I could stand it (and even enjoy/laugh at parts of it) because of how it was only for those few minutes of the movie. But an entire movie's worth of it? Yeah, that would have felt like a repeat of ROTF.
We really don't need a repeat of ROTF.
RIP Peter Cullen
- Thread starter LordGigaIce
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We really don't need a repeat of ROTF.
Just to add to this...nerds in general (and make no mistake I'm including myself in this because I'm about to kvetch about stuff I've been very guilty of) need to get over the idea that if they don't like a piece of fiction the creator must be the worst person imaginable.
I'm not going to go full "separate the art from the artist" because THAT segues into a lot of real life issues that can get very serious really quickly, and I'm not going to scold anyone for not wanting to financially support terrible people with terrible agendas.
I will say, though, that if a movie isn't to your liking that's not a sign that the director is terrible. Apparently Michael Bay, at thirteen, used the bar mitzvah gift money he'd gotten to donate to the Humane Society. Hell. When I was thirteen? I spent that on video games, toys, and an expensive pair of sunglasses I thought made me the coolest guy around (I so wasn't).
I think The Island is a piece of crap that rips off far better films with the same premise and I think Pearl Harbour is a poor attempt to cash in on the "historic tragedy married with a love story" genre Titanic kicked off, but I'm not gonna bash Bay as a person for those missteps and creative failings.
We all love Peter Cullen and what he meant to us as fans of Transformers. We're all sad he's gone, and deeply appreciative for his career. I dare say no one here will disagree with me when I say no one had a better understanding of who Optimus was as a character than him. That he felt so committed to a character that only existed to sell toys speaks to how much Optimus meant to people, and Peter specifically.
And clearly he and Michael Bay had some disagreements on how Optimus should be, but that happens all the time. Rian Johnson and Mark Hamill had widely different views on who Luke Skywalker should be in Episode VIII, but they worked that out and got the job done because they're professionals. Like Bay and Cullen did.
I can't speak on how that would have worked as a full length feature, because it would just be idle speculation.I could stand it (and even enjoy/laugh at parts of it) because of how it was only for those few minutes of the movie. But an entire movie's worth of it? Yeah, that would have felt like a repeat of ROTF.
We really don't need a repeat of ROTF.
That being said, RotF's suckitude was born out of very specific circumstances, namely a writer's strike. Bay just started filming action sequences while writers couldn't actually work on the movie, just so it wouldn't fall behind schedule. Then those writers, once the strike ended, had to write a movie on a massively reduced timetable and do it in a way that connected as much of the action footage Bay had already filmed as possible together. The same thing happened with the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace. Almost the same set of issues. And like RotF, QoS sucks majorly.
That is to say that I don't think a full length Bay King Arthur x Transformers movie would just be another RotF. Even if he kept Drunk Merlin front and centre. Just using "RotF" as a shorthand to dunk on the live action Transformers movies ignores the very specific set of circumstances that led to it being as bad as it was.
I would advise giving it a second watch. It really does well when you get to watch it as a series and not a weekly TV show. Seeing the multi-episode plots all resolve at once rather than weekly, might help you enjoy it more.
I honestly would recommend that you watch Armada again too, but for the opposite reason.
That is certainly true.
people really praise prime as the best transformers series? the same series that was too afraid to take serious risks and shake up the status quo? where basically all the autobots didn't change at all throughout the series? that prime? i'm pretty sure by the end the only autobots that have changed as characters are arcee and ratchet.
feel like i'm taking crazy pills, that damn show is like thoroughly in the average tier as far as i'm concerned.
feel like i'm taking crazy pills, that damn show is like thoroughly in the average tier as far as i'm concerned.
Watching it in Japanese is a much less suffering experience.I honestly would recommend that you watch Armada again too, but for the opposite reason.
I rewatched Armada more recently than Prime, and I had a great time. It's a flawed show, but it's a fun show. And I don't think any TF fiction has managed to do Unicron as well as the back half of Armada did. Yes, including the '86 movie. Armada is the closest Unicron gets to being a Lovecraftian elder god cosmic horror, and I'm there for it. Much better than what Prime did with the character, in my opinion.I honestly would recommend that you watch Armada again too, but for the opposite reason.
