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I've decided that for my "10 days of TFs-mas" (awful, awful name, I know) I'm going to do a series/season-per-day run of 5 episodes of each series. Some are just plain my favorites, some are important episodes, and in a couple of places (2 of the JP series), it's just the first 5 episodes of the series because I simply don't know anything about them.
Day 1 (Dec 15th): Generation 1, Season 1
Day 2 (Dec 16th): Generation 1, Season 2
Day 3 (Dec 17th): Transformers: The Movie
Day 4 (Dec 18th): Generation 1, Season 3
Day 5 (Dec 19th): Headmasters
Day 6 (Dec 20th): Super-God Masterforce
Day 7 (Dec 21st): Victory
Day 8 (Dec 22nd): Beast Wars
Day 9 (Dec 23rd): Animated
Day 10 (Dec 24th): Prime
After each batch of episodes, I'll probably come here and write a pointless essay's worth of thoughts on what I watched even though I imagine none of you care
If anyone wants to watch along with me, I can share my episode lists for each day.
So tomorrow I'll be kicking off with a batch of 1st season G1 episodes
For the curious, my G1 season 1 episode schedule for tomorrow is going to be:
More than Meets the Eye (ie the pilot) Parts 1-3
S.O.S Dinobots
War of the Dinobots
Heavy Metal War
Yes, I'm cheating and adding a 6th episode. I didn't want to cut the pilot, wanted to get in the 2 Dinobot-focused episodes (a theme that will continue with the S2 set), and tomorrow also turns out to be the 33rd anniversary of the original broadcast of Heavy Metal War, so it felt appropriate to finish of Season 1 with its finale episode.
Alright, so it's Day 1 of my holiday Transformers rewatch. As noted above, this was the G1 cartoon, season 1 and my 5 episodes were as follows:
Episodes 1-3: More than Meets the Eye (the pilot)
Episode 8: S.O.S. Dinobots
Episode 10: War of the Dinobots
Episode 16: Heavy Metal War
Overall I always find it funny that I expect to get more bored/turned off by the series the more I rewatch it. Like my nostalgia is going to burn out and I'm going to become more and more cognizant of all the flaws and corniness and no longer be able to overcome it. But instead I'm finding the more I rewatch the really good episodes, the more I appreciate how solid the show was on the whole (for a cartoon designed to sell toys to kids and written by people who really gave zero ****s about writing something good because it was just a dumb kids show.) Plus I know enough to avoid the really really bad episodes to save my sanity.
It's kind of funny that this season is so short (only 16 episodes) and basically half of that is taken up by 2 plotlines (the 3-part pilot and the 3-part Ultimate Doom arc plus Countdown to Extinction. So basically 7 of 16 episodes belong to just 2 stories and only 9 of 16 are individual other storylines.
Some of the things I thought and noted as I watched (collapsed into spoiler tags to avoid making a super giant long post):
More than Meets the Eye 1
It sure doesn't take long for the first animation error. Less than 5 minutes in and we get Seekers that look just like the big 3 (Starscream, Thundercracker, Skywarp) but speak with grossly different voices
It was really cool that they took the time to make Cybertronian alt modes for the half-dozen or so characters who transform during the time before they leave on the Ark. For the sake of <10 minutes of the show, they actually came up with transformations for multiple characters that look reasonably different from their earth alt modes, but fitting for the fact that their robot mode bodies never change.
The scene on Earth in the Ark after the crash, where it pans across all the deactivated transformers is shockingly more grisly than I remember. It almost feels like a dry run for The Movie. There's a Thundercracker-style Seeker that looks like it's missing all its limbs, Sunstreaker is laying partially off-screen with his leg ripped open and the hydraulics exposed, Brawn looks like his back has been crushed. It's a well-detailed scene and actually features all the characters you'd expect without any rando nonsense bodies or "he shouldn't be there!" intrusions. There's even a cool bit of a shot where you can see one of the "hoodboob" Autobots (the cars that transform by swinging hteir car hoods down so that the hadlights face forward and the heads pop out of the top of the hood area) and you can look up under teh hood assembly and see the rest of his torso just like the toys do.
Yowza, Teletraan-1 is super dumb considering that a computer capable of detecting decepticon influence inside of Autobots doesn't recognize that it shouldn't be a) finding alt modes for and b) repairing Decepticons. Especially not first before the Autobots.
I totally forgot about Cliffjumper's giant sniper rifle-bazooka gun. Shame he never uses it again. And in spite of having all the time in the world to line up his shot, he misses big time like a total doof.
The commercial bumpers are actually quite well animated. Especially the Jazz one where he does like a handbreak-turn 360 and mid spin he transforms and draws his gun to fire. It looks really great.
Reflector has to print out poloroid-style photos for Thundercracker to view while they're doing recon, hah!
The Autobots fly, in total contradiction with almost all later episodes that establish that only the Decepticons, the Dinobots, and select Autobots with existing flight capability (Powerglide) or a jetpack (Sideswipe, Ironhide) can fly in robot mode.
The Autobots float in water, in total contradiction to physics.
I forgot how abruptly the episode ends with no "To Be Continued..." plate or wind-down. It's just trapped humans! Optimus can't lift the rigging! *fin*
It's always funny that Megatron's gun mode always has the full set of accessories on it (scope, barrel extension, stock) even when it makes no sense. It's also even funnier that while his gun mode is based on a real gun (a Walther P-38), those additional parts are taken from The Man From U.N.C.L.E. which created a variant P-38 which could be converted into a sort of Sniper Rifle configuration.
The best bit of trivia from the episode is the one-off appearance of "Hauler", the Autobot who pulls Hound up from the cliff base after Lazerbeak runs him off the road. While in reality it appears that he was meant to be the character that eventually became Grapple, albeit under a placeholder name and different color scheme, a bunch of fanwanking and some sorta-questionable canon decisions later, he was given a backstory as the forgotten 7th constructicon who wasn't reprogrammed like the rest based on the S2 Episdoe "The Secret of Omega Supreme"
More than Meets the Eye Pt 2
Just like the last show ends, this one they just blow through the recap at hte beginning so they can get right to resuming the plot.
They sure couldn't write a better way to involve Spike and Sparkplug in the plot ("You can't help us", "but we know about earth!" "You can help us")
Spike's weird monologue at the beginning is awful. "I can't tell if they (the Autobots) are from the past, or the future..." What? They're not time-travellers you moron!
Ratchet has a workshop in this episode that appears to be a separate base outside of the Ark, but made of the same materials as the Ark. Wha?
There sure are a lot of one-off powers and abilities we never see again after the pilot. Jazz' grappling winch, Wheeljack's fire-Pejorative Slurant foam, Megatron and Optimus' energy mace/axe. That's a shame
The whole Ruby Crystals thing being an energy source (the energy source, apparently) is hilarious BS. But buried in that is some actual real research/learning: Burma/Myanmar really is the world's largest source of rubies (accounting for about 90% of the world's supply)
It's funny how uneven the script is. There are some spectacular lines (Megatron's half of the sparring match with Prime at the dam, where Prime accuses him of destroying everything he touches, and Megatron retorts "that's because everything is food for my hunger! My hunger for power!" or Starscream's response that "time makes all things possible" with regards to deposing Megatron. And then there are some garbage lines (Prime's response in the aforementioned dam scene is "you're junk! that's what you are! Junk!" Damn, Prime, sick burn.)
There's also some really gorgeous animation at points. The Sunstreaker/Sideswipe/Trailbreaker scene has some good stuff, and I love how they do Optimus being blown down the hillside when the bomb goes off
Roller! Of all the one-off powers from this episode, the lack of future Roller content is one of the most disappointing. He does actually appear twice more in season 2, but it's not enough for me.
Wheeljack spontaneously develops a southern accent, but only for the scenes he shares with Sparkplug (because their voices are basically Chris Latta doing exactly teh same thing, only Wheeljack gets a bit of robot reverb. So it's obviously his attempt to differentiate them a bit when they speak around each other)
More than Meets the Eye Part 3
Ravage has his own voice for the first/only time! Unsurprisingly, he is voiced by Frank Welker, who also voices all of Ravage's panther vocalizations and voices Soundwave.... and about a full third of the rest of the cast.
I love the dumbfounded look all the autobots give when Optimus is happy Ravage escapes. I mean, ok, Mirage wasn't there for the planning, but jesus, Hound. This was your goddamn plan! Why are you confused?
Speaking of which, holy balls is Hound's plan stupid. We're going to make a fake rocket base, and staff it with fake people that are actually the smaller Autobots wearing giant lab coats. The Decepticons will never suspect there's anything wrong with 8-foot-tall metallic humans with the broadest shoulders you've ever seen.
Similarly, how in god's name did the Decepticons manage to build perfect working models of themselves out of assorted scrap and junk they found around earth?
There's some hilarious animation errors during the Hound/Rumble rematch where they obviously reused the same animation from their underwater fight in Part 2. The managed to swap out the background for correct cliffside BG, but forgot to remove the overlay of bubbles from the underwater scene, making it appear like Hound is letting off random bursts of foamy bubbles for no reason above ground.
This episode has perhaps the single best Starscream coup attempts in the series prior to The Movie.
Did you know the writer of the 3-part pilot movie is still alive and still writing TV shows? His name is George Arthur Bloom and he was apparently born in the US but raised in/lives in Canada.
Episode ends: "next stop, outer space", following episode: "and here we are on earth, where we've been all along and not leaving at all"
S.O.S. Dinobots
I've seen this episode more than any other in the series. I have an official VHS release of it from f.h.e. It's funny that there are actually animation and coloring errors in the DVD release that weren't present in that VHS version. I can also probably recite like 3/4s of the script from memory, even after all these years.
The dam from this episode reuses a lot of animation material from the dam that appeared in MtMtE Part 2 noted above.
It's the ongoing saga of "what color are Wheeljack's blinky ear fin/lights supposed to be?" They were blue/white in the previous episodes. Here they skew yellow/orange.
Holy ethical ramifications of Wheeljack creating artificial life out of nothing but earth parts. Also later episodes establish that only Vector Sigma can grant personalities, so.... dinobots how?
Soundwave has to go off and do research about the waterfall dam in spite of the fact that they already ****ing know how a damn works from the pilot episodes.
In one of the best sound/animation errors in the series, Bluestreak speaks some random other autobot's line, then he speaks his own line, then he speaks Huffer's line while Huffer also moves his mouth in the background, only it's not Huffer's voice at any point. (as noted when Huffer speaks alone immediately after)
It's not relevant to the version I'm watching (2009 release from Shout Factory in the Matrix of Leadership shaped package) but there was a great error in the original Rhino DVDs where the scene with the Dinobots clearing the rubble as a demo has all the sound effects and lighting, but the rocks simply remain in place after the vaporization effect is heard.
Is it weird that the shot of Grimlock blasting Teletraan-1 is really cool and well done?
This episode has a lot more audio errors than normal. Almost every scene has at least one instance of someone speaking in the wrong voice, or the wrong character's mouth moving when someone speaks. Hell, Ratchet seems like he uses like 4 different voices in the course of the episode.
The ramifications that the Dinobots are somehow super-strong and durable in spite of being built on Earth with inferior earth parts is weird. If earth materials can make nigh-invulnerable transformers, why didn't the rest of the Autobots fashion armor for themselves or something.
Hound is one of the underappreciated characters of the series. Especially since the Bay movies have basically overwritten Hound into a goofy warmonger. Having him as the peaceful, earthloving outdoorsy type was fun. And he was better at it than whiny hippy Beachcomber.
The scene of Hound radioing in to Optimus has some really cool touches. from Hound's light-up button and face elements when his radio is active, to Optimus having a little retractable microphone that extends from the side of his "helmet" while an antenna pops up from one of his "horns"
So the Autobots are undone by a dip in the water? They spent the entire back half of pilot episode 1 in the water at the Oil rig. Also Energon Chains seem like a dumb idea given that a) Energon is their power source and b) it's extremely volatile.
It's somehow cool that Rumble has a pair of entirely different earthquake pistons (a set that he has to actually move his shoulders up and down to use, and a pair with hydraulic actuators in them so that he merely stoops over and they pound on their own.
Permanently dysfunctional Autobots: a big robot family and the troubles that plague them. Today on Sally Jesse Raphael.
Goddamn the Dinobots are so ****ing cool. Their whole fight with the Decepticons is absolutely fantastic.
Grimlock's head design is a weird, pudgy beta version for this whole episode.
After the pilot episode had the best Starscream coup, this one has the worst. Megatron loses his balance? "I'M IN COMMAND NOW! YEAHHHHH!!!!!"
So Bluestreak's gun can charge the Autobots' batteries? Doesn't that kind of make it the worst weapon ever?
War of the Dinobots
Second episode of Dinobots, Grimlock already has a new (and mostly permanent) head design.
Meteorini Chiparoni? Oh just **** off, Spike. That's the second worst thing you ever did (the worst was Daniel)
Optimus's red glowy hand of doom is sadly never seen again
"This meteor may be dangerously unstable. Let's get a sample of it by shooting a chunk of it off with someone's laser gun." A+ leadership, Optimus.
Slag, the one whose name is a swear word, is a hostile, angry jerk who just wants to fight people. It's so perfect
Wheeljack's fin thingys are back to blue. Also he constantly stands bow-legged in this episode. It's like someone looked at his weird forced perspective promo art and decided that's what he was supposed to look like all the time.
Poor Snarl. This was the coolest he ever got to be. He deserved better.
The Dinobots' transformation animations are really well done and do quite well to replicate how you actually transform the toys
Grimlock brandishes not just his own gun at the end vs Megatron, but Prime's rifle as well. That's so badass!
Optimus never actually says he forgives Grimlock. Buuuuuurn.....
Heavy Metal War
As I noted the other day, December 15th (which is when I began this run of episodes. Though it was the 16th by the time I actually watched this) is the anniversary of the original broadcast of Heavy Metal War in 1984
Damn, the Shout Factory version of this episode is rough. There are tons of really shoddy and rough scenes that look like they were restored from extremely worn down original copies. The sound is also super borky, with extremely low master volume on the sound effects.
So Megatron built the Constructicons on Earth? But Desertion of the Dinobots establish that the Constructicons are impacted by the Cybertonium degredation like all the rest of the Transformers except for the Dinobots explicitly because the Dinobots are Earth-born. Furthermore the Constructicons were shown existing on Cybertron to be reprogrammed to evil by Megatron. And worse still another flashback even shows them having a hand in creating Megatron. But if they helped create Meagtron. and Megatron created them, then Megatron couldn't have been created by them since he wouldn't be alive yet to create them himself well after they were there to create him and.... oh no I've gone cross-eyed.
They actually refer to the fact that the root word of "Decepticon" is "deception" That's cool.
The scene of all the Decepticons sitting down to watch the fight is cool. Soundwave even ejects all his cassetticons so they can watch.
Optimus can shoot a blast from his hand? Ok, sure....
Also, none of the Autobots are smart enough to realize that Megatron is utilizing all the powers of his subordinates? Surely they've seen Starscream and Skywarp and Rumble and everyone in battle enough to know what everyone's powers are. Nope? Oh, ok.
So much engrish in the Teletraan-1 readout of the Decepticon bio information.
Teletraan-1 also identifies Rumble as "red robot" FIRRIB/FIBRIR lives! Or if you want to be ultra pedantic, the computer refers to "Runble" and not Rumble.
Real chemistry alert! Mixmaster's acid suggestions are Sulfuric Acid and Hydrochloric Acid respectively.
Devastator's transformation sequence is glorious and surprisingly toy accurate. I'm pretty sure this doesn't keep up during the rest of the series as they begin to massively cheat. If only they didn't **** it up at the end by giving Devastator separated eyes instead of an eyeglasses style visor.
Devastator speaks in the 3rd person and calls himself "The Devastator" Cool.
He also goes down like a punk to one shot of Optimus' ion rifle.
The constructicons sure look like they died falling into the lava. They sank a lot more slowly and ominously than the rest of the Decepticons.
The whole lava river ending and wind-up dialogue sure makes it sound like this was a backdoor finale in case the series wasn't picked up for a second season.
Well that's it. It was actually kind of fun putting all my thoughts down, even if it was difficult to keep up sometimes. now the question becomes whether or not anyone cares. If there's no audience for me rambling about a bunch of cartoon episodes, I can gladly tone it down and either just list the episodes I'm watching from day to day or bail on the reporting part of the project entirely and just watch my shows in peace.
although maybe one day I'd like ot have something approaching a rewatch club or something. A bunch of us watch a series a few episodes at a time and then can discuss them all having seen the episodes in question recently. Kinda like that Movie of the Week thread.
Speaking of the episodes I'm watching, my season 2 5-set is more Dinobot focus with:
Dinobot Island Pts 1-2
Desertion of the Dinobots Pts 1-2
and Starscream's Brigade
Wow, it was a pain in the ass to find this episode. My Shout Factory DVDs cause the first problem by preserving episode numbering across seasons, so instead of Season 2 resetting to have its first episode be #1, it simply starts at 17, since Heavy Metal War finished off season 1 as episode 16. Also I'm not entirely sure what the logic behind the differing orders are (production vs broadcast?) but the TF Wiki lists Dinobot Island as episodes 14 and 15 of the season (which would be 30 and 31 overall), but they were on the very first disc of Season 2 episodes, 3rd and 4th in the list (after Autobot Spike, the correct first episode, and City of Steel, which TF Wiki lists as the 3rd episode of the season instead of the 2nd)
I don't like the Season 2 title sequence nearly as much as the first. From a design standpoint, there's a lot of really cool animation, but I prefer the S1 rendition of the theme, and I kind of like the simpler design setup.
Season 2 episodes get title listings and writer credits at the beginning, unlike Season 1, which tells you neither piece of info about a given episode
Dinobot Island was written by Donald Glut. Glut was apparently a dinosaur enthusiast, which might explain why 6 of the 12 episodes he wrote for the series feature the Dinobots (by the end of my run through G1 on Monday I'll have watched all 6: S.O.S Dinobots, War of the Dinobots, and Heavy Metal War from season 1, this two-parter, and Call of the Primitives from Season 3.)
Glut was also noted for his extremely cynical and mercenary attitude towards writing for cartoons and specifically The Transformers. When asked, he makes no secret of the fact that he did it solely for the money, doesn't give two craps about any of the characters, thinks the show is dumb and just a toy commercial, and didn't really try that hard when writing his scripts, caring more for churning them out in a day and submitting the first draft with no review process rather than doing a good job. Strangely, for figuring he didn't care about quality, most of his episodes aren't all that bad.
Snarl doesn't even transform on screen the first time you see him. There's a convenient pillar in the way as he walks, so that he passes behind it in robot mode, and emerges on the other side in Stegosaurus mode.
Spike thinks he'll call the island they find "Dinobot Island". Reeeeeal creative, Spike. If there ever was an indication that Spike didn't got to school (after all, he's younger than 16 (since he states at one point he's not old enough to drive) but was working an oil rig out in the middle of the ocean with his dad.), it's probably this one.
This episode feels like the beginning of "silly, goofy comic relief Dinobots" antics. I was originally going to say that it is perhaps the result of a change in the writer roster for the season. But it turns out that it's the same guy responsible for the two Dinobot-centric season 1 episodes as this one. So...
How the hell does Megatron know what Spike named the island?
Snarl doesn't get a gun for some reason, and is relegated to shooting laser beams out of the point of his sword. Man, Snarl certainly got the short end of the stick in this series.
While it does come across as base cowardice, Starscream's hesitance about the strange energy of Dinobot Island turns out to be well-founded and would seem to tie into the fact that season 1 says he was a scientist before the war.
As with Chip in Dinobot Island, this episode marks the last time I'll be seeing Sparkplug. He's never seen nor referenced at all after the franchise time-skips into the 2000s for the movie and season 3. However, the TF wiki states that he was actually supposed to make an appearance in the Season 3 premiere (Five Faces of Darkness) and appears in the casting sheet for the episode. But at some point in production his appearance was cut and his one line was given to Blaster instead. It's only idle speculation on my part, but it was well known that there were behind-the-scenes issues with his voice actor Chris Latta. Between the canonical deaths of Starscream and Wheeljack and the general phasing out of several of his other roles due to their toys no longer being new (Defensor, Laserbeak) or production issues (sticky legal morass surrounding Reflector, Buzzsaw being discouraged because you couldn't buy him individually) it seems like perhaps they simply decided to reduce the amount of times they would need to have Latta in studio for recording to a minimum.
Dinobot Island Pt 2
First appearances in the series of Perceptor (who introduces himself with a monologue) Seaspray (who doesn't) and Dirge (Who I don't even think talks)
The whole conceit of Dinobot Island is never actually explained. So there's a prehistoric island out in the middle of nowhere... for some reason. It apparently has a "chronological balance" and "drifts precariously in the sea of time" according to Starscream.... for some reason. It's loaded with energy, but harvesting it destabilizes the island... for some reason. Screwing with it causes time warps to appear all over whatever city is closest to where the Ark is that spit out people from the past... for some reason. And the time flow damage also causes volcano hte Ark is lodged into to spontaneously flare to life... for some reason.
If there's some sort of drinking game around the ever-changing color of Wheeljack's glowy ear things, this episode's color is a cool blue-tinged white.
Optimus calls the Decepticons, collectively, "unfeeling machines." That's kind of creepy and... I'm not sure what the word is. Racist? Factionist? Whatever it is, it's decidedly unlike the generally life-respecting "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" messianic figure that Optimus is supposed to be
Optimus' trailer apparently holds 3+ full-grown mammoths. Maybe it's bigger on the inside like the TARDIS.
Sunstreaker's gun having a weird mode that creates a flaring bracing structure to pry open the portal is weird. It seems like a niche setting for his gun to have.
It always amused me that Chip was better at using Teletraan-1 than any of the Autobot scientists. Like Perceptor, who is the team's dedicated scientist and is in this damn episode standing right next to Chip while he works. Ok, sure, in other episodes (like War of the Dinobots) it's maybe because they're dealing with Earthen subject matter that Chip will know about while they won't, but in this case they apparently need Chip to feed data into Teletraan so that it knows how to locate the time warps. And yet in spite of that, Perceptor offers to explain to Chip the science behind the time warps if he wants it. If Perceptor knows so much, why can't he work the computer his own damn self?
Speaking of Chip, since I'm not watching every single episode of Season 2, this episode marks the last time I'll be seeing Chip as he no longer appears in the series after the time skips for the movie and 3rd season. Interestingly, there were character model sketches made of a grown up Chip intended for use in the Japanese Headmasters series, but he ultimately didn't make an appearance in any more G1 fiction aside from a short Japanese-only OVA called "Scramble City: Mobilization" which served as a sort of partial bridge between the end of the second season and the Movie. I'll talk more about Scramble City in my Movie discussion, but pertinent(ish) here is that it is the only time in the entire franchise that Chip and Carly are in the same episode.
So the yacht the pirate ship attacks is manned by a single guy with a swarthy mustache and a captain's hat and a pair of scantily clad women. Hawt.
After a season and a half of not giving a single wild **** about the continuity issues of allowing Autobots not named Sideswipe, Wheeljack, Powerglide, or the Dinobots to fly in robot mode, now they suddenly decide to make a point of Optimus and crew having to strap on jetpacks in order to fly to Dinobot Island.
Screwing up the timestream via Dinobot Island is going to threaten the entire galaxy apparently. That's... kind harsh.
Beachcomber doesn't get a gun. He just shoots lasers from his fingers.
Blowing up the stacked energon cubes releases all the energy stored in them back to the island to re-establish its balance. This was never again touched on. Usually the cubes just blow up.
In the final shot of the episode, the Dinobots are drawn with strap-like lines around their arms/torsos, just like the rest of the Autobots, implying that they're using jetpacks to fly. Except the Autobots never brought extra jetpacks with them, and it's been well established that the Dinobots are among the few Autobots who are supposed to be capable of flying under their own power in robot mode.
Desertion of the Dinobots Pt 1
This episode's writer was Earl Kress. He wrote 6 episodes of the show, including part 2 of The Ultimate Doom (pretty good. But weird that it was only contributing to part 2, not the others), The Immobilizer (not bad), this two-parter (really enjoyable), Hoist Goes Hollywood (silly, but fun), and B.O.T. (guuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhh.....). He also won a couple of daytime emmys for work on other shows, which is cool. Sadly he passed away in 2009 from cancer.
The episode actually sorta begins with Blaster and Soundwave coming in near-direct confrontation (well, Blaster vs Ravage while Soundwave is 10 feet away) It was always kind of surprising how rarely those two fought given that they're counterparts
The episode seems to indicate that transformers are not innately aware of what goes on around them in vehicle mode. Ironhide is totally surprised to discover that Ravage is in the back of his van mode cargo area fighting with Blaster
I can't recall if this is one of the first episodes to use the term "flesh creatures"
I always loved the music cue that played when Jazz used his sound & lights distraction.
The autobot/decepticon fight at the beginning of the episode is actually really cool, with a lot of fun uses of Jazz, Hound, and Mirage's powers.
I'm not totally sure what the point of showing Spike, Carly, and Bumblebee at the carnival was. it lasts like 10 seconds and then they transition to the 3 heading to the airport to pick up Sparkplug, where the actual plot continues. Makes me wonder if they just found the episode running short and stuffed in that scene to pad it out.
After some of the doofy elements of the Dinobots crept into Dinobot Island, it was kind of nice to see them back to being their angry, non-conformist selves. Though it's kind of funny that War of the Dinobots made a big point of Grimlock learning that Optimus was a good leader and less than 5 Dinobot appearances later he's back to "**** you, can't give me orders". Except now he's kind of dumb enough to not even know why he doesn't want to do what the Autobots ask.
Slag gets the best line: "Me, Slag, no like anything."
for those of you playing the home game, Wheeljack's light-up head-fin thingies are medium blue in this episode. It actually appears that they've altered the effect somewhat, simply animating a pulsing blue light overlay while he talks instead of the matte screened backlight effect that blinks in time with the syllables of his speech (I suppose this is easier to do)
My copy of the episode has some audio errors. During the airport fight, Rumble crashes into Megatron and Megs tosses him away screaming (presumably) "get off me, you fool!". But my audio misses the "off me" and the line is just "get....................me, you fool!"
It's kind of funny that Sparkplug wears a suit when he flies. I mean, #1) he owns a suit? and #2) Is this the 1960s? Who still dressed up when they boarded a plane at that point?
Hey look, it's the beginning of paranoid Red Alert.
