Some of you may have missed the launch of Version 9 of Transformers At The Moon, some 3 years after work first started on the new layout, code and features.  You can't help but notice the changes, the three column (holy-grail) layout that is now used, a return to the drop-down horizontal menu and introduction of "focus areas".  These focus areas are helped to show you the vast content that you can find within the Transformers At The Moon database, and website.  The area that i'll focus on at the moment is Resources.

The Transformers At The Moon resource section contains over 12 years of information that we have collated over the lifetime of the website.  This information includes images of various Transformers merchandise, from rubbers to store displays, through to concept art and production pieces.

If you click the Resource Section you will find a list of different things to read and look at.

1. Transformers Toy Galleries - over 2,200 different Transformers featured. Our 99% complete G1 (including Japanese) collection will contain toys that you cannot see anywhere else.  Of cause there are also Lucky Draw Transformers toys, that we are known for, and also Hardcopies from different lines, production samples, testshots and prototypes.
2. USPTO Database - the only place you can see all the Transformers related Patients and Trademarks, in one place.  ther are 447 trademarks and over 6500 status updates
3. Hasbro Instructions - Scans of the Hasbro Transformers toy Instructions - there are 962 scans in this area, making it one of most complete Transformers Instruction scan archive you will find).  This mirrors ever Hasbro instruction that is published, and retains those which they remove.
4. Artwork - Various differnet official Transformers artwork, from the Benchpress concepts in 2000, through Dreamwave and beyond
5. Cartoons - episode  guides and galleries of the Transformers series.  Primarily focusing on Transformers Prime and Transformers Animated, we have access to every Western Transformers episode, and 80% of the Japanese episodes (soon to be 100%).  This area will continue to grow throughout the years
6. Comics and Books - We'll admit, we've been out of touch with Transformers comics for a long time = but our Comic and Book area covers Marvel and Dreamwave issues (IDW is yet to be added) and the books cover UK, US and Japanese prints
7. Instruction Scans - Scans of some of our Transformers Instructions.  At some stage will will combine this with the Hasbro instruction scans
8. Interviews - interviews with artists, writers, film producers, computer games companies, convention organisers .. we've covered them asll
9. Live Action Movie - a small area on the Live Action Transformers Movies
10. Magazine Scans - after our Toy Galleries and USPTO Database, the Magazine Scans area is the third lastest, and most impressive, area of Transformers at the Moon.  We spent several thousands of pounds in buying back issues of TV Magazine, TV Boy, Hyper Hobby and other Japanese collectors and TV Magazines covering the last 20 years in order to give you 100% correct information on some of the little known, or unknown Japanese campaign exclusive toys.  This area is a MUST for anyone interested in rare figures.
11. Merchandise - the weird and wonderful Transformers merchandise - most of which is from G1 and most of that we own
12. Profile Cards - an area that we hope to add to (when we get time) contains scans of Japanese Transformers Profiles cards
13. Prototypes and Concepts - Another BIG area for Transformers at the Moon, in terms of content that isn't often covered.  Here you will find
    
    1. Series Bibles (concept and character art from the Transformers TV show) - the largest collection on the web
    2. Concept art work
    3. Concept and finshed box art
    4. Hardcopies
    5. Prototypes
    6. Testshots
14. Toy Collections - group shots of people's toy  collections.  If you want to get yours added then get in contact with us
15. Toy Sheet Scans - complete scans of our Transformers toy sheets .. we own over 2500 Transformers, 99% of G1, so with that we have most of the old toy sheets for you to view
16. Website Mirror - old mirrors of some of the Japanese and Chinese websites
17. UK Store Locator - Currently offline, this told UK vistors the nearest stores selling Transformers

Welcome to Transformers At The Moon - Version 9!  Yes, I have finally completed the work I started 26 months ago which was re-writing the entire Transformers At The Moon platform from the ground up.  The only thing that is the same is the server.  I've re-engined the database, redeveloped all of the libaries, the website is entirely bespoke, re-jigged the look-and-feel of the website and have introduced a new message board.

My professional career lead to the significant delay turning what was originally a 6 month project into something that has taken over 2 years.  For that I am sorry, but these things happen.

One of the first changes you will notice is that we have moved back to using a drop-down menu for navigation.  This is to help group the content we have created since the site first launched back in late 1999 so that you all will be able to, hopefully, find the content much easier.  It also helps highlight all of the content we have to offer from News Services, through toy galleries, trademark databases, instruction sheets, concept art, character models to videos (an area that we will be expanding with a back catelogue of convention videos we have taken over the last 10 years), events and our much over looked community.

