TForm­ers have posted four images show­ing off what looks like Megatron’s rumored Tank Alt Mode. It’s a rather obscure look­ing tank with large yel­low thrusters at the rear, large cen­tral can­non, pos­si­bly some firearms on the side of the vehi­cle as well, and Megatron’s big ugly head peak­ing out from the Tank’s crotch.

Via TLAMB

A reli­able source that has proved cor­rect in the past has pro­vided some infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing the G1 com­biner Dev­as­ta­tor robot to TFW2005:

Dev­as­ta­tor details

- Seven con­struc­tion vehi­cles merge to form Dev­as­ta­tor
– Dev­as­ta­tor has lots of upper body strength, like a gorilla
– Not just green, some of the vehi­cles are red and yel­low
– The pre­vi­ously Long Haul con­cept art by Josh Nizzi is legit

Quite frankly, some­thing of this size and com­plex­ity would be both awe­some and epic.

TLAMB raise some very valid points which put this news into doubt, and why I can­not report this as a con­fir­ma­tion. Specif­i­cally — we have not seen any con­struc­tion vehi­cles dur­ing film­ing, a toy that is cre­ated from more than 5 parts presents a dif­fi­cult engi­neer­ing task for Has­bro — some­thing that will be more expen­sive “than the $25 sweet point”. They also stip­u­late that given Prime’s height of 35 feet, the size of an aver­age con­struc­tion vehi­cle, this robot could reach up to 80 feet in height.

The Josh Nizzi Concept

Roberto Orci took some time out to answer fan’s ques­tions over at TFW2005, with com­ments on Shia LaBoeuf’s hand injury as well as the inspi­ra­tion behind TF2, ani­mal modes and the mar­ket­ing push which is set to begin in Novem­ber (per­haps a trailer released with Quan­tum of Solace?)

The Injury

“Luck­ily noth­ing has to be reshot. Yes, we were on set last week to write it into the movie, not because it’s absolutely nec­es­sary, but more because we want to make sure Shia’s hand is pro­tected for the remain­der of the shoot…”

Inspi­ra­tions

“Back to the Future, Juras­sic Park, Close Encoun­ters and Ter­mi­na­tor 2.” “We were emu­lat­ing the style of movie from the old Amblin days, like Back to the Future and Grem­lins, which if you watch today are still very funny. Also, the car­toon itself was quite funny. Also, com­edy makes things more acces­si­ble to a larger audience.”

Ani­mal Modes

Will the Sequel have any Trans­form­ers with Ani­mal Modes like Scor­ponok? “All signs point to ‘probably.’”

Via FSR. You can also find a con­cise break­down of the ques­tions and their responses at /Film.

In an inter­view with MTV con­cern­ing the Trans­form­ers 2 pre­quel comic, pub­lisher IDW con­firmed that they would be pro­vid­ing a wealth of back­ground infor­ma­tion on the new main vil­lain, The Fallen.

“[We’re going to] explore the back­ground of The Fallen — the main vil­lain of the movie — as well as expand on the ‘Reign of Starscream’ story that we’re doing and tie every­thing in to what this next movie is going to be,” explained writer Chris Mowry, who part­ners on the book with artist Alex Milne. “The next movie starts out with just tons of action and there’s obvi­ously going to be a lot of ques­tions, so we’re hop­ing to answer some of those beforehand.”

[…]

“Des­tiny” will estab­lish much of the sec­ond before fans are intro­duced to an increas­ingly com­plex sto­ry­line with mul­ti­ple new robots. “We’re def­i­nitely tak­ing every char­ac­ter that we can from the sequel,” said Mowry. “So you’ll see some Sec­tor 7 involve­ment and how they devel­oped into a new group that will be intro­duced. The same thing with some of the new char­ac­ters, we’ll explain how they get to Earth. Because like I said, [the sequel] starts out with this giant bat­tle so peo­ple will be won­der­ing ‘Hey, where did that guy come from?’”

This is reit­er­ated in an inter­view with Simon Fur­man at CBR,

“I’ve never really had the chance to lay down the defin­i­tive story around [the 13] and what role they played in what came after them. Over the years for var­i­ous pub­lish­ers in var­i­ous pub­li­ca­tions, I’ve laid seeds of this group called The 13 and hinted about who some of them might be and how they play into the big­ger mythos. I think this is where we’re find­ing answers to all the big ques­tions. We’re work­ing very closely with Has­bro in this series so that what­ever we do in ‘The 13′ is very much tied in to the whole Trans­form­ers Uni­verse. They want to get all of their irons in the fire ready and in the right order for 2009, which is the 25th anniver­sary. We’re all work­ing hope­fully to get a defin­i­tive, cohe­sive Trans­form­ers Uni­verse in terms of the back story.”