Hoist just sort of steals an airliner to use as a transport to haul the broken Dinobots back to base.
Powerglide dropping bricks in bombing runs seems horribly inefficient.
Whatever the Decepticons' plan was before the whole Cybertonium issue happens, it is entirely forgotten about and never discussed again. Hell, I'm not even totally sure what it was supposed to be, or why it necessitated them making a new staging base in an airport instead of working out of their undersea base.
Starscream decides that Megatron not being able to talk is sufficient grounds to stage a coup
Given the severity of the problems that occur, this issue with Cybertonium seems like the sort of thing that the Autobots and Decepticons should've been prepared for.
The fact that Powerglide can still talk and operate with his head detached from his body is damn impressive.
Except that Scavenger is distracted and fails to link up into Devastator's arm, Devastator seems to operate just fine, raising the question if they're still being treated as if they were earth-made like Megatron said they were in Heavy Metal War (as an aside, I'm proud of myself for correctly identifying it as Scavenger when I usually can't recall which Constructicon is which except for Hook, Long Haul, and Mixmaster)
Not only does Shockwave have a handheld gun in spite of the fact that his entire left hand is a damn gun barrel (which he uses at exactly the same time for some reason), his gun is actually a tiny version of his own alt mode. That's trippy
It's funny that the "to be continued" note actually indicates that the show was designed to be run on a 5x/week weekday schedule. It actually says "to be continued on tomorrow's 'The Transformers'...." It's funny to remember that syndicated cartoons were actually meant to be released basically daily instead of weekly. And still put out like a 50-episode schedule for the season. The amount of work must've been crazy. Most cartoons now can barely handle the weekly 22-episode run and includes several breaks in the middle of the season.
Desertion of the Dinobots Pt 2
I love that the entire recap for part 1 is a single sentence. A sentence that doesn't even sound like it's the end of the thought the narrator was voicing.
Teletraan-1 spells Decepticon as "Deceptikon"
The lighting effect for the Decepticon computer core is really cool looking.
The roof of Wheeljack's lab, on a planet where everything is made of metal, collapses like it's made of rocks. With rockslide sound effects.
Carly gets over her twisted ankle awfully quickly. Perhaps she was just angling to get Spike to carry her for a while? Wooooooooooooo-oooooooo! (cue leering FOX audience noise)
Lots of nameless historical Transformers are killed with very little fanfare.
Swoop gets one of his wings entirely blown off. Hardcore.
So the difference between energon and cybertonium is that one is glowy purple cubes and the other is glowy green cubes. And not even a consistent hue of green from shot to shot.
Carly seems thoroughly unimpressed with getting just a medal for her troubles. I guess it is kind of ****ty recompense for being transported to an alien planet, having her car vaporized, hurting her ankle, and being put into a slaving pit to mine glowy green rocks for a brutal robot overseer.
Starscream's Brigade
This episode was written by Michael Charles Hill. He has 6 G1 episodes to his credit, most of which are in season 3, and two of which I'll be watching on Monday (Ghost in the Machine, and The Burden Hardest to Bear). He was also an associate producer on 95 of the series' 98 episodes.
The Guadalcanal flashback at the start is really cool.
It's kind of funny that after the flashback, we show Guadalcanal again and specify that it's 1986, and then flash to the Decepticon HQ and specify that it's "present day" as if the time frame is different (it's not supposed to be)
Starscream does perhaps his worst job at attempting to take over. Megatron walks away from Starscream, and screamer shrieks "NO ONE TURNS HIS BACK ON ME!" as if Megatron walking away from him isn't an everyday occurrence, then shoots Megs once. Then he assumes that Megatron is dead without checking even though Megatron has absolutely survived a single shot from Starscream's arm rifle things before.
Lazerbeak is strong enough to carry Starscream all the way from the Decepticon base to Guadalcanal. That seems slightly dubious (in a Transformers cartoon? Nooooooooo.
Sticking personality components in rusted out human-built vehicle bodies is enough to make real transformers? Sure. It allows the vehicles to gain robot modes and transformable construction, repair themselves from the effects of battle damage and 40 years of disuse and weathering, and even lets the vehicles shift form from their original design to what the character ends up being (Blast-Off is a B-17 Bomber that morphs into a space shuttle (for some reason), Vortex begins as a single-prop WWII era fighter plane and becomes a helicopter, and Brawl starts as a tank that doesn't even look close to resembling the kind of tank he ends up as. Only Swindle and Onslaught start and stay as a similar kind of vehicle to what they're made from. But not exactly the same.) The mechanics behind this are never touched on again, and indeed any other time we see Transformers' bodies being built it appears as if the construction must account for the ability to transform and be structurally sound in both modes.
Jazz has a giant, size-appropriate pair of scissors. Cool.
Speaking of, Jazz has the scissors because he and Cliffjumper are unveiling the Optimus Prime MEMORIAL STATUE. While Optimus is still very much alive. That's not ominous and prescient at all...
Optimus believing that Megatron kidnapped Jazz and Cliffjumper is totally reasonable. Megatron suspecting that Optimus would steal the Combaticons' personality components from the Decepticon prison on Cyberton in spite of the fact that a) the Autobots don't have a space bridge to get to Cybertron and b) the Autobots would never jailbreak Decepticon political prisoners for ill-defined reasons, is far less reasonable. Though I guess Megs is usually not one for reason in any situation.
Starscream has a hell of a crazy pissed-off rage scream.
The individual Constructicons have zero dialogue. They only appear to merge into Devastator. A really ****ty model of Devastator with a lot of rounded edges and once again missing his sunglasses/visor eye design.
The Combaticons merge into Bruticus by each emitting a "rrrrrrrgh" groaining noise in Bruticus' voice well before they link up and form the finished super-robot. It manages to sound super creepy.
Bruticus is one of the first characters to be regularly voiced by actor Roger Carmel, best known for playing Harry Mudd in a couple of episodes of the original Star Trek.
Devastator goes down like a total punk. I guess it's because his toy is no longer the newest and shiniest gestalt on the block.
Menasor always felt like a super lazy combiner because the limb-forming vehicles just sort of attach themselves to a fully formed Menasor body seemingly made wholly by Motormaster (instead of those vehicles visibly forming the entire limb themselves) It seriously looked like you could just knock the limb bots off the body to absolutely zero effect.
The Autobots are really worried about the prospect of Bruticus. Because it's not like they have their own gestalt bot combiner team that could go toe-to-toe with the Decepticons. (as it stands, the Protectobots will make their first appearance in the next episode. Not even getting a proper introduction, they just sort of show up. Man, I sure have a thing for liking the characters that get the biggest shaft from the writing team.
Megatron's chirpy "No, not Brut-ee-cus" line at Starscream is glorious.
Starscream and the Combaticons are stranded on that asteroid FOREVER. By which we mean the about 5 minutes that pass between the end of this episode and the extent of time in the very next episode (The Revenge of Bruticus) that they take to fly the asteroid to Cybertron.
And that wraps up season 2. Tomorrow I'll push along in the Transformers timeline with The Movie (watching from the 20th anniversary DVD's widescreen version of the film)
It's movie night in the Nem household. Because this is just one movie and not 5 episodes I'm breaking up the discussion into two sections: Meta-discussion and Commentary. The former is mostly going to be me pointing out trivia or going on related tangents like discussing Scramble City or info on how the movie was made or how some scenes may have played out if things had been different, or instances of rumors or urban legends with regards to the movie and the material surrounding it when I have downtime in the story. The latter is more akin to the stuff I was doing above, providing my own personal thoughts on what happens at various points in the movie.
I feel like a lot of the time people tend to treat the movie as if it's just death-death-death-kill-death-killydeath-deadlykills-everyoneyouknowandlovediesallthetime from wall to wall. But really, 90% of the fatality is contained in the first 20 minutes or so of the plot proper. Consider the following timeline based on my timecode from the Shout Factory 20th anniversary DVD (disc 1, the widescreen theatrical version):
21 seconds to first movie shot.
2:50 to end of the prologue and the beginning of the credits sequence
The first act kicks off at about 4:07 with the pan to Cybertron and Victor Caroli's narration explaining the time jump.
7:28 - Brawn bites it
7:41 - Prowl is gunned down
7:54 - Ratchet and Ironhide are struck. We know Ironhide survives for a bit, but this is apparently enough to finish the medic off.
8:31 - the initial kill-wave ends as Megatron finishes off Ironhide
16:45 - Arcee puts down the corpse of Windcharger and we see him now dead on the floor next to Wheeljack.
26:18 - Optimus succumbs to his wounds. Excuse me, I think I have something in my eye.
31:00 - Unicron begins to reformat the damaged Decepticons.
33:26 - Galvatron disintegrates Starscream, wrapping up the batch of pre-movie character deaths.
So basically all the "important" pre-movie character deaths happen in about the first half-hour, especially if you don't include the prologue and opening credits.
The only credited writer for the movie is Ron Friedman, who had been a script doctor/editor in the first two seasons. In fact, the TF wiki notes that he was particularly responsible for a lot of the goofy cybernetic wildlife references (Cybertronic Bulb Bat from SOS Dinobots, for example) or alliterative insults and catch-phrases (Brawn's references to "nickel knuckle sandwhiches") as well as honing the consistencies in voice and characterization since most of the writers were generally unfamiliar with what the characters were supposed to act like beyond their Production Bible personalities (like Warpath's tourette's-like exclamations, or Powerglide's over the top boasting). He turned in a pair of scripts for the movie which were generally deemed to be "incoherent", and heavily rewritten by Hasbro creative director Jay Bacal and lead series story editor Flint Dille. However, neither Dille nor Bacal get writer credits in the movie becuase of how Friedman had negotiated his contract to be the writer for the production.
In what seems like a weird oversight, Devastator is treated as if he's this unholy, unstoppable juggernaut by Kup and the others. Even though by this point we'd seen the end of Season 2 and Devastator routinely get beat up by all sorts of Autobots. The reason for this is the same reason that there's no Autobot combiner team guarding the city: The movie was put into production early in season 2, when the character roster was mostly still the same as it was in the first season. The other Decepticon combiners, along with Autobot heavy hitters like Defensor, Superion, or Omega Supreme had yet to be introduced. Years later, IDW's 20th anniversary adaptation of the movie attempts to fill that plot hole by showing that Omega Supreme, Superion, and Defensor are defending the Ark against Menasor and Bruticus. So Devastator is a horrific sight because there are no giant sized reinforcements coming.
Sunstreaker gets one of the most glaring continuity errors in the movie. He is shown as part of Kup's clean-up crew on Earth before the Decepticon attack, and then he also is shown as the pilot of Optimus' shuttle of reinforcements mid-battle.
Tying to the death timeline above, the urban legend that also sustains the movie's rep is this idea that there were a bunch of other character deaths that were allegedly "cut" from the movie. To the recollection of basically everyone who worked on the film, this isn't true. The closest we get to that is Flint Dille remarking in the commentary that he had considered a much more grisly "shooting gallery" that offed the entire pre-movie cast, but decided it was too much and dialed it back just to give Hasbro a slate clean of the biggest characters from the pre-movie cast. In the end there are 8 confirmed and shown deaths (Brawn, Prowl, Ratchet, Ironhide, Optimus, Windcharger, Wheeljack, and Starscream) and 6 sorta-deathy 'reformattings' (Megatron, Skywarp, Thundercracker, Kickback, Shrapnel, and Bombshell). Plus Unicron in the climax. Additionally, Dark Awakening has the characters visit the Autobot Mausoleum and while Daniel reads off the names of several of the above, he also notes the crypt of Huffer, seemingly indicating he died during the movie's battle as well. There are some other deaths that have been rumored, but since they don't play out in the movie they can't count for certain. They are:
Shockwave is alleged to die when Unicron lands on Cybertron. It's the most heavily implied death, as Unicron is shown to smash an entire segment of the planet while Shockwave pushes for evacuation from the building. Clearly we're meant to believe that he is crushed at this point, but it's never seen. the IDW 20th anniversary comic adaptation muddies the issue by showing Shockwave get vaporized by Unicron's eye beams instead of being crushed.
Gears is implied to be dead as he was on moonbase 1 (maybe. It sorta looked like him but wasn't for sure). There was also a piece of script in a draft of the film that had him killed in the battle of Autobot City killed by either Devastator or Scourge (back when Galvatron was supposed to attack the city, not Megatron). He never shows up again after the movie though.
Smokescreen was supposed to have been the corpse we see Arcee lay Windcharger next to, not Wheeljack
Trailbreaker had his corpse storyboarded, we don't know how he died, just that he's dead at the end of the battle.
In a storyboarded sequence Red Alert gets shot in the back by (depending on the source)either Skywarp or the Constructicons after the Autobots succeed in taking down Devastator and forcing him to separate.
Mirage is shown to be the one who mortally wounds Bombshell (notice that we see Sharpnel and Kickback get trashed in the fight, but not him), and subsequently Megatron gets the drop on the victorious Mirage and shoots him, likely fatally. This was also storyboarded.
Some people claim that like Gears, you can sorta make out Beachcomber among the bots in Unicron's acid pit slaughter line. Beachcomber shows up in season 3 though, so this is highly dubious.
There's a brief shot during Unicron's attack on Cybertron in which Dirge, Thrust, and Ramjet (ie the second group of Decepticon seekers, often called the "coneheads" for their shared design element of not having the plane nose flip down to become their chest) appear to be eaten by Unicron and explode. So they're dead. Or are they? They make repeated, important appearances during season 3, not attributable to animation errors or anything similar.
Some people suggest that a few of the above potential deaths survived. It's alleged that Outback and Pipes could in fact be the rebuilt/reformatted Brawn and Huffer the way Bumblebee became Goldbug since their models are quite similar and their toys are from the same basic molds. Who knows if it's intentional though. Probably not. But that's what fan-wankery is for.
Several characters, including Brawn and some others who may have died (like the conehead seekers) also appear later in S3, but it's possible those are animation errors.
Now we get to the other big continuity snarl of the movie. Hoo boy. The "who did Unicron reformat into whom" debate. Or maybe more succinctly: "Who the hell is Cyclonus?"
Strictly by what is shown on screen, Thundercracker is blatantly turned into Scourge, and Kickback/Sharpnel are in the background to presumably become the Sweeps. There's pretty much no debate here.
When it comes time to show Cyclonus' reformatting, Bombshell is the character in the foreground while Skywarp is in the background. Both become Cyclonus bodied bots and Unicron introduces them as "Cyclonus and his Armada" (curious term, that. An 'armada' of one other body) However it's the Bombshell body that the camera follows as he transforms and flies off. Additionally, the secondary Cyclonus is never seen again after this point. In fact, in the very next scene, Scourge now has 3 sweeps instead of 2.
From a characterization standpoint though, it makes far more sense for Skywarp to be Cyclonus since Skywarp was a high ranking lieutenant for Megatron, and arguably the most loyal seeker of the original trio, and this befits Cyclonus' personality as Galvatron's most loyal soldier and his second-in-command. Additionally there's a certain bit of symmetry if you assume the Armada-Cyclonus was a mistake and there were always 3 Sweeps. 2 planes = 2 lieutenants and 3 insects = 3 lackey troops. Also, since the Sweeps are basically the new cannon-fodder troops and seem to replicate endlessly to refill their ranks, something the Insecticons did quite noticeably throughout the series, it would seem sensible that they fill that role.
Unhelpfully, there appears to be no solid canonical answer. animation errors throughout the movie continue to show all 5 of the non-Megs dead bots in crowd shots well after their deaths. The script doesn't even provide names for any of the 'cons that become Galvatron's troops, only referring to them collectively as "other Decepticons." Storyboards would seem to lean to the Bombshell side of things, not showing Skywarp at all and actually naming Bombshell specifically as the bot in the scene becoming Cyclonus. It would seem that most of the evidence points to Bombshell, but it's hard to argue against the fact that it really doens't make a damn bit of sense compared to how neatly Skywarp fits into the puzzle.
Even more unhelpfully, the fact that this has become a big "thing" in Transformers fandom means that retellings of hte movie events or opportunities to explore the lives of the pre-formatted bots or Cyclonus afterwards tend to somewhat joyously troll the audience by being purposefully vague, intentionally contradictory, or gleefully uncaring about the question, content to simply mess with everyone who wants a straight and definitive answer by muddying the waters further and refusing to settle things.
One of the other big, iconic moments of the movie: Spike swearing. There was actually a practical reason for it. It was included to help the movie secure a PG rating because even with the deaths, the producers were worried it would get a G and they knew that this was not a G-rated movie.
It's often noted that the jump to the Movie and Season 3 marks the point where most of the characters introduced stop being toys cribbed from various Japanese toylines and start being wholly original creations. Hot Rod, Springer, Kup, Galvatron, etc. The one biggest exception is Ultra Magnus. You'd never know it in the movie or show itself, but the Ultra Magnus toy is actually at it's base a white recolor of Optimus Prime. The difference is that Magnus' trailer comes apart and forms power armor that attaches around the Optimus body which gives the expected Ultra Magnus design. The idea that Magnus is actually power armor with an Optimus-like actual body is rarely ever touched on in fiction.
If Ultra Magnus getting blown up by the Decepticons looks weird, it's for good reason: The original intention was that he was supposed to be drawn and quartered. Somehow in a movie that featured heaping gobs of violence beforehand including grisly exit wounds and full-on disintigration, this was the thing that was considered to be crossing the line, and the half-way animated scene was fudged to cover up its original intent.
I've mentioned Scramble City before, but here's a bit more background: Basically it exists as the only sorta-canonical material to take place between Season 2 and the Movie. It was made in Japan to bridge that gap (especially since Japan didn't get the movie until a lot later. It exists as a one-shot OVA and some manga and descriptions in a Japanese TV magazine. It actually shows some elements of building Autobot City (aka Metroplex) and is hte only time that Carly and Chip appear together. It does have some minor issues with canon though because for a time it treated Galvatron as a different character from Megatron. It's also something that never gets seen in the west because Toei are kind of assholes about licensing their stuff. The only time it's been available has been as an extra on some of the Shout Factory DVDs, but only with no original audio and a commentary track played over top of it.
Goofy fun fact: Hot Rod never transforms the same way twice. Every time he changes to car mode, it's animated slightly differently. No reason is ever given for this.
For a long time there were rumors that Orson Welles never finished his Unicron lines and that some of them were recorded by either Leonard Nimoy or Roger Carmel. By all accounts this is entirely untrue. Welles did finish his recording for the movie, but passed away shortly thereafter, well before the film premiered. Roger Carmel did do some Unicron voice work, but as the replacement voice in Season 3 of the show.
I'm kind of burying this here, but there's a long-standing fun bit of trivia that's worth sharing for those that don't know: Optimus Prime was never supposed to die in the original treatment for the movie. What triggered the idea was that the GI Joe movie, also in pre-production at the same time, decided to kill off Duke (the Joes leader) to make way for new characters. The idea piqued the interest of the people at Hasbro and asked the TF crew if they could do the same. As it stood at the time, the Transformers movie was due to come out after the GI Joe one, but production delays on the latter caused it to be pushed back, and Transformers took the lead into theatres. Unsurprisingly, people revolted at the amount of character death in Transformers, especially Optimus Prime, and in a rush to not have a repeat of parents angrily berating Hasbro for traumatizing their kids, they added some hasty editing to the Joe movie to indicate that Duke didn't die from his fight, but the serious wounds merely put him into a coma. And at hte end of the movie he's said to be waking up from said coma, alive and kicking. The way this plays out makes one wonder: if GI Joe had gotten to theaters first, would it have caused the same kind of furor? And would Optimus have then survived this movie? And how much might that have changed Transformers lore forever? Makes you think.
The list of pre-movie Autobots known for 100% certainty to have survived the events of the Movie is short: The Dinobots, Bumblebee, Cliffjumper, Jazz, Perceptor, Blaster (and his cassettes), Warpath, Seaspray, Powerglide, Cosmos, Omega Supreme, the Aerialbots, and the Protectobots. The first four are clearly visible during the climax and aftermath, and Perceptor shows up during Rodimus' speech. Blaster isn't seen again after the battle of Autobot City, but he shows up again in Season 3 along with all his cassettes. The rest of the above don't even appear in the movie at all, but show up in season 3. None of the following characters are seen again after the movie, and some of them weren't even seen in the movie at all. But if Huffer can die presumably from the movie events without us ever seeing it, who knows what that means. The roster is:
Inferno
Hound
Grapple
Tracks
Sideswipe
Sunstreaker
Smokescreen*
Bluestreak
Mirage*
Trailbreaker*
Red Alert*
Hoist
Skids
Gears*
Skyfire
Characters with a * are mentioned above as potentially having died based on movie or production evidence. However this evidence is not 100% canonical. Some characters may end up reappearing in The Headmasters cartoon from Japan, but this is canonically dubious because it was made largely without care for the events of The Movie and contradicts the Hasbro-canon of the 3-part Rebirth series finale.
On the Decepticon side of things, the deaths are more clear-cut since nobody actually truly dies permanently. Megatron and the reformatees are just different characters, not really dead dead. And Starscream survives as a ghost thanks to his mutant indestructible spark and gets a new body before season 3 is finished. That said, there are a bunch of Decepticons never seen again after the movie whose fates are unclear:
Shockwave*
Reflector
As above, the * (Shockwave) may have died in the movie. Or he may not have. the Reflector-bots were briefly seen as mooks during the Battle of Autobot City and at Starscream's coronation, but that was it. In the real world, Reflector was discouraged from appearing in the cartoon after Season 1 because Hasbro had decided against issuing the Reflector toy. Ironically, after Reflector was mostly phased out of the series (never being referred to by name or mentioned in a script after City of Steel. All his subsequent appearances were just in his usual capacity as crowd-filler for the Decepticons), Hasbro did finally decide to offer Reflector as a mail-in promotion to fans who sent in $10 and a couple of "Robot Points" (proof of purchase icons off of the packaging from store-bought figures)
Ironically, of the 3 Autobots (and Spike) who are hauled out of Unicron's belly before they can be dumped in the acid pits, 2 of them will never be of importance again. Scatman Crothers passed away in between the release of the movie and the production of Season 3, so Jazz would only make a handful of voiceless cameos from here on out. Meanwhile Cliffjumper no longer appears after the movie because Casey Kasem quit the show during the production of Season 3's "Thief in the Night" because he was offended by the episode's use of a fictional Middle Eastern country called "Carbombya" and its stereotypical quack dictator Abdul Fakkadi. Fortuitously for the show given Kasem's departure, his characters were easily retired without being necessary for future episodes, and the season 3 premiere had already destroyed Teletraan-1 (voiced by Kasem) to pave the way for the new computer in Autobot City, Teletraan-2 (voiced by Frank Welker, continuing his push to be the only actor the series ever needed to employ)
The end credits cast list contains numerous errors and awkward credits.
Michael Bell is credited as Prowl, but Prowl never speaks before he is killed. Bell is correctly credited for his playing Scrapper, Swoop, and at least one non-Wreck-Gar Junkion though.
Don Messick gets the weirdest credit glitches is credited as Gears, but Gears never speaks and it's kind of debateable whether or not he appears for sure. Meanwhile, the Constructicon Scavenger does appear and has lines, but Messick is not credited for that performance. And just to make sure there's no logic at all, Ratchet obviously shows up to die, but since he never utters a word or a sound, Messick is not credited at all for him.
Inferno is in the cast list and credited to his VA: Walker Edmiston. He never actually appears in the movie at all. Not even in an iffy "it might be him if you kinda squint" way. He was supposed to show up and even recorded lines, but Inferno's scene was cut.
Dirge is visible during Unicron's attack on Cybertron, but he never speaks. In spite of that, Bud Davis is credited for providing his voice.
Frank Welker and Michael Bell are both credited simply as "Junkion" but there are like 7 background Junkion designs that speak and no effort is made to differentiate who is who and which ones were voiced by which actor.
The colors are a little over-saturated and I feel like there are some contrast issues, but damn that intro flyby from Unicron is luscious to look at. the series would've killed for that level of detail
Overall I feel like some of the early parts of the movie, such as the destruction of Lithone suffer from color balance issues. Everything is bright and colorful, with lots of oranges and pinks but it tends to be so harsh that it makes a lot of the Lithone attack difficult to see.
That cartoony "chomp chomp" noise made by Unicron's internal crusher mechanism is really out of place with how serious that scene is supposed to be.
I'm not sure if it's just me, but everyone's voices are a little off in terms of their processing. Ironhide and Cliffjumper, for example, seem to have more robotic reverb added to their lines, while Soundwave actually sounds less vocoder-processed, to the extent that you can hear the underpinnings of Frank Welker's Dr. Claw voice as the base.
I get it, they had to kill a bunch of characters. But Brawn's death seems particularly stupid since he doesn't get hit in the torso. He takes it in the shoulder. Even with him falling down and showing a much larger exit wound, it doesn't seem like the same degree of fatal shot that everyone else takes. Even accounting for the fact that it's gun-mode Megatron and that's usually treated as being extra powerful, ehhhhhhh it feels kinda cheap
On the flip side, Prowl takes easily the most grisly death. It's even a bit of a harder kick to robo-junk when you recognize that it's not Megatron or anyone important that takes him out. It's Scavenger, who I'd wager is probably no better than 4th in the chain of "Constructicons you might actually care about individually)" Anyway, he gets a couple shots in the chest which apparently, and I can't stress enough how horrifying this seems, immolate his innards, leaving him to show his optics glowing a sickly flickering orange while fiery smoke plumes out of his mouth and his face contorts into a completely empty drained expression as he crumples to the floor. I know Optimus' death scarred everyone, but holy balls if I were watching this in the theater as a 5 year old (in spite of hte fact that I would've been 2 when it came out) this would've been the death that gave me nightmares.
Ratchet's death is rather 'meh' after the first two.
Ironhide's death is super harsh (considering we are left to assume that a point-blank shot from Megatron's fusion cannon probably decapitates him) but negated a bit by being off-screen. The one thing that bothers me is that Megs' one-liner ("such heroic nonsense") is a little bit awkward.
Daniel. uuuuuuuuuugh.....
I always forget that Hot Rod is basically pink instead of wine/red.
Now that I'm at the point that Stan Bush's "Dare" is playing, I have a moment to mention that for the most part the music is really awesome. Yeah it's all pretty much 80s synth pop/rock, and maybe it's not as atmospheric as proper score pieces all the way through, but with only a couple of exceptions, it all fits the scenes it goes in.
