Wheeljack's Brigade?

Thanks to my one post a week strategy, I have a month's worth of posts in the can.  They've been written for about a month.  Since I'm so far ahead, I've decided to up the ante a little bit try for two postings a week.  No, I haven't upped the rate of acquisitions, I've just decided to start writing a few articles based on some thoughts I've been having.  Some of these articles may be short, or they may be extremely long.  Here for your reading pleasure (displeasure?) is my first article.

Have you ever really taken a look at Brawn, Gears, and Huffer?

Yes, they're minibots.  Yes, they were imported from Takara's Microchange line, but so were Cliffjumper and Windcharger.  What makes these guys so special?  Let's take a closer look at Huffer over there.

Is that an "M" on the side of Huffer's cab?  I've always wondered what it meant.  As a kid, I just assumed that it meant that they were all-terrain vehicles.  Makes sense, doesn't it?  The "M" looks a lot like a mountain range, after all.  Seems legit, right?  Try telling that to kid I new named Bobby when I was eight.

"M" is for mountain and that's good enough for me

When I was eight, I was on a Tiger Cruise with my dad.  A Tiger Cruise is something the Navy does from time to time where kids or family members get to ride on a Navy ship with their parent.  On this cruise, I rode from Hawaii back to San Francisco.  All in all, it took seven days.  Seven days at sea with a bunch of other kids looking for ways to kill time.  Besides playing video games and eating ice cream, that is.  Luckily, I had brought a few Transformers with me, including Brawn.  This proved to be a good thing, as it led to an interesting discussion.

Not known for stimulating conversation

While playing with the other kids, Bobby picked up Brawn and commented on how Brawn was part of Wheeljack's Special Teams.  I literally had no idea what this kid was talking about, so I asked him.  Then, he blew my mind:

The "M" was now a "W"!  According to Bobby, the "W" signified their allegiance to Wheeljack!  I still argued with the kid.  There's no way that it was a "W", it had to be an "M" for "Mountain".  It turns out that I was the only person who thought that on the ship.  The other kids soon joined in and backed Bobby up on his assertions.  These guys all hung out with Wheeljack and together they were a special missions squad, they argued.  I was fighting a losing battle, so I just gave up.

To this day, I think about it and snicker.  The Transformers had only been out a year and I had already run across my first personal canon.  The Transformers are full of such things.  I'm sure now that I could argue that the "W" could signify that they are part of the Wreckers.  Still it's an interesting footnote in my history of collecting and being part of the fandom.