Floro Dery

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Hi. I designed all the Transformers. On TV. Mostly. The Movie definitely.

Floro Dery (born June 18, 1958) is a Filipino artist who was the design supervisor on the Generation 1 cartoon and The Transformers: The Movie. Working with a team of designers, he was responsible for creating all the animation models used throughout the first two seasons of the series and film.

Outside of Transformers, Dery served as production designer on Pirates of Dark Water, was a storyboard artist for Walt Disney Television Animation in the 90s, and spent ten years drawing the syndicated Spider-Man newspaper strip. Sadly, though, nothing excites him anymore except "the coming armaggeddon."^[1]

1 Role on the series
2 The Legend of Floro Dery
3 Notes
4 References
5 External links

Role on the series

For the first-year characters, Dery simplified Shōhei Kohara's character models further for animation. He often removed wheels and enlarged the heads.

In addition to his work as a storyboard artist for the first season of the series, Dery is credited with "Model and background design"; he shares the credit with George Goode and Andy Kim for the "More Than Meets the Eye" mini-series, but is credited solo for the thirteen episodes of the first season proper, with Gabriel Hoyos and Leandro Martinez listed as "assistant design." The earliest character models for The Transformers (Optimus Prime, Megatron, Sideswipe, Prowl, Jazz, Soundwave, Laserbeak, and the Seeker body-type) were created by Japanese artist Shōhei Kohara for the 1984 television commercials; Dery simplified Kohara's designs for the commercial animation, then further revised them for the cartoon, in addition to creating animation designs for the rest of the first-year cast using the toys' package art as reference.

Second-year character models adhered more closely to the toys' proportions; observe the differences between Dery's Red Alert (right) and Sideswipe (left), despite being based on the same basic mold.

With the expansion of the series in its second year, Dery's name became just one of half-a-dozen designers credited with "Model and background design" in season two. The designs for this year's new cast members were created from images of the toys themselves, and more closely resembled the figures than the season one designs had. Concurrent with the development of season two, Dery worked on The Transformers: The Movie, for which the usual order of production was reversed: rather than base his designs on pre-existing toys, Dery created the whole cast of the movie from scratch, and the toys were then based on his work, hence his credit as "original concept designer" for the film. He rates his designs for Hot Rod and Gnaw as his favourites (though even he doesn't like Wheelie, and he designed the guy).

The Legend of Floro Dery

MOST OF THE INFORMATIONS POSTED HERE ARE JUST TRASH!"Charlie Alvarado" on this very article

Dery is somewhat infamous among modern fandom for the outlandish and egocentric claims he has made in various interviews, many of which have been met by skepticism thanks to his own contradicting interviews throughout the years. He has taken credit for single-handedly designing literally every incidental human and robot character, and has further claimed to have been the originator of the idea of a transforming planet,^[2] despite early Japanese concept sketches which precede his involvement. Essentially, he takes primary credit for the success of the Transformers series, and has even claimed that, were it not for his movie character designs, then "the Transformers by now would be a has been already like the Go-bots."^[3]

Additionally, between 2002 and 2008, someone searched out Transformers forums and messageboards for mentions of Dery's name, and would post under various aliases (often claiming to be one of Dery's "associates") to inflate his legend and verbally attack fan and foe alike for daring to criticize him or suggest that someone other than Dery designed something in the show.

"Kuest144"—a screenname shared with one of Dery's websites at the time^[4]—posted on the alt.toys.transformers newsgroup in 2002,^[5] accusing those who observed Dery's egocentrism of "jealousy," and telling stories of how this "harassment" was so common that Marvel Productions had specially set it up so Dery could work at home to avoid encountering these vicious haters!
"Ote" briefly appeared on the The Allspark messageboard in 2005 to decry any critics of Dery's as "racists". Only a small archive of this series of interactions has been preserved, but "Ote" was silenced when everyone pointed out that one of the most popular Transformers artists at the time, Don Figueroa, is also Filipino.
"delamesa10" appeared on a Blogspot blog in 2007 to say similar things.
And in the last known instance, "Charlie Alvarado" made himself known on this very wiki in 2008 to contest the content of this article.

The commonalities of these tirades—including the assorted howls at being insulted, the claims that clear arguments against him somehow prove his point, citations of the same material in more than one place despite the claims that it was found "by accident"—make it pretty clear that they're all the work of the same person. Their immense similarities to the pontifications seen in Dery's own interviews have left most fans to assume this individual was Dery himself—but if it wasn't, he had one majorly rabid fan running around.

Notes

In the opening credits for "Scramble City: Mobilization", Floro's first name was incorrectly spelled "Frolo".
In the "Bullpen Bulletins" for December 1992 (written in October of that year), Stan Lee noted that Dery was quitting his work on Spider-Man because Dery "has been forced to give up his chores because of an increased work load at the animation studio which is his home base." What exactly Dery's work load was went unexplained.