And speaking of scores, the actual score for the movie itself is really good too.
I really appreicate how much they made the fights really dynamic. Instead of basic grapples and gunfire, there's so much action, flips, twists, dives, and movement.
It always bothered me somewhat that there was the eventual reveal that Autobot City is actually Metroplex and apparently was all along. The fact that they seem to have left their biggest weapon without the ability to transform until they fix it in Season 3 seems reallly really dumb.
Is it weird to say that Kup squashing Kickback's head as a ramp is really beautiful
As is the sweeping shots of Blaster in his command chair while the battle rages on around him, with lots of turns and camera pans is gorgeous. It might be one of my favorite pieces of the movie. In fact, the whole Blaster/Perceptor sequence is one of the high points of the battle.
The finish of the Blaster scene and switch to Blurr on the wall is a weird transition. For what was a theatrically released movie, it looks for all the world like a commercial break. It fades through black and the music/score stops and starts.
The Arcee/HotRod banter is a lot of fun.I don't even care about shipping or any of that nonsense, it's just fun and playful.
Devastator's character model is a lot less beautiful than most of the others. It almost seems like they pulled frames out of regular series episode production.
Snarl gets shafted so much in this movie. The first scene with the dinobots clearly shows only the other 4. In fact, the movie never shows all 5 on the screen at the same time. The two shots in which Snarl shows up also removes someone else.
The whole The Touch/Optimus sequence is suitably beautiful. As it should be.
There's a surprisingly glaring animation layering error at the beginning of the Megs/Optimus fight, as Megatron flies back into a wall and the cracking of the wall is shown over the smoke for a few seconds. It's far from the only animation error in the movie, but it's one of the ones I always notice right away.
**** you Hot Rod. This is all your fault. No matter how much I don't hate you for not being Optimus in Season 3, him dying is still squarely on you.
Showing Rumble carrying Megs' fusion cannon right behind Soundwave carrying Megatron himself is a neat little bit of personality to that scene.
GIANT PEDANTIC FAN-*****ING ALERT: We saw scans of Optimus' internal chest structure in A Prime Problem. Where was the Matrix then? Huh? Where?
Man, they were sure subtle on the foreshadowing for Hot Rod as he grabs the falling Matrix.
Unicron sure has good cable signals if he's able to see the entirety of Prime's death from within Autobot City from light years away.
the Astrotrain scene is pitch-perfect Starscream. And really great in general. Even though a lot of it doesn't really make sense. Though it's funny to see Soundwave care about leadership.
How the hell do the Constructicons play trumpets when half of them don't have mouths?
Galvatron does in about 5 minutes what Megatron could never bring himself to do in millions of years: actually say "**** it" and kill Starscream. I keep repeating myself, but the whole sequence is really really well animated.
Spike in his exosuit is basically as tall as Bumblebee. That's.... weird.
The fact that Scourge's head pops out of the tail of his vehicle mode so that he can talk is also weird.
Blurr is constantly animated with a ghosting effect. I know it's meant to show him being fast, but since he doesn't actually run any faster than anyone else a lot of the time, it doesn't really work.
We're still a short one guest actor introduction at this point in the movie, but I figure it's a good time to discuss the whole stunt-casting thing of the movie. It's really iconic, but on the whole I feel like it's a mixed bag. Some were really good (Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack) some were middling (Eric Idle was good, but his stilted stitched together catchphrase limited the damage that could be done to his performance. Lionel Stander's Kup was mostly good, but you can tell he wasn't used to voice work. Orson Welles was mostly really good, but there were times it was hard to understand him and times where he slipped out of his ominous bearing and became almost jovial sounding.). The weak link was Judd Nelson as Hot Rodd. Some of his lines were bland as hell, and some of them were so hammy and patronizing that you just had to rolle your eyes.
"I can't deal with that now!" Weeeee!!!!
Nothin's Gonna Stand In Our Way (from the scene with Hot Rod underwater on Quintessa) is one of my favorite songs in the movie. I might even actually like it more than The Touch (BLASPHEMY! ) I do love 80s hair metal though.
If you watch carefully, you can see that the "beryllium baloney/cesium salami" scene is the exact moment that the badass serious Dinobots die and are replaced by the goofy kiddy-time comic relief Dinobots.
The second dumbest thing in the movie is the Universal Greeting. Not in concept. In concept it's really great to have this idea that old guy Kup knows something from a time seemingly before the war that could help everyone get along. What's dumb is the fact that the literal greeting is "Bah weep granagh weep ni-ni-bong" so if that's the second dumbest thing, what's #1? well...... Keep reading
Wheelie. UUUUUUUUUUUUUGGHGHHHHHHH..... I almost want to hate him more than Daniel. Even more grating is the fact that it's Frank Welker doing the voice. The voice of basically every other badass Decepticon in the series also voices the dumb rhyming little kid-o-bot.
56:30 - OH MY GOD IT'S THE GHOST OF SHRAPNEL! And he gets beaten down by Daniel to boot. That's really sad....
Wheelie's cross-legged pose sitting on Grimlock's nose is unsettling. It looks like they lifted it from a pin-up model, and all the implications that comes with it.
The Junkion sequence is really neat, but as much as I love Weird Al Yankovic, setting that scene to Dare to be Stupid is the dumbest thing in the movie. (see, that foreshadowing paid off!)
Speaking of the Junkion scene again, I thought the concept of one transformer riding another, then them swapping places when they get hit is a cool concept that the franchise should've used more.
OH MY GOD, I SAW SNARL! HE EXISTS! MY LIFE IS FULFILLED!!!
And now the Dare to be Stupid scene ends the universal greeting and then with an impromptu dance party. argh... We've reached peak dumbness.
Ultra Magnus gets put back together shockingly easily after Arcee and Springer angst over him seemingly being irreparably damaged/destroyed. Click his limbs into place, wax on, and he's good to go!
Unicron's transformation and attack on Cyberton is another strong contender for best scene in the movie.
As I mentioned above, Beachcomber and Gears are allegedly in the line of bots getting dropped in Unicron's acid bath. I can sorta see the Beachcomber one, though honestly it's just mostly a pair of legs and is kinda dubious. I didn't see Gears at all though. Perhaps I was just typing as he was on screen.
YOU GOT THE TOUCH! YOU GOT THE POWER!
Optimus' "Arise, Rodimus Prime" line still gives me chills.
Galvatron goes down like a total punk. A bear hug, some grappling, and then he gets chucked through a wall. After all the great battles in this movie, that climactic showdown was ultra disappointing.
Almost as disappointing as Judd Nelson's numb reading of "Now, light our darkest hour."
He actually redeems himself with "Autobots, transform and roll out" though.
Everyone seems entirely non-plussed by Rodimus Prime suddenly appearing. Nobody questions why Hot Rod looks totally different and has a new alt mode.
Unicron's whimpery "you cannot destroy my destiny" line is kind of a weak way for him to go out.
And holy hell, that ending is sudden. There's no real denouement. Unicron goes kablamo, Hot Rod gives a 30 second speech saying the war is over, and the movie ends. But hey, that 80s metal cover of the theme song is pretty awesome.
So that's the second darkest thing in Transformers history (I actually contend that the season 3 episode, Dark Awakening is the darkest thing in the canon because it builds on top of all the bad juju of this movie to warp the audience with mind controlled zombie Optimus and that creepy half-destroyed version of his corpsified chassis in the episode's closing moments. Only hurt by the fact that most modern reprints of the episode tend to use the version that re-aired right before The Return of Optimus Prime and thus spoil the fact that he's coming back to life in the very next episode)
This one was a lot of work. I expected to be able to pop the movie in at 11pm and be done the whole process before 1am, but here I am at nearly 3:40 in the morning just finishing up my writing, and having taken a little over 2 hours to watch a 90 minute movie
Tomorrow it's back to the episodic grind with a quintet of Season 3 episodes, provided I can stay awake at night:
Starscream's Ghost
Ghost in the Machine
Webworld
Call of the Primitives
The Burden Hardest to Bear
no longer content to focus on Dinobot episodes when they're mostly schlock comedy, I picked out the one good Dinobot episode, the two solid Starscream episodes, a really great character episode in Webworld (with some super fun trivia) and what I personally feel is one of the best character-development moments in G1, hilariously immediately undone by the producers' best intentions: Giving the fans what they want.
Day 4, so we're gonna close out G1 with a selection of Season 3 episodes. I could've easily just gone with Five Faces of Darkness Parts 1-5 and been done with it, but I decided to pick and choose again. I also realize at this point that the episodes are probably getting a little fuzzy in most peoples' memories, so for this batch I'm going to post a quickie plot synopsis for each episode.
Starscream's Ghost
The first episode with <dur> the ghost of Starscream. Decepticon Triple-Changer Octane, who was banished from the Decepticons in an earlier episode, encounters the ghost of Starscream, with whom he conspires to.... take control of Cyclonus and stage a coup on Galvatron somewhat sloppily.
Before I even get started, intrigue! It turns out that not even DVD companies are immune to the confusing and slapdash ordering of the post-season-1 episodes. My Shout Factory DVDs came with a companion booklet that features an episode list and disc directory, placing this one on Disc 13. Well, guess what? It's not there. It's actually on Disc 12 thanks to some awkward order shuffling.
Once again, it's a new season with a new title sequence. This one (obviously) designed to reflect the status quo changes of The Movie. It's a bit of a roller-coaster. There are some really finely detailed clips in it, including a nice transition from a face-on shot of Galvatron, some good shading work on Blurr and (ugh) Wheelie, some cool Sharkticon shots. But there's also some really terrible work on the Metroplex/Trypticon bit, a lazy Blaster model, and some blink-and-you'll-miss-it lazy modelling of the final bit of Magnus/Rodimus/Kup running at and past the camera. Also this is the worst rendition of the theme song, with it constantly backed by this weird industrial/choral mishmash noise that sounds like a combo of a steel hammer striking a drum and ominous choral chanting of a rhythmic "Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!"
Written by Megeen McLaughlin, this is actually a good point to stop and note that for an 80s cartoon about violent robots that was designed to sell toys to boys, the show had an impressive of women contributing stories to the franchise. 9 different women contributed in part or in whole to 13 episodes of the series. Yes, as a series that had 45 different credited writers (!) across 98 or so episodes that's a fairly small cut, but it still seems impressive given the show's audience, intent, and time frame. It's also worth noting that McLaughlin later returned to the franchise to write an episode of (ugh) Beast Machines. Nobody's perfect, I suppose.
to this point I've been lucky that all 10 previous episodes and the movie were all animated by Toei Animation from Japan. Toei is famous for 3 things 1) being the company responsible for the "Super Sentai" shows, better known as the source material for the Power Rangers franchise, 2) Being responsible for just about every major anime series of the 80s/90s (Dragonball, Sailor Moon, Digimon, Voltron, One Piece, etc) and 3) Being absolute bastards to work with when it comes to exporting and licensing (unless you're Funimation). Just from a Transformers perspective, Toei refused to give Shout Factory the audio for the Scramble City OVA, meaning the version that appears in its western TF DVDs has a forced commentary track over it just to allow some semblance of understanding what's going on. Shout's releases of the 3 post-G1 sequel series were also extremely stripped down, only getting the bare minimum episodes themselves with hard-coded subtitles and often missing things like recaps/previews or clip show episodes even though those episodes often featured new content and animation or helped make sense of the series' often confusing plots. Anyway, it turns out that perhaps TF didn't know how well it, because this episode is one of the bunch (10 season 2 episodes and a little more than half of season 3) that were farmed out ot other studios. In fact, this episode is one of a handful for which the studio has never been identified. at least it's better than AKOM (who did the shonky title sequence I talked about above, and who will have their moment in the sun in the next episode discussion.) That said, "better than AKOM" is kind of a backhanded compliment, as this episode looks flat, dull, and boring, and often has lazy character models.
Galvatron actually hires an assassin to kill Octane. I know he's mostly just a bag full of crazy at this point, but that's pretty cold.
Of course, he also does a pretty **** job of it considering that the assassin just plants a bomb which blows up Octane's ship and is no threat of killing Octane because he's a robot who doesn't need to breathe or have to worry about the vacuum of space.
Right before he gets his ship blown up, Octane is totally looking at robot porn on his computer.
Octane's actually a surprisingly personable and pleasant guy for a Decepticon, even if he's still a grouch and kinda snarky.
I can't remember if it's an ongoing feature of season 3, or if this episode was just running a few seconds short, but each time there's a scene transition with the theme jingle and flipping insignia it slows down for the last note, as if it's dragging things out.
Octane's voice acting is fun and personable, but the same can't be said for Sandstorm. Who sounds like he's just reading off the script. Fun fact though: Sandstorm is voiced by Jerry Houser, best known for playing Killer Carlson in Slap Shot
Even the commercial bumpers look rough in this episode (pretty sure they're AKOM work too.)
For an episode called "Starscream's Ghost" they sure take their sweet time getting to that part of the plot. It literally takes HALF the episode before Octane stumbles into the crypt of fallen Decepticons.
In a weird bit of continuity snarl (in his show, shocking, I know), Octane heavily implies that there's a tomb marker for Dirge (he quotes a play on Dirge's motto "Death comes to he who crosses me.") and Dirge was shown apparently dying when he and the other "conehead" seekers (Ramjet and Thrust) are eaten by Unicron. But Dirge ends up appearing in multiple season 3 episodes including the sequel to this one.
Terrified Octane can't even transform right. That's kind of funny.
The fake interrogation scene with Starscream (in Cyclonus) and Octane acting is a lot of fun.
When Octane and Starscream/Cyclonus are sitting around in Galvatron's throne room, the animators manage to mix up who's supposed to be talking, with Octane mouthing Starscream's line and Cyclonus being given a close-up saying Octane's line.
Galvatron's shot at the possesed Cyclonus actually appears to blow an entire chunk out of his torso, exposing all his wiry guts. Hardcore.
The ending is really weird. We get the teaser of Scourge now being possessed by Starscream's ghost. And indeed Scourge is at the center of the next episode with Starscream, but Ghost in the Machine doesn't pick up here. instead Starscream just sort of appears and takes over Scourge right from the outset.
Ghost in the Machine
A quasi-sequel to the above episode, the ghost of Starscream appears again, this time forcefully recruiting Scourge as his lackey and forcing him to aid him in striking a bargain with the still-living head of Unicron: in exchange helping Unicron gather some parts he needs to repair himself, he will grant Starscream a new body. It's Starscream, so you can probably guess how that turns out.
This episode was written by Michael Charls Hill and Joey Kurihara Piedra. Hill was already mentioned previously having written Starscream's Brigade. and he'll also be writing the Burden Hardest to Bear. Piedra only contributed to 2 episodes as a writing partner with Hill, this one and The Killing Jar.
DVD episode order problems strike again. While this episode is on the correctly listed disc, it's funny that in between Starscream's Ghost and this one are the episodes Fight or Flee and A Thief in the Night. Otherwise known as the episodes that introduce Sandstorm and explain Octane's defection from the Decepticons respectively. So if you watch the DVDs in order, you get to watch Starscream's Ghost with a guy you were sure was bad being friendly to an Autobot you've never seen. Then you get some backstory, then you get the sequel.
Yeesh, it's AKOM time. I talked a bit about them above, but now it's time to go down the rabbit hole: You know the really, really ugly episodes of the series? The ones with flat colors, no shading, wonky character models and tons of issues with polish and quality? Those are AKOM's work. Founded by the Nelson Shin, the series' lead director, this studio. AKOM was notorious for being "Cost efficient", which meant that they balanced cheapness with usually being really crappy quality. However, they were also often a little bit smoother than most as they tended towards a higher framerate than some of the other studios. AKOM actually animated some early episodes of The Simpsons too, but were fired from that job for the poor quality. Shin was also noteworthy for being part of the visual effects team on the original Star Wars and for designing that move's lightsaber effects (before they were replaced by superior effects in Empire Strikes Back onward). Lastly he was also a contributor to the 20th anniversary Transformers The Movie DVD commentary with Susan Blu and Flint Dille. He's easily the least interesting part of the commentary, as he generally points out "captain obvious" type things like what's happening on screen, and rarely actually gets into the technical side of directing the series even though Blu and Dille both try repeatedly to needle him into expanding on anything. It also wasn't helped that he's very difficult to understand through the thickest accent you can possibly imagine.
Anyway, on with this episode. Unlike Starscream's Ghost, where I complained that it took forever to get to the plot, this one throws you right into the thick of things in the first 10 seconds. Starscream appears, takes control of Scourge, and we're off.
Galvatron's reaction to the possession is priceless. his "THERE'S NO REASONING WITH HIM! KILL HIM! HE'S LOST HIS MIND!" is great. A lot of people dislike loony Galvatron and Welker's voice for him, but I think he's a good counterpoint to Megatron.
During the original gunfight Cyclonus rasps "he's a traitor, give him no quarter" in a weird singsongy pattern. It's always bugged me.
Whatever issues I had with the slowed down transition bumpers in the previous episodes are gone now. But the audio is worse and kinda warbly.
Roger Carmel (Bruticus, Cyclonus) now voices Unicron in this episode since they had to overcome the pesky problem of Orson Welles being an expensive name-brand actor and suffering a severe case of "the deads". He does a really solid job replacing Welles. This is also probably partially responsible for the rumors that Welles didn't record all of his dialogue for the movie
Ugh, that model of Metroplex in city mode....
the scene of Kup and Spike entering the door to Metroplex is animated weirdly, as if there was supposed to be other frames and some dialogue there.
Some of the voices are also missing their reverb effects. Blaster in particular sounds weird.
HOLY BALLS WHAT HAPPENED TO BUMBLEBEE'S TIRES! HE LOOKS LIKE A DAMN MONSTER TRUCK!
The whole concept of stealing Metroplex's eyes is both incredibly squicky and kind of cool.
Ugh, that transformation sequence of Metroplex...
The shot of Metroplex having the bomb in his head explode with smoke pouring out his eyes is brutal. Even if Metroplex himself looks like butt because **** you AKOM.
Hey look it's the weird random appearances of Runabout and Runamuck, a pair of "twin" Decpeticon cars. I had a Runabout toy as a kid. He was a "Battlecharger", a simple transformation triggered by having one of those springloaded pull-back motors. Draw him back in car mode and let him go and he'll drive forward and then pop up into robot mod along the way. It was kind of a neat trick. Though I'm pretty sure the drive on my Runabout broke
Insaneo Galvatron lecturing the failure of Runabout and Runamuck and shooting the screen is also great. I really like crazy Galvatron.
After Starscream's Ghost never made much use of the opportunity for possession, with him sticking in Cyclonus for the whole time. Having Starscream flit about between a bunch of different bodies is a lot more fun.
Ugh, those low-detail shots of Unicron's head...
And Springer's giant helmet.
Dirge is back here, along with Thrust. Both totally not dead.
I forgot how much I don't like a lot of the season 3 score for the show.
Starscream ****ing over Unicron and bailing on their deal is fantastic. As is him getting caught in the blast and flying off into space.
On that note, Starscream flying off into the darkness of space was supposed to be a setup for Season 4, in which he would return with a group of new Decepticons called "Raiders" at his command.
There's something really hokey and lame about the ending. The dialogue reading is really flat, particularly Rodimus, who's usually one of the better actors in the S3 cast.
Webworld
Having been severely damaged ever since being recovered in the wake of Transformers The Movie, an ever-more-unhinged Galvatron finally snaps and forces Cyclonus and Scourge to have him committed to the planet Torkulon, an entire world devoted to mental illness.
This episode has perhaps the best writer trivia of the series: It was written by the tandem of Len Wein and Diane Duane. Duane is notable as a sci-fi and fantasy author, having written a bunch of Star Trek novels, among others. The bigger get is Wein, a prolific comics writer who created Swamp Thing and had a hand in creating several X-Men including Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus, and ****ing WOLVERINE.
Aaaand they totally forgot to run Soundwave's voice through the Vocoder. Like, at all. He's just full-on Dr Claw.
Speaking of Soundwave, he also just sort of disappears from the episode after that scene.
"Strategy is for cowards!" You tell 'em, crazy Galvatron.
Seriously, just watching Galvatron go bat-****ing crazy for the whole episode is just a ton of fun.
It's kind of funny watching Cyclonus be flustered by paperwork.
That's some terrible therapy if they give Galvatron the parts to assemble a gun.
I get the sense that Wein and Duane don't particularly like psychiatry.
Galvatron is weirdly obsessed with Ultra Magnus in spite of the fact that his biggest beef should be with Rodimus.
This is another S3 episode that just sort of... ends. It's kind of weird.
Apparently the German localization of this episode is titled "Galvatron goes Crazy"
Call of the Primitives
Fearing some sort of universe-threatening catastrophe, a mysterious figure called Primacron assembles a group consisting of the "primitive" bots from both the Autobots and Decepticons: that is bots with main or alt modes based on animals or other biological-styled monsters.
The last episode written by Don Glut, it's also not surprising that he goes out on a Dinobot-centric episode.
It's also famous for the fact that it looks absolutely gorgeous. This is one of the episodes animated by a studio besides AKOM and Toei. It's never been revealed which, but many speculate that it is, in fact, Tokyo Movie Shinsa, famous for a lot of work in the west including Batman the Animated Series, the 90s Spider-Man, Ghostbusters, Animaniacs, and more. They also do a ton of anime including Lupin III and Detective Conan.
Primacron (the mystery figure behind the plot of the episode) calls Sludge as "Sweep" when he summons them.
Abominus looks freaking awesome.
The first and only (brief) appearance of Soundwave's 2 forgotten Cassetticons: Slugfest (a stegosaurus) and Overkill (a T-Rex-like dino with a horn on its nose.) The two eject from Soundwave, transform, and then vanish from the show. I didn't know these were a thing when I was little, but I totally want a Slugfest figure now.
I guess they have to fit with the "primitives" motif, but the Predacons are portrayed as notably dumber than they tend to be the rest of the time.
But at the same time, while the Dinobots are still kind of comedic, they regain a little bit of their badass-ness and are less doofy in this episode.
Funny bit of trivia: as one of the few episodes in which Trypticon speaks, it's noticeable that he is voiced by comedic actor Brad Garrett.
I take back some of my comments about the Dinobots being less doofy. They're still slapstick comedy relief. But who cares, they look awesome doing it.
I take a little bit of issue with assertion that some of the "primitives" were created by Primacron. We know all the characters are Transformers and where they come from. It seems pointlessly dumb to muddy the issue now.
The effect of the "Oracle" as a glowy wall is really cool looking.
Sky-Lynx' "rage" is a single ineffective missile. What a fop.
Slag's voice is really different in this episode.
The shot of Predaking facing off against Tornadron is one of the most beautiful things in the entire series.
alright, now we're at the point where I can note the biggest, stupidest weight that drags this otherwise gorgeous episode: The little monkey gremlin alien guy created Unicron. The ****? I get that G1 stayed away from the comics' very overtly religious treatment of Unicron as Transformer Satan, but it seems pointlessly dumb to make his origin be that of the little monster alien dude instead of just letting him by mysterious.
Yeah, the whole last act is really a let-down from where this episode starts.
And again, it just abruptly ends.
The Burden Hardest to Bear
Growing sick and tired of the pressure and expectations of being Prime, Rodimus bails on his responsibilities and ends up losing the Matrix and, reverting back to Hot Rod. Freed of the weight of the Matrix, he takes off to have fun. But the discarded Matrix is taken in by Scourge and forces Rodimus to reconsider the recklessness and selfishness of his actions.
It's kind of fitting for the last episode that I get to see see Devastator and Defensor among the set. This episode actually has a surprisingly large cast.
It also is cool to see the episode take place in Japan, the birthplace of the Transformers, although it is a little bit stereotypical at times.
Rodimus is kind of a jerk for walking away from the government officials, but he's kind of right to when the people complain about being saved from the Decepticons.
This is the first and only of my chosen episodes to feature primary season 3 human Marissa Faireborn. It's never stated in the series, but she was actually created with the intent of being the future daughter of the GI Joe character Flint (whose real last name is also Faireborn) and other Joe character Lady Jaye.
Warped, mutated Scourge is super creepy.
There's a lot of schlocky philosophy in this episode, but I think it does a good job of addressing Rodimus' biggest issue, his ongoing inferiority complex and feelings of not measuring up. By episode's end he's learned the importance of his job, and accepted the burden of leadership on the understanding that he can be a good leader if he doesn't spend so much time worrying about whether or not he's going to screw up. It's a big bit of character development for what Rodimus has gone through all season.
"Let her alone" sounds so dumb
And a guy with a katana threatening Scourge is even dumber. Especially since he actually seems to do some damage with one swing (and it makes laser-striking noise)
Hot Rod transforms differently yet again.
Scourge is rather easy to defeat in the end, after the other Decepticons were so troubled by him.
Plus he reverts right back to his smooth, unblemished body, which is odd.
You know all that stuff above about character development and what Rodimus goes through to learn not to be weighed down so much by the mantle of being Prime? Guess what the next episode of the series is after this one: The Return of Optimus Prime. Yep. The writers finally give Rodimus the character development he needs in order to make him into a great leader (and what honestly makes him a better character than Optimus, if not a better hero) and in the very next episode after this one it all basically gets undone because Optimus comes back, takes back the Matrix, and reclaims the mantle of leadership while Rodimus reverts to Hot Rod and just becomes one of the troops again in The Rebirth episodes as he becomes a Targetmaster. It's such a disappointment things were ordered this way, because I feel like they could've really made Rodimus a much more likeable character for fans if he had some time to show his growth after this episode.
Finally, and fittingly, I get a season 3 episode that doesn't have a weird sudden ending. This one wraps up nicely.
Well, that's it for season 3 and that's it for the original G1. In the end, as I said at the beginning, I feel like the show is simultaneously better overall than most people give it credit for, but also just as goofy and cartoony at its worst points. I also think that while there are some good character elements in season 3, a lot of the episodes are kind of thin and it shows the wear and tear of the franchise by this point.
So tomorrow I move on to 3 days of the next phase of the re-watch: The Japanese G1 continuation. For Headmasters I'm going to watch episodes that were selected for a best-of list. For SuperGod Masterforce and Victory I'm just going to watch a sequential bunch of episodes. But what I am going to do is knock my count down from 5 to 4 episodes per series. Because the 3 nights before this I was up until almost or past 3am working on this project and even tonight having started like an hour and a half earlier and not being slowed down by the time spent exploring the movie, I still end up finishing at 1am. I really want some sleep leading up to Christmas, so if I can cut an episode and hope that perhaps the weirdness of the JP eps will leave me with less to write about that I can get to bed at a reasonable hour on an ongoing basis.
