If only all the BW expanded universe fiction that's been made over the years didn't take her claim so literally.
They're not half the price, they're far cheaper than that. The cheapest one is 80 dollars. I compared then because they're similar toys. I usually try to compare various versions of the same character when possible. Perfectly logical.
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Tarantulas being a literal "Unicron spawn", too.
Full disclaimer: I actually don't mind him being a Unicron minion during the 2003 Universe fiction since every bad guy in that fiction was (and it'd suit his personality that he'd join up with what he'd consider the winning side and use that to his advantage), but having his creation being literally rooted in Unicron is just... ugh.
Also, backing up to when I previously mentioned that BWII said humanity disappeared from Earth "several tens of thousands of years ago", that's another thing that may not need to be taken as literal as it looks. In Japanese, the number "ten thousand" is the highest base number represented by a single Kanji character, that being 万 (man). To write any number higher, one must combine 万 with other Kanji that represent other base numbers. For instance, in order to write "four million" in Kanji form, that would be 四百万 (shihyaku-man), combining the Kanji for "four" (四, shi), "hundred" (百, hyaku), and 万, essentially multiplying each value to get 4 x 100 x 10,000 = 4,000,000.
Anyway, when BWII said "several tens of thousands", the spoken dialogue meant it as like "several 万". In some cases like this, when the Japanese use 万 to refer to a number of years and don't specify an exact amount, they don't always necessarily mean "10,000" literally, but more simply just mean "an absurdly long amount of time beyond human comprehension". A similar thing happened in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild when that game spoke of the history of Calamity Ganon as having attacked the kingdom of Hyrule in an event known as the First Calamity that occurred "ten thousand years ago". While the English version of the game gave that exact number of years by translating 万 literally, the Japanese version used 万 in its sometimes vague sense, to illustrate the point how ridiculously long ago that event took place to the point of it feeling more like a legend rather than confirmed history (even though it definitely was since there was plenty of physical evidence of it in the game's present day).
But the point I'm getting at here is, by considering the BWII timeframe of "several 万 years" to be less a literal amount of time and more just a general way of saying "an impossibly long time ago", the timeframe doesn't seem as much at odds with the ridiculous amount of time the Maximals and Predacons would need for the age of the Autobots and Decepticons to have faded away into myth and legend.
A thought also on the whole discussion about the rumors of Ravage being rebuilt, etc: wouldn't this be the Transformer equivalent of Elvis lives(apart form the fact that Ravage actually does)? Or perhaps a better example: how Kamen Riders were treated as an urban myth in Fourze. They quite clearly existed, but no one can confirm the details, so it's treated like Bigfoot and Nessie. I wouldn't be surprised if there were Ravage impersonators unofficially "encouraged" by Ravage himself to keep his little secret while still being able to do wetwork. If he gets spotted or to one of the people he deals with, he's just another impersonator. And if he does reveal himself to someone, who's gonna believe them?
And back on the whole information creep thing, it existed in the toon as well, not just IDW. Besides the Quintessons, remember that Alpha Trion was A3, but that was another fact lost over however long the timeframe was. And to use your example, if the biblical Abraham was around and people did try asking him questions, and all he could do was shrug his shoulders, people would eventually decide he's just a kooky old man, which as I recall is how Alphatrion was looked at. Just because you can ask the questions doesn't mean they can or will answer them, and may even leave more questions than answers when all is said and done. And that assumes they don't pull a Highlander or vampire and just change identities every so often, so people might know a Alpha Trion but they don't know if he's THE Alpha Trion. And he ain't talking(assuming he even knows himself at this point).
And as far as data preservation and backups etc - even the cloud is not immune to that. Backups don't get tested, data gets buried under other data, maybe some of it even gets deliberately destroyed or replaced. The cloud is just a fancy name for someone else's computer, and data there can corrupt or be lost just as easily as someone typing rm -rf / and bumping enter before they finish typing the directory path. There's plenty of stories of technicians accidentally dropping entire massive database tables by accident. Information that seemed useless now might be erased and then people want it later - see for example the lost Dr Who episodes as a real-world example, where the BBC assumed no one would be interested in it at the time and didn't take care to preserve it. Even today, examples of lost media exist, and I don't mean studios deleting completed works for tax writeoffs. Add in a worldwide war that drains the planet of energy to the point that you're basically abandoning it just to survive.... and for that matter in that sort of environment preserving technology documentation is going to have a much higher priority than the census records from the 30000th year of Nova Prime's administration. One bombing run may not take out important records, but thousands or hundreds of thousands of years of wars can certainly do a lot of damage to records over time. A few here and a few there still adds up.
