posted
I have all of 'em on DVD, and the Movie. Grantd some of them are absolute pants, but then, the same goes for Star Trek, BSG, Doctor Who, Babylon 5...
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
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posted
The basic premise was geared towards children and the marketing of the toy line. At it's best, it can be said t inspired our generation much in the way the old Flash Gordon serials inspired guys like George Lucas.
If it were made for our current age group, many plot flaws would have to be addressed- like why the Autobots just hang around the the bot-cave waiting for Megatron to imperil millions of humans instead of them hunting them down. Only an idiot would follow such a strategy...
Thus, I blame Transformers for Bin Laden not having been captured yet- Bush is a G1 fan.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
I think what confused me most about transformers as a nipper was exactly why did NOTHING change on Cybertron in the several million years they were away? I mean when they get back it's as if they never left.
I don't actually expect a credible answer to that and it dosen't take away for the feeling of nostalga I got from watching the old movie some months back. Mind you that movie is probably the exception as I did borrow a DVD of G1 from a mate a while ago and Mark's right, it really doesn't hold up very well AT ALL.
To be fair though, the same can be said of most cartoons of that era, it wasn't until the early 90's that they started to get more watchable. *cough* Batman *cough*
posted
Yeah- I always wondered what Shockwave was doing all that time...waxing his blaster, I guess. In the (very strange) Marvel comic (a theme brought back by Dreamwave), a LOT had changed- Shockwave had taken over everything and there was no war- evergy was too damn scarce for all that waste anyway. Maybe half of the Autobots and decepticons fall in with Shockwave and everyone else either gets killed or goes rogue. Shockwave's right hand man...er bot...is Ultra Magnus (sporting size 1000 feet of clay).
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
In defense of Shockwave, when Megatron left to pursue the Ark, he did say "Cybertron shall be as you left it".
True, some eps have the 'Bots learning of some evilness and going out to combat it, and I expect they were using the Sky-Spy to try and find the Decepticons, but being under several hundred feet of Pacific Ocean makes a good screen. But other eps showed the Autobots out doing something when the Decepticons showed up to ruin it. So it worked the other way, too.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
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posted
I'd always figured that energy was so low on Cybertron that they couldn't afford to do ANYTHING, and the war was at a standstill for much of that time. There were doubtless skirmish wars every few centuries, but for the most part everyone just held fast waiting for the Nemesis or the Ark to come back with some energon. Then one day Shockwave happens to try picking up the phone, and the whole thing flares up again.
posted
He got tired of Megatron's lame-ass answering machine for millions of years.
Seriously though, the standstill is pretty lame- I mean no one developed any new means of energy production for millions of years?!? Fuck, even solar cells could have stored an incrdible amount of power in say, a century of inactivity (presumably the state most everyone was in anyway).
OTOH, theres an episode with an Autobot bounty hunter skipping from one robot-filled planet to the next, and there's those robot worlds that Unicron eats in the movie, so maybe some hardy colonists ventured forth and Cybertron was eventually forgotten/discared as being too energy costly to maintain. That last explanation I can dig- maybe the adverage movie-era robot uses only a hundredth of Bumblebee's energy consumption (a million year's worth of tech advancment) and the homeworld is both dangerous after so long a war and far out of date with modern tech.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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posted
They probably could have invented a new energy source. But then, they're functionally immortal robots. It's not like they're in a rush.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
*cracks knuckles* I've spent far more time than is probably healthy obsessing over these guys, so...
After the Ark left, I have that being the era on Cybertron that they perfected gestalt intelligences (the Constructicons went with Megatron, and Devastator was an early, and imperfect, attempt), triplechanging, and the idea of sending out protoforms. That would be Shockwave's biggest accomplishment. The Decepticons sent out automated vessels to various worlds. The ship would scan the local fauna, use that as a template for the protoforms. Those robots would build an energon collection station, and start sending out abeacon for retrieval. And in case something big and nasty threatened, they could join together into a gestalt. This is where I have the Predacons, Seacons, Terrorcons, and Insecticons coming from. The Insecticons' ship was damaged, and only three were able ot be activated, and that with damaged programming. Megatron found them later when the Ark was revived.
As for all the robot-inhabited planets in the vicinity of Cybertron, I say that during the Quintesson occupation of Cybertron, they did a lot to populate the area with exports who, after the Quints were driven out, set up their own independent societies. Yes, that's a very condensed version.
I also have written about the origin of Cybertron, Primus and Unicron, sparks, the Allspark, Vector Sigma, ane Matrix, forms of reproduction, the nature of transforming, mass-shifting and subspace, and a bunch of other stuff.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
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But can you tell us what a few Autobots are "female"? Is there's kinky some power socket hidden somewhere or what?
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
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quote:Originally posted by Jason Abbadon: But can you tell us what a few Autobots are "female"? Is there's kinky some power socket hidden somewhere or what?
I'm assuming you mean "why" instead of "what". The answer depends on what continuity you're looking at.
In the G1 comic, I've read that there weren't female TFs until the creation of Arcee. The reason she was created with a female form was because the Autobots were attempting to understand the idea of gender, which was alien to them.
So far as the G1 cartoon goes, female TFs seem to have been around for a long time, although they're almost mythical by the 1980's. The best reason I've heard for their existence in that continuity is that the Quintessons created robots that resembled both genders, depending on what their clientele wanted.
-------------------- "Kirito? I killed a thing and now it says I have XPs! Is that bad? Am I dying?"
-Asuna, Episode 2, Sword Art Online Abridged
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posted
In my Grand Unified Transformers Theory, it goes something like this.
The Spark is a bit of -- essentially -- plasma-based genetic/soul/personality/whatever material (still working on better defining that). It is a glimmer of the Allspark, being the energy within Primus, a.k.a. Vector Sigma. Besides providing energy for their bodies, energon keeps the Spark going. It's like RAM -- if the power goes out, whatever was encoded in the Spark is gone forever.
As with Terran sexual reproduction, where a half-portion of genetic material from each parent is combined to make a new individual, so can two Cybertronian parents combine portions of their Sparks to create a new one, which then inplants into a new body, whether grown or built or whatever (still working on this aspect, too).
When the Quints came along, part of their subjugation included trying to erase the Cybertronians' racial memory of a time before the Quintessons, and thus set themselves up as gods and creators. Whether a result of their own quasi-organic nature or what, they were able to build Cybertronians with vaguely Sparklike life essences, although not completely sentient (the Guardian robots, various drones, etc.), but so thoroughly brainwashed the Cybertronians, even their natural offspring were considered part of the Quints' greater abilities to create life. Even much later, Cybertronian scientists and engineers were able to replicate their work (cf. Wheeljack and the Dinobots).
Another way is to directly infuse constructed bodies with a portion of the Allspark, either directly from Primus, or via the fragment of Its essence -- the Prime Matrix.
As for the later scarcity of female Cybertronians (transforming or not), millions of years of civil war had a damaging effect on the less durable portion of a sexually-dimorphic species. A lot of males who were either unable or unwilling to fight -- like Orion Pax -- would have been weeded out, too. But only the tougher females would have survived to the present, like Arcee, Elita-One, Moonracer, Chromia, and so on.
And no, that isn't what I think Optimus and Elita were doing in "The Search for Alpha-Trion". Although they did kiss (awkwardly, with that damn faceplate in the way) in the original two-part version of it that I really wish I'd had a VCR for at the time. *grump*
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
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I bet you won't believe me when I say I do. And everyone on here knows I have a hot girlfriend. bX and Charles have even met her, too. I've just had over twenty years to think about such things.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
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