comics and an animated series produced by Sunbow Productions and Marvel Productions with Toei Animation. Although the comic outlived the animated series by a number of years, the animated series is more widely recognised. With the original show's conclusion in 1987, original series exclusive to Japan were created which ran until 1990, and the franchise was later re-imagined with the fully CGI Beast Wars in the late 1990s. The 21st century saw a total reboot of the Transformers universe (first being Takara's produced Car Robots, imported and retitled for Western release as Transformers: Robots in Disguise), as Hasbro collaborated with Japanese Transformers producers Takara to create a new storyline with Transformers: Armada and its sequels, produced in Japan and then dubbed for English-speaking audience. In 2008, Transformers Animated saw Hasbro take control of the franchise once more through collaboration with Cartoon Network, bringing writing duties back to America, with animation being handled by Japanese studios. Hasbro also reacquired the distribution rights to the original series from Sunbow finally giving them the complete rights to the series based on their Generation 1 toy-line. Overview Gobots Although initially a separate and competing franchise in 1984, Tonka's Gobots became the intellectual property of Hasbro after their buyout of Tonka in 1991. Subsequently, the universe depicted in the animated series and its follow-up film was established as an alternate universe within the Transformers Multiverse. Transformers: Generation 1 The term "Generation 1", or "G1", is a retronym, coined after the advent of 1992's Transformers: Generation 2. Although frequently used to simply refer to the original 1984-1991 marvel comic series, 1984-1987 animated series, the term encompasses all Transformers fiction from 1984 to 1992. The Transformers After the Federal Communications Commission did away with regulations that prohibited toy companies from broadcasting cartoons based on their products in 1985, The Transformers began with a three-episode miniseries that introduced audiences to Optimus Prime, Megatron and their armies, as they travelled from the metal world of Cybertron to Earth in search of new sources of energy. The final episode ended on an open note, should the series prove popular enough to continue, which it did. A standard season's worth of 13 more episodes was commissioned, expanding the Transformers universe in which the Dinobots, Constructicons and Jetfire (then later called Skyfire in