Does the Alt-Mode make the Bot? Options

[Fortress Ironhol...]

Yes & no. For the most part, I don't think characters are married to an alt mode.

Well except Hot Rod, but Hasbro doesn't have that name anymore.

Actually, Hot Rod doesn't just have to be a dedicated performance racer.

Instead, he could easily be a "sleeper" with some token customization, like exhaust pipes or an air scoop.

He could even be a souped-up mini-van.

In this case, the logic would be that Hot Rod is a spy or "force recon".

Here comes this "rich guy" car, fat SUV, old beater, or even a "mom" van pulling up somewhere. It's mundane enough to where nobody would give it a second thought (red, maroon, and orange are all fairly common car colors, so people wouldn't normally be alarmed by a brightly-colored vehicle coming their way). It comes up, parks, and sits for a while.

...until such time as it needs to bug out in a hurry or its prey starts moving.

Then it either shoots out like a bolt of lightning or starts doing high-performance stunts, the kind you'd think only a Formula 1 racer could pull off.

How does that sound?

[Kup]

The alt mode does make the bot in my case, as I'm a selective collector nowadays. I'll never own Prime Soundwave because thats not "my" Soundwave. I'm not opposed to characters evolving per se: RTS Perceptor is a good example. I own the toy, and would ditch it if a microscope version was released, but the overall look is fitting enough for me to be content as that toy standing in for my only representation of Perceptor on my shelves.

I would never buy a jet Optimus or a drag racer Starscream. Its just not how I want to represent the character in my limited display.

[BlackMax]

Well, the primary question is "does the alt-mode make the bot', and I guess in the ~broad~ strokes I can say that it doesn't... not really. As several have already stated, Transformers are ~characters~, and what you remember about any character in any fiction ever tends to be personality. As long as Blaster sounds like a DJ and love his music far too loud he could turn into a vacuum cleaner - he'd still be Blaster. And Cosmos could turn into a Hubble-style space telescope (or even a terrestrial one) - you could slap that name on that personality and I'd probably still buy it.

Look at the Unicron Trilogy. Names slapped willy-nilly onto whatever character model they felt like (and many onto non-speaking Mini Cons), without any regard to what the original character was like (Armada Wheeljack for instance). ~That's~ the kind of thing that bothers me. It happened to a somewhat lesser extent with the Bayverse too - Prime and Megs were still pretty much themselves, and Ratchet and Ironhide had ~elements~ of their old selves, but they were still a bit too different - you could call me picky on this, but that's how I feel about it. The most basic level of Transformers, when you strip it down to the deepest level, is beings that can reconfigure their appearances - tying any one of them to a particular image is kind of the antithesis of the core concept.

That being said however, I do hold that certain alt-modes epitomize certain characters, and that some should have stayed.

To illustrate the first point, Transformers (like many people here, I'm sure) came from the 80s, and therefore there will always be some kind of bond between the franchise and that period of time, in the way that the John Williams Superman theme music which has been around for such a long time quickly and easily recalls to mind the orchestral music that accompanied the early "talkies" that were playing in theaters when the character was first seen. In this way I would assert that the most iconic images of Sound wave and his deployers will always be as a cassette player and cassettes, and Perceptor as the kind of kid-friendly toy microscope that so many kids had to play with growing up at that time and which also cemented his place as the scientist of the 'Bots. Likewise I see a beautiful representation of Megatron in the original alt-mode of a gun because, to put it simply, a gun is a thing that exists for no reason at all other than killing and destroying - and the same is largely true of Megs.

As for the second point, let me quote Bob "Game Overthinker" Chipman in his first episode regarding the casts of video games:

For some reason, somewhere along the line we went from video game heroism being a profession diverse enough to include plumbers, hedgehogs, robots, cavemen, ninjas, and ~whatever~ the hell Kirby is supposed to be, to a field monolithically staffed by guys who are all doing their best to pull off the look of self-employed landscaping contractors.

I think this is a painful truth of the TF franchise too, in a way. Since G1 we went from boom boxes, tape recorders, tapes, cameras, microscopes, and a big alligator that was 50% bubblegum pink by color to the population of the used car dealership that's two blocks from your house. Doublecross looks like he scanned ~his~ alt-mode from a Toho movie that came about in the early 60s because the only thing cooler than a robot dragon is a robot dragon ~with two heads~. But now apart from a few jets (and far be it from me to complain about the invention of the turbofan, but it ~is~ always jets) it's just an ocean of ~cars~. I can't possibly be the only one who misses how creative the designs used to be. When the second Bay movie came about and the toys followed the emergence of toys like Ransack, Scalpel, and Ejector made my heart float a little because they were actually interesting things, two of which Transformers never turned into before.