I'm not against """prestige""" storytelling with Transformers, but I think the franchise reaches those heights when it just tries to tell a good story. Beast Wars could get crass at times, and kinda dumb if we're being honest, but its high points work because it was just very well written.
With Prime it seemed like they were aiming for epicness from the start, and despite aspiring to that, they never managed to make it work for a variety of reasons. Again, in my opinion.
Meanwhile the three shows I have at the top of my list, Armada, Victory, and Masterforce, just embrace being super robot anime. They're not trying to be a prestige tv product, they're just trying to be a fun spectacle and they mostly succeed.
Also I will reiterate that I think Armada and Cybertron had the most relatable human kid characters in the franchise. Sari in Animated is right there too. Not Kicker though. Kicker can go sit in the corner.
It's always helpful to remember that art, even populist art, is subjective and there are precious few truly unquestionable facts.
That's more or less my opinion on it. And I can't blame Cullen for Optimus' listless performance because he was playing the character in other projects around that time that were full of energy... Prime's handling of Optimus just wasn't that interesting.
That's certainly fair. I don't wanna speculate on how a feature length Bay Arthurian Transformers movie would go because of how little we have to go on. It would be pure speculation...
... but I know I greatly enjoyed the opening to TLK as both a Transformers fan and a fan of Arthurian mythology and wouldn't mind the experiment being expanded upon.
I feel that it's better than any other TF show before or since. It also has the distinction of earning an Emmy in 2012 and nominated in four other categories, which no other TF fiction has ever done.
As for the status Quo, in the 1st episode, an Autobot dies. Megatron gets blown up shortly in the series, and Starscream takes over for a while. Then Megatron revives and takes over and Starscream is on the run. Also, its beena while since I have seen it, but off the top of my head three Decepticons die and a fourth gets zombiefied, and that is before the finale where Megatron dies, or the follow up film where Starscream dies. Speaking of Starscream, we get character growth where the treacherous bot actually sees what his ambitions cost him and rejoins the Cons as a loyal bot. Heck, Megatron even kills a Con to save Starscream in one of the most epic moments of all TF media. We get the massive plot twist that Earth was Unicron that the last Bay film stole and went nowhere with.
Also, Optimus doesn't grow, as he is Optimus Prime and his character is kind of set at its high bar. That is pretty much how every Optimus Prine is in every cartoon. So that leaves Arcee, Ratchet, Bumblebee, and Bulkhead as the regular Autobots, not counting the two later additions or Cliffjumper from episode 1. Half of those you admit get character growth. Bumblebee has a ton of development from the start by the end of the show and the start of the RID series. Which is a hard thing to do considering that Bumblebee doesn't talk until the end, just makes these weird noises. I still would rank the scene where he says his first words as one of the best moments in TF fiction. I honestly don't remember much about Bulkhead, other than they kept the space bridge expertise for him from Animated.
To my mind, TF Prime seemed to want epicness as an aesthetic affectation more than anything, and didn't really put much toward actually building it and executing it. It's like there was a checklist: dire, serious tone. Lengthy detente and small squads -- a tight bunch of Autobots and a handful of individually immensely threatening Receptions (and lots of filler Steves) which conveniently lines up with practical constraints. Threats treated as huge. Daaahhrrrk Energon, Journey to the Unicron at the center of the Earth, Predaking. Lots and lots and lots of plot devices that could turn the tide. Plenty of key moments treated as huge, in the moment.
But it never actually BECAME epic because the giant threats would show up with very little real build for their own multiparter and then generally fall down the list of priorities. (To be fair to TLK, they also stole "not doing much with Earth=Unicron" from here.) The moments struggled to connect. An episodic formula is fine (albeit not as easy to build into an epic arc), but they didn't really use it well and while there was TALK of stakes, it never really FELT like the stakes were going any higher.