So tomorrow my Headmasters rewatch is going to be:
The Mystery of Planet Master (episode 2)
Cybertron is in Grave Danger (episodes 8 and 9)
Ultra Magnus' Death (episode 24)
Were it not too much extra work, I'd probably love to watch the series's goofy malaysian English dub along with the JP original, but I just don't think I can handle that much content all at once now.
Saw the new Dinobots figures at Walmart today. I didn't think they were supposed to be out until next year. Wasn't everything, but they had Slag ( or "Slug") for like $24 and Swoop and the new one, Slash, for $12.
EDIT: I think my Walmart may have had things placed on the wrong shelves. According to TF Wiki, Swoop and Slug are both deluxe class figures, which means they should be the same price. Slash is the only one that's part of the lesser class (legends class, smaller figures). It also says that Voyager class Grimlock should be out now too.
In all, this "Power of the Primes" imprint looks like it comes with some really sweet toys. I've seen Starscream and Jazz as well and they're very G1. Forthcoming from that line, and incredibly cool looking, are a pair of really interesting concepts: Optimus and Rodimus Prime figures that are actually kind of like the old Ultra Magnus power armor setup. You can peel off the "Prime" components to reveal a smaller robot underneath that is a fully functional standalone Orion Pax (based off his G1 cartoon "War Dawn" character model) and Hot Rod. It's almost like that way-too-expensive Masterpiece Hot Rod that also turns into Rodimus Prime and both versions vehicle modes.
For a brief period I mistakenly believed that the "Legends" line was also out around now, but that's just a Japanese run. Which is a shame because it's full of some really cool headmasters-y stuff like Perceptor and a newer, more cartoon-accurate Sixshot, as well as headmasters releases of the old G1 Jumpstarters, Topspin and Twintwist.
*WARNING: I never considered spoilers for the G1 cartoon since I have to assume that most people will have seen it when they were kids or rewatched it since then. Chances are that almost no one here will have seen any of the Japanese series, so that means that basically anything out of this is spoilery. But I'm not going to be concerned with this in my discussion. IF YOU EVER WANT TO WATCH THE SERIES WITHOUT BEING SPOILED, DO NOT OPEN ANY OF THE COLLAPSED SPOILER BOXES. I will do my best not to spoil anything significant in the plot synopses which isn't already spoiled by the episode titles (which happens a lot as a function of how Japanese shows tend to title their stuff. For evidence, look no further than the 4th episode of my chosen quartet). Within the spoiler boxes though, I will not only be discussing many of the significant parts of the episodes themselves, but I may mention things that happen between the episodes I picked if I feel it's important for you to know as we read along. CONSIDER THIS YOUR FIRST AND ONLY SUPER IN-DEPTH WARNING. THE WEDNESDAY/THURSDAY RECAP POSTS WILL NOT BE SO EXPLANATORY ABOUT THIS POLICY*
For those that aren't familiar, Transformers: Headmasters is the Japanese sequel series to the original G1 cartoon. It picks up at the conclusion of the 3rd season (ignoring the 3-parter pseudo-4th-season "The Rebirth" that aired in the west) and spins its own 35-episode yarn (plus 3 clip shows at the end) around the characters introduced in the Headmasters, Targetmasters, and other 1986/87 parts of the toyline as well as the characters from The Movie. For the most part, it rather quickly abandons most of the older, recognizable characters and focuses almost entirely on the new ones introduced. Only a handful of "classic" characters make any sort of meaningful contribution to the story, and in some cases their personalities are distorted significantly. Daniel, for example, begins acting like he's about half the age he's supposed to be, turning into a petulant little crybaby. Meanwhile Arcee is stripped of all her badassness from the previous series and mostly becomes a whiny, simpering, exceedingly stereotypically "girly" waste of a character who mostly exists for Chromedome to swoon over and to exhibit a sort of conservative motherly side towards Daniel. It's exactly as disappointing as it sounds. The pre-Headmaster chracter contributions are mostly on the Decepticon side, where Galvatron and his movie lackeys remain the primary villains (though Scourge and Cyclonus are somewhat recast as a comedy duo of bumbling idiots as a result of the previously mentioned distortion effect on older characters.)
It also changes up the functionality of the Headmasters within the fiction:
In short, western Headmasters are the entire Transformer, and the head is simply host to an organic co-pilot who works symbiotically with the Cybertronian main body. Eastern Headmasters are miniaturized Transformers who are like a Cybertronian sub-species and who can fight on par with "regular" Transformers by piloting lifeless larger bodies (and pilot those larger bodies' vehicle modes while in their robot mode)
Also of note is that the series was unavailable in the west for the longest time, with the first Region 1 (US/Canada) release was 2011's set from Shout Factory. There also has not been an official western dub of the show ever. The closest thing ever made was a Hong Kong based dub by a company called Omni Productions, which did a hilariously inaccurate and rudimentary job translating the material, leading to such flubs and oddities such as the Matrix being referred to as the "Power Pack", Blaster being named "Billy" (indeed, many classic characters get pointlessly weird real English names like Marshall (Jazz), and Phillip (Magnus)), Spike as "Sparkle", Fort Max as "Spaceship Bruce" and Sixshot's descriptor "Ninja Commander" to "Ninja Consultant"
Seriously, this dub is in all the drugs. The same company also apparently made dubs of SGMF and Victory as well. I have yet to watch any of them though.
In the future maybe I'll do an Omni rewatch, but not now.
So I ultimately picked 4 episodes to watch for this day of the rewatch:
1) Mystery of Planet Master (Episode 2)
The Decepticons' attack on Cybertron worsens, with Galvatron's plan to capture Vector Sigma seemingly close to fruition. However 4 mysterious Cybertronians (Chromedome, Highbrow, Hardhead, and Brainstorm) appear to help beat back the Decepticons and their own new recruits (Mindwipe, Skullcrusher, and Weirdwolf). Meanwhile, Optimus Prime ventures into the depths of the planet to understand why Vector Sigma has destabilized and what it could mean.
Yeah, I skipped episode 1. Not a lot happened except to set up this episode. Vector Sigma went haywire, a bunch of Autobots retreated to a base on another planet that we've never heard of, and a bunch of others went off to Cybertron to stop the Decepticons. The new Headmaster Autobots only appear right at the end.
I have to admit, the theme song (link to YT of the show's opening) isn't half bad as far as 80s J-Pop tv themes go. It's kind of reminiscent of Cha-La-Head Cha-La from Dragonball Z, if you know what that is. It does suffer from some unfortunate engrish and all that entails, particularly with long, complicated English words that are being rendered in the fair rigidity of Japanese phonemes. So "Transformers Headmasters" becomes something akin to "TOH-ran-sue-fo-mah heh-DOH-MAH-sue-tahs" The title sequence itself is.... weird. But expectedly weird in that way that a lot of anime openings are. That way that comes from depicting a lot of fights and stuff that never comes close to happening in the actual show. It also kind of spoils some stuff with the appearance of a couple of characters (which I will mention once we get there)
In a good example of Toei's international dickery, there is no recap of the previous episode. Toei intentionally provided Shout Factory with the barest minimum of material possible, and that meant cutting out previous episode recaps, next episode previews, and the 3 OVA clip shows that were meant to help explain what the hell was going on with continuity at the time. Not a great thing when this show is a fairly serialized exploit with an ongoing story that covers most of the 35-episode run and tends to play a little bit loose with how it adapts stuff from the previous show (because, as I've noted before, The Movie was not released in Japan until a fair bit after it was out in the west. I have at a various points before pegged it as being in the 90s but according to the TF Wiki it was acutally 1989 that the first screening took place, and it was out on VHS and Laserdisc shortly thereafter. Still, this was late enough for it to **** with continuity a bit, as Prowl and Wheeljack both appear in one of these Japanese series (Prowl in this one, Wheeljack in Victory) in spite of being afflicted with that pesky problem called "being totally, gruesomely dead in The Movie"
As is anime-standard, every episode starts with a title card that plays a theme jingle and shows the episode's name over a static picture that's somewhat relevant to the episode. This one shows a background shot of Cybertron. It's actually fairly nicely done
The very first line of the show is "Scrap you!" being shouted by Weirdwolf. I imagine the original line wasn't entirely like that, but the Shout subs appear to have been made by someone who is a decent enough fan of the show to have inserted a lot of Transformers-specific slang and turns of phrase. Including using "scrap" as an all-purpose Cybertronian cuss word. This is probably to deal with some of the cultural inequalities of a direct translation, where the Japanese insults will sound kind of silly and soft because "darn you!" is not a great translation and simply the best we can do, and doesn't carry the same weight because of the low implications of "darn" in English, but also avoids the issue of substituting stronger English curses in a show that might be viewed by a broader age range of viewers. Or the issues of style and tone that come from peppering the dialogue with stronger cursing (such as infamous 90s fan-subbed versions of shows like Dragonball Z which made all the characters swear like a South Park episode in a misguided attempt to sound "cool" and carry the intensity of the Japanese dialogue.
While I'm on the subject of translations, the subs also tend to have preference for western Transformers terms wherever possible, likely to avoid confusion for fans who know who Optimus Prime, the heroic Autobot leader is, but would be confused by references to the noble Cybertron leader, Convoy. Most names tend to be the same, or same-ish in both languages, and all Japanese names are from English roots, but sometimes the Japanese name doesn't take into account the context of the English used or whether or not an English-speaking person would call the name silly. For example, this episode is named for the fact that the Headmaster characters come from a Transformer colony world called "Master" but doesn't take into account that a planet called "Master" sounds kind of dumb. Japan also doesn't often recognize that splitting words into component parts can sound shonky too, as, for example, when they refer to Fortress Maximus' head bot (called Cerebros in the west) as simply "Fortress". Get it? Conceivably this would be the sort of thing that would make it not crazy in the eyes of Japan to call the body component (the "Transector" in Headmaster JP lingo) "Maximus" so that the name of the unified mega-bot is the unified names of its components (it doesn't happen that way. Transectors don't get names. They're more or less just armor suits) even though that would probably sound silly to an English ear. Not that I'll ever use JP terms when the subs provide me with perfectly serviceable English equivalents, but it's worth noting the following Eng/JP conversions:
Autobot = Cybertron (yes, just like the planet. No, the Japanese apparently didn't think it too confusing to change the faction name while keeping the planet name. And no, it's not meant to signify that the Decepticons are from a different planet. They're not.). And just to make sure it's as mind-****y as possible, there are indeed some continuities where the term "Autobot" is used in Japanese for the faction. Just not this one.
Decepticon = Destron
Optimus Prime = Convoy (just Convoy. I note that because...)
Rodimus Prime = Rodimus Convoy (yep, after Op and in some continuities, Convoy can be used as much as a title, equivalent to the use of "Prime" in English, except that in the English case, Prime is only ever used as a one-word name in the context of being a nickname and no character is ever officially just named "Prime". But in Japan Op is always just called "Convoy" and not "Optimus Convoy", while Hot Rod is often referred to as "Hot Rodimus" or simply "Hot Rod" and gets the Convoy name appended to him when he possesses the Matrix and takes the mantle of leadership. Though he doesn't take it for very long here because Takara thinks "**** you, western continuity. we're going to make our own new leader. With blackjack! and hookers!"
Cerebros = Fortress (sort of. Cerebros doens't technically exist in the Japanese continuity because there's no distinction between the bot we know as Cerebros and the entire entity we know as Fortress Maximus. In this series, those two, plus the mini headmaster head (Which was actually Spike in "The Rebirth") are all the same person, just as a mini-robot wearing a transector wearing a bigger transector.
Blaster = Broadcast (though not for long)
Like a Power Rangers or anime show, characters shout their actions out to announce them. Such as yelling "Transform!" every time they change mode. Headmasters transforming to robot mode always accompany this with "head ON!" to announce that their head is attaching to their body (dur!). This is done in English, of course. Because English is cooooool. And oh yeah, they actually also do this when they transform to their alt mode. Even though shouting "HEAD ON!" makes no sense when the head is coming off the robot mode and acting as a pilot to their vehicle or animal.
To continually reinforce that the JP Headmasters' primary beings are the head units and not the larger bodies/vehicles, any time a Headmaster transforms, we are also treated to a shot of the head transforming and settling into the cockpit (or somewhere in the body for the Decepticon HMs, who are all animal alt modes). And in the most anime way possible, all these transformation sequences happen in separate shots from the action going on, with whooshing backgrounds and all that (so that they can be re-used from episode to episode and save time/money.
Mindwipe uses his hypnotic powers by chanting a line over and over again. In this case it's "you will be blind as a bat in battle!" over and over again sounding like a Buddhist chant
Holy hell, it's the Dinobots! Or rather it's Grimlock, Sludge, and Slag appearing in a wide group shot of the battling Autobots. Don't get too excited. They were in Ep 1's part of this fight, they're here now, and then never again because who would want cool legacy characters like the Dinobots when you can have the super-awesome-kawaii Chromedome and Highbrow dominating every scene?
Everyone's voice and speech pattern sounds SUPER INTENSE. Like the stereotypical samurai movie
Well, except Daniel. He sounds like a little girl (with good reason, he's voiced by a woman. Who also voiced Dende in Dragonball Z)
Damn, Wheelie (Who doesn't rhyme in Japanese) is kind of a prick in this continuity. When Daniel expresses excitement that the headmaster characters are good guys (they didn't know who they were at this point), Wheelie chides him "you're easily impressed, Daniel." Buuuuuuuuuuuuurn.
Unlike the English version of the show, there's no real standard for "roboticizing" the Transformer voices. Some charactesr sound really reverb-y and metallic (Galvatron borders on Soundwave-level processing. Speaking of, Soundwave doesn't get a vocoder voice like in English. Instead his is just extra echoey, sounding like someone speaking through a megaphone with a lot of warble.), and some (like Kup and Wheelie) barely sound robotic at all.
In keeping with a lot of other Japanese media, any character appearing on screen for the first time gets a little subtitle below them to show their name. Some of this is likely because they believe it helpful for people to get to see who everyone is. Some of it may be to provide the audience with proper spelling since Japanese can get confusing and you can theoretically use a jillion different Kanji to spell what is essentially the same name, or spell a bunch of different names using the same set of Kanji (the latter is likely less of a concern since most names are written in Katakana owing to their English origins, but no doubt it's simply too standard a trope to not do.) For this DVD, the subtitle is overwritten in English (though you can still see the kana behind it). And my first instance is, of course, super confusing since it introduces Fortress, the head of the Transector body we know as Fortress Maximus (Headmasters' Fort Max body is treated more like a giant spaceship than a city base), but the subtitles all clearly call him "Cerebros" (his western name) even as we hear the dialogue simply say "Fortress...?"
And now we get the flashback that explains the Headmasters. In this version, the Great War starts with nobody able to transform, and a bunch of pacifist Cybertronians left and fled to the PLanet Master. There their ability to transform "evolved" (their word) differently as they learned to turn into heads and attach to Transector bodies. Then later on some of the citizens rebelled and became the evil Decepticon headmasters, led by Scorponok.
This show retains the trademark scene transition with the "more than meets the eye!" jingle and the flipping insignia.
Optimus is fighting his way to the heart of Cybertron to find out what's wrong with Vector Sigma at this point. In a nice bit of continuity, he has to fight "Decepticons" that are actually the Centurion Droids from "The Key to Vector Sigma" in G1 season 2.
Alpha Trion appears as a ghost, also harkening back to the same episode as above and the fact that he committed robo-suicide in order to let the Autobots interface with the supercomputer and grant the Aerialbots life.
Apparently Optimus left the Matrix on earth to "recharge". This is tying to the events of G1's S3 finale, The Return of Optimus Prime, where Op releases all the knowledge accumulated in the Matrix in order to cure the Hate Plague, leaving it as an empty shell. Apparently the Japanese continuity chose not to take the Matrix being formed of "knowledge" quite so literally and instead makes it more like a battery you simply have to plug in and top up.
The animation quality of this episode is all over the place. The first few minutes with the battle above ground look really good, and the character models are detailed and full of shading. But as the episode goes on, things get flatter, and the characters almost get more anime-esque. Spike and Daniel, for example, get more stylized faces with broader noses. Kup also seems to get a squintier set of eyes to make him look almost like a grizzled samurai.
The explanation for why Vector Sigma is going haywire and why the Matrix matters to it seems needlessly complicated. And this does take hte Matrix being full of actual "knowledge" more literally.
Except for the classic transformation sound effect (Which, like the voices, loses a lot of its reverb) this show uses almost none of the sound effect library from G1. The laser blast sound effects come across incredibly weak, as even heavy hitters like Galvatron and Optimus get high-pitched "ssshhhhhew!" type noises for their guns instead of the deep, throaty sounds that they make in G1. Meanwhile, there's no classic G1 music except for the scene transition jingle. Most of the score cues are extremely generic sounding and simple too.
Blaster uses his cassettes a lot more frequently here than he ever did in G1. Hell, here they even take on the Predacons (and are roughly the same size as the Predacons in their alt modes)
Maaaan, Headmasters Arcee suuuuuuuuuucks. I don't want to make cultural value judgements, but there's kind of an unsettling 50s/60s sexist-y conservative vibe coming from her as she spends most of her time fretting and worrying and acting emotionally overcome by everything that's happening, while never actually doing anything but stare at the screen from HQ.
This is the episode that delivers the long-awaited major showdown between Soundwave and Blaster in one-on-one battle (setting aside that one G1 episode where they have a fight with actual waves of sound in that nightclub). It is the epic showdown everyone always wanted and dreamed of, by which I mean they disappointingly:
Stand about 10 feet away from each other and stay perfectly still while they shoot one another with their handguns, taking a ton of needless hits.
Symmetrically each throw a single punch that crashes through the tape-deck-cover of their chest, shattering Soundwave's glass and ripping open the metal of Blaster's chest.
Crumple to the ground from the punch
Soundwave gets punched in the face and it makes his arm fall off for some reason
Soundwave shoulder tackles Blaster like a football player and rams him into an iceberg (this fight is in the arctic for some reason. Or it may have been explained and I just don't remember.)
Blaster peels off the iceberg wall and keels over, spread-eagle and face-down. Soudnwave, meanwhile, stands in front of him, emits a warbling, emotionless "wahhhhhh" sound and spontaneously explodes in a smokey, flashing mushroom cloud (marking the first time I hear a sound effect I recognize from G1. He explodes with the sound of Megatron's fusion cannon firing. This is the only god damn time in the entire god damn episode that I hear a G1 sound effect that's not the transforming noise.)
Watching on a screen in... wherever the hell Decepticon HQ is in this show (I honestly don't remember if it's supposed to be on Char. It certainly doesn't look the same as their G1 Season 3 base), Galvatron sees Soundwave explode and quietly simply says his name. Then lets out a manly pained scream of manly concern and sorrow and manliness. Because sure why not (I haven't mentioned it yet, but Galvatron isn't bat**** ax-crazy in this show the way he was in G1 season 3. Instead he's just eeeeevil and stern.)
Hot Rod reaches Blaster, who is on his hands an knees next to exploded Soundwave. Blaster weakly compels Hot Rod to fight on and find the Matrix and Optimus Prime. And then he immediately turns black and white (not black and grey like Op dying in the movie, black and bright white) and collapses dead.
Seriously, for all the grand talk that this fight used to get from the western audience who had never seen the episode and only heard tale of "Soundwave and Blaster having a brutal fight to the death in the arctic", I cannot stress enough how lame and boring and anticlimactic it all is. And it takes about 45 seconds.
By the way, the Omni dub gets one of its iconic scenes here with how it dubs this. I'm going to put corrected names in square brackets so you know what everything is referring to:
Roadimus [Hot Rod] *sounding barely concerned*: "Billy [Blaster], are you OK?"
Billy [Blaster] *in the most blase way possible*: "Not really. Find the power pack [Matrix]...
*dies*
That's a 100% accurate rendition of the scene.
Also, immediately after, Hot Rod matter-of-factly tells Steeljaw to "deal with this situation." By which he means clean up the corpse of his dead friend (and perhaps worse, he's telling Steeljaw, who remember is one of Blaster's Cassette bots, in the most blithe and unconcerned way he can, to "deal with" the remains of the bot who basically was his master and superior.) Harsh, Japanese Hot Rod. No wonder you were probably a ****ty leader before JP Convoyimus Prime took back the Matrix.
Meanwhile, Laserbeak, Buzzsaw, and Ratbat are picking up the shattered pieces of Soundwave (Laserbeak grabs his decaptitated head) and fly off with them.
I've noted that this show keeps hte G1 scene transitions. But it reanimates them with moderately off-model versions of the insignia that look too rounded and squashed tall compared to their proper proportions.
Back at Autobot base, what's the reaction to seeing (on hte video screen, broadcast... somehow) that Blaster died?
Kup bluntly says "Blaster has fallen in battle." Well durr, Kup. Everyone just ****ing saw it.
Arcee bawls uncontrollably and buries her face in her hands(because she's just an over-emotional girl. Get it?)
Beside Arcee, Blurr (who somehow is given a chiseled and manly-looking face for some reason with the poutiest lips I've ever seen on a robot) stands and stares stone-facedly straight forward. Never betraying his emotion, like a true warrior and not like that simpering bundle of feminine nerves to his right. Because he's a real man...er robot, dammit.
Daniel sobs into the wrist of a suddenly gigantic Wheelie (Seriously, Wheelie goes from being maybe 1.5x as tall as Daniel, with Daniel's head at his chest-level to being big enough that Daniel barely reaches his waist and his forearm is as big around as Daniel's entire body)
Sad, lonely violin music
The 4 headmasters stoutly proclaim they have to go help Hot Rod. To this, Wheelie wishes Chromedome good luck and they shake hands (or grab hands, their arms don't move) and they stare at each other, knowingly.
What I'm trying to say is holy **** is this melodramatic. and I still hate JP Arcee for being so cringey
Also since I'm skipping to Episode 9 after this, all the wangsty drama ends up meaning NOT A DAMNED THING since in Episode 4 both tape deck bots get rebuilt and brought back to life as basically the same character except with a new paint scheme and new name. Soundwave goes from purple to black and becomes "Soundblaster" and Blaster is changed from red to blue and dons the name "Twincast" This produces some excellent comedy value in the Omni dub as Blaster... I mean "Billy," is renamed "Blaster" (negating the idea that the dubbers couldn't figure out what his original name was and that's why he was stuck with a human name) and Soundwave becomes (I swear to god I'm being serious and this is literally his name *drumroll*...... "New Soundwave." Yes, the "New" is part of his name and with the dub's awful rushed dialogue he will continue to be called "Newsoundwave" for the entire rest of the show.)
Also, this is one of the things that the credits sequence spoils: Twincast (aka Blue Blaster, not to be confused with Blaster Blues, the G1 episode) and Newsoundwa- sorry, Soundblaster appears in the cast group shot of the opening titles right from episode 1. Though I suppose with the franchise' history of shoddy animation you could probably be forgiven for beliving that blue Blaster and black Soundwave are a coloring ****-up instead of a MASSIVE SPOILER.
Cut back to Optimus running through the bowels of Cybertron. And the narrator (who we've basically heard nothing of for the entire episode) imploring him to be careful while also imploring a suddenly very shiny looking Hot Rod (have I mentioned how inconsistent the animation quality is? I ragged on G1 for being wildly different from episode-to-episode, but this show's quality surges and wanes from scene to scene...) to hurry up and find the Matrix because Optimus is in "grave danger". Fin.
the closing credits feature another 80s J-Pop song, featuring visuals such as unecessary and confusing gymnastics out of Spike, Daniel (who, I feel the need to remind everyone is supposed to be about 10 years old) sitting on Spike's shoulder, bright colors, and a line "you can transform yourself, any way you want" because the "point" of this and the other JP shows is as much about giving the audience some sort of empowering message about making your own destiny and changing to be your best self and what society needs and **** as it is about robots shooting each other over their millennia-old war. This is far less cool than the opening song. It also features the singer narrating what the various Headmasters are (like a "super car" or a helicopter) while Spike and Daniel "transform themselves" into those things like some sort of hybrid of Cirque du Soleil performance art gymnastics and the world's worst touchdown dances. the helicopter one literally has Daniel balanced on his stomach held by Spike's hand, then spin fast enough to become a blur and lift he and spike off the ground. And it's all punctuated by a terribly engrish-y "toh-rah-oon-su-foh-moo" rendering of saying "Transform" (which didn't sound nearly as mangled in the title sequence song. Nor does it sound anywhere as bad 5 seconds later when the song ends with all the characters doing a gymnastics period after Daniel points at the screen to assure the audience "kimi wa trans-foh-mah!" ("you are a transformer").... argh, argh ARGH. This is SOOOOO BAD....
I'm losing my mind and it took me almost 2 hours to get through this episode because I kept having to pause to rant about everything.
By the way, Jazz was here too. And like everyone who's not a Prime or a new character, he didn't do a damn thing of note.
2) Cybertron is in Grave Danger, Part 1 (Episode 9)
Vector Sigma is in the process of developing a new alloy, which the Decepticons plan to seize for themselves. However Galvatron is not known for being a gracious loser, and has prepared a serious surprise for the Autobots should his team be unable to capture Vector Sigma's new toy for themselves.
So, at this point you might be asking: Where's Optimus after the previous episode recap talked about him delving deep into Cybertron to figure out what to do with Vector Sigma? You'd think he should be here for the giant battle on Cybertron again. Welp, that's not happening. He's dead again. In fact, he died in Episode 3, "The Birth of the Fantastic Double Prime" whose ridiculous word salad title basically refers to the fact that Rodimus bonds with the Matrix and he and Optimus coexist for about 5 minutes before Optimus decides the only way to stabilize Vector Sigma is to merge with it like how Alpha Trion did. So he just sort of drops dead, getting one Autobot leader out of the way on the path towards the Headmaster characters taking over the series. Sorry, it's not getting much better from here.
You've got to be kidding me, Shout Factory. After I railed at them for not even being able to keep the episode order of their own discs for season 3 straight in my G1 rewatch, they did it here too. It's one show, one season, and 35 epsiodes. And yet while the paper insert in the DVD case that gives episode lists states that this episode is on Disc 2, it's actually on Disc 1 and the two-parter spans the first two discs. It's like the show is trying to force me to bail on the JP stuff. And I'm not even at Super-God Masterforce yet (aka the show so overwhelmingly cringey and Japanese that I didn't even make it past the first episode last time I tried to watch)
Let it be known that I'm watching this and Part 2 at 1.5x speed, because watching this on my PS3 lets me speed it up to 1.5x while retaining the audio and subtitles. This way I can get through in far less time.
