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VOOZH | about |
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VOOZH | about |
Griffin Bacal, Inc. was a New York City-based advertising agency which played a major part in the development of the original Transformers franchise.
Griffin Bacal was founded in 1978 by Tom Griffin and Joe Bacal, who had previously worked together at Benton and Bowles. One of their first clients was Hasbro, whom they had previously served while working for Benton and Bowles. Hasbro employed their services for coming up with advertising campaigns for several of their toy lines. Together with Marvel Comics, Griffin Bacal retooled G.I. Joe into its 1980s incarnation, "G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero". Following that, Griffin Bacal participated in the development of Hasbro's My Little Pony series.
In 1983, Griffin Bacal were asked by Hasbro to adapt two Japanese toy lines, Diaclone and Micro Change, for the American market. Griffin Bacal suggested to merge the two into one single series, and Jay Bacal, Joe's son, suggested the name "The Transformers". Griffin Bacal also had the idea of making the robots the main characters of the series (the Diaclone backstory had portrayed them as piloted mecha) and make them sentient alien machine lifeforms. Lastly, Griffin Bacal divided the robots into two groups, "Autobots" (good) and "Decepticons" (evil).
Following this, Hasbro and Griffin Bacal asked Marvel, whom they had previously worked with on G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero to flesh out the backstory, to give the robots names and personalities and develop a comic series and an animated television show. The cartoon was produced by Marvel Productions and Sunbow Productions, the latter of which was owned by Griffin Bacal.
In 1988, Griffin Bacal producer Tim Speidel developed the live action sequences used to bookend the season 5 rebroadcasts of The Transformers.
In 1994, Griffin Bacal was bought by former competitor DDB Worldwide, but still continued to serve Hasbro. Hasbro eventually stopped employing their services in 2000,[1] resulting in Griffin Bacal laying off two thirds of their employees.[2] Following this and the retirement of Tom Griffin and Joe Bacal, DDB's parent company Omnicom merged Griffin Bacal with Moss Dragoti in 2001.[3]