I don't know. Maybe if I gave it a sit-down run through, as opposed to the "whenever we could find a decent download and/or time to watch it after other stuff" of the period, a season would feel like a proper running season. But back then it never felt like you missed anything, until a Big Epic Multiparter would show up and pretend that you had, mostly unearned.
It's kind of like what you'd expect if the goal were to create something epic from a checklist or blueprint, rather than just write something meaningful that is received and valued like an epic by the people who should get to decide whether to call it one. No true king and all that.
It's a shame because it was also kind of a dream voice cast (although I wish Richardson had a different voice for Bulkhead than his usual Gruff Guy Voice; he's capable of a lot). But at least they really shone in the moment-to-moment stuff.
DOTM is so close to being a great Transformers story. The conflict between Optimus and Sentinel is such good stuff. Rebuilding Cybertron is a very Prime thing to do. But saving their new home is the Optimus Prime thing to do.
It's especially impressive given his "Cut! That was perfect." approach. He does not spend all day fiddling with the lights before filming a gazillion takes of a simple snippet of closeup dialog, but his movies still look like money. He's either a genius, or a lot of people in Hollywood are pretending there's more secret science to their jobs than there really is to justify their billable hours.
If you play enough tabletop, you'll know that there are infinite stories you can get out of drunk Merlin.
Beast Wars and Rescue Bots both won Emmys as well.
Wow, such a big shift in the status quo we only got to see mere minutes of, and coming before the actual storyline even kicks off.
Exactly how it was in the first episode before Megs showed up.
Starscream going on the run? Neat! Megatron taking over again? Tuesday.
Only Dreadwing's death felt meaningful since he had a fully fleshed out character arc with lasting consequences (e.g. - his arc led to the Autobots acquiring the Forge of Solus Prime). Skyquake was treated like disposable fodder, Hardshell even moreso, and Breakdown's death destroyed any potential his own character arc could have had, making him feel like a waste of a character.
Which nothing of value was done with (whether you're referred to either Skyquake, Cylas, or Airachnid).
The main villain dying in the finale? How groundbreaking.
This one you'll get no argument about. Starscream was one of the best, legitimately good things TF: Prime did in its entire run. We just wish other characters had gotten as much of an arc as he did.
And after that reveal, once Unicron is put back to sleep, the show went nowhere with it, either. Taking him out of the Earth in the epilogue movie is the opposite since it removes the very concept of Unicron being inside the Earth from the equation altogether, begging the question of why (besides mere shock value) it was done in the first place if it was only a thing to be explore for just 4 out of 68 episodes.
Which means, if he's not going to grow, then he has to be written as someone we want to enjoy as he is in his current state all the time. What is there to enjoy about a stoic, platitude pontificator who never shows any personal likes or interests of his own besides "the sanctity of all life in existence" that ought to also apply for every single other good guy as the baseline without even saying, or any personal issues or insecurities that viewers can relate to and sympathize with, or ever wants to just hang out with any of his fellow Autobots and just enjoy their company during any downtime? Even Jesus wasn't so burdened with the weight of the world on his shoulders as to not be able or willing to attend parties or dinners or simply enjoy spending time with his fellow man.
Example?
(I'll give you RID since that was his show, but I mean in Prime)
They did not.
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You know, that one is on me for not knowing about the Beast Wars Emmy. To be fair it was when I was 16, when the internet was accessed using AOL floppy disks. As for the other show, I have honestly never even seen an episode of Recue Bots, but I know that a bunch of you folks like it. So at least this means that Beast Wars, Prime, and Rescue Bots are the Emmy winning series in our franchise.
It set a tone for the series that no one was safe. Characters didn't just die off screen during season breaks like Beast Wars. Scheming and plotting had real consequences in this show unlike every other TF show (Maybe other than animated) that gets reset at the end of the episode. And more than one character was scheming and plotting here, not just the token Starscream character.
Now he had full command of the Decepticons, not just his little group. He was the leader of them all after that. Also, that rmeinds me of the awesome yet mute version of Soundwave that we got from this show.
Look, you can't dismiss a change to the status Quo just because it's a Status Quo that you have seen before. It's still something different for the show.