I'm re-evaluating my stance on the opening J-pop song. I think the only part of it I like is hte opening synth-drum-kit and synth-guitar riff. Basically everything before the singer starts shouting "HEAD ON! HEAD ON! HEAD ON!"
The narrator actually starts out by wasting 40 seconds to infodump about Vector Sigma figuring out a new alloy rather than have it come about organically. It also does so by starting "in this week's episode"
Soundwave.. .erm Soundblaster sends out all 3 of his major cassetticons (Rumble. Or maybe Frenzy, I don't remember if the JP series use the same color/name combos that the western show did. Ravage, and Laserbeak) to spy on Vector Sigma. No idea why they all needed to be there.
The new alloy "Cybertonuron" (a complete nonsense engrishy word) is described as "many times stronger" than Cybertonium, which was a thing mentioned in Desertion of the Dinobots in G1 and actually has the "ium" ending that fake elements and metals sensibly have in their names. Issue here is that Cybertonium was not a strength-dependent alloy in G1. It was more akin to an internal electrics component, like gold or platinum plating on circuits and connectors. Strength shouldn't matter. But **** you, Transformers in Japan is even more of a kids cartoon than it was treated as in the west. and Kids are dumb and who cares if it doesn't make sense.
Galvatron's master plan for this new element is to build an awkward, jaggy sword to cut down Rodimus with.
Strangely Twincast needs to go and spy on Vector Sigma to get the same information, even though they should be keeping tabs on the master computer at hte core of the planet they live on.
The HEadmaster characters are working out, evne htough that makes no sense. Plus they're all kind of rude, snide jerks. Mocking each other, calling each other immature, etc.
Scorponok only appears right now as a shaodowy figure with glowy green eyes advising Galvatron from the shadows while Galvatron chafes at the idea of being told what to do.
Kup cites something that sounds like a proverb about 3 days of peace followed by 4 days of battle. It turns out that this is actually a specific pattern that Galvatron follows, disappearing for 3 days and hten showing up and acting out for 4 straight on whatever his plan is. Ooooo.....k. That's weird.
Blur doesn't motormouth like he does in English (I guess there's no Japanese equivalent to the John "Micro-machines man" Moschietta). instead his quirk is that he almost stutters, delivering a line of "what's that you're saying" kind of like "wha-what's-what's that you-your-you say-you're saying?"
Another big deal is made about Chromedome being "impulsive" Seriously, a running theme of this series is Chromedome (who is like the de-facto leader of the headmaster characters) being a rash, impulsive kid kind of like Hot Rod, except instead of Kup chastising him for it and hten him growing out of it as Rodimus, Chromedome gets constantly shamed for his impulsiveness until he finally gets it through his thick skull.
There's a recurring graphic that appears when the Headmasters transform to robot mode and their heads attach, showing a 3-bar graph for stats on speed, strength, and intelligence. This was actually the gimmick of the Headmasters toys, that different heads would cause different stats to appear on the bars in the hidden chest-mounted graph of each Headmaster toy body. That way it could show like partnering a different headmaster partner with a different cybertronian body bot would impact performance. The gimmick seems kind of pointless for the JP show though because something like intelligence should always be constant for a given head since it's the entire living being in the equation while the body should always determine speed and strength as the lifeless suit of transector power armor.
At least the shots of Cybertron continue to look like what we saw in G1.
God the Combaticons look awful. AKOM awful with terrible side-profile running shots.
Apparently there are still untransforming cybertronians on the planet.
Lolz, comedy sequence with Blurr stuck in a chair for some reason and Kup and Arcee have to pull him out, leading them to all tumble into a wall when Blurr finally unsticks. Hiiiiiiilarious.
Apparently this attack to get the alloy scares Rodimus so much that he believes it's tantamount to "hadning over the planet" to the Decepticons.
"Chromedome, don't be rash!" Jeeez, we ****ing get it already.
Oh yeah, all the autobots can fly now in robot mode. I know this was an inconsistency in G1, but they basically no longer care about even part-time pretending that only some Autobots are able to fly.
Oh my god, Arcee's actually going to fight? I take back everything bad I said about the insultingly outdated and sexist portrayal of her so far.
Wait, nope, she doesn't do a thing except see some mook corpses and sadly remark "terrible...." False alarm. JP Arcee still sucks. and then she worriedly shrieks at seeing Rodimus fight.
Even though most of hte old pre-movie characters are getting ushered out the door as quickly as possible, the combiner groups (that aren't Devastator) are getting a ton of screentime.
Rodimus and Galvatron have a hardcore martial arts fight with roundhouse kicks and everything
Meanwhile, 2 decepticons fight with Hardhead by having 1 hold his arms from behind and the other punch him repeatedly in the gut like a pair of elementary school bullies.
So JP Blurr is a GIGANTIC coward. That's what the "stuck in the chair" gag was, he was staying there because he's such a wuss that he doesn't want to fight. Kup here suggests he joint the battle and he basically has a panic attack.
Scorponok maintains his shadowy cloak of mysterious shadows by magically being able to stay hidden in darkness even as he walks across a brightly lit room. Damn, that's shadowy.
He also of course reveals himself to be pulling more strings than just ordering Galvatron around as he secretly contacts the 3 Decepticon headmasters to tell them to carry out his super secret plan B: If Galvatron can't beat the Autobots and retrieve the alloy... they're supposed to do something That we don't hear because the scene cuts.
Oh, ok. The other hting is that they bail from the fight, run into the tunnel and plant some super secret mega bombs that can't be shut off and will low up the entire planet.
Also apparently the Decepticon base has apparenlty been on Cybertron all the time since Scorponok reassures the others that he'll evacuate the other Decepticons off the planet before it blows up.
To be continued.... dun dun DUNNNNNNNNNN.......
*cue cheery j-pop credits music*
I have to split this up because apparently NuHF has a character limit per post.
Headmasters watch-along, part 2 (aka To hell with you, HF post size limit)
3) Cybertron is in Grave Danger, Part 2 (Episode 10)
The battle continues from Part 1 and the fallout will change the war forever.
First off, I want to assure everyone that in now way do I feel like my watching of the show is compromised by playing it at 1.5x speed. It's not any more confusing than it is at regular speed. And not because I don't know what's going on (even though I make a lot of "for some reason" comments, I can still more or less follow along), simply because how indecipherable the show is doesn't change at either speed.
Second, on my third run through of the theme song, I've found that I like a little musical part in the middle around the line "fight on, headmasters" where there's a key change. There's also a verse "All this suffering we're going through now/will surely bring good fortune for someone in the future" Which is like the most Japanese thing the show can possibly say, presenting the very communally-oriented social philosophy that people should suck it up and endure hardship without complaining since there should be some sort of karmic balancing out for other people later on. That way your sacrifice has meaning and that's the best thing possible.
Thirdly, even though I make a lot of griping comments about the very Anime-esque nature of the show and a lot of kind of snobby comments about Japan, I want to assert that a) I am normally a big fan of a lot of anime. Not full blown weeaboo levels, but I grew up on Dragonball Z and Gundam Wing and even some of Naruto and still love Ghost in the Shell and Cowboy Bebop and the like. and b) I'm mostly making the cross-cultural comments from the perspective of "man, these cultural differences sure look weird from me as an outsider" and how that changes how I perceive actions in the show. It's not about being "that's wrong or dumb" about their cultural traditions or viewpoints. Except for the uncomfortably-sexist-ish Arcee stuff. That feels wrong and dumb and outdated no matter what culture, especially since the Japanese have seen season 3 of the original show where Arcee was every bit as action-oriented as every other character.
(to Chromedome) "You're so naive" (shortly after, Chromedome takes off to search for the missing Decepticon Headmasters because he's soooooo impulsive, you see.)
This the first time in my reviewable episodes that the Trainbots show up. I don't remember their names because they're qutie goofy, but they're a set of 5 Autobots that turn into bullet train engines and train-cars and also combine into a gestalt called Raiden. The Japanese-iest name any character in this show gets.
"even if we pay for our lives, the Decepticons mustn't get it [the alloy]" Rodimus Prime embodies the strongest spirit of Bushido (the way of the warrior). Hardcore. Someone get that man a kamikaze headband.
The Autobot headmasters all have a telepathic link with each other. No, not built in radios. Acutal mystical telepathy known only to the warriors from Planet Master.
Hardhead has a flying kick that would make Liu Kang proud.
The music cue for this fight between the 4 autobot headmasters and Skullcrusher/Weirdwolf gives off dumb Benny Hill type vibes.
Evil sociopath/hypnotist Mindwipe behaves like a comedy villain.
Oh Chromedome, you're so over-eager. You walked right into that easily collapsing bridge and nearly fell to your death.
Wholly robotic Cybertron has organic-looking bats in its core tunnels. Sure? I guess that kind of explains Mindwipe? Or it would if Mindwipe wasn't from a different planet.
Vector Sigma has a production plant area that looks like a giant organic neuron. Whatever. Fine. I don't care anymore.
For being hte "mother computer" that gave them life and is the core of their planet, and for having visited it multiple times in the G1 series, Why do none of the autobots have a god damn clue how Vector Sigma works or how to work with it? They act like it's this capricious and unknowable god-being that works on its own whims and answers to none.
More Wheelie burning Daniel with a "Don't you know anything?" Remember, these two are supposed to be friends, but Wheelie acts like that guy you know who pretends to barely tolerate the presence of his other friends only so he can remark about how dumb they all are.
Somehow falling through levels of Cybertron and getting knocked out by acid pipes led Chromedome to Mindwipe at the core of the planet even though Mindwipe wasn't multiple levels lower than Chromedome to begin with. I guess.
Mindwipe: "This bomb can't be decativated." Chromedome: "Tell me how to deactivate it!"
This is the point where I am compelled to point out that by the Hasbro character bios, Chromedome is a "quiet, number-crunching academic" who solves scientific problems while working at the Cybertronian equivalent to a university research lab. In other words basically the opposite of the character presented in this show.
The autobots plan to stop the bombs from going off by using all their technical skills to... try to tear it off the walls. For 10 whole minutes.
And then they all claim that they have the samurai spirit and are not afraid to die for the noble cause of saving everyone (they don't literally mention the samurai part, but it's subtexted to ****ing death.)
The subtitles constantly refer to the bomb's timer in terms of "clicks", referring to the "klik" unit of time from various continuities which is roughly analogous to a minute. Except I guess fearing we wouldn't understand that, the initial discussion of the bomb's timer clearly says it lasts 30 minutes in spite of that being a useless frame of reference since Cyberton doesn't have a sun.
Oh my god you're the worst character ever, JP Arcee. Her response to the bomb is to buckle her knees, hug Rodimus around his very masculine waist, and weep in uncontrollable fear about he fate of their planet.
I say the above about "the fate of their planet" because everyone meets at the Autobot base and basically comes to the immediate conclusion that there's nothing to be done about the bombs.
Wheelie, after spending multiple episodes snarking at Daniel for being a little twit, pounds his fists and cries like he's throwing a tantrum when told they can't save Cybertron.
Daniel, in a strong change of pace, chastises Wheelie and tells him to grow up. Wait, no, that was just in the better version of this show that was playing in my head. Instead he constantly rubs his eyes with his arm as he bawls that the Decepticons "can't do this." Seriously, I've watched 3 episodes of this show tonight and Daniel has cried about 10x as much in them as he did in the entirety of Transformers The Movie, and that featured him watching Optimus die in front of his eyes, and believing for like 80% of the movie that his dad was dead too. And again, I am compelled to point out that Daniel was supposed to be about 10-12 during Transformers: The Movie. and if we take that the movie and season 3 happen pretty close to one another, time-wise, only about a year passes from them occurring to the events of this show (which is set in about 2011, after Japan decided to bump the movie/S3 timeframe from 2005 to 2010). So a nearly-god-damn-teenager Daniel weeps and wails and snivels like he's about 5 years old. To the point that he runs across the room and Cerebros picks him up off the floor and looks like he's trying to crush him in his hands.
So everyone solemnly decides to bail on Cybertron as the clock ticks down. Except Galvatron who runs right to the bomb room the second it goes off. AND SURVIVES (though we don't know that yet.)
With their planet destroyed, Rodimus (who I keep forgetting to remark is now using an altered character model that has him wearing Jack Sparrow levels of eyeliner.) does what every responsible leader in his place would do: decides he's going to leave everyone behind in the middle of a gigantic war so he can "go on a journey" which will include finding a new home planet. He also appoints Cerebros as the new Autobot leader, basically telling him that he's not allowed to refuse. And since we're getting the old toys out of the way, Kup and Blurr and Arcee all decide to join Rodimus on his quest and are never seen aga- Wait, what? Rodimus is totally cool with the first two coming, but specifically tells Arcee to stay behind so he can play den mother to Wheelie and Daniel. Even though Daniel's actualmother is very much around and capable of looking after her son (FWIW, though Carly never got a super strong portrayal in G1, she was shown to be very smart since she had gone to MIT and basically functioned as a human/cybertronian ambassador with Spike. Here she gets hit with some old fashioned "chickification" to turn her into exactly the same kind of grating pointless worrywart character as Arcee.) No, we get to have this pointless, worthless, grating version of Arcee stick around for the rest of the series.
And then Rodimus takes the other 3 and they fly off into space. On their own. As in superman pose self-sustained flight. Because they don't even take their own ship. Because..... shut up, that's why.
His parting words? "Farewell, until we meet again." BUT WE DON'T. This is literally the very final appearance of Rodimus Prime, Kup, and Blurr in the show, nay, the entire cross-pacific G1 continuity stream. They don't even come back at the end of the finale to announce a new home for the Autobots to go to. Nope. This is how 3 more pre-Headmasters characters are swept under the rug, never to be seen or impact the story again.
BLARGH......
4) Ultra Magnus Dies (Episode 24) (yes, that's the real title. Yes, it's exactly as spoilery as it sounds)
I think you can probably figure out what's going to happen here as Ultra Magnus faces down Sixshot when the Decepticons attack Autobot City.
Yep, the title is 100% accurate. Ultra Magnus dies in this episode. but in spectacular fashion, we're going to waste the entire episode getting there and he dies at the climax.
I think the animation is getting worse.
Some of the character models look a little different oto.
Also this episode shows I was wrong earlier when I thought the Decepticon base was on Cyberton. It was apparently on Charr all along. Only Charr looks like hte moon instead of a lava planet.
I've skipped a ton of stuff, but Galvatron's back after blowing up in the last watched episode. Also his plan now is to "incorporate Earth into his body" because that's going to grant him the ultimate power to defeat both Scorponok and the Autobots. For some reason.
To draw a Dragonball Z parallel, Sixshot is basically the Broly of this show. He's so cool. But he's so dumb. But he's just soooo cool. But he's also so incredibly dumb. He's a badass, unstoppable killing machine who can trash autobots without a second though. But he also apparently is lonely and just wants a friend, and spending some time with Daniel through contrived circumstances will eventually soften his (mechanical) heart and cause him to re-evaluate his life cause he just needs frieeeends.... No word yet if his power is maximum.
two-headed terrorcon Hun-Grr, who is very much one single robot, has his two beats mode heads talk in different voices and fight with each other. For some reason.
"meanwhile on earth the Decepticons repel an Autobot attack" cut to two other Terrorcons fighting with Hun-Grr
More fakey Shout Factory added TF swearing as Magnus says "Scrap you" to Sixshot. Scrap wasn't used as a curse verb.
Sixshot can now create duplicates of himself. Or illusions of himself. For some reason.
Fort Max's battle station mode being a giant starship continues to look dumb.
Sixshot's suddenly not-illusory duplicates can each operate individually and transform into different modes and attack at the same time.
They also can disapper in flashes of light htat unite like a Voltron made of light to form his "Ultimate Form", a never-before-seen seventh transformation (which doesn't mean he changes his name ot "Sevenshot" called the Wingwolf. Which the show made up by giving the animators a real Sixshot G1 figure and letting them play with it until someone realized that if you kind of fudged the figure into a weird abomination of its tank, wolf, and plane modes, it kind of looked like the world's worst wolf-like robotic thing with wings sticking out of the sides and a flat limbless body. And the animation model looks every bit the visual atrocity that "fan-made" toy mode is. The kind of thing that you'd expect a kid to come up with like when they realize they can close the t-rex chest components of a Grimlock figure over his head and make a stubby, "devil mode" Grimlock with viking horns on the side of his "helmet" (ie the t-rex arms) and with elbow-bendy claw hands (ie you keep the toes pointed down but extend the dino shins out past the fists so that they can bend again). Not that I know a kid that ever did this with his blue G2 Grimlock ever. Because that would be so dumb and not cool at all...
and yet, this is what beats Ultra Magnus, blasting him with a barrage of laser bursts (which still sound pithy weak because of the awful sound effects this show has). Argh.
Ultra Magnus doesn't turn white when he dies. For some reason.
the 5 headmasters team up and manage to beat Sixshot with the power of karate kicks. for some reason
Ultra Magnus gets a gigantic coffin filled with flowers to lie in state. For some reason
Daniel bawls at the fact that Magnus is dead (at least his actual damn family is with him this time instead of just pawning him off on Arcee.) but then suddenly gets inappropriately cheerful at the thought of burying him on earth instead of shooting him into space. Kids, this is how sociopaths are born.
The eulogy for Magnus? "He was a good warrior and a good friend." Nobody could come up with anything better.
And then they "bury" him by putting a glass lid over his coffin and dumping him out the cargo hatch of their ship into the ocean, where he goes right into a sea cave mouth and the coffin sinks. Guys? a burial requires actual earth on top.
And then the narrator finishes the episode off with what is essentially "Who knows what will happen next?" I'm right there with you, man.
Jesus ****ing christ I'm actually done. And it's only.... 3:45? Good god, I cut an episode out and it still took me longer than anything else to finish becuase I could not stop talking about how DUMB all of this is.
I also just noticed that the closing vanity plate of the episodes after the credits is this weird sheep on a yellow circle and something called "TV Toonland AG" It's simultaneously bizarre beyond understanding and also perfectly sensible within the framework of this baffling series.
If anyone wants to know how the series ends beyond what I've talked about, and doesn't care to watch the rest of it:
Galvatron is gone within a couple episodes of this last one recapped, entombed in an iceberg after becoming a giant, fat monstrosity due to trying to absorb the Earth or something. Scorponok takes over as the true big bad, Sixshot befriends Daniel somehow and sorta betrays the Decepticons (for Daniel), then he doesn't (for some reason), then he does for good (for some other reason I think), but then he has to go because his planet needs him (note: Sixshot died on the way to his home planet ). Spike almost dies and then he doesn't. For some reason. Scorponok is defeated by the Headmasters. Chromedome stops being so naive and reckless and grows up. The transformers all leave earth. Daniel cries. And then this whole godforsaken continuity is abandoned when Super-God Masterforce dispenses with practically everything that's come before it to tell its own drugged up tale of the Japanesiest nonsense you can possibly imagine. Even more Japanese than this.
it took me almost 4.5 hours to watch 4 episodes because holy balls I forgot how bad all of this was. I knew what I was getting into, but wow having to snark about it somehow made it a lot worse than I remember.
I make no promises for what happens tomorrow (or rather tonight) with SuperGod Masterforce. If it gets unforgivably dumb after 2 episodes, I'm out and getting some sleep. At least Victory has the promise that I haven't seen it suck before.
I've queued up 4 episodes to watch, but who knows if I make it the whole way. If things start to go south, I'm going to cut bait on this series. But if it looks like that's happening I'll likely at least skip to ep 4 because that introduces one of the central conceits of this series.
So.... this show. It only kind of tangentially follows Headmasters, set apparently years later with a peaceful earth, free of conflict. Then out of nowhere, a new group of Decepticons appear. With the planet in danger, suddenly the Autobots reappear, having been hiding in plain sight as Pretenders (which somehow makes them human sized. (say it with me) For some reason.) At the same time, the Autobots need reinforcements, and the come in the form of a new batch of Headmasters: a set of humans imbued with a mystery power called the "Masterforce" that allows them to become headmaster robots and link up with a set of Transectors sent to eath by Chromedome (Basically the only link to the previous series). Over time the Decepticons manage to do the same, and the battle to save the earth from the new Decepticon army and their shadowy leader, "Devil Z"
Yes, all of the above has a very Power Rangers/Super Sentai feel to it. If anything, this is the point of the series that feels by far the most Japanese, with pretender bots who all but call out "It's Morphin' Time!" to turn to their robot forms, and the fate of the earth in the hands of a set of teenagers with attitude against a mysterious space evil instead of a proper, standard Decepticon. Making things even more confusing are that the Headmaster characters, along with the other imprint line of this series: the Godmasters (Japanese equivalent to the Powermaster figures, in which the mini robot turns into an engine component instead of a robot's head) are all unique characters to this franchise that happen to in many cases look like somewhat prominent (Siren, Nightbeat, Doubledealer) or extremely prominent (Optimus frigging Prime) western/Hasbro characters in spite of generally absolutely not being those characters in any way shape or form. It should be abundantly clear that Ginrai's godmaster transector is NOT Optimus Prime. It just looks like him.
Anyway, the Japaneseness of this series, and its very Sentai/Tokusatsu feel owes to the show's central theme: "With the masterforce, you too can transform." The very intention of the show was to pull away from the sci-fi, futuristic trappings of The Transformers franchise with its sentient robot aliens and put the focus on human characters drawn into the conflict and gaining the power and resolve to defend themselves and their planet. This owes to the fact that in Japan the Transformers brand and the basic franchise concept is seen as being very childish, and the more 'mature' show involves humans dealing with the consequences, especially young characters the age of the audience watching so that the audience can see themselves in the roles and see the impact of things like taking responsibility and maturing, leading to mecha series where the robots are being piloted by the actual-hero humans, or the humans are outright getting powers themselves. Where we look at The Transformers as a sci-fi concept that is as mature as the story needs it to be, and shows like, say, Gundam Wing or Power Rangers as somewhat being wish-fulfillment fantasy where the audience stand-ins get to be the hero, Japan sees The Transformers as immature escapist fantasy for kids and something like Gundam or a sentai show as a more "grown up" message about people stepping up and sacrificing their childhoods for the greater good. It's that cultural divide that probably makes this series so awkward to watch as an outsider. I read a review that said it's like trying to use right-handed tools as a lefty (or vice versa). It rebels against your muscle memory by being same enough to identify, but too different to adjust to easily. That's a relatively apt parallel to draw, though I'm not entirely sure about its other conclusion that such differences make the series neither better nor worse, just different.
Ep 1: Rise Up!! Pretenders
Living peacefully on Earth, the emergence of a new Decepticon threat forces the long-hidden Autobot Pretenders to reveal their presence to defend their adopted home, starting up the great conflict once again and shattering the peace that the Headmasters had earned.
Yep, the title includes the double exclamation mark and the hanging and punctiation-less "pretenders" assertion afterwards.
If Headmasters' theme is an upbeat 80s synth J-pop song, this one is like some swarthy japanese lounge ballad. It's soft and soothing and rolls on in a way that feels like it belongs to some romantic drama rather than a show about transforming fighting robots. It also hits all of hits story subtext right smack on the head with blatantness as it croons about "boys growing up into warriors" and not caring if we get hurt because we fight for something greater and all these same sort of warrior culture collectivist tall-poppy-syndrome very Japanese tropes that Headmasters featured too.
The title sequence itself is heavily stylized to shots of the various humans and also gives some bio information, which I can't read because almost all of it is in Japanese.
If there's a cool positive here, it's that Shout's subtitles for the song give me both the translated english lyrics and romanizations of the Japanese, which is a nice touch.
We begin on a cruise ship that the decepticons attack.... for some reason (the fact that I'm not even 2 minutes into the episode and at our first "For some reason" justification does not bode well. Special note goes to the weirdly singing captain and the water that actually glows with the same kind of lighting effect they've traditionally used on energon cubes.
And then a woman appears to be killed as she gets tossed overboard into the glowing sea of energon while the guy that was filming her (presumably her boyfriend/husband) has one of his glasses lenses shatter and then he stays curled up on the deck of the boat continuing to film everything.
Character first appearances get on-screen subtitles identifying their names, though it uses western names instead of the original Japanese ones. Bomb-Burst appears first, though he goes by the Japanese name "Blood"
The Seacons, a cool decepticon combiner set of oceanic creature bots appear here, though never in their robot modes.
Apparently this attack was meant to get the attention of Metalhawk. Whatever that's supposed to mean in the context of the show is not explained now because *blam* title card.
The title card image looks really silly.
We now interrupt your regularly scheduled Transformers anime for a slice-of-life high school soccer anime.
So apparently everyone on the ship died. But nobody seems to care all that much given that the bigger issue is the return of the Decepticons. Optimus Prime taught you guys to respect all life, guys. What's up with this?
Also apparently the ship was also "off the coast of Canada" Canada now officially exists in Transformers cartoon fiction!
The kid who was playing soccer is named "Shuta". He appears to be a striker for his soccer team, and there's lots of talk about his shot. Get it? Shuta? Shooter? Bueller?
Hawk, the man who was watching Shuta's game along with Shuta's dad reveals that he is "not from earth." It's a rather matter of fact way to tell someone you're an alien.
Shuta isn't taking the bate
*gasp* Hawk is actually Metalhawk, an Autobot! What a shocking development. He's a pretender, which allows him to change into anything possessing life. Not explained: how he manages to turn from a 20-foot-tall robot into a normal man-sized human.
Hawk also explains that the Autobot and Decepticon pretenders have been on earth since the time of cavemen, with the Decepticons taking on demon-like forms. Gee guys, maybe you might've wanted to step in in the bigger parts of the Great War? Who knows, Autobot City could've used you during the giant battle that killed the greatest Autobot hero who ever lived and the laser-gun-wielding robotic embodiment of a Jesus metaphor. Just sayin'.
Oh great, anime-esque commercial bumpers with characters transforming and shouting "maaaah--staaaaah-fohhhhhh-ssu!" This seriously isn't helping...
The overall animation for this show is rough. There's some better human and background stuff because it looks more "normally" animeqsue, but the transformers themselves all look pland.
All the decepticons sound like yakuza thugs with gruff deep voices.
