1992 - Transformers: Operation Combination

As with Battlestars, the lack of audience interest relegated Transformers: Operation Combination to the printed page. Told through TV Magazine as a series of text stories with color images, Operation Combination chronicles the latest clash of the Transformers on Earth. Battle Gaea and the Jet Army are sent by the Destron leader Scrash to plunder Earth's energy. But they are opposed by the Cybertrons -- Guard City, the Road Army, and the Microtransformer Sixcombiner teams Sixbuilder, Sixliner, Sixtrain, Sixturbo, and Sixwing.

True to the "combination" moniker, most of the characters (except for the Jet and Road Armies) were composed of teams of transforming robots that could combine to form a giant. In fact, the final battle of Operation Combination is resolved when Guard City and the Sixcombiners join to form a mega-combiner of 29 robots, creating a linkage that obliterates all the Destrons with a single mighty burst of energy.

Form Blazing deus ex machina!

Due to its low profile and threadbare plot, Operation Combination has been largely overlooked by most Transformers fans. The lack of new toys didn't help any; only the Sixcombiner toys (except for Sixtrain) were new designs, while everyone else were recolored versions of the Protectobots (Guard City), the Combaticons (Battle Gaea), and the European Turbomasters and Predators.

An interesting bit of trivia about Operation Combination is that the Destron leader, Scrash, was never actually shown nor released, but is only mentioned in the text of the stories. Transformers fan Hydra Darkwings speculates that Scrash was originally intended to be the European Predator toy Skyquake; given Japan's disinterest in Transformers by 1992, its release was probably deemed unmarketable.

A second piece of trivia is that, unlike most other combiners shown in Transformers, each of the Sixcombiners were depicted as a single character whose identity was divided among its individual component robots.