I don’t really care how or if it’s explained. All I know is that it’s distracting. It’s like seeing the same actor play different characters in the same movie and not in the Mike Myers or Eddy Murphy way.
The jankiness of TF lore: a feature, not a bug
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I was out on Aligned very early on for that reason. WfC the game was clearly trying to be a 2010s "mature" prequel to G1, but it got shoehorned into Aligned. And then the comic adaptation of the game got some details wrong. And then the book Exodus told an entirely distinct version of that story that was irreconcilable.
And then the Prime show came along, and while the show certainly did try I felt it was just... sauceless. Which is how I felt when I read the CoP. The story and the art was... ok... just bland.
And that's how I view Aligned. Bland and directionless. The most interesting part of it seems to be Rescue Bots, and that wasn't even planned on being part of it.
Attempting to wrangle different projects from different creatives and force them into one coherent continuity just seems like a bad idea. I mean... I guess it's a nice homage to G1, but that was the 80s when no one knew what they had or what they were doing. Aligned was designed and pitched as a new unified continuity for everything, and it ended up disjointed anyway. And when your first few projects can't even line up... well...
Same. And being the JG1 fan I am, it pissed me off when Aligned's terminology made its way into the official subs of the JG1 shows that came out during Aligned's heyday.
I think a lot of it is a loss of what to do, exactly. The old model of a huge blitz behind a new tv show doesn't work because cable is less and less common and streaming is so fractured. Where do you put a new show? They had the WfC trilogy on Netflix, but Netflix just up and said no to a Legacy show, despite Hasbro getting decently far into development on one. "I donno just put it on YouTube?" seems to be the play and I guess we'll see how that works with Cyberworld.
The movies seemed like a decent alternative but they've not done well lately so... who knows? The most consistent western media we have these days is the Skybound comics and Cyberworld on YouTube. There's talk that Skybound's stuff is going to be adapted into a show, and I guess we'll see how that does? Invincible took off, and if the same tv people are working on this (as was the rumour) maybe there's something there?
But yeah... I don't blame Hasbro's lack of ambition these days when it comes to lore because there's no real avenue for it. I'd love to see them just let some of the nerds on staff go to town on package bios and the like, but that's always been tricky anyway with various regions' language laws and the like.
True enough, but Masterforce was thirty-seven years ago. It wasn't the most elegant solution, or even the preferable solution, but at this point it is what it is. Ginrai is his own thing, and he looks like Optimus. You're not putting that toothpaste back in the tube nearly forty years later.
I've been meaning to actually watch Headmasters for precisely that reason (that, and the fun factor of the toy commercial continuing I mentioned above). We get a little bit more of Rodimus in charge, even though he... isn't even prominent in the opening credits. "Hi I'm here oh sorry Chromedome, please, take center stage". (I'm aware of why, we've been talking about it.) It's unfortunate that his tenure also happens to be when Cybertron gets blowed up. I'm sure there's nuance there, hence wanting to watch this, but that's still a hell of a thing to have on your resume.
There's just something about that time. Brand still buoyed a bit by AOE, despite itself, and before the settling in of the doldrums with TLK. Lots of fun flexing from Takara with unique takes on the lines between Legends, Arms Micron, Go, and Adventure, before going under for the dreary brand unification period. (I am still mulling over whether to approach tracking down the unique redecos etc I dont have from Lost Age and Adventure, some fun stuff there that I REALLY wish HasTak would get back to.) Hasbro was still turning out limited but decent toys for the show, although that started going down the "largely the same handful of characters and plenty of package refreshes forever" road that Cyberverse -- also a very diversely populated show -- would later suffer from. (Cyberverse's main line pre-Deluxes and barring a few exceptions would drift out of my "I can still appreciate this" range, and Cyberworld is, well, as discussed.)
But the show was REFRESHING. It was bright and colorful and everyone had a personality (sometimes gratingly so). Very interesting new era for lore, and it seemed much more free of the narrative weights placed on the preceding series. Great voice acting, very nice designs. I wish it had gotten half the toy attention Prime got. (And a similarly great theme.)
I haven't watched a lot of Rescue Bots (I did see the pilot, which was as expected), but I get the sense that there's a lot of appeal to it as well. Maybe I'll pick a random in-the-middle episode and jump in cold. That didn't work out well with Cyberverse, but maybe there'll be more here.