Their animal/demon pretender shells also are constantly slack-jawed and speak by waving their jaws even though they have no lips and their mouths never close.
Apparently Hawk can't take it anymore. he pulls out his Zeo morpher (seriously, he adapts a silly pose that looks straight out of Power Rangers Zeo), shouts "SUIT ON!" and suddenly he's wearing a suit of goofy armor over a still-human body (basically taking the form of the Metalhawk pretender shell from the toy).
Shuta is riding around on his very 80s motorbike (I'm sure it's a Kawasaki Ninja with the serial #s filed off) with no helmet. **** safety, kids!
Next up in the mighty morphin Transformo Rangers, Hawk adopts another silly pose and shouts "PRETENDER" (or "Prey-ten-dahhhhhh!" ) we get a laser light show and his full-size transformer body appears out of nowhere.
Shuuta decides the only reasonable response is to do a sick wheelie and ride one-wheeled down a cliffside in pursuit of Metalhawk. Ok...
Transformations to vehicle mode are still punctuated by shouting "Transform!"
More pretenders are introduced as Metalhawk calls them to battle. The next one (already in armor) calls out his robot mode (Waverider) while a dolphin or something jumps majestically in front of him for some reason.
The next one, Landmine, gripes that he told Metalhawk he was going on a date and this is interrupting it. But no matter, he goes SUIT ON! in the glass elevator and bursts out the door in full pretender mode armor while his date sits in the elevator in shock at what just happened (apparently she never questioned the fact that her date's name was god-damned LANDMINE (ok, fine, in Japanese it's just "Lander", but still...
Our final autobot pretender is Cloudburst, who has the most hardcore looking Wolverine hair you could imagine in his human form.
By the way, just to note how bland the Japanese names are, only Metalhawk gets away with sounding interesting. Waverider's Japanese name is "Waver", Landmine is "Lander" and Cloudburst is "Phoenix"
Shuta rolls right into the battle area with no one to stop him. Because I guess authorities are useless.
For super advanced robots, the Autobots rarely seem to be using their guns. I guess it's not heroic enough vs punching them in the face.
Aaand Shuta gets caught by a decepticon, forcing Metalhawk to jump into action and getting shot in the back while distracted.
And our second set of commercial breakers shows us the franchise's most confusing character not yet introduced: Optimus Prime's twin brother from a another species fused with a robot body because he's totally not the same person, no-sir-not-at-all, Ginrai.
Metalhawk solves all his immediate problems by suddenly producing a sword, forcing Skullgrin to step in and meet him sword-to-sword. Like real warriors.
Owing to the fact that their pretender shells are monstrous beasts that are already Transformer-sized, the Decepticon pretenders get a much cooler effect, turning to shadow and fading out of their shells to robot mode.
The music cues suck and are really loud, often drowning out the dialogue.
Landmine can drive on walls for some reason.
Yep, you can tell the Decepticons are evil because they hold Shuta hostage to make Metalhawk stand down.
Strangely even though Metalhawk only goes by "Hawk" as a human, all the Decepticons who were apparently held hostage underground within the earth for thousands of years" repeatedly call him Hawk instead of his full Transformer name.
There's kind of a creepy vibe going on as Metalhawk saves Shuta and they share a long stare into each others' eyes while smiling about having averted crisis. I expect Chris Hansen to show up any minute now given that Shuta is like 16 and Metalhawk is like millions of years old.
The decepticons retreat as quickly as they came. For some reason
We get a gushing monologue by Metalhawk about how humans taught them to care and protect people and all sorts of other crap, kind of undercutting the value of the Transformers as life-forms.
Now everyone reverts back to their humanoid forms and walks into the sunset with clips of their transformer forms fighting in the background
Wow, this series gives us the episode preview for the next show when Headmasters didn't. Progress from Toei!
The closing credits are also translated, with subtitles appearing over the picture to indicate what the on-screen credits are (directed by.... <name>, cast list, etc.
Landmine's girlfriend was called "Madonna". Um, ok?
Whoops, I spoke too soon. There are no credits translations after the cast list. Also the translated credits are jumbled up with the subtitles translating the ending theme.
Speaking of the ending, the credits animation is kinda silly shots of chibi versions of human/pretender characters watching pictures or screens of the transformations of their robot modes.
The song itself is bland and forgettable. It says the word "hero" about 50 times and closes on the note that "you too are a transformer!"
Blah....
Ok, you know what? It wasn't nearly as bad as I remember it being, but it's very 80s and a lot more of a Shonen Anime series like a gundam show than a Transformers series. So now that it took me over an hour to watch that episode while pausing to write the above, I'm just going to skip to episode 4 and stop at 2 shows for this series.
Ep 4: Birth! Headmaster Jrs
Apparently the following things are the result of the Decepticons: The Bermuda Triangle, the Nasca Plains figures, UFO sightings, and.... the destruction of Pompeii? One of these things is not like the others...
Having skipped a couple episodes, this episode is hte first time I'm seeing a new human character named "Cab" who is some sort of island native who has a beef against the decepticons.
Shuta's dad apparently died in the second episode, and I guess the most responsible course of action, instead of finding him relatives to live with, is to entrust him to a giant war robot who will totally not take issue with inducting Shuta into the Autobot ranks to fight. But not until after the school day, I guess.
The other character making their appearance here after skipping their orignal debut episode is Minerva. The daughter of a Japanese diplomat and French mother, her life was saved by the Transformers too and because of this she decides she "needs to do something with her life and live for hte sake of others" and join the Autobot cause.
Hawk protests to her wanting to sign up to help. "It's too dangerous for a girl." If Headmasters Arcee were here, she'd agree. And probably start bawling uncontrollably...
So the kids get bracelets that let them transform into armored modes, like an untransformed headmsater unit.
Congratulations kids, you're now gonna fight in a war. Don't get killed.
Hijinks as they get used to the powers of their suits. Except for Minerva who doesn't get any action an just frets in amazement over everything, repeating that it "can't be real" and passively follows the other Trnasformers around.
Hawk is also apparently Japanese Transformer Uncle Ben, as he more or less gives them a "with great power comes great responsibility" speech
Apparently Transformers Masterforce super-powers also include instant driving lessons.
But not lessons in avoiding doing something dumb like having a street race in emergency vehicles.
Aaand Minerva is whiny. great.
"Girls are so timid" What the hell is wrong with you, Japan?
Apparently I've been wrong all along about the word for lifeless Transformer bodies meant as mecha suits for smaller life forms (headmaster robots or humans) to plug into and ride. It's not "Transector" It's "Transtector" Because that's not more awkward.
The Decepticons are recruiting their own kids. You can tell they're delinquints because they wear headbands and leather jackets.
Shuta Go totally disguises his identity as a headmaster by adopting the alias "Goshooter". Genius. No one will figure it out!
Cab and Minerva do him one better by becoming.... Cab and Minerva.
One of the Decepticon Headmaster kids is a Chinese orphan named "Cancer". For serious. He turns into a transformer that totally isn't obscure G1 Decepticon Squeezeplay.
It's the tenuous linkage to the previous series as it's revealed that Chromedome built the Transtectors that the headmaster kids are using. Everyone agrees that he's the best character ever and sooooo cooooooool.
I wiould also like to note that half-Japanese Minerva is portrayed as having striking blue eyes and long blonde hair. Suck on that, genetic improbabilities!
The Decepticon headmasters, unlike Cab and Minerva, are known by their western counterpart names: Fangray, Squeezeplay, and Horri-bull.
Landmine's pretender shell still has its glasses on inside its helmet.
In spite of being animated in and for the Japanese market, they couldn't get the lip sync timing down, as several characters flap their mouths for seconds before and after their lines.
The Decepticon headmasters terrorize the city by... stacking cars in an abandoned warehouse district and karate-kicking them. Those bastards! They must be stopped, no matter the cost (you got the touch.... you got the power!)
A woman tells Minerva her baby is trapped in the burning building. Minerva then boldly leaps into action to save the day, proving her worth... Or she would in a better show. Here she just shouts at Shuta to go do it and then says "I'm counting on you"
Then when Shuta is attacked by the decepticons and distracted from the baby, Minerva still just stands there and shouts at Shuta to do something instead of actually making her self ****ing useful. Goddammit Japan...
So Hawk shows up, beats the Decepticons, chastises Shuta for being an idiot, and everything turns out OK.
It's worth noting that a writer named Masumi Kaneda was the overseeing writer on production of all 3 Japanese G1 sequel series as well as the Japanese adaptation of the Movie, and several Transformers manga adaptations. This might explain the consistency in how the different series handle female characters. Interview quotes from him seem to strongly indicate he is extremely eccentric (Minerva disappeared from being referenced in the Victory sequel manga becuase he believed the book was "Drowning in female characters" when it only had 1 other regular. He also likened part of the ending of the manga adaptation to this weird allusion to the snake in the garden of eden with a pair of villains as adam and eve.
Factoid: the Omni dub of this show (which exists in full, but I haven't seen it) refers to Minerva by the name of the toy whose mold she appropriated: Nightbeat.
That's it. I'm done with this show for now. Maybe one day I'll come back an watch the whole thing, but 2 episodes took me to 1:15 am, so I want to get some sleep.
Tune in tomorrow when I try to watch some amount of the last Japanese G1 sequel series: Victory. Like this show, I'm just going to start at the beginning and watch episodes until I get to 4 or tap out.
Day 7. I can't believe I've actually made it to the 1 week point without falling apart due to either sleep deprivation or Japanese-induced insanity. Thankfully we're about to wrap up the drug-fueled portion of the schedule with the last part of Japanese G: Victory.
If Headmasters pulled parts of its ideas from the Gundam franchise with the idea of piloted Transtectors, and Masterforce was like a Super Sentai/Power Rangers show kludged into a Tarnsformers framework, Victory is easily the "purest" Transformers series, returning to the roots of a simple battle for energy between the Autobots and Decepticons. There are still some oddball Japanese trappings, like ornate, engrish-y names for stuff, unfortunate english names (like the main decepticons being part of a sub-group called the "breastforce". Because they have connectable chestplates that power them, you see.) and the major Autobot leader has an adopted human "son" who spends a lot of time in focus when the reality is that people don't care about humans in Transformers.
As the franchise was also dying a slow death in Japan that mirrored its fall in the west, the constraints of a small budget began to take its toll on this show, with it featuring a ridiculous 12 clip shoes across a 44-episode schedule, and a relatively small major cast compared to some of the other series entries. However, in spite of the crunch, the show was lauded for its strong animation and visual design.
Victory is also unique in that it was the first series to feature significant toys that never showed up in the west in any form. Headmasters was a shared line with the western releases. Chromedome is chromedome, scorponok is scorponok etc. Masterforce characters made it to the west as alternate characters (Minerva to Nightbeat, Lander to Landmine, etc). Victory has characters that have no western equivalent. There is no western character that used the toys of Star Saber or Deathsaurus/Deszaras* or anyone of that design. Victory did include the Micromasters, and some shared designs on alternate characters (Such as the Decepticon monster pretenders, who become the "Dinoforce"), but many of the characters were unique, Japan-only toy designs. Some of the designs were made into figures that saw release in Europe under different names though.
*The decepticon leader for this series features a confusing, awkward, conflict-inciting name. The problem is that like most other Transformer names, it's essentially an English name that was translated into the limited phoneme set of Japanese. Then when translating from the Japanese-ified name back to English, the "data" of the original full pronunciation in English is lost and all that's left is the somewhat sketchy, indirect phonetic translation . デスザラス, technically romanized as "Desuzarasu" caused many, many fights in the fandom over how to properly adjust it to English. His original toy package included an english rendering of "Deszaras" But people often fought and contended that it could be any of "Deathzaras", "Deathsaurus", "Death Czarus", "Death Czaras", "Dezsauros" and "Super Happy Engrish Fun Man" It took until 2015 when a convention panel featured Takara designer and Transformers "godfather" Kojin Ono, who once and for all cleared up that the name was always intended to be "Deathsaurus." The whole thing is similar to the issue over the name of the Decepticon leader from teh subsequent show (Transformers: Zone), which would go from 1989 until 2008 with no official word on how the hell to spell his name. For the record, that one is "Violen Jiger" Though that probably won't stop people from using Violin Juggler, Violent Chigger, or Valium Chugger.
Anyway, I'm going to do what I did with Masterforce: Minimum 2 episodes, but I reserve the right to check out after that. Time permitting I may also finish off by watching the one-shot OVA of Zone.
Victory Episode 1: The Brave Hero of the Universe - Star Saber
The opening looks really cool. And the song starts out really cool with this sort of dramatic G1 type fanfare. And then it goes downhill to sounding like a lounge-singer.
Immediate commercial bumper with a super-deformed character. Not a promising start.
Nor is the score piece that shamelessly rips off every spaghetti western song ever. And the very spaghetti western shots of robots fighting with no dialogue to explain what the hell is going on.
I will admit though, the animation looksvery nice. Lots of shading and character design. Though the colors seem kind of washed out.
The very first dialogue line? a character who I'm assuming is Star Saber doing a totally Shonen Anime attack call-out. SABER BLADE!!!!!
Man, if this were any more shonen, I'd be watching an episode of Bleach.
Yep, it's Star Saber. The name-tag caption thing shows it. Right as the scene ends.
Basic story is that some time after Masterforce, everything is peacful and the Autobots and humans joind a "Galactic Defence Force" on "Planet V"
Star Saber somewhat weirdly has like an alternate combat mode, and a with a very Gundam-esque head and a regualr Transformers-looking body and a vehicle mode. it's almost like a triple changer iwth 2 robot mods.
Dark, disturbing villains are shown and it looks all terrifying and stuff. Except they also behave like comedy villains. With tons of anime pratfalls. I feel like the show doesn't know what it wants to be.
Look, it's Totally Optimus Pr---- erm, I mean God Ginrai, who's a totally different and unique character and not Optimus Prime at all, he just looks just like him for some reason, guys.
Ok, once again characters with western names get those instead of their Japanese names. The Micromaster police car "Holi" is preferred to here by his western name, "Stakeout" even though that makes little sense.
New scene transitions with the logo flips. If all the animation otherwise looks good, this feels weirdly cheaped out on.
3 characters who get to keep their Japanese names are the "Brainmasters" (reverse Headmasters. The "real" robot is the full-size transformer and he can separate off his head into a micromaster sized smaller robot): Laster, Blacker, and Braver.
Man, there are some serious anime tropes going on here. Giant transformation sequences as Star Saber enters battle. He turns from his jet mode to a transitional phase, ejects his brainmaster, reintegrates it into his body to form his "regular" body, then the rest of his jet mode forms a set of power armor that bonds to him and turns him into his full super mode thing. There's also constant call-outs during the sequence. TRANSFORM! BRAIN OUT! FIGHT ON! and so forth.
I guess some of these sequences are the price ot be paid for solid otherwise animation.
Ok, so the intimidating looking "Dinoforce" units are basically the comedy bad guys. That's kind of disappointing.
Interestingly, the Dinoforce are pretenders (which you won't forget since every time they go into battle they eject the robot modes from their shells by shouting "CHANGE OUT!") and are re-uses of western figures (the pretender monsters released in the west) except with brand new Dinosaur-based pretender shells instead of the creepy monster things they have in their western versions. Also the combined form is called Dinoking instead of Monstructor (though apparenlty the Omni dub of Victory calls him Monstructor because Omni sucks at learning names)
I don't know why it took me 3 series to notice this, but the Japanese shows don't animate the mouthplate of characters that have them when said character talks. Like Optimus Prime's faceplate used to move up and down in time with his dialogue. here Star Saber's face is motionless
Episode previews are back. I guess just Headmasters had to dispense with them. Though it appears this series also lacks the clip shows like all the rest
The credits song is a really silly comedy piece. Like really silly. Asking if Star Saber was ever a little kid who snuck food and wet the bed when he was little..... It was also difficult to follow becuase the subs that were overlaid for the credits kept either replacing or cutting off parts of the song subtitles. And one time an entire verse was rendered in romanized Japanese with no translation.
Episode 2: Sneak Attack! Dinoking
The thing that immediately jumps out at me while watching the title sequence again is that the singer has supereme difficulty pronouncing "V!" as in just the letter itself, like "Vee". It comes out more like "byooo-weee". I know that's a thing that a lot of Japanese speakers have issue with becuase they lack that sound in their phoneme set, but this guy seems particularly bad at it.
The series is set in the year 2000-and-god-knows-what, but the human kid (Jean, who is apparently Star Saber's adopted son) is playing a video game that would look dated on an Atari.
This episode began with a lengthy narrated explanation of the war and the important characters of the show. Which seems like it would've been useful in the previous episode.
The more I see their lazy scene transition logo "flip" the more irritating it is. The music cue even sounds dumb because it's like it's been sped up 20x
The Decpticon base spaceship apparently has a dank, dark, dungeon cave looking room for the leader Deathsaurus to sit in. Decepticons build their ships out of bricks and stone with flaming torges in side. No wonder they keep getting beaten in all the important battles.
Kind of like Masterforce, it's really hard to keep up with all these characters when I don't know anything about them.
apparently the combined Dinoforce figure, Dinoking, is the shortest combiner in the G1 line. Fully assembled he stands shorter than even a regular non-combiner figure like Hot Rod. Even some of the Micromaster combiner teams (things we never got in the west) are taller than his figure.
Also apparently, the Dinoforce are never referred to by their english name (the way "headmasters" or "brainmasters" would be). Instead they are always called "Kyoryu Sentai" which literally means "Dinosaur Squad", and also makes them suspiciously similar to "Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger", better known as the Japanese series that was the source material for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
Also, perhaps to cover up the fact that the Dinoforce individual character figures are taken from "monster" themed pretenders that were released in the west, and have the robots transform into horrible monster-like creatures too (somewhat evocative of their monster pretender shells, since they mostly fit in the shells in their alternate modes, not robot mode), the Dinoforce bots never transform into their alternate modes. they either operate from within the pretender shell, or in robot mode.
It's kind of funny how much Japan seems to love melee weapons over guns. Almost all the transformers here use physical melee weapons like swords, axes, and maces instead of laser weapons or guns or the like. It's a little silly
Continuing the shonen theme of calling things out, Star Saber even has a heroic call-out as he leaves the base to join the battle. Flying down the launch bay tunnel, he shouts out "SAY GO!"
Hod damn, they're going to use this long-ass Star Saber transformation sequence EVERY SINGLE TIME to save animation and cut down on episode length.
And now there's another transformation sequence just for him to go from regular robot mode to super mode and draw his sword for his shonen super mega ultimate bankai killing attack (Which, of course, doesn't kill the Dinoforce, just makes them retreat.) No wonder the animation looks so good. They were really only animating like 10 minutes of stuff every episode, and then pasting transformation sequences to fill the space.
This episode ends with Star Saber vowing to protect earth because it's so beautiful. Which is a lot different from episode 1 which ends with Star Saber vowing to protect earth because it's so beautiful...
I think I've had enough of Victory for now. It's definitely a step up from the barely-Transformers-in-name-only of Masterforce, but it's still a lot less Transformers-y than even Headmasters was. It often seems like the writers or studio were embarrassed about making a Transformers show, so they pumped them as full as they could with the kinds of things you'd find in a giant mecha series, or a Super Sentai series, or some shonen anime to cover for the fact that Transformers is a dumb little franchise for dumb baby kids in Japan.
This was also by far the most jokey/comedic of the 3 series. I mean, all 3 had facepalm-worthy comedy angles, but this one has an entire enemy troop that seems to be little more than a silly comedic minion squad who's here to goof off and screw up and act incompetent so they can cost their boss victories.
I was thinking of watching the one-off Zone special, but have decided against it. On the one hand, it kind of follows from Victory and features Star Saber returning as the Autobot commander (before he totally pulls an Optimus and dies) but it also has the big bad, Violen Jiger/Violent Juggler/Bio Ranger Iga/Violin Jagger/Valium Chugger assemble a group to be his "Nine Great Deamon Generals" and that group basically ends up being every G1 Decepticon combiner, plus Trypticon and Scorpinok/Zarak. Except Predaking dies like a total punk, getting slashed in half by the new Autobot leader, Dai Atlas. On the other hand, the fact that the show was cancelled means the plot is basically unfinished, and there's a lot of really gigantic nonsense in the plot synopsis.
So if this finishes off my run of Japanese series, my overall feeling is that I'm glad I watched at least some episodes, I'll probably finish the whole set for each series sooner or later, and if you're a Transformers collector then you might want to get these for G1 completeness. But at the same time if you've ever considered the idea that Transformers comes across like a kids cartoon, these series feel far, far worse in spite of having some levels of death and violence in the regular show that the G1 series only touched in the movie. They feel immature and silly in ways that are frustrating, and they show their age worse than G1 does in some regards.
So I guess tomorrow I'm moving on to the next step in my process: Beast Wars. Yay for great shows again. So join me as I watch:
Possession (the Starscream episode)
Other Voices 1 (season 1 finale)
Other Voices 2 (more season 1 finale)
Code of Hero (you know what this episode is)
I haven't provided any clips or evidence of the JP materials before, but before I get to my Beast Wars writeups (which are halfway done now. I'll have to come back tonight to do the last episode or 2) Here's a comparison between the original Japanese Audio for the Soundwave/Blaster fight in Headmasters, and the "English" Omni Productions dub
JP at the start through about 0:30 (punctuated by the scene transition icon switch thingy), English from 0:30 to the end (the english version includes Blaster's death, the Japanese version doesn't in this clip.)
It's day 8 and I've spent the morning wrapping presents, so I'm going to use my break for lunch to start watching the series and save myself from being up at 2am. Time for some Beast Wars.
I don't need to go into too much background on the series since I'm sure most of you know the deal by now. The one interesting thing I will note is that when the toyline came out, the original intention was for the characters to be reformatted G1 characters. The reason Optimus Primal and Megatron were named as such was that they were supposed to be the actual, original Optimus Prime and Megatron. I'm not sure if the series itself caused that change or the toy bio writers realized it wouldn't work, but the decision was made to have the characters be original creations, giving them more writing opportunity. Though you can see some elements of holdover in things like Cheetor and Terrorsaur being strongly evocative of Bumblebee and Starscream respectively.
So my episode lineup for the day is:
Possession
It's a dark and stormy night on the planet they somehow have yet to recognize as being Earth in the distant past, Waspinator is possessed by the ghostly undying spark of Starscream, who drifted through space and found his way through the space/time warp to the Beast Wars conflict. Predictably, Starscream gets up to his old Starscream-y ways.
Before I get into the episode, I wanted to point out the TF wiki notes that lead producer Bob Forward claims that Season 1 of the series cost a total of $18 million to make. That's an average cost of just under $700,000 per episode.
Also series Production Designer Clyde Klotz won an Emmy in 1997 for outstanding animation design for the series. It's the only "major" award won by a series entry until Transformers Prime won some animation and design awards.
Finally, it's generally known, but I might as well reiterate that the series was animated by Mainframe Studios in Vancouver, and pretty much the entire cast is Canadian or Canadian residents (Scott McNeil, for example, was born in Australia but lived in Vancouver at the time)
Yeah, the animation is rough and primitive, especially the texture work. But it's been a while since I've watched the show and I forgot that they did a really good job at making the characters expressive and fluid. Especially when compared to the abomination that was the CG transformers in the anime shows like Energon.
I love, love, Looooooove David Kaye's Megatron so much. I might like him more than G1 Megs.
Doug Parker (Terrorsaur) does a damn good impression of Chris Latta's Starscream. I guess it's not too surprising given that Terrorsaur is just a nudge or two away from actually being a full-on Starscream expy, but props to him for going the distance instead of having Waspinator retain his regular voice.
Of note, this actually becomes the second G1 character reference to be filtered through Waspinator in the series. In Dark Designs (the episode with Eeeeevil Rhinox, a blow to the head makes Waspinator believe he's the Insecticon Shrapnel, even adopting an iffy approximation of Shrapnel's repetitive/stuttering vocal tic.
I get that it's for effect, but it's funny that Megatron coughs in the smoke.
The lightning flash briefly revealing Starscream's form is cool. Even if it's a bad model. Like, a really bad model with coloring errors and really bland design. It was only meant to be seen for like 1/5th of a second anyway. Or you can pretend it's a purposeful homage to the **** character design that was used in the mostly **** Generation 2 comics series. But you'd be a liar for both a) suggesting that's the case, and b) liking the G2 comics enough to be OK with that fact being true.
It's also a great little touch that Waspinator's Predacon insignia on the side of his head are replaced with Decepticon ones while he's being possessed.
Again, pedantry, but it's funny that Blackarachnia refers to the Decepticons as "our" ancestors when she is in fact a reformatted Maximal protoform (And thus an Autobot descendant. Something she points out later on as her reason for switching sides when Megatron tries to blow up the Ark and futz with history.)
The shot of Starscream hurling himself in front of a blast from Unicron to "save" Galvatron is fantastic and the perfect bit of completely trumped up bull**** that Starscream would come up with.
Megatron is rightfully suspicious of Starscream, but ultimately sort of trusts him. You would think that even if Decepticon history is heavily rewriten, the records of Starscream's constant betrayal and usurping would be legendary among them.
Funny trivia bit: The sound of Cheetor's gun sound is the same effect that was used for Mega Man in the early 90s Ruby-Spears cartoon. Both Mega Man and Cheetor were voiced by Ian Corlett
I might as well simply spend this entire writeup gushing about how much I love BW Megs. Seriously. Best character.
Also for whatever reason, the constant "calling your attacks" moments in this show don't bother me the same way they do in the Japanese show. I don't exactly know why.
Ok, so Dinobot does know the score with Starscream. That almost makes it more confusing that none of the other Predacons do. More so because Blackarachnia's conversation with Starscream where she reveals that she knows the true story of his death indicates that it's public record.
A little more pedantry, but Starscream calling Galvatron a fool is silly because his only interaction with Galvatron was getting killed by him. It would've made more sense to refer to G1 Megs, but I suppose that would've been too confusing.
Beast Wars did generally take the approach of playing fast and loose with its G1 connections so that they wouldn't ever feel nailed down to the cartoon or Marvel comics continuity too specifically (most specific events depicted tend to side with the cartoon, but there's also plenty of invocations of Primus and some of the more metaphysical Transformers concepts that only the Furman-era comics run addressed), but the Starscream backstory here obviously alludes to his death in The Movie, but neglects the fact that "Ghost in the Machine" saw Starscream returned to life before he was blasted into space at the end of the episode. I guess we're just supposed to presume that centuries of drifting through the cosmos after getting shot repeatedly meant that he died at some point again.