And yet more character deaths, that led to change of the status quo and affected surviving characters. Breakdown's death was especially impactful given what happened to his body and his friend. Leading his friend to a path where he would eventually join the Autobots. Also, the word friend should be in quotation marks here.
Lots to choose from there. I always hoped that we would get to have a follow up episode with Airachnid and her forces.
Yeah, like they did in G1 and Beast Wars, oh wait. Seriously though, this show had the lugnuts to kill off the main villain and basically send him to Cybertronian hell. Not all the TF shows do that.
Ehh, they killed him in the film. It wasn't until they needed to bring him back in RID that he was saved.
Glad that we can agree on that.
I will admit that I wished that they revisited that too, but what were they going to do about it? I mean Earth's core is Unicron. Kind of limits the story potential. Removing him would doom the planet. They all just kind of hoped that he would stay asleep and let him lie there. The only thing that I could think of would be that he would start spawning monsters for them to battle, or maybe influencing some of the Bots and Cons, but what could you do with that? Unicron is just a big monster that historically takes a matrix/macguffin to beat.
To be honest, I don't remember him being such a stick in the mud that you folks do. He was just Optimus Prime to me. Plus he was leading a small team to fight a war on an alien world that they were losing and had already destroyed their home planet. Kind of hard to be jolly or have hobbies in that situation. If you and 12 other people are fighting on an alien world against a bunch of facists that have already blown up earth, with both sides being all that is left of Humanity, you wouldn't want to go dancing either.
To be honest I was kind of using RID for that one, as we just have him as a scout in Prime whirling about, using his pet human to translate for him. It's not until the epic finale that we get a chance to actually hear him talk. Kind of hard to have any character before he can speak, especially when Ernie Hudson, Peter Cullen, Frank Welker, and Jeffery Combs are on the show.
You know, I thought that they did, but I can't remember any specific reference where they did.
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Intrigued by the implication that Optimus Prime's package bio isn't fiction.
Tell that to Bulkhead. He came the closest to being the only other Autobot killed off mid-series with a meaningful sacrifice that would have been a very emotional and bold move for the show to go through with, but the show instead chickened out and went from the end of one episode showing him in a near-death state to the very next episode showing him already up and about struggling to get his legs working again.
They even failed to follow up on Agent Fowler asking the Autobots to let him know if anything changes about Bulkhead's condition, as he had bonded with Bulkhead in the previous episode and his little insistence of "I mean it," when asking to be kept apprised of Bulkhead's status was really touching. Yet, the show just skips past all of that like it was nothing.
We saw Optimus get blown up in the Season 1 finale, the Season 2 opener revealed that neither Tarantulas nor Inferno died in the Season 1 finale, we saw Terrorsaur and Scorponok plummet to their deaths in lava, and the Season 3 opener showed that no one but Ravage died in the Season 2 finale (and we saw him get blown up before and then saw his decapitated head get knocked off a cliff into water).
His little group was the extent of Decepticons we saw in the show. There weren't any other major Decepticon factions shown anywhere outside of his little cadre aboard the Nemesis.
Megatron being in charge was the show's standard status quo for the Decepticons. It's how the Decepticons were depicted for the show's majority. Him not being in charge was the exception to the norm and a brief one that only lasted for nine episodes of the first season. It would have been more notable if he had been absent for the whole season, but they clearly wanted to do Unicron's return for the finale instead of Megatron's return (and, in hindsight, it's probably for the better that they didn't make it about Megatron's return since Animated already did that same plot with its first season keeping Megatron out of commission until its own season finale).
No one cared about Hardshell's death. Only Dreadwing cared about Skyquake's death, yet it still took over an entire season for his death to matter, with no one giving a darn about his death for the entire first season. As for Breakdown...
Breakdown's death was felt by no one when it happened. No shock from Bulkhead that he lost his rival. No motivation for revenge from Knock Out that he lost his pal. And when Silas later gets put into his body and becomes Cylas, everyone is mostly appalled by the ghoulishness of Cylas's nature rather than the loss of Breakdown, personally. And it was only then, a whole twelve episodes after Breakdown was killed off, that Knock Out finally expressed any reason concern over Breakdown's death, but mainly because of Breakdown's body being used in such a disturbing manner, rather than because the mere fact that Breakdown died. The show carried on without him as a character as though he was just a disposable mook.
