posted
Might be a first look at one of the robots for the new TF movie - if I had to guess I'd say it's Bumblebee. Obviously if you're not into spoilers I'd steer clear of this link.
Anyone got any thoughts on the design? Personally speaking, though we only see the robot from the one angle in the shot, I think it looks kinda cool. Sort of a halfway point between the chunky humanoid robots from the 1980s cartoon and the very stripped down skeletal look of the robots in the Citroen adverts.
Oh and if you listen very carefully that sound you hear is the many, many oldschool G1 fans on the net shitting themselves with sheer rage because the movie isn't going to be a straight retelling of the old cartoon show.
-------------------- Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
I'm a G1 fan, but I'm excited about this movie. My problem with the follow-up series was that there was no real-world basis for the vehicles, which took out a lot of the fun for me.
And given the few spoilers I know, I'm pretty sure this is Bumblebee. I think he's based on a 2006 Camaro.
posted
Mabye they'll explain why an alien robot is named "Bumblebee". ...when "Bumblefuck" would work so much better.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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OK, I give up. Can someone, anyone, EXPLAIN Transformers to me? As I understand it, you have these robots that disguise themselves as cars and trucks and stuff, they then convert and fight each other. And, er, that's it. Are these robots self-aware, or are they driven/operated by humans or whoever? If the former, who drives them in their disguised state? And why is this one twenty-year-old marketing tool, er, sorry, children's programme, so popular still, when, for example, He-Man etc. aren't?
posted
The basic setup is that they're sentient, self-aware robots from the planet Cybertron. They have split into two factions: Autobots (freedom loving good guys) and Decepticons (nasty evil horrible types) and an Autobot ship (the Ark) crashlands on prehistoric Earth after being boarded by a party of Decepticons. The robots lie dormant for millions of years before the ship's systems are accidentally reactivated to restore the occupants, leaving them to fight their war in the modern world. Depending on what continuity you look at the Transformers themselves are either commercial model robots who rebelled or the last line of defense against the dark forces of the universe.
In their disguised states they have fake drivers that pop up out of the chairs and look like dummies (at least they did in the old comics) - as of the 2006 IDW comics version, they had projected "holomatter" human bodies that acted like drivers. In the new version the holomatter bodies were also able to move about outside the vehicle form, giving the Transformers the ability to go places their robot forms couldn't - think of the Doc on Voyager and you're pretty much there.
Strangely although they're not piloted many of the early toys were bought in from a line called Diaclone, which did present them as piloted mecha. Thus a lot of the early Transformers have little hatches that open to reveal a cockpit for diaclone drivers. There's a good primer on general Transformers backgrounds here and one on Diaclone here.
As for the coolness still holding after 22 years, I dunno. It might be something to do with the fact that Transformers have pretty much been rolling on since they launched - they've never really gone totally out of production though they have faltered in the popularity stakes a few times along the way. As you can see from this guy's site if you scroll down, there have been releases every year since 1984. Transformers, unlike He-Man, never really came to a complete halt so maybe that has something to do with the popularity thing. Mind you, it might also have something to do with Prince Adam and his worrying tastes for mullet haircuts, pink waistcoats and leggings.
Plus you have to love a toyline that calls robots names like "Windbreaker" and "Erector". Even BumbleFuck sounds better.
-------------------- Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
I see. And do these robots ever get destroyed? Or is it just like every other kids' show of the era, where they bash each other about a lot with lots of "WURGH!s" and "CRASH!es" followed by a hasty "Curse you, Autobots! You win this one!" and "Quick! He's getting away!"
And what does modern-day humanity make of all this? When random vehicles suddenly turn into robots and trash the surrounding environs? There's gotta be some serious collateral damage. . .
quote:Originally posted by Lee: I see. And do these robots ever get destroyed? Or is it just like every other kids' show of the era, where they bash each other about a lot with lots of "WURGH!s" and "CRASH!es" followed by a hasty "Curse you, Autobots! You win this one!" and "Quick! He's getting away!"
