We all have a 'Hubcap'

Hubcap’s holds a special place in my heart as my favorite Transformer of all time, and there’s an odd reason for that. If you’re a fan of any long running franchise, there’s a character that you consider “yours”. Not as in you created them or anything. (Maybe you did.) But that you feel an attachment to them that is actually personal. Maybe it’s the Doctor’s companion when you first started watching. Maybe it’s that anime character that got you into it in the first place. Maybe it’s that teleporting girl that made you laugh during a time when everything was dark. Or maybe it’s just a happy childhood memory that no one could ever share. For me Hubcap is that last one.

Lots of toylines produce obscure characters, from Ninja Turtles’ Mutagen Man to G.I.Joe’s Repeater. But the thing about Transformers is that there’s a conservative estimate in the low thousands. Not every toy is a Bumblebee or Optimus Prime. In fact for every Starscream, there are probably about 20 Nautilators, Nightcruzes, Bantors, and Overcasts. A bunch of smaller, lesser known guys that not only do people never know and totally forget about, but they don’t ever even receive ANY established fiction at all. (And if they do, it’s usually in a group setting, where the story focuses on someone else, and they’re just along for the ride.) Until twenty years later when some writer, desperate to look edgy has them show up just to be killed unceremoniously by their pet character. And that obscure cannon fodder is someone’s first toy, their happy memory. Potential stories upon stories of action and adventures wiped out, just because they wanted D-Void to look like a badass. (And who is D-Void you ask? That’s my damn point.)

I bought Hubcap back in 1986. I don’t remember the details, but I remember it was a spur of the moment purchasing, that my late mother let me get. I had the choice of a few but I picked Hubcap. Hubcap ended up never having any fictional representation the cartoons or the comics, which was odd, because at that time, because just about EVERYONE got some story representation, even if it was only in the UK comic books that we here in the States never got until years later. He was just this yellow bulbous car guy, with an orange face, who I had no idea what his personality was supposed to be like. So for a first time with the Transformers (and it wouldn’t be the last) I decided to give him one. (I think I’ve established before that I used to come up with storylines for my toys as I played with them and kept them in continuity as I went. It wasn’t brilliant by any means, but it was the start to a lot of my creativity.)

I didn’t have Blaster so he was a communication’s expert who was also a con man, who went around listening in to everyone’s private secrets and then using them to get ahead in life. He was basically an unsavory character, until he had a change of heart after he almost got Bumblebee killed. Fortunately, he was able to be saved by the Terrageners. (They were basically a couple of the Robotix toys I had, that I pretended was a race of engineers that traveled around the universe in a giant machine planet the size of Uranus. Hey… I was eleven.) After Bumblebee, now Goldbug, was saved, Hubcap stood by him as a bodyguard and friend and they ran around as a sort of Dynamic Duo. They were pretty much my main characters. When I thought I lost Hubcap once, I was ready to repurpose a newer toy as him. (It would have been Vroom, if I hadn’t found Hubcap in the backseat of my mom’s car.) In my stories, Hubcap (and Bumblebee) was responsible for the return of Optimus Prime as a Powermaster, the defeat of the corrupted zombie Leader-1, and had more than a helpful hand in the final defeat of Galvatron. (Doubledealer was waiting for the right time, as it was.)

As new toys came and went, from the Blurr, Kup and Rodimus, to the Headmasters and Targetmasters, to even the Pretenders and Micromasters… Hubcap was there throughout the years. This lasted all the way up to G2, when the new Hubcap came out, and I had him ‘upgrade’ to the G2 color schemes. Toward the end there, it was basically Hubcap, Bumblebee, Pincher, Waverider and Hyperdrive. (Who I had decided was a female and a former Decepticon who wasn’t cool with the whole destructive way of life.)

Eventually I grew up, and stopped playing with the toys like I used to… But to me, Hubcap is still the coolest. Seriously, if I ever get around to doing a fan comic again, I really should do one starring him.