Prime as a show was full of things I wanted to like. I think it's the last regular-programming run that had Peter Cullen and Frank Welker as ongoing Op/Megs? If nothing else, the show is worth watching for them, but there are other great VA performances (some too expensive to keep around long, alas). Combs edges Burton out as my favorite Ratchet. I still prefer ***erbakke over Richardson for Bulkhead, but the pairing WAS good for this show; I just wish Richardson had used something other than his default voice (and he was in other projects with mostly the same voice at this time). Montano is a solid Arcee. North's Smokescreen made me wish they'd saved him for a Hot Rod. Then they brought in Michael Ironside for Ultra Magnus, which was a great fit. (Let's not discuss Bumblebee, who may have the worst execution of Radio Voice here ever.) Soundwave's lack of voice acting (for the most part) was also deftly handled. And this is one of my favorite Steve Blum roles. I don't think any of the shows since have had this good a voice cast (but RID2015 does approach, since that seems to be the last time they had sizeable budgets for that sort of thing). [Oh, wait, the Machinima shows had some pretty interesting names and some BIG gets. But they're the Machinima shows, and I tapped right out after Combiner Wars.]
But the show was kind of a slog to get behind, seemed insistent on not really going anywhere (and then trying to make up for lost time with big lore dumps and Please Get Excited for This??? finales before resuming the nothing), and just generally dour. It;'s a very "clippable" show, with plenty of great sequences and great moments and lavish cinematography, but I think it's also "clippable" out of necessity -- because it's so hard to invest in sitting through the whole thing. It's very much the opposite of RID2015 in that regard -- while the latter did also have its repetitive areas, its lower-stakes, con-of-the-week formula made its episodic nature a lot more entertaining than the seemingly-interminable stalemate situation that lingered in Prime.
I've spoken before about my surprisingly deep fondness for RID2015 and Transformers Adventure (and a little bit of Arms Micron), akin to my fondness for the Unicron Trilogy (except this time the show wasn't riddled with issues).
There's just something about that time. Brand still buoyed a bit by AOE, despite itself, and before the settling in of the doldrums with TLK. Lots of fun flexing from Takara with unique takes on the lines between Legends, Arms Micron, Go, and Adventure, before going under for the dreary brand unification period. (I am still mulling over whether to approach tracking down the unique redecos etc I dont have from Lost Age and Adventure, some fun stuff there that I REALLY wish HasTak would get back to.) Hasbro was still turning out limited but decent toys for the show, although that started going down the "largely the same handful of characters and plenty of package refreshes forever" road that Cyberverse -- also a very diversely populated show -- would later suffer from. (Cyberverse's main line pre-Deluxes and barring a few exceptions would drift out of my "I can still appreciate this" range, and Cyberworld is, well, as discussed.)
But the show was REFRESHING. It was bright and colorful and everyone had a personality (sometimes gratingly so). Very interesting new era for lore, and it seemed much more free of the narrative weights placed on the preceding series. Great voice acting, very nice designs. I wish it had gotten half the toy attention Prime got. (And a similarly great theme.)
I haven't watched a lot of Rescue Bots (I did see the pilot, which was as expected), but I get the sense that there's a lot of appeal to it as well. Maybe I'll pick a random in-the-middle episode and jump in cold. That didn't work out well with Cyberverse, but maybe there'll be more here.
Prime as a show was full of things I wanted to like. I think it's the last regular-programming run that had Peter Cullen and Frank Welker as ongoing Op/Megs? If nothing else, the show is worth watching for them, but there are other great VA performances (some too expensive to keep around long, alas). Combs edges Burton out as my favorite Ratchet. I still prefer ***erbakke over Richardson for Bulkhead, but the pairing WAS good for this show; I just wish Richardson had used something other than his default voice (and he was in other projects with mostly the same voice at this time). Montano is a solid Arcee. North's Smokescreen made me wish they'd saved him for a Hot Rod. Then they brought in Michael Ironside for Ultra Magnus, which was a great fit. (Let's not discuss Bumblebee, who may have the worst execution of Radio Voice here ever.) Soundwave's lack of voice acting (for the most part) was also deftly handled. And this is one of my favorite Steve Blum roles. I don't think any of the shows since have had this good a voice cast (but RID2015 does approach, since that seems to be the last time they had sizeable budgets for that sort of thing). [Oh, wait, the Machinima shows had some pretty interesting names and some BIG gets. But they're the Machinima shows, and I tapped right out after Combiner Wars.]
But the show was kind of a slog to get behind, seemed insistent on not really going anywhere (and then trying to make up for lost time with big lore dumps and Please Get Excited for This??? finales before resuming the nothing), and just generally dour. It;'s a very "clippable" show, with plenty of great sequences and great moments and lavish cinematography, but I think it's also "clippable" out of necessity -- because it's so hard to invest in sitting through the whole thing. It's very much the opposite of RID2015 in that regard -- while the latter did also have its repetitive areas, its lower-stakes, con-of-the-week formula made its episodic nature a lot more entertaining than the seemingly-interminable stalemate situation that lingered in Prime.