Starscream totally cops a feel of Blackarachnia's ass as they walk down a corridor together. Of course, it's rumored that the animation team came up with her character model after they took one of the newbie animators to a strip club, so I guess it's not totally surprising.
Starscream has clearly superior speed, but all he does when Optimus charges him is stand there and get slugged by a very telegraphed punch. I guess it wouldn't be Starscream though if he wasn't hilariously overconfident.
Other Voices, Part 1
After a season's worth of fighting finally gets their attention, the aliens who have been alluded to all season appear and intervene in the conflict. Meanwhile, the truce that was established last episode (Before the Storm) was shown to simply be a cog in Megatron's machinations.
I forgot about it until the credits of the previous episode, but Beast Wars' voice direction was handled by Susan Blu, best known as the voice of Arcee in G1 and several other continuities since.
Ahhh, this was the time when "slag" wasn't a banned word in Transformers fiction due to its British slang implications. Instead it gets used as a euphemistic Transformers curse word. Which also fits because Dinobot Slag would've loved that his name was a swear word.
As much as I gushed over Megatron in the previous episode, I might gush about Rattrap here. In general this series has a ton of spectacular characters and great voice acting (especially Scott McNeil since he voices like half the series' cast by himself.
As I noted in the previous episode, the CG hasn't aged super well. It's rough and has terrible texture work. But the animation is generally fairly smooth and the best thing the series has going for it visually is the great camera work, a benefit of being a 3D CG series where they get to manipulate virtual "cameras" to shoot the visuals.
Apparently Bayformer Devastator wasn't the first transformer to have nads. Rattrap punts Waspinator square in the groin and he ends up talking in a high-pitched voice as a result.
This episode sets up the Vok (the aliens species) as having some super complex secret master plan in play that references the Transformers as a species and features their setup of ancient earth. This is more or less ignored after this episode, swapping out these motivations for the Vok being almost stereotypical evil aliens.
Since the bulk of the voice cast is Canadian, it shouldn't be surprising that many of them do a lot of other work when Canadian casting is invovled. In particular, several actors were hired by the Ocean Group to do anime dubbing, such as the original pre-Funimation dub of Dragonball Z. (the Beast Wars cast accounts for, among others, the Ocean Dub versions of Goku, Piccolo, the Narrator, Frieza, Captain Ginyu, Oolong, and Recoome). Beyond that, Garry Chalk (Optimus) and Venus Terzo (Blackarachnia) should be familiar to genre fans for recurring roles on shows like Stargate SG-1 and the current DC series on CW, and Jim Byrnes is best known for his supporting role on the Highlander series)
This episode all but eliminates the ring of stasis pods around the planet, meaning that we get the Fuzors at the start of next season and almost no other cast additions that don't come from other origins (like Rampage and Depth Charge)
Other Voices, Part 2
The fallout of the previous episode brings the conflict to a head. Meagtron and Tarantulas put their plans into motion as the Vok (the aliens) begin to sterilize the planet, and the transformers are left to band together to stop the world from being destroyed with them on it.
Seriously, this show has so many great characters. Even the one-note goofy character like Inferno is just so fun.
I forgot how jarring the fire effects in this show were. Instead of being CG fire, it's like real fire that's been "greenscreened" onto the other animation. it's like seeing awkward real life people inserted into animation.
"Shut up, Rattrap."
The acid-trip sequence inside Tarantulas' head is hard to watch, but in a good way. It makes it seem screwier.
I wouldn't be surprised if Venus Terzo blew out her vocal chords screaming as Blackarachnia.
As janky and low-tech as most animation effects in the show are, Tarantulas' energon webs look really cool.
Optimus never actually provides any reason why Airazor can't fly the pod like he does for Cheetor and Tigatron (for whom he reasoned his flight capabilities made him a better choice.) He simply ignores it and sarcastically asks Rattrap if he plans on volunteering.
So they make a point of showing Optimus folding in part of his legs to fit in the pod in a move that's part of his transformation sequence. But at the same time, rather than have him fold in the shoulder epaulets formed by his gorilla mode shoulders, his animation model simply has them chopped and squashed so that they form to his shoulders better instead of clipping through the pod. Weird.
Cheetor totally talks as if Rhinox is dead or dying.
The pod approach sequence looks pretty cool given the technical limitations.
I'm not entirely sure how he was supposed to bail from the pod in the middle of the giant super-heating laser beam.
Wanna have something blow your mind? Tarantulas' only line of the episode besides his cackling wasn't recorded by regular VA Alec Willows. He was apparently unavailable for the episode for some reason, so Scott McNeil filled into record the line "Too late.. Goodbye, Optimus!". I didn't know this until today. And even listening for the difference, McNeil does an absolutely
I don't really like the choice to re-show the pod explosion like 4 times from different angles, but the effect of the muted pained groan (or the very end of Garry Chalk's outstanding "MEGATROOOOONNNNNNN!!!" scream) is creepy and unsettling and great.
The End? It's so corny, but given that this was a season finale, the question of how the hell they were going to walk back killing the main good guy was a solid cliffhanger.
Code of Hero
Dinobot discovers what Megatron has planned for the golden disc, and that it could alter not only the fate of the Beast Wars, but of all Transformers history, leading him to make a choice with grave consequences.
Yes, that is the proper title for the episode. Not "Code of the Hero" as a lot of places write.
Beast Wars employed a relatively small batch of regular writers throughout most of its run. There were a few notable guests or big names in the bunch, such as the Marvel TF comics' most iconic writer Simon Furman penning the series finale, or legendary comics writer Marv Wolfman co-writing "The Probe", other comics super-writer Len Wein writing "Tangled Web", or legendary Star Trek writer D.C. Fontana penning "Crossing the Rubicon". But most of the episodes were scripts from series creators Larry DiTillo and Bob Forward, or this episode's author, Ian Weir. Weir also wrote the previously-reviewed "Possession".
In addition to regular writer Weir, this episode was also directed by lead writer and co-creator Bob Forward, the only episode to be directed by a writing staff member. He also apparently storyboarded the episode (something that no other episode had as part of its directing process)
Though I'm usually pretty forgiving of the show's shortcomings with regards to character models given time, budget, and technology, I've always disliked the neanderthal/primitive human models. They're just so lame, and have serious issues with hair rendering.
Dinobot's actually contemplating suicide on a family show. Dark.
Also note that bird flyby in the "missing man" formation. *gasp* Foreshadowing!
Rhinox asking Optimus if he remembers "the transwarp cell explosion" (from Other Voices) is fantastic. As is the blank, implied facepalm look from Optimus.
It's funny that Dinobot has this reputation now for being Shakespearean and grandiose in his dialogue, and yet this is really the only episode where he talks like that for an extended period.
The color balance of this episode seems rather off, and the texture models are fuzzy and lack detail. I don't know if the episode was always like htis, or it's just the transfer on this episode for the DVD (or the series revolting against my TV settings)
Dinobot holding a gun in dinosaur mode for no discernible reason at all (except that he needs a handgun in a couple of scenes so he can threaten Tarantulas) is weird.
As is the fact that Tarantulas appears to want to eat that very organic deer. It certainly can't have any use to him as sustenance since he runs on energon.
In spite of how serious the episode is, the site of Dinobot riding motorcycle-mode Tarantulas makes me smile.
I also dislike the vocalizations of the ape-men. It's too obviously Garry Chalk making the same noises he makes when Optimus fights.
This episode always confused and muddied the issue on the Golden Disc becuase it's easy to get this disc (which is a "sounds of earth" record modelled after the one attached to one of NASA's space probes) confused with the one fought over through much of season 1 (which had to do with the Vok and other stuff)
And here's where Megatron graduates from megalomaniac to total genocide.
Oof, that mountaintop exploding into triangular low-poly bits.
Damn that epic shot of Dinobot backed by the sunset as he recognizes the likely outcome of attacking the Predacons without backup.
Also holy balls is him nearly bisecting Inferno with his sword (Which rotates and thus does not have a sharp cutting/cleaving edge) is ****ing hardcore.
The series' framerate is never great, but it always suffers when the show goes into slow motion. The shot of Dinobot descending with his tail-rotor shield thing being used like a helicopter blade is super clunky.
"One lonely turncoat, battling on against impossible odds. I'm almost touched.... Fortunately such moments pass quickly." Oh Megs, you so crazy.
The music for this episode also deserves a special recognition. Usually it's fairly standard techno-rock, but this is so orchestral and operatic.
This episode is full of great lines, even ignoring Dinobot's shakespeare paraphrases. The Quickstrike exchange with him asking "What's a warrior without weapons?" and Dinobot answering "A warrior still." before dismantling the fuzor is also awesome.
I kind of get that it's supposed to be stock recorded computer responses, but Dinobot's personal on-board computer reminding him that he should enter stasis lock is supposed to be this deeply dramatic scene, and then after Dinobot demands the automatic stasis be overriden, the chipper "acknowledged" response seems out of place.
Yes, it's a setup, but Dinobot being able to beat on Megaron with a stick is a touch silly.
Still it leads to Dinobot's greatest moment. "Improvise"
*sniff* excuse me, I think I have something in my eyes....
I hate to break up the somber moment, but the whole final Dinobot scene has a great story attached to it where Scott McNeil is in the recording booth doing this scene and the crew are in the control booth joking and laughing and McNeil gets mock angry and still in his Dinobot voice, shouts "Do you mind? I'm trying to DIE here."
This ep also had a noticeable animation error during the funeral sequence, with a pre-transmetal model of Rattrap operating the funeral pyre.
The flyby really should've been the last shot of the episode. I know the anthropoid using Dinobot's stone axe was meant to be both a bookend to the opening scene and a reminder that early man would be safe now so the future could play out as intended, but jesus guys, end on the funeral. Dinobot deserved it.
Speaking of deservedness: In 2010, Hasbro launched the Transformers Hall of Fame as a means to recognize and enshrine characters and people who have had a significant impact on the franchise. The very first batch of indutees were 4 characters (Optimus Prime, Megatron, Bumblebee, and Starscream) and 4 creators (franchise story/mythos creator and Marvel Comics writer Bob Budiansky, original Optimus Prime Peter Cullen, and Takara employees and lead designers on the early toylines that became the Transformers Kojin Ono and Hideaki Yoke. There was then a 5th character slot set for a fan-vote to determine the final inductee pitting 5 characters against one another for the honor:
Soundwave
Grimlock
Jazz
Shockwave
Dinobot
Dinobot's inclusion wasn't really considered a "gag" nominee, but apparently handicapping amongst the fandom had him as a heavy underdog to beat out any one of the other 4, who were beloved G1 characters and G1 absolutely rules Transformers fandom. Welp, Dinobot beat them all, becoming the only person or character in that initial class to not be tied to G1 or the creation of the Transformers brand as a whole.
I'm going to close this recap in the only way that it should be ended:
"He lived a warrior, and died a hero. Let his spark join the Matrix, the greatest of Cyberton."
That's it for tonight. Tomorrow I'm going to dip into perhaps the most unfairly forgotten western contribution to Transformers: Beast Mach- No, I'm kidding. I'd never do that.
It's Transformers Animated. the 2007-09 that launched around the time of the first Bayformers movie (dear god, Bayformers have been a thing for a whole decade now...)
Day 9. The penultimate day of my TF rewatch & ramble is Transformers animated.
What if I told you there's a Transformers out there that's perhaps the least like any Transformers you know and remember? And it's not Beast Wars?
What if instead of a show about a grand scale war being fought with the heroic, messianic Optimus Prime leading the Autobots against the feared despot Megatron, you were watching a show where Optimus and his crew were a small, unimportant group of repair technicians who accidentally got sucked into a conflict with a rogue batch of Decepticons and had to rise above their lowly station (and various misgivings that landed them in that station in the first place) to become the heroes we're more familiar with? Because that's what this is. It's also the "weird one" by western Transformers standards.
Transformers Animated is perhaps the oddest western entry in the franchise. I have to specify "Western" entry because if you haven't noticed by now, the Japanese shows tend to fall on the "bat-**** super crazy" side of the spectrum, rife with lame, goofy attempts at humor and an aversion to any show being totally serious for any length of time. This is especially true for all the series dubs after G1. From Beast Wars onward, the Japanese dubs are complete acid-trip insanity comedy dubs. Every character is the comic relief, every episode reduces its plot to something inherently silly, and every single moment of the show is filled with dialogue or character noises, even if it's just characters needlessly nattering their stupid jokey verbal tics. It tends to destroy whatever drama the series was going for. And in the case of most western series, drama is usually the primary and overriding focus of the show.
Animated, however, is the outlier in that group. It was designed with bright, expressive, stylized animation meant to help it be more emotive, comedic and "fun" than most of its predecessors. But with that said, the show also had a fairly dramatic seed at its core, dealing with the usual war, along with personal fallout such as terrible decisions, PTSD, betrayal, unethical behavior, and a host of other surprisingly "adult" topics for a show that boasts so much color and cartoony panache.
The other thing that Animated did get famous for beyond its art style was that it wore its G1 roots more proudly on its sleeve than pretty much every other (post-G1) series before or since. With few exceptions, almost every cybertronian who appears in the show was either a visual or personality homage to their G1 predecessor, and especially when it came to cameo bots, most would be random caricatures of popular G1 cast members if for no other reason than to make classic fans go "hey, I know that bot!" In addition, numerous references and dialogue choices often pointed to elements of G1 in such a way that a new fan could easily assume the reference was just some added color, but a classic fan would get a kick out of knowing that the material was drawing on familiar sources to flesh itself out. The casting process also found itself as a means of getting some G1 nods in, as multiple characters appeared in the series while being voiced by their G1 actors, including Blurr, Arcee, Shockwave, and even Spike (shown multiple times with Carly and Daniel and all wearing recognizable knockoffs of their futuristic 3rd season attire.
But the show didn't just nod to G1. There were a few smaller Beast Wars references just to show that the series wasn't forgotten, including making one of the primary recurring antagonists a version of Blackarachnia (with a backstory that is, befitting this show, both shockingly tragic and grim as well as being a sly nod to G1 as well). Released alongside the first of the live action Michael Bay movies, the series also hewed a little closer to the new continuity that universe was establishing, with the primary mcguffin of this show being the AllSpark instead of the familiar Creation Matrix/Matrix of Leadership (thoug hit obviously still gets some G1 cred for designing the AllSpark to look suspiciously like the classic Matrix design.)
Ultimately the show would run for 3 seasons of 13 episodes before being quietly cancelled in 2009 (it wasn't even officially announced as cancelled until well after the 3rd season finale had aired, though people tended to see the writing on the wall). Being the second shortest run series of the western canon (only Beast Machines was shorter), being released at the same time as the Bayformers movies, thus being dwarfed in importance in both advertising and toy promotion, and falling into the trap of being hated by ever-reactionary Transformers fans who loudly declare that every new iteration of the franchise ruins Transformers FOREVER, Animated has kind of become the black sheep of the franchise in the west. But I wanted to take a fresh look at it and give you some thoughts.
A Bridge Too Close, Part 1 (Season 2 finale)
Megatron's ambitions need for him to get off of Earth and return to Cybertron, but to do that he has to build a Space Bridge. In order to facilitate that, he decides to kidnap the one Autobot whose records indicate is the best Space Bridge technician in existence. And to the surprise of pretty much everyone, it's Bulkhead.
First off, yeah, I don't love the art style. It's a little too cartoony. But it does fit the generally tone and style this series went for. So I was OK with getting used to it.
It scores major nostalgia nerd points for using a remix of the original theme though.
The voice cast is pretty good. It's not aping G1, but it feels fitting for the most part.
Fun fact: Optimus is David Kaye, last appearing as Megatron in Beast Wars/Beast Machine and some anime dubbing. This makes him the only person in franchise history to voice both Optimus and Megs.
The Constructicon designs are fun in a sort of gag-character way (they're like stereotypical construction workers) It outwardly seems kind a doofy, but remember how many original G1 characters were basically thinly veiled gags. Tracks was vain and had a snooty Thurston Howell from Gilligan's Island sort of thing going on. Shockwave was aping David Warner as SARK in Tron, even Optimus was (by Peter Cullen's own admission) basically a mild John Wayne impression. If you're going to have fun with the series, having kinda-goofy parody characters is a time-honored tradition.
This show also provides us with a fresh take on the Immortal Starscream G1 bit by makig him have an allspark fragment in his head which not only makes him unkillable, but also has led to the creation of duplicate versions of him, each a different color and representing some part of his personality while at the same time often hinting at other members of the Seeker family from which Starscream himself hails. According to the TF Wiki, the clones are:
Cowardice = Skywarp (he has teleporting powers because he's scared to confront people directly)
Ego = Thundercracker (brash, abrasive jerk)
Sycophantic = Sunstorm (an obscure elevated fandom character who started out as a background bot in the pilot of G1 (and it being G1, people latched onto odd colorations like crazy and made up gigantic bios for those characters, promting a few to become reality later on. This one also basically has no correlation to the characterization G1 Sunstorm would receive, as a grandiose religious nut who believed he was chosen to purge the universe of the unworthy)
Duplicity = Ramjet (again, doesn't really fit with Ramjet who was an over-aggressive lunkhead)
...something = Slipstream (the female clone, it was never indicated what aspect of Starscream's personality this one represented, and slipstream was mostly a repurposed name of unrelated earlier characters. Instead this name and characterization kinda stuck and since then most incarnations of Slipstream have been fembots with jet modes, until RiD2015 in which the name was passed onto a minicon partner for Drift.)
Hey, it's Shockwave! And hey, he's voiced by Corey Burton (original Shockwave). In fact, while the main characters on both sides for this show are new actors, plenty of secondary or one-shot characters were done by their G1 actors.
And now we're introduced (in my recap) to the human companion: Sari. A little girl who's excitable and interested in the Transformers as a way to escape the dullness of her life which is sheltered at the behest of her industrialist father. For a change she's actually a fairly well received character, which makes something that happens later in this two-parter kind of fun/ironic. She's also voiced by Tara Strong, which is always a plus.
This series is also kinda unique for the fact that Megatron isn't a gun or a tank or even a cybertronian vehicle. He's a sorta helicopter.
This franchise also had an impact on later series, as Prime's Bulkhead is basically a character from this series lifted whole-cloth. Ratchet too comes largely from here as the characterization of the cranky, exasperated medic.
And here's our other G1 casting: John Moscitta as Blurr. He absolutely sounds like Blurr, but lacks some of the G1 version's motor-mouthing. Though realistically a lot of that yammering in G1 was repetitive.
So I pick a series that is generally regarded as comedic and get what's mostly a heavily dramatic episode. That's actaully an advantage of this series: in spite of its heavy comedy focuse, it was actually pretty decent at being serious and dramatic when it wanted to (mostly around season finales and premieres.)
Blitzwing actually has a good comedy gimick in that he has 3 faces in addition to 3 modes. Each face has an obvious personality to it, with a stuffy generalissimo type, an aggressive Arnold Schwarzenegger parody, and a jack-*** looney face.
Part of the episode's conflict is that Bulkhead is kidnapped to build Megatron a space bridge, and this works with Bulkhead constantly being put down for the fact that he's viewed as the dumb muscle. SO he ends up really building the space bridge just to prove that he's actually smart when it comes to something. From a character conflict aspect it works, but the logic of it is seriously questionable because even Bulkhead should be smart enough to know that giving the villain a real, working space bridge is a really dumb idea.
And then finally all of Starscream's yammering with his clonse pays off as they show up to take down Megatron and steal the space bridge for themselves. TO BE CONTINUED. Dun dun dun.
A Bridge Too Close, Part 2 (Season 2 Finale)
With Bulkhead captured, Megatron pushes him and Dr. Sumdac to complete the Space Bridge. Meanwhile Sari and the Autobots mount a rescue effort and Starscream plots a coup with the aid of his new army of clones.
Previously on Danny Phantom.... (sorry, I couldn't think of a good late 2000s Cartoon Network show to sub in here. Lame joke)
Here comes the chance to explain why Bulkhead made a working space brige.. and they sidestep it for a joke about the also-captured Professor Sumdac (Sari's dad and the world's foremost roboticist) and how his robotics empire is actually based off the fact that like 20 years ago he found Megatron's severed head in a field after he blew up and crashed on earth. Everything Sumdac made was then reverse-engineered from Megs' Cybertronian technology.
And now for the 2-parter's second biggest reveal: The Ark that the Autobots crashed on Earth in is actually Omega Supreme. That's actually a super-cool twist.
I've neglected it to this point, but besides the art style the other contentious thing this show does is use anime-esque transformation sequences. Yeah, it stalls and wastes time in each episode, but it also slows things down from other shows that have transformation be part of the action.
Ughh, Leet-speak jokes...
In this continuity Prowl is a ninja sort of warrior instead of a police-officer type. Jazz is too when he shows up from time to time. It's kind of cool at times, but it also has some kinda gimpy and eye-rolling silliness like mystical robot ninja powers called "processor over matter"
This episode shows some coolness in the fact that Shockwave is a mole for Megatron, with an alternate robot mode where he fakes being an Autobot called Longarm.
The sequence with Omega Supreme transforming and taking out the decepticon army is pretty solid and harkens back to original Omega who.... mostly never got to do anything cool.
Omega never got a toy in the Animated toyline. For a series in a franchise about selling toys, this show perhaps did a bad job of that objective, with a ton of characters that appeared on screen and never got toys on store shelves. On the other hand, plenty of characters did get toys, including a Shockwave/Longarm quadruple changer.
And here's the single biggest twist of the episode: Sari is injured in the final attack and discovers that under the skin on her hurt elbow is robotic circuitry! So the first well-received human character in, like, forever turns out to not be a human at all.
Instead of a closing version of the theme song, the credits for this episode air over a sort of epilogue shot of Megatron and Starscream stranded out in the middle of nowhere in space after getting sucked into the space bridge. And most of that is Megatron lamenting the fact htat he might be stuck floating with Starscream for all eternity. It's pretty fun.
Finally, this show, like Beast Wars before it, featured Susan Blu (aka Arcee) as its voice director. It's cool to see Blu stay involved in the franchise so much. She would also go on to be the voice director for the start of Transformers Prime, but had to depart after a death in the family.
Transwarped (3-part "movie", Season 3 Premiere)
The Autobots deal with the fallout of the Space Bridge incident, the Decepticons plot their next move, and Sari gets some much needed truths from her father.
Holy nostalgia run! This episode kicks off with a battle between a bunch of throwback reference Autobots and Decepticons including Ironhide, Brawn, Rodimus Prime and Cyclonus from G1, and Bumblebee knockoff Hot Shot from the Armada anime series. In fact, Hot Shot was meant to be in the spot in this series that's occupied by Bumblebee. But when the Bay movie went into commission and Bumblebee became the central Autobot character of the film, Hasbro requested that he be included in this show as well, and Hot Shot got his spot usurped.
For the first time since Transformers The Movie, Rodimus Prime is voiced by Judd Nelson. Like Hot Shot above, Rodimus was meant to be part of the main cast, as the hot-headed jerk on Team Prime (and no doubt not voiced by Nelson) but he was cut from the role and elements of his personality were spread to the other team members.
It's a G1 nostalgia trip! an Autobot shop comes to join the fight and is being piloted by Jazz with Ultra Magnus in the captain's chair.
Aaand Rodimus gets infected with Cosmic Rust (G1 nod!) and he's down, never to speak again. I guess even as a washed out 80s teen star, Judd Nelson is expensive.
It's not revealed now, but Dr. Sumdac's story about where Sari comes from actually indicates that she was originally a Transformers protoform. When Sumdac touched her body, it imprinted a human form on her the way most Cybertronians would get an alt-mode
When Sari gets angry, now that she knows of her robot origins, her hands transform into devices that look a lot like Iron Man's hand-mounted repulsor units. It's a cool scene.
Ratchet now gives a flashback to Omega Supreme's origins. It turns out that he was part of a project designed to help win the war, and that part of that included an incident where Ratchet had to harvest information from the mind of a comatose Autobot spy: Arcee. It shows her on an operating table, with her head opened up and wires being fed into her "brain" at multiple points. For the colorful art design, it's still super creepy.
And here my review set gets its first taste of recurring non-Decepticon villain "The Headmaster" His whole schitck, besides piloting a flying robot head that can attach itself to and take over cybertonian bodies and totally doesn't look like Galactus, is that he's a stupid gamer/computer nerd stereotype that talks in leetspeak and awful tech puns. It's exactly as frustrating as it sounds.
about 20 minutes after Sari's origin, now Prowl spills the beans on the fact that she is is from a Cybertronian protoform.
Well, Blurr's dead. Pretty grisly death too. Reporting to "Longarm" about the traitor in the Autobot ranks, Blurr tips off that he hasn't told anyone else, so Longarm turns back into Shockwave and traps Blurr in a series of passageways before triggering a trash compacter and crushing him. Brutal.
Perceptor and Wheeljack make very G1-esque appearances. But to hammer home that Perecptor is a pure scientist with no social desires, his voice is a text-to-speech program like Stephen Hawking's computer.
Ultra Magnus' voice is clearly a pretty solid Robert Stack impression, so there's another G1 nod.
In a scene that raises a whole bunch of questions, Sari uses her allspark key (a gadget she's had all series that can re-energize and repair Transformers) to upgrade her robotic body. She also now looks suspiciously like Metabee from the anime series Metabots.
She also basically becomes a teenager in her human form.
And as her powers go berserk thanks to being overcharged by her key, she also ends up impaling Bumblebee and nearly killing him. This also causes Ratchet to have the Cybertronian equivalent of 'Nam flashbacks.
And now we get another G1 cameo in the form of Cliffjumper serving as Longarm's attache. Longarm/Shockwave gives him a compacted cube of Blurr's remains to dispose of. Creepy.
So Bumblebee gets his weapons upgraded by Ratchet as part of the giant final act fight vs Megatron controlling Omega Supreme. Ratchet explains that he didn't do it before because such weapons upgrades are illegal on non-combat Autobots. But this means that any or many non-combat Autobots are carrying around the potential for much stronger weaponry than they're allowed to have, just locked behind some failsafes. It seems like a dangerous methodology...
Prowl projects himself into Omega Supreme's mind/processor, and suddenly this very Tron-like inner world is loaded with atari-style video game sound effects. Weird.
We also end on a scene where Omega Supreme, having been mentally taken over now by Starscream, begs Ratchet to basically kill him to stop his body for being used for evil. Hardcore for a family show.
