Mall Than Meets the Eye

Transformers: BotBots ep 1a »
"What're we doing tomorrow night, Burg?" "Same thing we do every night, Blinky... try to win over the mall!"
"Mall Than Meets the Eye"
Production company	Entertainment One
Airdate	March 25, 2022
Writers	Kevin Burke & Chris Wyatt
Directors	Paul O'Flanagan
Animation studio	Boulder Media Studio
Watch this episode on Netflix

It's BotBots time, y'all!

Synopsis

My mall wants to party all the time party all the time

Late at night, as the last of the lights shut off at a mall, and the last of the employees leave, a long shadow crosses the main floor... that of a tiny robotic donut, who declares... "BotBots!" And ordinary items across the mall spring to life, transforming into miniscule mechanoids intent on throwing a very loud party. As a team of bots hijack the mall's cameras to hide their presence, the rest run rampant, but the revelry is interrupted as one cries out... the flesh creature is on its way! Once again the bots hide and disguise themselves as the mall's lone night security officer Dave wanders through, completely oblivious to what just happened. He spies a juice box on the edge of a trash receptacle, and not being one to pass up free food no matter how expired or backwash-infused, takes a hearty sip only to find the flavor repulsive, and tosses it into the trash. As he leaves the wing of the mall, the party resumes, and two BotBots stage a rescue mission: Fottle Barts uses a burst of koncentrated ketchup to propel herself and Spud Muffin to the top of the bin, where the fry-bot is able to pull the juice-box-bot Ulf the Orange out. Spud offers a round of tanning under the heat-lamps, but she declines, having made plans already with Burgertron... except nobody has seen him since the previous night.

Said Burgertron pulls himself from a box in a darkened room, uncertain of just how he got there and where he is. His exploration is interrupted as he's suddenly blinded by a bright light and assaulted, sending him staggering around until he steps on a desk lamp's on-switch, revealing four BotBots he's never seen before who have themselves never seen anyone else before. They cheerfully welcome him (well, three do, the one with the sword still looks ready to throw down), saying that they were just playing. They introduce themselves: the timid flashlight Dimlit, the enthusiastic soccer ball Kikmee, the very-serious bonsai tree Bonz-Eye, and the... um... the very himself plunger Clogstopper. Burgertron realizes he's in the mall's Lost and Found, and he's just found the rumored Lost Bots! In response to the bots' confusion, he tells them (and the audience) that the energon cloud that brought them to life did the same to objects across the entire mall, and that the other bots formed "squads" based on the stores they were "born" in. Burgertron is ready to return to his squad, the Hunger Hubs, and go back to leading them. The Lost Bots, entranced by his tales and feeling the need to belong, ask to join him and find the squads they should be in as well.

And I threw it on the ground!

The five leave the Lost and Found through the vents, but the sound of a flushing toilet has Burgertron pulling the others into hiding as Dave exits the nearby bathroom. It's time for them to learn The Sacred Rule of the Mall: they can never under any circumstances reveal themselves to humans, or the results would be absolutely catastrophic for all BotBots! They need a plan to sneak by the guard, and Burgertron has one: getting in the mall's ride-around train and veeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyyyy sllllllllooooowwwwwwwlllllllllllyyyyyy driving it to the food court. Unfortunately, they also activate the colored lights and circus sounds; fortunately, Dave is extra-inattentive tonight, too engrossed in a podcast on his phone to notice. The Lost Bots drive up the escalator, which is just a hair too small to fit the locomotive, scraping and squealing its way to the second-floor food court. Dave does notice this and rushes in to investigate, finding a bunch of random objects in the train, and a cheeseburger! He prepares to stuff his face with lukewarm meat, but Dimlit transforms and leaps, knocking Burgertron from his grasp. He catches a glimpse of the tiny robots, but they're gone in a flash, as are the items that were just in the train's driver's seat... and he's certain he wasn't imagining things! He's forced to put that aside for the moment as the train's audio-visual assault starts up again, and he attempts to get it back to the ground floor.

The five slip out from hiding as Dave leaves, and Burgertron is suddenly reunited with Ulf and Spud Muffin... who just saw everything! In fact, all the BotBots saw what just happened, and not a single one of them is happy about it. The Sacred Rule of the Mall has been broken. Ulf is saddened, while Spud Muffin is furious, and he kicks Burgertron out of the Hunger Hubs. The other BotBots disperse, leaving the now-five Lost Bots alone in the food court. While Burgertron is bummed, the others are actually still upbeat... sure, everything just went wrong, but that's no reason to give up! There's always tomorrow, they can try and patch things over!

And elsewhere, in his darkened office, Dave plots... no-one will believe there's little robots in the mall until he captures one!

Featured characters

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Quotes

"BotBots!"

—Sprinkleberry D'uhnut sets the tone for the entire series

"You should go find your squads! You've got friends out there you've never even met yet!"
"What is... 'friends'?"
"'Friends' is... are... only the most important thing in the world!"

—Burgertron are... is... absolutely right, Dimlit

Kikmee: My whole life, I've been a team player without a team! I wanna come with you and find where I belong!
Bonz-Eye: I do as well. For too long, I've been a warrior without a cause.
Dimlit: And I've been a flashlight! ...What? Aren't we just listing stuff that we were?

"Okay. Time you all learned... The Sacred Rule of the Mall! No bot may ever, I repeat, ever reveal to the flesh-beings that we exist! Got it?"
"But that creature seems nice."
"Nice?! That thing eats burgers! And prunes plants! And kicks soccer balls! And let me tell you, you do not want to know what it does with plungers!"
"W-what does it do with flashlights?"
"We-e-e-ll, it... I mean it just kinda holds them."
"...I would like to be held."