You will also find that we have introduced a "tab" system into the "introduction area" of every page.  For instance, on the home page you will notice three tabs under the welcome section.  Clicking on the tab will display the content on that tab.  These tabs come into their own within the News and Resource and Toy image gallery sections of the website.  Within those areas of the website, you will find that these tabs contain alternative ways to search for content.  Most commonly you will find a tab that lists each of the categories as well as a tag cloud and a tag index.  The tag index works just like the index of any reference book you may have read.  Simple choose the letter and all of the words starting with that letter will be displayed.  You can then click on the work to filter the section by that word.  Give it a go, the tag indexes are cached locally ensuring they performance improvements once you've clicked on a letter.

You will also find that every news article, gallery or resource article now contains the ability for logged in users to post comments as well as rate the toy / article / news story.  Those of you on Social Media sites will find shortcut icons allowing you to easily share pages and galleries with your friends.

As part of the change we have also upgrade our exclusive and popular In The News section, now called "Other Sites News" which now contains even more sources of news that have been freshly categorised and sorted into alphabetical order.

Another major overhaul is the way that the image galleries and "other sites news" stories are displayed.  Image now use a lightbox-esque feature rather than opening in a new tab or overriding the main site.  Once the image appears you can quickly browse through the rest of the images within the gallery be using the navigational arrows or using the cursor keys on your keyboard.  The images are automatically scaled but you can switch to the full size view by clicking zoom or by pressing the down key.  Pressing "up" will then re-scale the image.

There is another handy keyboard shortcut you can use whilst looking at our image galleries and that is to press the ctrl key on your keyboard and then type in the page number of the image you wish to view.  For example is you want to jump to page 2 simple press ctrl and then press 2. The page will automatically jump to page 2.  If you want page 14, just press ctrl then type in 14.  Simple!  You can test if be clicking on the images within the additional image section of this news article below.

We have also including a series of Easter Eggs into the website as well, let us know if you find how to access them.

As well as the layout changes I have also improved the performance and scalability of the website by introducing more caching which should speed up your browsing.

You will also notice that the URLs for all of the pages have been cleaned up but do not worry most of the old links will still work and will simply load the new version of the content.

New Look Message Board

We are no longer using PHPBB, which will please many of you.  PHPBB is the most popular free PHP / MySQL message board on the internet.  It's also one of the worst written and bloated message boards you will find and is often targetted back exploiters.  It also has some rather annoying interface issues which I was fed up with so we are no longer using it.

The new board is very much a work-in-progress and over time will be re-skinned so that it can be fully integrated into the main website.  All of the posts have been copied over as have the user accounts however we need to re-instate the moderates as those permissions were not carried over in the change.

Mobile / Tablet Users

I realise that the new layout of the website is not suited to a lot of modern smartphones.  Do not worry, a mobile version of the website will be launched soon that will be "thumb friendly".

So take your time to explore the new look site, I'm sure you will discover you never realised we had.

Steve - AKA Quartz

Transformers Generations Sky Shadow is a recoloured, remolded, version of Transformers Generations Thunderwing based on the original Japanese Black Shadow toy from the Transformers Victory line. Back then Black Shadow and Blue Bacchus made up the group known as the Crossformers. In 2011 the name Black Shadow could not be used, so Hasbro went for Skyshadow, a name with several uses previously in the line.

 

The original Black Shadow toy is quiet hard to find, though you can see a full image gallery of that figure on Transformers At The Moon. This image gallery of his Transformers Generations update also features comparison pictures to the original.

Transformers Generations Skyshadow is a really nice toy and a great partial remold. The figure took a while for release, but the colour and molding changes make the toy significently different from the original Thunderwing release.

It's taken far longer then we had wanted, but we can final reveal the start of our big Beast Wars Second celebration by showing you the character sheets for Lio Convoy and Galvatron from our Beast Wars II bible.

The sheets show various character designs including very early concepts for Galvatron, which are far more detailed and Anime styled in nature.

12 years ago today, 29th October 1999, Transformers At The Moon was first launched.  The website, at that time, operated from the domain www.transformers.themoon.co.uk which was based from the email address transformers@themoon.  It was by registering this email account that we decided to settle on the name for the site.  Whilst both the email address and the domain have since moved to domains owned by us and to better reflect the focus of the website, Transformers toys, the site has continued to be maintained by the two brothers who first launched it.

We had hoped to launch the 9th version of the website to coincide with the anniversary of the site, however due to my computer at home failing, that project is still outstanding.

We will, however, still run the 12th anniversary celebrations, in terms of new special content and announcements, just as soon as wee are able to.  But in the mean time we would like to express our thanks to all of you who have visited the website over the last 12 years, joined the message board, Facebook group or follow us on  Twitter.  So on behalf of thhe pair of us, THANK YOU.