I also don't think that you have to talk about billions of years for creative freedom. Look how fast the Transformers changed once they came in contact with humans in G1. *masters, Pretenders, etc. Look how fast humanty's own tech has changed in the past hundred years compared to the past 1000. Just because things were static for 10 million years doesn't mean they'll be static for the next 10 million, particularly if there's information loss and cataclysmic wars happening for thousands of years during that time period. (ANd you know, now I really want to see a Cybertronian archeologist equivalent, trying to piece things together in that sort of environment!) There's plenty of creative ways to get that creative freedom within merely geologic timeframes or less.
Additionally there's the audience problem. Get too large, and your audience's eyes will glaze over, or they'll just stop caring - just like how people tend to not really grasp the magnitude of difference between modern millionaires and billionaires. Just throwing larger numbers at it, once you pass a certain threshold, isn't going to help.
Again, yes, 300 is too little, but there ought to be a middle ground here to work with that's not reaching the point of galactic timescales.
And back on the whole information creep thing, it existed in the toon as well, not just IDW. Besides the Quintessons, remember that Alpha Trion was A3, but that was another fact lost over however long the timeframe was. And to use your example, if the biblical Abraham was around and people did try asking him questions, and all he could do was shrug his shoulders, people would eventually decide he's just a kooky old man, which as I recall is how Alphatrion was looked at. Just because you can ask the questions doesn't mean they can or will answer them, and may even leave more questions than answers when all is said and done. And that assumes they don't pull a Highlander or vampire and just change identities every so often, so people might know a Alpha Trion but they don't know if he's THE Alpha Trion. And he ain't talking(assuming he even knows himself at this point).
And as far as data preservation and backups etc - even the cloud is not immune to that. Backups don't get tested, data gets buried under other data, maybe some of it even gets deliberately destroyed or replaced. The cloud is just a fancy name for someone else's computer, and data there can corrupt or be lost just as easily as someone typing rm -rf / and bumping enter before they finish typing the directory path. There's plenty of stories of technicians accidentally dropping entire massive database tables by accident. Information that seemed useless now might be erased and then people want it later - see for example the lost Dr Who episodes as a real-world example, where the BBC assumed no one would be interested in it at the time and didn't take care to preserve it. Even today, examples of lost media exist, and I don't mean studios deleting completed works for tax writeoffs. Add in a worldwide war that drains the planet of energy to the point that you're basically abandoning it just to survive.... and for that matter in that sort of environment preserving technology documentation is going to have a much higher priority than the census records from the 30000th year of Nova Prime's administration. One bombing run may not take out important records, but thousands or hundreds of thousands of years of wars can certainly do a lot of damage to records over time. A few here and a few there still adds up.
I also don't think that you have to talk about billions of years for creative freedom. Look how fast the Transformers changed once they came in contact with humans in G1. *masters, Pretenders, etc. Look how fast humanty's own tech has changed in the past hundred years compared to the past 1000. Just because things were static for 10 million years doesn't mean they'll be static for the next 10 million, particularly if there's information loss and cataclysmic wars happening for thousands of years during that time period. (ANd you know, now I really want to see a Cybertronian archeologist equivalent, trying to piece things together in that sort of environment!) There's plenty of creative ways to get that creative freedom within merely geologic timeframes or less.
Additionally there's the audience problem. Get too large, and your audience's eyes will glaze over, or they'll just stop caring - just like how people tend to not really grasp the magnitude of difference between modern millionaires and billionaires. Just throwing larger numbers at it, once you pass a certain threshold, isn't going to help.
Again, yes, 300 is too little, but there ought to be a middle ground here to work with that's not reaching the point of galactic timescales.
I guess what all of this really boils down to is the original absurdity of the G1 comics and cartoon making the Autobots and Decepticons able to live for millions of years in the first place. The whole reason the Ark was stated to crash-land on Earth "four million years ago" was to allow the ship to crash at a point in history long enough before the northwestern United States had any people in it so that the ship would remain completely undisturbed by humanity until Mount St. Hilary erupted in 1984, woke up the Ark's computer, and reactivated the Autobots and Decepticons on board. That backstory didn't need a four-million-year-long time gap to make that happen. All that was needed was a gap of about 12,000 years since it was a little less than that prior to 1984 when any Native Americans in the northwestern U.S. first turned up in that part of the continent. Granted, 12,000 is still a pretty big number, but nowhere nearly as ungodly HUGE as 4 million. It's actually 333.33 times less that amount.
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Also I don't think the kids watching the cartoon would've paid any attention to these numbers anyway
I half expected someone to take the line from a Tripredicus council member.....