—Burgertron and Dimlit have very different worldviews

"(gasps) An abandoned burger!! Ooohhh, my self-affirmation podcast was right! I imagined what I wanted most, and it came true!"

—Dare to dream, Dave, dare to dream

"oooooooh heeeeyyy good news! The captain of fun's back! Passport for carousing? heh-heh heh heehhh..."
"Passport revoked, bromide. You broke the only rule we have! A flesh being knows we exist! And that puts mall life in jeopardy!"

—Burgertron's whoopsiedoodle doesn't fly with Spud Muffin, or anyone else

"He called us your... 'weird friends'."
"Yeah, sorry about that."
"That means 'weird most-important-thing-in-the-world!' Oh ho, no-one has ever said anything nicer to us!"

—Dimlit helps Burgertron see the bright side of things

Notes

Continuity notes

• Obviously there's no prior continuity to note here, what with this being the first episode, but as the first episode, it establishes several ongoing important elements to the show: most importantly, The Sacred Rule of the Mall.

Transformers references

• The episode title is, of course, a play on "More than Meets the Eye", which was the original Transformers series' tagline, major lyric to the theme song, title to its cartoon's three-part intro, and so many other uses over the years.
• The very first shot shows what appears to be the Transformers' homeworld of Cybertron... but is then revealed as just an illustration on a billboard advertising a wifi router. Psyche!
• Sprinkleberry's shout of "BotBots!" is a callback to the original promotional music video for the BotBots toyline, in which his title call was the only spoken line in the video. This continues to be his "thing" in most of the remaining episodes.
• Dave calls the bots he saw "robots in disguise", the other major tagline from the original Transformers series that has been used many many many times since.

Real-world references

• Dave has a version of the "I WANT TO BELIEVE" UFO poster on his back wall (with the text in the BotBots show cypher, of course), similar to the one hanging in Fox Mulder's office in The X-Files.

BotBots cypher translations

• The electrical box on the back wall in Dave's office (seen most clearly in the intro) reads "WARNING".
• It is unclear if the "text" on the wifi billboard means anything; that font only shows up a few times in the show, not remotely enough to work out if it's an actual alphabet or not.
• There's a lot of background posters and signs that will make appearances throughout the season that first appear here. We'll list as many as we can here, but some will more or less never be quite clear enough to be legible (like the one with glasses in the middle).
  • The big text on the sign on the mall's outdoor right side reads "SALE". The top-left text is too blurry to read in this shot, but other instances reveal it to be "Great sale".
  • The yellow-and-red poster near the fountain and escalator is gibberish: "PND".
  • The watch posters read "New And Improved", but using an older version of the cypher; the D and M are different shapes altogether, and the lowercase letters are smaller versions of the uppercase, rather than different letters as with most of the text in the show.
  • The purple poster on the second floor above the train reads "TEXT HEXRE"; like the watch sign this uses an older version of the main font. Occasionally this one also appears with even more text on it, but is never quite legible when it does.
  • The fancy-looking black-and-white clothing store sign has a unique text that means nothing.
• The sign near the balloon cart is just the colors shown: "orange", "purple", "green".
• The text on the lost & found's monitor is almost completely gibberish. There is "Folder" in the upper-right corner, but the rest is nonsense filler keysmashes.
• The papers Burgertron pulls off the map are covered in a "handwritten" font. However, this font only shows up a handful of times across the season, so between that and the complete lack of spacing and punctuation on this example of it, we have not been able to determine if these pages are actual "English" or not (but we're wagering "not").
• The sign on the back of the restaurant the Lost Bots hide in does not use the regular cypher; it's possible it's the same as the "tech" font from the billboard. Either way, it is likely gibberish, especially as it's just the same line a dozen times, sometimes flipped vertically.
• As noted above, the UFO poster in Dave's office reads "I WANT TO BELIEVE". It's out of focus here, but the letters are big enough to make out the "WANT" and "BELIEVE"; "Escape from Snackatraz" will give us better views of this poster and more of Dave's office "decor".

Animation and technical errors

• As the Sugar Shocks run up the escalator, two small white boxes appear under Lolly Licks's legs for a single frame.
• When Fottle Barts blasts Spud Muffin and herself up to the top of the trash can, the descriptive audio for the episode says "He lifts them up" instead of she.
• The labels on Ulf's juice box mode alternate orientation in various shots, with one side a mirror opposite of the other.
• The papers taped to the map don't appear in any shot before Burgertron pulls them down.

Trivia

You are here, here, here, here and here.

• When Burgertron tells the Lost Bots about some of the other squads in the mall, an instrumental of the main theme song plays that changes slightly with each team. When he talks about the Jock Squad, the music is more forceful and electric-guitar-filled, the Sugar Shocks get a lighter version with a drumline running at incredibly fast speed, the Gamer Geeks get electronic bleeps and bloops added in, while the Custodial Crew have plops and plarps in the percussion.
• Also during this sequence, a number of squad symbols show up on the mall map for squads that barely-to-never appear in the show; the Pet Mob (never mentioned by name and Anty Farmwell is the only bot from it to appear), the Backpack Bunch (also unnamed and who only appear in "pillbot" form in the final two-parter), the Shed Heads (who only appear twice and mostly as still images), and an unknown squad represented by a stylish shirt sigil (possibly from the original plans for the toyline's Series 7).

Foreign localization

Arabic

• Title: "Akthar Mmmā Tarāh Al-'ayn" (أكثر ممّا تراه العين, "More than meets the eye")

French

• Title: "Bien plus que des machines" ("Way more than machines")

Brazilian Portuguese

• Title: "Mais do que os olhos veem" ("More than meets the eye")

European Portuguese

• Title: "As aparências enganam" ("Looks can be deceiving")