Knock Out joined the Autobots because he was an opportunist. It was out of self-preservation.
They kept writing her out of the show because Gina Torres was too expensive for them to keep her on regularly. Same with their killing off Breakdown early into Season 2 because of Adam Baldwin likewise being too expensive.
Beast Machines, Armada, Energon, Cybertron, and several of the Japanese-only shows all say "Hi."
Only to immediately bring him back to life in the epilogue. So, they couldn't even commit to that previous ending for the character.
They didn't show him dying. The last we see is of him being cornered by the Predacons and whimpering in fear of them before they even do anything to him.
Honestly, Starscream, Dreadwing, and Smokescreen had the best (or even, the only) character arcs of the series, and it really makes me wish other characters had gotten anywhere near the same treatment as they did. And while Knock Out didn't go through an arc, he was at least easily as entertaining as Starscream was due to his very hammy personality that always made him a joy to watch. He and Starscream played off each other way better than Knock Out and Breakdown ever did. That bonding moment the two had in the Season 3 zombie episode was really well done, despite it also trying to make light of the fact that it was a scene of two Decepticons expressing respect and admiration for each other as though Decepticons can't be friends with each other. Like, come on, guys, this was good scene. Don't ruin it because you're afraid of coming off as buds. And while his screentime was brief, once he started talking they made the most they could out of Predaking being a cool character.
But everyone else? Done dirty by comparison.
At the very least, they could have given us an episode where the Autobots discuss the situation and try to come up with options over how to deal with the situation now that they know Unicron is inside the Earth and how dangerous it is for him to be left down there even if he's still asleep. Like, have someone suggest attempting to carefully excavate and extract all the Dark Energon from the Earth, even if that suggestion were to get shot down for reasons of impracticality. Like, have Bulkhead or Jack or Raf suggest it and then have Ratchet or Fowler explain why it would be too difficult to do so. Then have Optimus say they will continue to consider their options going forward even if nothing can be done about it right now.
Then, a few episodes later, have a brief scene where Ratchet is at the computer trying to do further research looking into the situation with Unicron still inside the Earth. Optimus could come by, ask what he's doing, and when Ratchet explains what he's doing and says he's still not any closer to finding a solution than before, Optimus could encourage him to keep at it and not give up, before the scene switches to focusing on the main plot of the episode. And even if nothing could be done about it in the long run, little asides like these could have gone a long way to making the revelation of Unicron being inside the Earth feel more consequential. But instead, the show immediately switches gears to focusing on scavenger hunts for random McGuffins. Riveting.
Tell that to the epilogue movie where he just gets out on his own with no consequences to the Earth.
Just like in the first two seasons of the G1 cartoon. (Only there his team was a little bigger.)
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The discourse really needs to evolve to understand the spread of options that lies between "great" and "done dirty".
The package bios all totes happened. The show and comics were "based on a true story."
as @Sabrblade already said: yeah an autobot we only got to see for a few minutes before being killed off to make audiences go 'WOW HOLY jive CHARACTERS WILL DIE IN THIS CARTOON' (and then how many other autobots die without getting resurrected?)
if they actually cared, they would've had cliffjumper actually be a character for more than like 5 minutes in the show. maybe for the whole first season or half of the season. have him be a character who actually develops and changes as the season goes on, so that way his death is actually 'holy jive they killed off one of the main characters of this cartoon' not just 'they killed him off in episode 1'
Prime's budget was already nuts. Imagine if they had to pay for The Rock for half a season.
The original plan actually was for him to die at the end of the first season. And for him to be Smokescreen instead of Cliffjumper.
But, gotta have that Gritty n' Matureâ„¢ shock factor upfront to show "This ain't yo' Daddy's Transformers!"
Also made worse by Starscream refusing to shut up about that ONE time he snuffed out that ONE Autobot, and never did so again despite proving that he is fully capable of doing so.