Steve and Dave AKA Transformers At The Moon

As you have no doubt notice the number of updates to this website, including news stories, has gradualy become less and less over recent weeks and so I thought I would take the time to update you all as to why this is the case.

For those of you who do not know this website was set-up and run by some twins 12 years ago.  In fact the site first launched on the 29th October 1999.  However, for the last few years, as we have gotten older, both of our professional careers have taken up more and more of our free time.  Its fairly common for both of us to work 12-16 hour days and personally I have worked 37 hours straight only a few months ago.  Because of this the time we get to maintain the website code, add new galleries and launch new features has dwindled.  The last year has been especially difficult for us as my brother, who you may know as Moonbug, no longer lives in the same town as myself and he use to maintain a lot of the content whilst I was working on the code.  During this time, and indeed the year prior, I have been re-writing the whole website from the ground up.  What was suppose to have been a 6-8 month project has slipped to 2 years.   I was hoping to launch the website this month as a part of ther 12th year anniversary celebrations, however as of last night my the motherboard on my main computer has died.  The machine has been on its last legs for a while with both the graphics card and soundcard failing and finally the fan on the northbridge has once again packed in causing the board to overheat and fry.

The good news is that when the issues stared all of the data was backed up onto an external hard disk so I have, at most, lost about a few days worth of coding and 2 months worth of emails to an old email address.

I will continue to update the news from work, when I can as well as from home via my phone or this extremely low powered netbook whilst I order and re-build a new computer.

My brother is currently out of the country on holiday but once he is back I am sure that he will try to update the site as much as he can whilst I am unable to add new galleries, yes this netbook is that low powered it can't handle high res image editing.

I will continue to try to complete the last 3% of the website re-write as well as things are so close to launch but I wanted to let you all know that if things seem quiet around here for the next week or so it is not because the website has stopped, on the contrary, we have a lot of unique content that we have been preparing to add to the website from hard copies and testshots through cartoon models and behind the scenes Sunbow documents as well as general toy galleries.

What it does mean though, is the big celebration I was hoping to have to commemorate the 12th aniversary of the website will be delayed, perhaps to the 12th anniversary of the official launch of the site which was the 11th November 1999.

Thanks,

Steve AKA Quartz

The event officially starts at 11am at the pub but the plan is that people will meet up there over a 1 hour period before moving onto the nearby shops including Forbidden Planet and Orbital Comics.

As long time visitors to this site will know we have run pub meets in Holborn before (starting back in 2001/2002) and normally meet just around the corner from this pub so you should be able to find it easily enough.

More information is available on our forum here or on the official event's Facebook page here.  Work permitting, I should be there and it will be great to see as many of you as can make it especially as the website will be turning 12 at the end of October.

We have uploaded our image gallery of Transformers Generations 2011 Volume 2.

This book included a manga for Transformers United Stepper along with images of Transformers Dark of the Moon figures.

Also included in the book are images of hardcopies for several unreleased Unicron toys from Generation One and Beast Wars Neo, a great look at the production run for Fortress Maximus from designs, hard copies, prototypes and all the finished items of Fortress Maximus, Grand Maximus, Brave Maximus and Lucky Draw Brave Maximus. Also included is a really nice look at a hard copy Wheelie toy. The magazine also includes concept art for unreleased Pretenders and Action Masters.  Also included is only the second ever image of the super rare Chromedome statue

With the release of Beast Wars II on DVD, we thougth we'd show you a sneak peak into the future

Following on from our 1997 TV Boy scans, you will now find 5 new galleries in out Japanese Magazine scan archive from 1998 TV Boy (TV Kun).

• February 1998 TV Boy scans
• June 1998 TV Boy Scans
  
• November 1998 TV Boy Scans
  
• December 1998 TV Boy scans

Our "Hunt for Lucky Draw Transformers Campaigns" continues with our latest Japanese Magazine scan archives.

The latest in our long running Japanse TV Magazine / TV Boy updates sees 8 new galleries from 1997 (the year Beast Wars hit the UK).

1. TV Boy January 1997
2. TV Boy February 1997
3. TV Boy April 1997
4. TV Boy May 1997
5. TV Boy June 1997
6. TV Boy July 1997
7. TV Boy October 1997
8. TV Boy December 1997

There are more to come, so stay tuned at Transformers At The Moon­

We have started on our next batch of Japanese magazine scans, this time the focus will be on TV Boy.  Before we get onto that though we thought we'd upload two of the recent Japanese hobby magazines, August 2011 issue of Dengeki Hobby and August 2011 TV Magazine.

There are 50 pages scanned from the Dengeki Hobby managzine and 13 from TV Magazine.

Remember to check out the hundreds of other Japanese magazine scans which we have in our Transformers In The Media section.