Throughout the original series, I don't think there were any Transformer deaths, but Transformers: The Movie was full of them. And only one of them was really undone later in the series, that being Optimus Prime.
quote:Originally posted by Lee: And what does modern-day humanity make of all this? When random vehicles suddenly turn into robots and trash the surrounding environs? There's gotta be some serious collateral damage. . .
Funny you should ask that in conjunction with TF deaths. Transformers: The Movie, which was released way back in the 80's, took place in the oh-so-futuristic year of 2005, and I think one could arguably make the case that some/all of the third season of the series took place in 2006.
Anyway, one of the last American episodes was "The Return of Optimus Prime." In that episode, yet another Autobot-Decepticon battle causes massive collateral damage and seriously wounds/cripples a scientist's daughter. As revenge, the scientist uses the newly-rediscovered corpse of Optimus Prime as a trap to infect the Transformers with a plague that causes murderous rage and insanity.
-------------------- "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
Note that the Return of Optimus Prime wasn't the first time Prime came back. At one point in the third season the Decepticons found the tomb of the late great Autobot leaders, which included the shell of our big red hero. They reanimated him into a primitive state, made him trick Rodimus Prime out of the Autobot matrix, but came back to his old self enough to save the day before "perishing" again. What a guy.
I watched and appreciated G1, but when Beast Wars came about I totally loved the awesomeness that was the new show's writing and characterizations, which were astounding and IMO haven't been matched since in the franchise. Beast Wars wrapped its storyline around the origin tale of Transformaers and became an integral part of the G1 story, even if you never saw it. Never liked the toys, though, and of course the finale of the Beast Machines plot killed everything...
posted
Well, they were all beasts when they weren't transformed(or whatever the technical term is), rather than cars or planes or whatever. Other than that, Beast Wars sounds cool and they probably couldn't call it Robot Wars.
posted
I can talk BW for freaking HOURS. Here's a quick overview of the whole series. Spoilers!
"Beast Wars" tells the story of the descendants of the Autobots and Decepticons, now called Maximals and Predacons. Some 300 years after G1, Earth is off-limits for some reason and the Cybertronian race is at peace, more or less. Maximal starships explore the cosmos, dropping off brand new robots at each newly surveyed planet before moving on. The new guy(s), arriving in a "stasis pod", would scan their surroundings for local life and create a partially organic alternate form for the purposes of disguise, protection and exploration. Presumably they get picked up some time later. Note that by this time both Maximals and Predacons were much smaller than their engergon-guzzling predecessors, and can convincingly fit into the forms of the life they scan (for the most part - Rattrap for one would make a pretty large rodent even for New York).
To the main plot: one day Megatron (not the ORIGINAL Meagtron, but a Predacon who has taken the name in his honor) steals the "Golden Disk", an ancient Earth artifact and presumably a map to undiscovered riches of energon. Recruiting a crew and stealing a transwarp-cpable ship (which in BW means it's possible to travel in time), he heads through time and space to a mysterious planet with two moons. The Maximal council sends the Axalon, a transwarp exploration ship, to intercept. In a familiar space battle, the ships shoot each other down, setting up a mirror of the G1 scenario which has Maximals and Predacons fighting across the planet from their respective crash sites / bases. However, before the Axalon crashed, Optimus Primal (again a namesake) had his dormant crew's stasis pods ejected into orbit. Thus, a large part of the first year's plot had to do with retrieving the pods as they crashed or landed before the Predacons could get to the new arrivals and reprogram them (they were rendered amnesiac becasuse of energon overload and were vulnerable until they could scan and adopt a local form). The planet, BTW, has extremely high levels of ambient energon - so high in fact that going around outside their shielded bases would cause them to overload and go into protective "stasis lock" or they would die. The solution to this is to create the aforementioned beast modes, which being partly organic (and based on local DNA) would provide a natural shield for the energon radiation. This was basically an excuse for everyone to go around mostly in beast mode instead of robot mode, where they could use their various robot abilites and weapons. Helps sell the toys, you see.