The writer added that the threads intro­duced in “The 13″ will even­tu­ally pay­off in cur­rent series and plots and pos­si­bly else­where within the Trans­form­ers fam­ily of media. “It’s inter­est­ing that the sec­ond movie is using this char­ac­ter called the Fallen, which is a char­ac­ter that we cre­ated back in the Dreamwave days for this big series called ‘The Dark Ages’ which tapped into what had gone before. So these names and insti­tu­tions like The 13 are rolling on into dif­fer­ent incarnations.”

For those not in the know, from Wikipedia:

Although the Fallen’s ori­gins are only sug­gested in his comic book appear­ance, they would be fully explained in Dor­ling Kindersley’s Trans­form­ers: The Ulti­mate Guide. One of the orig­i­nal thir­teen Trans­form­ers cre­ated by Primus, the robot who would become the Fallen betrayed his cre­ator by sid­ing with Primus’s dark twin, the malev­o­lent planet-eater, Uni­cron. In the final bat­tle between Primus and Uni­cron, the Fallen fell vic­tim to the same fate as his mas­ter, sucked through a black hole into another dimen­sion. How­ever, while Uni­cron emerged into another uni­verse, the Fallen was not so for­tu­nate, find­ing him­self trapped in the “under­space” between dimensions.

The Fallen made his only appear­ance in the sec­ond vol­ume of Trans­form­ers: The War Within — the Dark Ages. Around 6.5 mil­lion years ago, a test of the exper­i­men­tal “space bridge” matter-transport sys­tem on Cybertron lib­er­ated the Fallen from his prison, and he mate­ri­alised on Cybertron, where he quickly recruited the Chaos Trin­ity, three mystically-inclined Decep­ti­cons — Blud­geon, Mind­wipe and Bugly — into his employ. Abduct­ing Trans­form­ers that he iden­ti­fied as pos­sess­ing “genetic poten­tial” within their sparks — Grim­lock, Blitzwing, Jet­fire and Hot Spot — the Fallen planned to use their ener­gies to awaken Primus from his self-imposed slum­ber, thereby alert­ing Uni­cron to his loca­tion, allow­ing the world-eater to renew hos­til­i­ties with his old enemy. An attack from com­bined Auto­bot and Decep­ti­con forces led by Shock­wave and Prowl dis­rupted his plans, and Primus him­self reached out and promptly destroyed the Fallen.

The fel­low at the Don Mur­phy forums have pro­vided some new shots of the Trans­form­ers fleet in prepa­ra­tion for trans­port — the Chevy Beat, Chevy Trax, Opti­mus Prime, Ratchet, Iron­hide and most impor­tantly cap­tur­ing our first clear shots of the slick sil­ver car we saw at Fair­mount, thought to be a Chevy Corvette ZR1 or C7, though the rear pan­els on both of those do not fit with this model. The lat­est rumor puts it as a rein­tro­duc­tion of the pop­u­lar Chevy Stingray, with the styles and aura of pre­vi­ous incar­na­tions. What­ever it is, it’s very sexy.

Con­tribut­ing Source: TLAMB

In a post on Don Murphy’s mes­sage board, writer Roberto Orci stated that Trans­form­ers 2 shoot­ing has been tak­ing place “all week and last week”. It was pre­vi­ously thought that TF2 had ceased film­ing in antic­i­pa­tion of the SAG strikes.

Michael Bay has con­firmed this in an inter­view with Enter­tain­ment Weekly, where they spoke to Michael Bay at a remote air force base.

Auto­mo­bile blog, Motortrend, are report­ing that Gen­eral Motor’s elec­tric pow­ered “Chevy Volt” will be mak­ing an appear­ance in the Trans­form­ers sequel, “Revenge of the Fallen”. What role the vehi­cle shall have in the movie is unknown.

Whilst Trans­form­ers 2 has no offi­cial involve­ment in the San Diego Comic Con this year, the IESB reported that Has­bro, with per­mis­sion from Paramount/Dreamworks, would be show­ing a small snip­pet of the Trans­form­ers sequel. How­ever, since that arti­cle was posted and the slew of inter­net movie sites posted the news about the web, Para­mount has issued a brief state­ment that there will in fact be no Trans­form­ers 2 footage shown at Comic Con.