Dread slaves

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The Dread slaves are aliens from the cartoon portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.

When the Orbs figured out that the death crystals growing on the behemoth Chaos were, like, the greatest ammo ever, they also figured out it would be both wiser and easier to get others to do the collecting for them. So they captured every defenseless robot that they came across and forced them to mine the crystals lying around the entrance to Chaos's lair. In the span of several millennia, the Orbs brought together hundreds of slaves on Dread, only one of whom ever managed to escape.

Fiction

The Transformers cartoon

Voice actor: Frank Welker, Gregg Berger, Casey Kasem (English), Francis Lax, Albert Augier (European French)

Little do they know they're actually mining inside Unicron's nose.

About 100,000 years ago, Kup ended up on Dread and was captured by the Orbs. Made to work in the mines of Queeg Mountain as one of the many slaves, his chance for escape came when he first encountered Chaos. During one of his shifts, the group of shrikebats entered the mine and attacked the workers, the sound rousing Chaos from his part of the cavern. Kup used the, uhh, chaos its arrival created to make a run for it, during which he came by the slave cells. The occupants begged him to free them, but because Chaos showed up again, Kup couldn't afford to stay long enough to do so.

Kup's act of selfishness would haunt him until the Earth year 2006, when the Decepticons learned of the death crystals and took over the Orbs' business. As they began construction on a death crystal cannon, the threat of Chaos brought three of the slaves to try to flee, but Galvatron sicced Predaking on them, who recaptured them swiftly.

Kup and a handful of his Autobot colleagues arrived shortly after. In the course of events, the others came to fight the Decepticons while Kup entered the mines to confront Chaos and make up for his past cowardice. He first freed the slaves and requested two of them to help him out against the creature. Because the Decepticons were preoccupied, the death crystal cannon was left badly guarded, so the three previous slaves joined forces to get it aimed and fire at Chaos. Succeeding in destroying the creature, the three ran and were picked by Sky Lynx and the other Autobots. Chaos Presumably, the other freed slaves were also taken aboard.

Notes

"JAILBREAK!"

• The script refers to the three speaking slaves as "Slave Robot" (voiced by Welker) "Imprisoned Robot #1" (Berger) and "Imprisoned Robot #2" (Kasem).^[1] "Slave Robot" is of the red model and "Imprisoned Robot #1" is of the brown model. By process of elimination and ignoring all the "extra crowd filler"-material, this would imply that the unseen "Imprisoned Robot #2" is of the blue model.
• The early script called for the slaves to be organic aliens, and they even had character models developed. The final, aired version replaced these organic slaves with robots, presumably because organic creatures don't live for many thousands of years. Jim Sorenson posted the organic aliens' designs on his blog.^[2] These models did appear in the episode very briefly, when Kup frees the prisoners, and were reused as patrons of the diner that Sandstorm and Octane stop at in "Starscream's Ghost".

References