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Recent discussions I've had elsewhere about Aligned made me realize that the whole things seemed to come about not just in response to the runaway commercial success of the 2007 movie, but also from a desire by Hasbro to eat from the same kind of "expanded universe" pie that Star Wars had going on at the time, with TF: Prime feeling like it was created to directly compete with Star Wars's then-shiny-new primetime animated series, The Clone Wars, what with all the marketing hype from Hasbro about TF: Prime being "rightfully huge", "epic", and meant to run "for the next ten years!" (granted, this was all Hasbro, not the actual people making the show, who were hoping they could at least get to a third season by the end of it all).
The WFC comic one-shot was a near-direct adaptation of Chapters 12-15 of Exodus, trimming down some of the fat in those book chapters. The part of Exodus that the game corresponds to are the book's second half.
Funny thing about those beeps and boops is that they were placed over actual recorded dialogue for Bee that was spoken by, of all people, Frank Welker.
I misread that at first but I'm entirely convinced that Frank would make AMAZING bleeps and bloops.
I thought they said "rightfully huge" in reference to the Thirteen themselves (meaning they thought it appropriate for the original Transformers to be "impressive" instead of Just Some Prototypes/Ancestors like the first Transformers realistically and logically should be), not the scope of Transformers: Prime (which, of course, did try very hard to be "epic")
It was used for both.
BotCon 2010 - Hasbro Studios Panel - Bucket Head is Back!
We are live at the BotCon 2010 Hasbro Studios Panel. We will be giving you a minute-by-minute account of the events going on here, so be sure to tune in! Panel has ended. Check out the full report now.
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BotCon 2010 - Hasbro Designers Panel!
We are here for the Hasbro Designers Panel on the final day of BotCon 2010. This has been billed as the second half of the reveal, so get re
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It all reminds me of attempts to reinvent English orthography so it corresponds to pronunciation with consistent rules in the way that most other languages do. Pretty quickly big compromises have to be made, the question of which accent/dialect you're ultimately favoring looms large, and the end result will be something that's far enough removed from what people are used to that it'll be an uphill battle to get them to care.
I mentioned earlier that one of my favorite books is The Silmarillion. When I first read it, it frequently made me go "Ohhhhh!" Reading The Covenant of Primus made me go "Oh."
Speaking of fantasy series, when I was young and foolish I tried reading The Wheel of Time. One of the things that hooked me early was how vast its world was and how little the main characters knew about it. In addition to the action and character development, there was the thrill of learning the lore in tantalizing drips along with the protagonists. Then about halfway through, the drips kind of stopped. I wondered why, and then I discovered the existence of this, which had come out right about the time the novels had stopped revealing lore. I of course read it, but it gave me none of the thrill of discovery I'd experienced before. It felt like the difference between being a jungle cat catching prey in the wild and being given a slab of meat in a zoo.
Package bios! I'd called Hasbro "apathetic" when it comes to worldbuilding, but really that's about long-term cultivation. I give them all the credit in the world for the above-and-beyond investment in upfront worldbuilding they put into the brand from day one. They could've just licensed the Japanese toys and hoped they would sell on physical coolness alone. But there was a reason I would lose myself in the toy aisle poring over every TF on the shelves and not GoBots. Those giant battle scenes, the posed character portraits, the bios and tech specs, then the mail-order inserts they came with if you actually got to take one home... Everything was rich with story. And no, none of it quite lined up with the cartoon or the comic or the storybooks or anything, but every crack was a foothold for imagination.
So I love it when Hasbro invests in that sort of thing in the modern day, and yeah, it's a shame the concessions that localization demands.
With Welker's all-time best Megatron performance, as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, as I was watching it I kept thinking, this is so well-crafted, all the ingredients are top-notch... so why does it feel like less than the sum of its parts? Sunbow was a hot mess in comparison, but at least one thing you couldn't say about it was that it was lifeless.
Hahaha, I guess that's why you don't see much Oliver Twist talk on this board.
Add to this the fact that several of the creators behind those things were also wiki editors. I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if that were a factor in something I noticed during the heyday of "multiversal singularities" and "universal streams": Articles would make uncited claims about the nature and instances of both which I never saw questioned in all the arguments about them. Like, what it actually meant to be a singularity and who was one, and how streams corresponded to real-world media and what that meant about relationships between them, were as far as I could tell not very well attested in the fiction itself, but were stated and accepted as fact in the wiki. Even citations to creator statements were thin. I didn't have it in me to pore through edit histories to figure out who'd written what or to question the community about it. But it felt of a piece with the incestuous loop you're talking about.