Some alt-mode changes over the years make good sense too. Making Megatron a tank from G2 on through recently made sense because like a gun, when you see a tank you know damn well it exists to crush the living breath out of everything that stands in its way. Even the Alternity Seekers kind of made sense because at their core the Seekers are sleek, fast, stealthy hunters.

...so does the alt-mode make the bot? I don't think so. But sometimes it works so well that any ~other~ will just never compare.

This post has been edited by BlackMax: Jun 18 2012, 06:56 PM

[Dake]

That's more a problem with the writers going crazy with the battle droids. If there were less fights with incompetent throwaway robots, the Autobots might actually have to try to win the fight instead of just going all sickhouse on some minions.

True - but he's still built like a football player now and that wasn't always the case. I think the old 'Bee and Hot Rod have been combined into the 'Bee we have now from the films and Prime.

Were you to take G1 and Animated BB and set them next to Movie and Prime BB and show them to someone who knew nothing of Transformers, even going so far as to show them clips I don't think a person would automatically think they're all versions of the same character. The second two are just that different from the first two and I think at least some of that comes from the difference in Alt-modes.

[Stungun]

That's more a problem with the writers going crazy with the battle droids. If there were less fights with incompetent throwaway robots, the Autobots might actually have to try to win the fight instead of just going all sickhouse on some minions.

True - but he's still built like a football player now and that wasn't always the case. I think the old 'Bee and Hot Rod have been combined into the 'Bee we have now from the films and Prime.

So basically Hot Shot minus any of his personality?

[gargunkle]

The alt mode does make the bot in my case, as I'm a selective collector nowadays. I'll never own Prime Soundwave because thats not "my" Soundwave. I'm not opposed to characters evolving per se: RTS Perceptor is a good example. I own the toy, and would ditch it if a microscope version was released, but the overall look is fitting enough for me to be content as that toy standing in for my only representation of Perceptor on my shelves.

I'm with you on the perspective of Soundwave, though I bought the toy just because it seems very nice - I simply don't much think of it as a Soundwave. Might customize it into a BM Jetstorm (of whom I don't have any toy at this time).

[The Doctor Who]

A little here and a little there.

The personality often seems reflected in the alt-mode. Although sometimes the alt-mode clearly came first, as in the case of many of the repaint characters. I mean, why is Smokescreen the same vehicle as Prowl who is the same vehicle as Bluestreak? It makes sense for Smokescreen and Prowl (A race car for a compulsive gambler and a police car for the rule-mongering security man), character wise, but Bluestreak? There doesn't seem much reason for it, other than they needed a character to go with their extra requisite Fairlady Z.

Mostly though, I think they tried to pick an alt-mode and personality that were compatible, in most respects.

As far as can a bot be a different alt-mode and still be that character? Sure, as long as the new alt-mode and/or bot-mode reflects their personality well enough. We've seen many occasions where characters have had new forms in different fiction and it worked really well.

[Cybersnark]

I think it's a case-by-case thing, in my head, at least.

Just like some humans have their signature look that they don't want to change, I'd imagine Transformers being the same way (and, like humans, some people will suddenly completely change their style when they go through a life-altering crisis/epiphany). Of course, you'd also have people who just don't care and will keep wearing the same outfit whatever they're doing.

I've never really been tied to the G1 altmodes though --I mean, most of them didn't get any choice. Teletraan-1 just rebuilt them into whatever was available in their size. I'd imagine that if you gave G1 Ironhide the chance to switch from a red vanette to a GMC Topkick, he'd volunteer in a spark-beat.

Soundwave is a good example of a character that has had everything from a jet to a car, and then some.

I think of Soundwave as one of the exceptions. He'll reformat into anything as the need arises.

(In fact, I'm starting to think of Soundwave as a hive-mind. He collects different bodies [perhaps from his reformatted victims] and controls them remotely. What one sees, they all see. What one hears, they all hear. At this point, no one is quite sure where the "real" Soundwave is. Possibly not even himself.)