The initial teams had five Maximals and five Predacons each, including one defecting Predacon (named Dinobot) heading over to the Maximal side when he figured his sense of honor didn't fit with his former crew. Two more transformers were added to each side over the course of the first year, the plots of which included fights with an alien race that was using the planet as a sort of evolutionary experiment, which by the end of the first season destroys one of the planet's moons. Other stories included various escape or rescue attempts from Cybertron, which is searching for them, and dealing with their beast modes for extended periods of time, which they were never programmed to do.
The second year sees various additions, evolutions and subtractions to the cast (including Dinobot, who has quite possibly the best death scene in any animation EVAR). Along the way, we discover that the mysterious planet is in fact prehistoric Earth, and the Golden Disc is in fact the message disc attached to the 1970s Voyager spacecraft! Megatron thus reveals his plan, kept in secret for two years - he didn't come looking for energon to power a Predacon war. Instead, the original Megatron, guarding against failure, left a message in the Golden Disc for a plan for his descendants to find - to come back in time to a specific point and exterminate the first tribes of proto-humans at the dawn of their existence, about two million years ago. Failing in that, Megatron went to his own backup plan - THE ARK has been under that volcano all this time too, filled with the dormant G1 transformers in emergency stasis lock. With some help in the form of a traitorous G1 Ravage sent from the future Cybertron, Megatron finds the Ark and kills the sleeping Optimus Prime. The subsequent paradox wrecks everything...
...Until it's put right again by the Maximals at the top of the third and final season. Optimus Primal saves his predecessor by housing Prime's "spark" (the BW explanation of a Transformer's life force and soul), forcing a mutation into Primal's final BW form, which is far more machine than monkey (by this point the various adventures had cleansed Earth of most of the ambient Energon, and most of the Maximals and Predacons had evolved into more mechanical and technologically powerful beast and vehicle forms). Anyway, adventures continue, with the final battle being between Optimus Primal and a souped up Megatron (who had similarly taken his ancenstor's spark and mutated into a dragon form). The final battle also involved the Nemesis - the previously unnamed Decepticon ship from G1 - being restored and used as the ultimate weapon. By the end of the series, history was "put right", most of the bad guys (and a good percentage of the good guys) are killed, the survivors finally head home with Megatron as a prisoner, and Waspinator is happy at last...
...At least until the sequel series Beast Machines, which turns everything upside down AGAIN and screws things up royally. This was the last North American TF production until this new movie, with the interm being filled in by a variety of imported anime series that do not match the cartoon or comic continuities.
posted
Soo...what happened with Unicron in the BW series? I recall an episode with him, but nevers aw the second part.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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Rattrap had ALL the cool lines. And if he didn't, it was Waspinator, Silverbolt, or Dinobot. All of them, perhaps not coincidentally, were played by the same voice actor, Scott McNeil.
[Axalon's defense grid is pulverized] Rattrap: Aww, man! NOW what do we do? Silverbolt: Well, considering our proximity, I breathe through my mouth.
[Rattrap figures out Silverbolt has become romantically involved with Blackarachnia, a Predacon] Rattrap: Where were you? Silverbolt: Scout patrol. Rattrap: Oh yeah, scouting the enemy.... Find any new positions?
[One of Dinobot's most famous lines] Dinobot: Insolent vermin! Perhaps I should take care of you the old fashioned way - BRUTALLY!!
As for Unicron, he only made two cameos in BW, never in person. Once, a visiting Starscream was explaining that he had fallen in battle defending his master, Megatron, against Unicron. The big guy appears in a flashback, which of coruse is later disproven. Later, the aliens commnicate with Optimus Primal with a hologram of Unicron's face, extracting an image of fear and respect from Primal's memory to use against him. Finally, Tarantulas is later explained to be one of "Unicron's Spawn", which was the explanation as to why he wouldn't be affected by the paradox when Optimus Prime was killed in the Ark. I'm not sure what that means, but it was apparently a comic reference. I think it may have been that he's decended from the transformers created by Unicron, or something.
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