I'm noticing myself basically saying I want to turn the world back to the '90s and freeze it. But the fact is, TF is a brand that runs on narrative media and has an audience that includes a loyal fanbase that lives for lore. Of course HasTak want to capitalize on that. Pumping out new, unrelated series works too, but that's more for another part of the audience. If somebody died and made me King Hasbro, how would I make product that appeals to the lore-hound contingent without creating some variation on the kind of thing I've been complaining about?
Prime was like the Star Wars Prequels or the Snyder DC movies. You can clip scenes and toss them up on TikTok and they look epic and awesome, but the product as a whole never knew how to make those scenes feel earned or otherwise have value.
Prime specifically was just kinda dull. Even aesthetically. It was a show that had a lot of money and passion behind its visuals, but the look of the thing was just the Platonic ideal of lifeless 2010s blandness. The same thing applies to the CoP's designs by the way. That era's whole aesthetic was just visual grey sludge.
Story did it no favours either. Season two was just a prolonged treasure hunt that would put the first half of Armada to shame, and everything just seemed built around what the kids call "hype moments and aura."
Lots of speechifying leading up to a confrontation (usually between Prime and Megs) accompanied by Bayverse-lite music that was meant to feel epic... but it all felt like it was trying too hard or that it was unearned.
Prime himself was a big part of this. I don't blame Cullen, because I never found his voice to be the issue. No, the issue was that the writers of that show fell into the trap of thinking 1986 movie Optimus WAS G1 Optimus, and they went from there. Their mandates that Optimus wouldn't use contractions and "Primes don't party" turned Optimus into a boring trailer line machine.
Compare this with G1 S1 and S2 Optimus who played basketball, trash talked Megatron, called Astrotrain and Blitzwing "boobies," and lost his temper when Grapple and Hoist made friends with the Constructicons or Blaster played his music too loud.
Prime Optimus was, by contrast, relegated to lines from the '86 movie or existing in a space where he could only be that guy from the '86 movie.
Optimus just came off as uninteresting and boring in a show that was supposed to be about him (it is named after him, after all), and it sort of permeated through the rest of the show.
The CGI medium didn't help. Everything felt so empty. Be it the DBZ-style desert wastelands a lot of the action took place in, or the town of Jasper, everything felt empty.
Beast Wars also had this issue, but the prehistoric setting meant it was far less obvious, and the jungle setting meant that backgrounds at least FELT lively, even if they didn't have many assets in them. Prime, by contrast, had an empty feeling small town or an empty desert as its setting for most of the show. Even when they ventured out of that, it was to the empty Arctic, or an empty greyscale forest.
Sauceless designs, bad writing trying too hard to feel epic, and a medium that left the world feeling barren all just converged to make a show that only actually comes across "epic" in 15-30 second clips. Which is sadly how more and more kids and young adults consume media these days.
It was during the late 2000s that brands realized that they could come off as more personable by using less formal language in promos and marketing and maybe even getting in on the sass in social media spaces. Combine that with the post-ironic age of shrugging stuff that aged poorly as a joke... and I have no idea if "rightfully huge" was supposed to be a "hip and with it" way to promote what they were trying to do, a joke, or the former that turned into the latter when the show and line petered out. Still, Hasbro had big plans for Prime as a property and Aligned as a continuity, both of which never ended up manifesting.
I've been feeling that way about the 90s myself, and I'm struggling to figure out if I'm just becoming an Old Person and defaulting to "things were better in my day," or if there really has been a noticeable shift that's not entirely been for the better over the last thirty years or so.
I think it speaks to wider problems with technological progress that we are always looking to improve the technology in our lives, but at a certain point it stops being incremental improvements and becomes entire system changing, or system destroying, leaps.
Technology marched forward all through the 80s, 90s, and 00s, but not so much as to fundamentally alter how media was consumed. Hasbro, after all, followed essentially the same playbook for G1, BW, Armada, and Animated. A show that was widely available with a huge toyline and marketing push. Prime was the last entry in that playbook, and its general failure (the show didn't reach enough people because of the network, and the toys didn't sell nearly as well as every other post-movie line) combined with the emergence of streaming kind of killed that concept.
Technological advancement finally reached the point where it altered how kids consumed media. Now it's YouTube or streaming or TikTok. Very few kids watch stuff like Cartoon Network or Nick or anything else that's comparable.
