Donald F. Glut

Donald F. Glut (born February 19, 1944) is an American writer and filmmaker. Glut got his start writing for the Warren horror comics magazines of the '70s such as Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella. He was also an amateur filmmaker throughout the '60s, producing, writing and starring in several fanfilms based on popular superheroes, even playing the titular webhead in a 1969 Spider-Man fanfilm.

In addition to The Transformers, he wrote many, many scripts for other '80s cartoons, including G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, Masters of the Universe, Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, DuckTales and The Mighty Orbots. A noted dinosaur enthusiast, Glut has written several non-fiction books about dinosaurs and also "supervised" the paleontological accuracy of the 1993 film Carnosaur (good job on that one, Glut). He also wrote the bestselling novelization of The Empire Strikes Back.

Glut's testimony regarding his The Transformers work is much more cynical compared to his peers. In 2001, he wrote:

"No one, not even the story editors, looked at these scripts very carefully. I seem to remember the show being on a really tight schedule, and we had to crank these scripts out fast. I wrote some of them in a single day, first draft, and they went almost immediately to the storyboard artists after Bryce or an assistant gave them a rather cursory read. We were not trying to create art, just get them done fast, and get paid... None of the writing on this series, in my opinion, was good or passionate or, sometimes (my own included, like The Autobot Run) even adequate. But we got paid well for writing them fast.... I was never a fan of any of the characters."^[1]

Following the 2007 live action movie, he also explicitly admitted not liking the "half-hour commercials" he wrote for in the 1980s, admitting that he "did it strictly for the $$$". At the same time, he also confirmed that his primary inspirations when writing episodes for the G1 cartoon were "Japanese giant robot shows" and Toho's Godzilla, while "Megatron's Master Plan" was based in part on the movie Meet John Doe.^[2]

Episode scripts

The Transformers

• Divide and Conquer
• S.O.S. Dinobots
• War of the Dinobots
• Heavy Metal War
• Autobot Spike
• Dinobot Island, Part 1
• Dinobot Island, Part 2
• Megatron's Master Plan, Part 1
• Megatron's Master Plan, Part 2
• The Autobot Run
• Masquerade
• Call of the Primitives

Notes

• Despite Glut's own feelings towards his work in the 80s, he does think the "Autobot Spike", "Dinobot Island" and "Megatron's Master Plan" episodes were good episodes while he considers "The Autobot Run" was his worst episode.

External links

• Donald F. Glut's official website
• Donald F. Glut at Wikipedia
• Donald F. Glut at the Internet Movie Database
• Zobovor's interview with Donald F Glut

References