Alpha Trion makes another G1-inspired-cameo in an Autobot council meeting. This episode was loaded with cameos.
Well, that's Animated. I honestly enjoyed this show a lot more than I expected to. I still don't like the overly cartoony art, but underneath that is a very G1 show with very G1 stories, but also more serious plotlines that lack some of the inherently cartoony storytelling that series tended to have. I also really appreciated all the nostalgia nods and easter eggs it provided. If you get a chance to watch Animated, I wholly recommend it.
Tomorrow it's Christmas Eve, so that wraps up my 10-day run with 4 episodes of Transformers Prime:
Predatory
Crisscross
Partners
Deadlock
The overall theme is Arcee-heavy as one of the more interesting characters of the series. Plus the series finale (not counting the very disappointing "Predacons Rising" movie)
Here we are at day 10, the last day, and I'm up to the second most recent series: Transformers Prime.
I'm going to save some time rehashing the series itself because it's something I've discussed at length in assorted related threads, but suffice to say this is one of my favorite incarnations of the franchise, right up there with Beast Wars and G1. It's dramatic, at times very dark, takes the whole war deadly serious, but also manages to have some fun along the way. Toss in a very solid voice cast and just enough playful nostalgic references and it's easy to enjoy this show. It's also generally well respected in and out of Transformers fandom, including winning 9 emmy awards in its 3-season run.
My set of episodes to review here largely focus on Arcee, who was perhaps the most interesting character in the series. After being fairly generic in G1, with little to set her apart other than being "the girl Autobot", here she becomes the long-term scout/soldier with some serious PTSD issues after having lost her last 2 partners (Cliffjumper bites it in the series pilot, and we later on see that her previous partner, Tailgate, was killed in a flashback which appears in one of the episodes I'm going to be watching) I know some people complained that there was too much focus on Arcee and her new human companion, Jack, but honestly they were more interesting than another run with Bumblebee, or the relatively straightforward elements of Bulkhead.
The other thing that's interesting is how many different sources this series pulls influence from: from a design standpoint, Megatron, Optimus, and Bumblebee all share a lot of commonalities with their designs from the Michael Bay movies, though with some obvious improvements that make them look less monstrously janky. Bulkhead and Ratchet both seem heavily informed by Transformers Animated, as beyond model design Ratchet inherits his Animated incarnation's guff and cantankerous nature and Bulkhead is the "dumb muscle" of the team. Arcee is the only major autobot without a clear earlier influence, though being recast as a motorbike instead of a car would point a little bit towards the Bay movies (a set of bots that were allegedly based on Arcee appear in Revenge of the Fallen before getting dispatched with little fanfare. Just like everyone else.). Wheeljack shows up as a guest a few times with some very G1 elements too. Hell, just the fact alone that Peter Cullen and Frank Welker star opposite each other as Optimus and Megatron for the first time since G1 makes this show worth the price of admission. It did take a step down in quality in the back half of the series (apparently due to budget problems and staff shakeups at Hasbro) but if you can find the blu-rays of the series it's well worth it. You can also apparently watch on Netflix, though I haven't checked for some time if it's still there.
Predatory
When Arcee and Jack are sent to investigate a crashed ship in a remote forest, the pair find themselves in danger while Arcee is confronted with some of the ghosts of her past.
The opening starfield is pretty gorgeous, even for one that is devoid of the usual sci-fi tendency to just jam nebulae and pulsars and all sorts of crazy stuff into "empty space"
If there's one thing I don't like about the art style, it's that the humans have kind of "blank" faces without a lot of detail in them.
On the flip side, the Transformers have tons of detail, up to and including some really nice light reflection based on the properties of the parts of their bodies. Arcee's "fins" for example are made out of the high-gloss blue paint like her bike body, so they shine like an automotive finish. But the other parts of her that are black or silver have less gloss to them and give off a more diffused light.
I love the theme for this series. For as much as I give the Bay movies, the one great thing about them is the score, and that seems like the primary inspiration for this show and its score. The big, strong orchestral theme song is unlike anything any of the other series use (tending towards electronic or synth rock) but it totally works.
This is a really creepy, atmospheric episode. It's almost more like a horror movie.
The stark, high-contrast, partially desaturated, over-exposed lighting on Arcee's flashbacks makes it even creepier.
So we've hit the point in the production timeline of Transformers series where "slag" has been phased out as the epithet of choice for "scrap". Kind of disappointing, but at least a little understandable.
Jesus, the flashback of Arcee getting maimed a bit is pretty horrifying and it's just a cut to black and a scream.
One of the other nice things that we get on the cybertronian character models is accumulated battle damage. Nothing major, but the characters get dings and scars and paint scratches on their body that make them look "worn", which is cool rather than them simply being pristine all the time. Only issue is that sometimes the damage isn't consistent from shot to shot.
Fun fact: though he barely talks, Tailgate is being voiced by Josh Keaton, who also voices Jack. Thus creating layer of similarity between Jack and Tailgate to help explain Arcee's over-protectiveness of Jack.
The look of the war on Cyberton is nice. It's dead and foggy and looks like a burned-out husk of a world.
Airachnid's spider-webbing makes the same noise that spider-man's webshooters often do in non-movies. Also kinda funny because Josh Keaton voiced Spider-Man for a while.
Gina Torres does a really awesome creepy voice.
The acid-burned tree stump Arcee finds is strangely beautiful. It actually looks like it was hand-painted rather than CG, with a lot more "handcrafted" shading than CG usually gets. In fact, that's one of the graphical touches this series does a lot that I love.
The forest really helps sell the horror esthetic. it's constantly dark and foggy and gloomy and green.
Damn that sunset is super, super orange.
It's cool that when you get to a really close look at Airachnid's face you can see that her eyes aren't just glowing camera apertures like most others, and that instead she actually has a hexagonal pattern to mimic compound-style bug eyes.
In general the cybertronians emote really well, even if there's some cartoony elements to their mouths and fluid-ish facial structure (though that was a cheat that G1 employed as well to avoid flapping jaws on mechanical mouths or the over-designed bayformer esthetic.
The flashback with Tailgate being killed in front of Arcee is really well done and hardcore.
Airachnid's "you have to ask yourself, Arcee, is it them, or is it me?" is super creepy fun. Her chipper expression is great.
Continuing the long-held Japanese tradition of every imported, JP-dubbed show from the west being turned into goofball comedy, they did it to Prime as well. Even in an episode that features a character having terrible war flashbacks of her partner being murdered in front of her, they undercut everything by making Airachnid into a boy-crazy obsessive teen stalker fangirl who gleefully coos at Jack and stalks him like she has a crush on him instead of being like a predator. It's exactly as weird and dumb as it sounds
For as much as I love all the atmosphere nature of the episode and the flashbacks, Arcee's "I couldn't save my partner!" line as she gets rescued gets a groan. she should've just kept brokenly crying out "I couldn't save him" It's one of those weird "people don't talk that way" things that bugs me like when parents refer to their kid as "son" to their faces (as in "come here, son.")
Actually, on a really dark shot with a close-up, Arachnid has compound compound eyes (a large hexagonal pattern with a smaller other hexagonal pattern in each hexagon. It's totally unnecessary but really cool looking.
So Airachnid doesn't hear Jack talking to himself, but does hear the scraping of his flint? Sure. Why not.
After watching Beast Wars, these fire effects are much better
Fire-damaged Airachnid is even creepier. She's not really damaged beyond scorch marks and paint damage, but it looks horrifying.
Slow-mo impact shots like this is a Zak Snyder film!
I really enjoyed the pilot, but after that, it was this episode that sold me on the series. The intervening episodes were interesting, but not great. It was watching this one with its really different premise and darker bits of backstory. This was the show that pushed that we weren't watching G1 with its softer edges (the movie notwithstanding) and that they were going to commit to strong character-driven drama like the best parts of Beast Wars.
So the episode that got me hooked into the series has the smallest cast list of any episode with just 3 actors voicing 4 characters (Arcee, Airachnid, and Josh Keaton doing double duty as Jack and Tailgate.) and none of them are Optimus or Megatron. Huh...
Crisscross
Following the events of Predatory, Airachnid teams up with the human Transformers hunters, MECH, to get revenge. Meanwhile, the secret of Arcee's true nature and Jack's involvement with the Autobots begins to take a toll on his home life.
Ok, for the most part this episode is kind of slow. The MECH/Airachnid stuff is intriguing, but sorta minimal. The whole subplot with Jack and his mom is a nice sort of touch on the fact that someone would have to notice the kids bailing on all kinds of stuff to go off and play with giant space robots, but it's also a little corny and sitcom-y and feels like something that would've belonged in G1. But in the end, the whole sequence in the concrete yard is what makes this episode stand out. The Airachnid/Arcee fight is freaking gorgeous. Aside from that though, I do enjoy all the Jack/Arcee banter. Usually the Transformer/human relationships tend to be sorta patronizing or protector/little-kid type affairs, or they're just for the humans being able to pump exposition at the Autobots to explain Earth (usually for jokes). With Jack being a bit older, he and Arcee get something that's more like siblings or cool aunt/nephew type thing. It gets more sarcasm and snarking and honesty about things and it's enjoyable.
Airachnid's ambush is also visually impressive.
Airachnid mentions to MECH that she knows what happened to Breakdown. He died in the previous episode, in what ultimately turned out to be an early sign of the series' budget issues (apparently they had to start cutting costs even after the positive response to the series, and one of the first things to go was Breakdown since he was voiced by Adam Baldwin, who was more of a celebrity stunt cast than most other characters. Ironically, Gina Torres would suffer the same fate as Airachnid made more infrequent appearances and was written out.
This episode implies that the term "Transformer" isn't something Cybertronians use to refer to themselves. that's not always the case.
The whole conceit of the issue in this episode is that Arcee and Jack have to coordinate to make sure that his mom doesn't find out she's not always in the garage. Seems like it shouldn't have been a big deal for the Autobots to get a "Decoy bike" that looks like Arcee's vehicle mode that could stay in the garage until Jack was no longer grounded. It wouldn't even have to run. But then of course I suppose that would defeat the purpose of the episode.
Mrs. Darby drives home to make Jack dinner, but then she leaves immediately after having it out with him for Arcee being missing. The implications of the scene would seem to preclude her making dinner before Jack got home too. It's like all those scenes in TV shows where characters go to eat lunch and then leave without taking a bite.
Obviously they can't replicate the stitched-together soundbites of movie Bumblebee, but his replacement buzzing and beeping "talking" is kind of lame. Surely they could've done better.
The whole bit with Jack telling the 100% truth about Arcee and it comes across like insanity is fun. It's wholly predictable, but still kinda fun. And subtly would seem to imply that Mrs. Darby might be starting to think Jack has some kind of mental disorder.
I make a snarky comment about "Stalker Airachnid" from the JP dub, but here when showing Silas the photo of Jack, she suggestively calls him "my Jack" in a stalker-ish sort of way. Except here it's creepy and fun instead of facepalmy.
It's funny that some issues haven't solved themselves in the 20 years since Beast Wars. The asphalt texture on the roads is pretty ugly and low-res, just like I'd expect out of a much older show. Especially when right after that we get laser sights with a really cool tunneled beam effect.
It's muted but still good to know the G1 transformation effect is still vital to all Transformers series (except the bayformers. Coincidence? I think not)
This episode is almost creepy in a different way than Predatory. that was a horror movie, this is more like a psycho thriller.
So MECH's tool to cut through an alien metal alloy body sounds like the world's rustiest chainsaw. Sure. I guess it makes it sound horrifying.
Kind of fun fact for anyone that grew up on 80s sitcoms: Mrs. Darby is Markie Post, possibly best known for being a regular in the classic sitcom Night Court.
Silas wants to go straight for Arcee's heart as their prize from her body? Wouldn't it make more sense to take the head? it'd be easy to cut off and surely things like cyber-mechanical eyes and a brain would be more valuable than a fuel pump.
"I can explain, mom. Wait. I already did."
The shot of Airachnid and Arcee faicing each other on the concrete rigging against the full moon is one of my favorite shots of season 1.
Concrete doesn't seem like something that should hold a giant superstrong robot at all, even for a couple seconds. Nor should it dry that fast. Or be permeable by light like Airachnid's eyes. But who cares, it looks cool.
Airachnid scans Fowler's nam-era looking Huey helicopter and adopts an alt-mode of a hyper-modern 1 man attack chopper. That doesn't entirely track. But hey, at least it justifies the "Air" in "Airachnid"
It's always kind of funny that Fowler's tie is soooo short.
The final scene of the show, taking Mrs. Darby to the Autobot base is cool because it's an almost complete shot-for-shot remake of a similar scene in the pilot, except that now Raf and Miko are in the background.
Partners
Still haunted by the deaths of Cliffjumper and Tailgate, Arcee finds herself with a difficult choice to make when Starscream appears and seemingly wants to switch sides.
It's taken to this point in the process, but it seems weird that every disc on my season 1 blu-ray uses exactly the same scenes from the pilot for the stuff that plays over the disc menu. They don't even vary it up to show stuff from the episodes on a given disc.
Steve Blum's Starscream is radically different than previous versions, vocally (a deep, relatively intimidating voice vs usually trying super-hard to do a Chris Latta impersonation) but it works because this Starscream is actually generally more competent than most versions. He's less whiny than usual to, instead trading that in for a more low-key self-absorbed streak.
Prime Soundwave is great though. Shadowy, blank face, creepy skinny body, predator drone alt mode, and he never speaks in the entire series, save for 1 line.
Megatron's voice is solid too, as Welker dials in a better version of his G1 voice, giving him less rasp but in exchange for more range and a more fearsome, menacing tone rather than insanity.
Starscream himself canonizes the term "seekers" to refer to decepticon jets. Cool.
I don't necessarily love Jeffrey Combs' Ratchet, but I do love Combs in a lot of his other roles. Especially The Question in the animated Justice League series from the 2000s.
I guess it's not surprising since it's been 25 years, but Peter Cullen's voice has deepened significantly since playing G1 Optimus. It makes him sound more sage and authoritative, but he does lose some of the energy in his performances.
Annnnnd here's some whiny Starscream. Fun.
I kind of miss that Optimus' rifle doesn't make the same noise it did in G1.
The close-up of Arcee's face after replaying the Tailgate death flashback from Pedatory is really nice. the detail in Arcee's eyes are interesting considering usually they're just sort of fuzzy light balls.
It's rarely seen in the show, but Optimus' trailer basically being a dressed up version of his G1 trailer. Cool.
Remember, kids. Vengeance is bad.
The Immobilizer is a nice G1 easter egg too. It doens't even look the same, but it's the same name.
"You extinguished Cliffjumper!" This show makes some seriously odd dialogue choices sometimes.
And now Starscream is his old snivly self, except that it's in service to his goal more than just him being a complete coward.
Vicious wounds with dripping blood are OK if the wound is on a robot and the blood is blue energy fluid. Woo standards and practices!
Starscream cuts a gnarly cash in Arcee's side with his claws, but Arcee has arm blades which strangely don't leave a scratch on Starscream in spite of several direct blows. For no reason other than making her look better than Starscream for not drawing blood.
The cloud-cover underneath the Nemesis as it floats through the sky are really gorgeously designed.
I don't know why I've never noticed, but Arcee has too many wheels on her robot mode. She has a wheel on each leg behind the calf, and she also has one in her back as well. None of them make much sense from a design standpoint compared to her bike mode, but really her having that much mass never really made sense at all given how light her bike mode is. I guess who cares, it looks cool.
This episode was dedicated to Peter Cullen's brother, a member of the marine corps who Cullen credits as one of the inspirations behind his characterization of Optimus Prime (and thus all characterizations of Optimus Prime since all anyone ever (rightfully) tries to do is live up to Cullen's example)
Deadlock (series finale)
It's the final battle between Megatron, intending to use recovered Cybertronian tech to reformat Earth into a new Cybertron for him to rule, and the Autobots.
Previously on Transformers Prime, all the stuff we need to know for the finale happened. But it's too much for me to bother recapping here. It was super intense though.
In the interim between the last episode I watched and this one, the Autobots have added a trio of new quasi-regulars: Wheeljack, here re-cast from mad scientist to adrenaline junky delta-force hardass. Ultra Magnus: the commander of Wheeljack and Bulkhead's combat unit, the Wreckers (and played by Michael Ironside) and Smokescreen, a sort of Hot Rod archetype. They're all interesting in their own way, though Smokescreen has some of the same flaws that Hot Rod usually had pointed out.
If Shockwave (the Decepticons' only newbie) sounds familiar, he should. David Sobolov was last heard playing Depth Charge on Beast Wars.
Knockout was a fun decepticon. He was basically Sunstreaker or Tracks, but eeeeevil. And Daran Norris' voice is super fun (you may remember him as Spottswoode in Team America)
Soundwave having a giant wire/tube/thing from his back to his gun arm is interesting, but seems kind of limiting in terms of design.
Oh yeah, Optimus now has a giant badass gatling gun, while Megatron has a twisted, evil sword carved out of gnarly purple crystal.
This is my rewatch's first appearance of Miko, who manages to uphold the tradition of human characters that fans hate.
Loooooool, Ghostbusters "crossing the streams" reference in a show that features Ernie Hudson? I get it. I get jokes.
Lots of anime jokes can be made at the expense of Megatron's evil sword of evilness firing giant purple energy waves. Like Megatron possibly auditioning for a job as a Bleach villain now that this show was ending.
The POV shot of Bumblebee cracking Shockwave's eye is pretty cool.
This episode features a giant Autobot sword called the Star Saber which is a double reference to both the Victory character I discussed in an earlier recap set and a namesake super ultra power sword from the Armada anime. There are actually a few easter egg tech references to the Unicron Trilogy anime series, which is shocking considering it usually has a pretty low rep in the west.
Bumblebee's death is quick, brutal, and really well done. It's a lot more sad than the Optimus death fakeout that this show did late last season (or early this season, I can't remember). The slow-mo shot of him falling into the Omgea Lock energy pool is beautiful.
Bumblebee's return to life and stabbing of Megatron is fantastic. Because for the first time he talks. You see Optimus about to be killed, and then there's a sudden "MEGATRON!!!" with no idea whose voice it's supposed to be. Cut to Bumblebee holding the Star Saber clean through Megs' chest, his wound from Megatron's fusion cannon healing in front of us. And then the line "You took my voice. You will never rob anyone.... of anything ever again." is 100% fantastic. It's all a complete deus ex machina, but who cares, it's great.
The Omega Lock totally doesn't look like the Stargate from... well, Stargate. Not at all.
This was a much better finale than the Predacons Rising movie that followed. It's almost a same that movie was a thing, because it really wasn't nearly as good as this.
Zero explanation is made for how Predaking was clinging to the side of the Decepticon ship for the entire episode. Oh well though, I guess it doesn't really matter at this point.
Ratchet is apparently totally "needed" on earth. But he barely appears at all in Robots in Disguise in spite of being a direct sequel to this series.
Similarly Raf and Bee talk of staying in touch and he too never returns in RiD even though Bumblebee is THE central character. (in fact, none of the humans appear in RiD)
And finally Arcee is the only original member of the Prime team who never shows up in RiD. Bumblebee is a main character, Optimus has a supporting role, and Bulkhead shows up right at the end. but there is zero mention of Arcee at all.
The final line from Optimus: "Until we meet again, old friend" might've been a good way to send off the franchise if it was going into another "hibernation" period.
Well, that wraps it up for me. I had a lot of fun putting my thoughts down on all these shows, and both nitpicking about them and thinking more critically about my views on each episode and series.
Prime remains a heavy favorite. It took until this rewatch before I started seeing some more flaws and oddities that I hadn't really noticed before, but as might be noticed in earlier recaps, none of the series escape criticism entirely. And this one did pretty well to have as many positives as it did.
If I were ranking the watched contents by day (ie separate series along with G1 seasons and movie individually):
1) G1 season 1
2) Prime
3) Beast Wars
4) The Movie
5) G1 Season 2
6) Animated
7) G1 Season 3
8) Victory
9) Headmasters
10) Super-God Masterforce
With it being a steep, steep fall from 7 to 8 on that list.
I guess that's all I've got to say. Thanks to anyone who might've read my ramblings, and apologies to everyone who didn't want to and now has 10 posts to scroll through. I doubt this project returns in nearly as complete of a form if only because of the time commitment (3-5 episodes of a given series should take me less than 2 hours but in most cases it took me 3 hours + each time out because of pauses to collect my thoughts and write them down, especially when I couldn't afford to miss the action.) but I do look forward to maybe having similar other projects in the future. Maybe a scaled down, slower full-season/series watch. Or group rewatches or soemthing. I've thought about doing a complete rank for all the series that exist, but there's a lot I haven't seen all the way through and I don't want to pay for out of print DVDs on series I know I don't like, nor is it even possible to obtain some series like the ill-fated Japanese Beast Wars filler shows (Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo). who knows what the future will hold.
Thanks again everyone for bearing with me on this weird, super-nerdy journey. and Merry Christmas.
Now that I've killed the thread I might as well see if I can revive it with transformers Christmas talk.
I got Slag and Swoop from the Power of the Primes line. They're pretty cool, and nice updates of the 80s originals. Their limbs are all ball-jointed and mobile, but I feel like they lack some of the bulk of the original dinobots. I went to Walmart where I saw them originally and they appear to have run through their entire initial stock aside from a single Starscream and a couple of Shrapnels. Slash and Grimlock are supposed to be out now too.
When I did go out today to check on Boxing Day deals, I did pick up a headmaster from the last lineup for like $12 and a couple of the extra heads (I mistakenly thought they had vehicles that turned into tiny bodies, but instead they're just vehicles that turn into other vehicles and into guns for bigger bots. And I went on Amazon and picked up a Six Shot and Blitzwing. I also stopped into Toys R Us but all they had left on their shelves was Trypticon (not justifying even the reduced $180 price tag) and a whole bunch of stuff from the last Bay movie. I really wanted a Titans Reutrn Twin Twist because I had the original G1 Twin Twist, but they seem to be sold out everywhere now.
So I just spent an obscene amount of money on Transformers this christmas in addition to the ones that I got for christmas. Must be going through my second childhood. I also forgot that I picked up the last in-stock copy of the Transformers Animated DVDs in my previous order. Rewatching a few episodes the other day reminded me how much I liked that series.
Saw the new Dinobots figures at Walmart today. I didn't think they were supposed to be out until next year. Wasn't everything, but they had Slag ( or "Slug") for like $24 and Swoop and the new one, Slash, for $12.
I was out of the country for the last couple of weeks, but was surprised to find Grimlock/Swoop/Slug at a Toys R Us in Thailand. If I was doing the exchange rate correctly, Swoop/Slug were like $30. I dropped by a Target on Xmas eve intending to pick them up if they had them in stock, but no dice.
I did see a few Optimus knockoff toys while in Asia which were amusing. I think one was branded as "Transformation Toy" with a company that also tried to mimic the Hasbro logo.
It's funny for me, the 2007 movie always makes me think of Scott Gomez. My buddy and I watched it in the theater. He loved it. We'd argue about it over the next few weeks. We also had a side argument about Gomez who had just signed his big contract with the Rangers. I didn't think Gomez was worth the money, my buddy disagreed. Somewhere on my Facebook, he left a comment along the lines of "Transformers was awesome, you're just butthurt about Gomez" which I like to annually bump with the Rotten Tomatoes score.
Also watched The Last Knight on my plane ride to Asia a couple weeks ago. Glad I didn't waste money on that.
Now that I've killed the thread I might as well see if I can revive it with transformers Christmas talk.
I got Slag and Swoop from the Power of the Primes line. They're pretty cool, and nice updates of the 80s originals. Their limbs are all ball-jointed and mobile, but I feel like they lack some of the bulk of the original dinobots. I went to Walmart where I saw them originally and they appear to have run through their entire initial stock aside from a single Starscream and a couple of Shrapnels. Slash and Grimlock are supposed to be out now too.
When I did go out today to check on Boxing Day deals, I did pick up a headmaster from the last lineup for like $12 and a couple of the extra heads (I mistakenly thought they had vehicles that turned into tiny bodies, but instead they're just vehicles that turn into other vehicles and into guns for bigger bots. And I went on Amazon and picked up a Six Shot and Blitzwing. I also stopped into Toys R Us but all they had left on their shelves was Trypticon (not justifying even the reduced $180 price tag) and a whole bunch of stuff from the last Bay movie. I really wanted a Titans Reutrn Twin Twist because I had the original G1 Twin Twist, but they seem to be sold out everywhere now.
It's funny for me, the 2007 movie always makes me think of Scott Gomez. My buddy and I watched it in the theater. He loved it. We'd argue about it over the next few weeks. We also had a side argument about Gomez who had just signed his big contract with the Rangers. I didn't think Gomez was worth the money, my buddy disagreed. Somewhere on my Facebook, he left a comment along the lines of "Transformers was awesome, you're just ******** about Gomez" which I like to annually bump with the Rotten Tomatoes score.
Also watched The Last Knight on my plane ride to Asia a couple weeks ago. Glad I didn't waste money on that.
I actually thought the first movie had some serious issues, but also showed that underneath those problems there was the promise of a better, thoroughly entertaining movie franchise. And then it didn't happen that way...
I too watched The Last Knight for free and still felt like it owed me money for sitting through it.
Also re: Power of the Primes releases - In that Walmart I only saw the 3 dinobots, Shrapnel (or "skrapnel". Damn trademarks), Jazz, and Starscream. Some of the "Prime Masters" (this line's Headmaster-y gimmick set. They're kind of like the old "Powermasters" that plug into some bots or accessories like engines (or in this case, they represent sparks). They come with "decoy armor" that's basically fashioned after G1 Pretender shells) are supposed to be out now too and I saw no indication of them.
Walmart was still clearing out some of its Titans Return stuff and Toys R Us was trying to offload a bunch of assorted Bayformers. Maybe once they've purged those old lines they'll restock with PoP stuff.
Thanks. Except for the parts where I was up until like 3am ranting about awful Japanese episodes, it was fun. It also inspired me to track down some of the series I'm missing. Like Animated because I'm shocked at how much I liked that one on a second look. It almost makes me want to give Beast Machines or the 2000s anime seris another chance. Almost.
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*drumroll*...... "New Soundwave." Yes, the "New" is part of his name and with the dub's awful rushed dialogue he will continue to be called "Newsoundwave" for the entire rest of the show.)
