JaAm

From Transformers Wiki

This article is about the unusual substance. For the Japanese supergroup, see JAM Project.

It's like someone compressed the essence of early '00s internet "humor" into a single image.

Hot Shot is obsessed with JaAm. No one's really sure what it is, though Hot Shot's Autobot peers have suggested it may be some mysterious fuel source. Regardless, it's important enough to Hot Shot that he had a vanity license plate made to proclaim his love for it!

What is "JaAm"??

Just before the Armada toyline's launch in 2002, scans of the first pack-in mini-comic were released online, and quickly became the subject of ire. The original comic was trilingual, forcing the writer to fit three languages' worth of dialogue into tiny speech bubbles, resulting in unintentionally goofy-sounding stilted prose. To poke fun at the comic, British fan Yartek rewrote the entire thing with ridiculous and crude dialogue, with Hot Shot specifically speaking in nonsense in randomly-mixed-case Comic Sans. The most famous quote from the comic, "jaAm", comes from Hot Shot's description of the large green energy-draining device, which he mistakes for a container of jam. Hot Shot's obsession with the foodstuff was apparently inspired by the "Bunny Cuddles" stories from the British magazine Playhour, featuring an anthropomorphic rabbit whose favorite food was jam.

This is also Michael Bay's vanity plate

The rewritten mini-comic immediately took on a life of its own within the fandom, surviving as a meme long beyond Armada. For instance, when Ben Yee overhauled his toy review system, he commissioned Hot Shot fan David Willis to create a series of images based on the mini-comic. Our own coverage of the meme seems to have played a part in perpetuating it: the specific capitalization of "JaAm" used when Hasbro themselves made reference to it is sourced not from the comic, but apparently from this very page.

The first official reference to JaAm came with Hot Shot's new figure as part of the 2008 Universe line, which referred to it both on his vanity license plate and in his on-package bio. Years later, JaAm was again referenced in the Rescue Bots Academy episode "Rescue Promo": when that show's version of Hot Shot was dropped into a vat during a rescue mission at an out of control Griffin Rock cake factory, he emerged covered in a blue substance which he declared to be "jaaaam!"

All this said... it is a joke that has not aged well at all, and looks worse as time goes on, even as its origins are increasingly obscured by time as often happens with memes. For many, the source joke is—at best—ableist and in poor taste. However, TFWiki.net has elected to retain the link to the original comic below purely for contextual purposes.