So where do you even put this stuff? They tried to put ES on Paramount+ and no one seemed to care. It didn't seem to make any lasting impact.
It seems like the comics have been the place where lore is cultivated. IDW had a strong following while Aligned was floundering, and Skybound has been consistently producing strong sales. And comic books, unlike traditional kids tv, are benefiting from a revival in popularity of sorts.
A lot of what we consider "central" to the modern TF mythos was either introduced in IDW, or refined to its most popular form there... and I can see the same happening with Skybound if they're allowed just as prolific a run.
At that point it just filters into whatever avenues of storytelling Hasbro can figure out.
With regard to the Ginrai topic, how do we feel about Optimus Primal having Optimus Prime's name and face as a result of his toy being designed to be Prime, and that being an in-universe coincidence rarely, if ever, acknowledged by the characters? Is that also an absurd concept for a sequel and a ridiculous thing to ask audiences to accept, or does he get a pass for some reason?
Beast Wars' first episode had a very awkward "everyone names themselves" scene. "Optimus Primal" was just a part of that.
Beyond that, I just wrote off the name and look similarities as being a result of Primal being Optimus' ancestor. However you wanna justify that with robots.
What really brought this home was when he reverted to being Orion Pax. Cullen's delivery had life again. I was hopeful that this would be a new status quo, that Pax would need to grow naturally back into being Prime over the course of the show. Alas.
To be fair, I think Cullen's age is not not a factor. I watch Sunbow and I just can't imagine him bringing all the same energy today. I hear the difference between a younger guy impersonating his older brother and an actual old man.
Very true. I tried to give Prime as much slack as I could, knowing its technical limitations. But the comparison to BW, even after over a decade of CGI advancement, shows it up. When I imagine "BW background", the first thing I see is waving palm fronds. When I imagine "Prime background", it's a still desert.
Both can be true. I'm pretty sure if I were actually teleported back to the '90s, I would struggle to readjust to a world of dial-up and dumb-phones (or really still land-lines). And I've certainly had experiences of rewatching beloved media from that time and going, huh, this was actually pretty crappy. We tend to remember the better things and forget the worse ones.
I can't answer for a "we", but for myself, I think it's dumb and confusing, but to the extent that it's earned a pass, it's because the character and storytelling outshined it. If BW weren't so damn good, I think that would be a criticism you'd hear more.
I mean, Botcon 2010 was a convention with people in attendance, so maybe you could ask whether anyone here was at the panel where the phrase came up, and remembers what the was context and what the vibes were.
Until we found out that he, Megatron, and Tarantulas each still had those names back on Cybertron.
I'm sure it was said jokingly... but I also doubt anyone was going to say "yeah our new show is going to be epic *dismissive jerking motion* "
And given how Prime as a show carried itself, it did have pretences of being le epic
Whether or not it pulled that off...
I don't know about "we", but Beast Wars viewer discourse at the time was awash with "which G1 character is this BW character a counterpart/reincarnation of." Cheetor was Hot Rod, Rattrap was Kup, a whole host of flawed connections and comparisons because these are different characters separable by nuance. You can guess who Primal was connected to, as that was one of the main motivators behind raising the question about everyone else. This happened despite the main media Primal was in, which fleshed Primal and everyone else out, being in English and more widely available to this audience, vis-a-vis the initial lack of such with Ginrai's fiction (which mostly left people with just the knowledge of the toy and name).
Later, Lioconvoy showed up with even more G1 Op similarities, bringing more of the color scheme into it amid the white fur, and people who weren't following the Japanese series had "Beast Wars Optimus Prime" responses.
The resemblance, smaller though it was, didn't get "a pass for some reason". It was noticed and prompted responses that made sense. TRUKK NOT MUNKY isn't just proof of fans conflating the two for the comparison/contrast (i.e. Prime by any variant name shouldn't be a monkey), something aided by the vestigial helmet choice; it's also a reminder that these two situations are not really that comparable. A robot with Optimus Prime's face that turns into a beefed up version of Optimus Prime's altmode, color scheme included in both modes, is going to get more of a response than a robot with Optimus Prime's face ONLY and an entirely different everything else that turns into a gorilla that also doesn't look anything like a red truck with a gray trailer. The latter isn't "getting a pass for some reason" any more than people not really making much of BW2 Thrust's Megatron-like head (yes, I'm aware of why he has that).
It's also worth noting that precedent is a thing, and Primal happened after Ginrai happened, so a new leader having a strong resemblance to Op but pointedly not being Op was not a new thing anymore.
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I know it was meant to be a flippant colloquialism rather than being taken literally, but I am amused at the idea of Arcee actually being Rattrap's great aunt.