"Megatron? I thought we heard the last of that RENEDAGE?"
.....and run with it, making BW Megatron a universe crossing Go-Bot. Would certainly validate his lack of concern for erasing himself from history.
That would require someone caring about Go-Bots in the 90's.
It could have been three hundred, three hundred thousand or three hundred million years and it wouldn't matter since it was just an excuse to get the Autobots and Decepticons out of the picture. Doubly so since there's time travel involved anyway.
The writers could have written it as the Autobots getting bought out by the Dinosaucers after ill-advised real estate investments and the Decepticons disbanding because of Megatron's new girlfriend insisting on performative evil schemes and Beast Wars would play out the same.
The writers could have written it as the Autobots getting bought out by the Dinosaucers after ill-advised real estate investments and the Decepticons disbanding because of Megatron's new girlfriend insisting on performative evil schemes and Beast Wars would play out the same.
The Autobots and Decepticons didn't even factor into the world of the Beast Wars cartoon at all until the fans came up with the idea of the "Great War" mentioned in Episode 1 referring to the Autobot/Decepticon war of G1. As mentioned, Bob Forward originally just threw in those two words to say that something happened in the past to cause the Maximals and Predacons to be at odds with each other, and then the fans took that idea and applied it to the G1 war.
Those first two episodes of Beast Wars aired months before the rest of the series and featured no references to anything from G1 besides the very basic concepts of Cybertron and energon (the latter of which Beast Wars even changed to be drastically different from how it was portrayed in the G1 fiction).
Those first two episodes initially presented Beast Wars as a full hard reboot, but the fandom of the time didn't like that idea (among, well, other things), and sought to connect it to what had come before and what they were familiar with, instead of allowing Beast Wars to stand on its own and grow by its own merits, all because the fandom was starving for more G1 and didn't want something completely new and different.
Even when Armada first came out were there still some lingering attempts to connect it, too, back to G1, rather than just accepting the concept of it being a reboot. The same could have nearly been the case for Beast Wars if not for the G1-starved fandom. But of course, we did get BW Season 2 out of it, so some good (nay, downright excellence) did come out of it.
On another note, all this makes me realize we really need us a proper Beast Wars thread.
I was gonna say "At the time?" Becuase the fandom, still generally doesn't like it; its just gotten more accepted; and I think that's largely due to the multiversal BS the Funpub did which basically ties all series togeather, into basically being reflections of G1.
Sure, but you watched both, so you had the prior context of G1 to be able to connect the "Great War" mention in BW Episode 1 to G1, like the rest of the established fandom at the time did. But in my case, I started with Beast Wars as a kid, and had zero prior familiarity with any of G1 or G2 at the time. And I wasn't alone in that case, as many of my peers who watched Beast Wars only ever knew of the Autobots and Decepticons from what the Beast Wars cartoon told us about them (and through Machine Wars, of course), having likewise had no prior experience or familiarity with the Transformers brand (we were of the generation whose earliest childhood powerhouse brands were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers). To us, the "Great War" mentioned in Beast Wars's first episode didn't initially have that specific G1-related meaning until further episodes of Beast Wars later told us that it did.
You missed the "half-the-size" part. I mean, you can compare anything to anything I suppose but is there much value in it? Would you compare Masterpiece Prime to Core Prime? SURPRISE- one is way cheaper than the other!
And so we're not carrying on the convo in two different threads...
But then you're buying them for different reasons. If you want a smaller Guardian Robot, then naturally, you wouldn't buy the big one (and yes you'd expect to pay less for it). But if you want a BIG Guardian Robot, how will one half the size (regardless of price) do you any good? "Yay, I only spent $80 on the one I didn't want!"
As I'm typing I'm trying to think why I even care about this, but I realized your presentation of the information came across as... rude? I guess? It wasn't "Here's Takara's new Guardian Robot. And don't forget there are some cool smaller 3P version out there too!" It's, "Sucky Takara is trying to rob you with this hunk of junk, only an idiot would buy it instead of these!" Maybe that wasn't your intention, and sorry for reading it that way. But the basic critique still stands, you're comparing two things with only superficial similarities.
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If the creators had bothered to give it another name, that'd be a different story, but they didn't, so might as well use the fan canon.
To be fair, design wise Newage's stuff is way more comparable to Masterpiece than to Core.
Right? However, being cheap, I opted for Pangu's version. I'm going to keep my eye out for the American/Hasbro Legacy version but the Takara version is waaay too expensive to bother with.
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So how about that TF legacy toyline?
I saw that Australia has Powerlinx Hotshot already!
I saw that Australia has Powerlinx Hotshot already!