Transformers: Cyberworld, Bumblebee Gets Yamcha'd

lastmaximal

Administrator
Staff member
Council of Elders
Citizen
That's partly my point. The line isn't used a lot there, let alone enough to be the shorthand face the humor is referred to by. But parroting the meme has created precisely the opposite impression -- a loud opinion used as a convenient wedge against something that's built up enough hype to generate backlash.

There's no shortage of actual lines and scenes that fall flat. But those come up quite rarely in this discourse; instead it's this and "well, that happened", both of which are staples of older cartoons and sitcoms but not actually a substantial part of the media being complained about. "He's right behind me" is from Thor 4, but that one usage becoming the face of this sort of humor -- and getting inflated into "MCU Humor", not "another example of why Thor 4 wasn't good", has led to this slippery slope of assumptions.

It's a shorthand, sure, but the spread of it has become misleading (you yourself were led to anchor your point on the assumption that "it is used a lot there"). "It" being that line is just not accurate; "it" being "that type of comedy" is more debatable.

The problem with that debate is the assumption resulting from the "MCU humor" label that it's this monolith, like there's ONE comedic style that's employed (trotting out said non-examples AS examples). Or that "humor I don't like" is "MCU humor", rather than separating slapstick from quips from wordplay from situational humor etc (and most crucially, effective vs non-effective cases within each of those). It's all just "if I don't like it, it's MCU humor".

(Similarly, I understand the tendency to view Feige as the driving force behind this as he's often characterized as the sole architect behind this whole thing, but this issue in particular is one where there are more immediate, obvious likely culprits.

Internally to the MCU, I don't even think Feige's all that closely tied to the comedy quality issue. There are producer/architect decisions I can lay at his feet that could've led to that, like hiring the writer for Quantumania or whoever wrote "Illumi-what-y" in Dr Strange 2, or letting Taika basically go off leash for Thor 5, and that's just the comedy -- Feige and whoever else is the braintrust can be pointed to for a lot of other arc-level and production-decision mistakes.

But the fingerprints on the comedy in those movies are more from those writers, not Feige, I don't think. I don't even know if there's one signature comedic style running through these, let alone his.)

Worse, and sort of getting back to what Sabrblade brought up originally tied to this episode, this reductive thinking has then mutated into essentially Humor Bad, grousing about humor appearing at all -- in the MCU, and eventually in anything. (And, as mentioned above, it'll be called MCU Humor.)
 
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Platypus Prime

Well-known member
Citizen
Thank you Richard! I had mentioned that Hot Wheels SkyByte was the one thing from cyber world I was looking for. I was at Target just Friday. Nothing. But today there was ONE, a friend saw it, and now I've got it! As utterly bizarre as the original pictures made it appear! I'll try to get a good picture later.

Well, that probably wraps up my Cyberworld collection. On to Age Of The Primes where I'm going to define 'complete' as 'taller SkyByte and Combaticons/Bruticus'. Possibly Megatron. I've found it's easier and less expensive to be completionist if you pay no attention to what the word actually means.
 


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