posted
And Lee... Since we're on the subject, ans since Mark just gave us such a nice overview of Beast Wars, here's my best-take amalgamation of the G1 cartoon and comic continuities...
Long, long time ago, toward the beginning of the universe, two entities existed that basically embodied the yin-yang/light-dark/good-evil balance, Primus and Unicron. They fought... and fought... and fought... But of course couldn't defeat each other. In an attempt to buy some time, Primus plunged his essence into a planetoid, trapping himself. Unicron, thinking this some new ploy or tactic, did the same.
Eons passed. Each realised they could affect the substance of their respective planetoids, albeit slowly and with great difficulty. Unicron began converting his prison into a new giant body for himself. Primus took a more subtle approach, using the force of his will to drive something like evolution, but with the inorganic matter of his planetoid, that meant inorganic life.
This eventually led not only to the landscape of what would eventually be known as Cybertron, or the humanoid beings who would inhabit it, but all the other fauna as well: roto-rats, turbofoxes, cyberdragons... And pools of liquid energon.
Then a race of five-faced, egg-shaped beings called Quintessons showed up and decided this was a planet they could exploit. They enslaved the sentient population, reworked the landscape into sweeping curves and arches and generally behaving like conquerors everywhere. Over quite some time (can't remember if it was thousands or millions of years), the Quints set up a nice little economic superpower, selling Cybertronian slaves to other planets, and tinkered enough with the poor sentients that they came to believe the Quintessons had created them in the first place, and this was their intended purpose in the universe. Incidentally, on one of their forays deep into Cybertron's underground tunnels (their 18th exploratory path, or "Vector Sigma"), they found a chamber with a large, scintillating sphere. They couldn't make hed or tail of it, so they left it for future study, but well-guarded by drones they'd built.
Then, of course, as with just about every downtrodden majority, the Cybertronians rebelled against their Quintesson masters and eventually kicked them offworld for good. Naturally, it didn't take long before the Cybertronians who had been built or modified to be sold as military hardware tried to take over. The workers and domestic models objected, and the Great War began. The workers began armouring themselves like the military models. Then we get to the technology...
I don't know if it's leftover Quinteson tech or something they developed on their own, but all the warriors have their own subspace pockets where they store their weapons (you can see this in action frequently in the cartoon). Somewhere along the line, the weaker Autobots (as the workers were now calling themselves) developed transforming as a means of protecting themselves by blending in with the various drone vehicles fulfilling various tasks all over Cybertron. The bad guys caught on to this eventually and followed suit, using it as another weapon in their arsenal. Transforming involves mass shifting, contortion, and specially designed armour that will shift into the approximate form of the vehicle disguise. The extra mass is shunted into their subspace pockets when it's not needed (like when the 40-foot-tall Soundwave transforms into a handheld microcassette recorder).
The Great War had gradually depleted Cybertron's energon deposits and the Autobots built the Ark to go looking for other sources of energon. The Decepticons (as the military models were now calling themselves) found out and intercepted the mission. By means never adequately explained, the Ark crashed on primordial Earth some twelve million years ago or so. The volcano it crashed into erupted in the early 1980s and exposed the Ark to the open air again, reactivating the onboard computer, which sent out sensor probes to scan the planet's dominant life-forms, which the Cybertorn-centric computer interpreted as the vehicles it saw. Eventually everyone got reactivated.
The names are, of course, a function of translation. The younger 'bots had their names translated as contemporary English. Older 'bots, like Optimus Prime or Ultra Magnus, had their names translated as Latin. Older 'bots still, like Megatron, had their names translated as Greek.
I can elaborate on any of these topics, as well, not to mention going into things like triple-change and gestalt transformations. But I will spare you for now...
--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've always been a G1 fan. I think I've seen like one episode of the CG Beast Wars cartoon. So will Soundwave, my favorite Decepticon, still be a walkman looking bot?
-------------------- I'm slightly annoyed at Hobbes' rather rude decision to be much more attractive than me though. That's just rude. - PsyLiam, Oct 27, 2005.
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Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
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posted
That's kind of funny....because as I remember, the Sweeps were formed from the Insecticons.
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
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As much as I love G1 TF, there's one issue I can't get my head around. Just what was everyone still on Cybertron doing for those millions of years? Sitting on their backsides waiting for their leaders to show up again? Yes, we do hear about what happened, but it seems like that's WAY too long a time to just be status-quo. Nobody built another ship to go looking for the first one, nobody (hardly) was killed, NOTHING! If I were to reboot TF, I'd have them crash at most 100 years ago or into a remote area, so that no humans know to come looking for something.
quote:Originally posted by Mark Nguyen: 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.
Mark
As much as I love G1 and Beast Wars as well, you have to wonder why such a deep story when after all THEY ARE FUCKING KIDS TOYS. WHILE US NERDS MAY APPRECIATE THE STORY, SOME 5-YEAR-OLD ISN'T GONNA GIVE TWO SHITS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF TRANSFORMERS BUT WILL CARE MORE IF HIS ROBOT WILL TRANSFORM INTO A TOASTER THAT SHOOTS MISSILES OR SOME BULLSHIT LIKE THAT. Thought I'd just point that out
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So? Beast Wars was originally just that, and to a large extent the Japanese anime that have since become the backbone of the TF franchise have stuck just to it. In the the case of Beast Wars, the writers found that they had an opportunity to inject some old legacy G1 stuff into their show. With the help of the alt.fan.transformers newsgroup, they got enough source material to craft a pretty intricate story that brought old AND new fans together to enjoy the show and buy the toys. The original arc of the aliens using Earth as a prehistoric lab gave wy to the G1 side story pretty quickly - the original writers didn't even consider that the Ark was lying around somewhere until the fans told them. All for the best, I say.
quote:Originally posted by B.J.: As much as I love G1 TF, there's one issue I can't get my head around. Just what was everyone still on Cybertron doing for those millions of years? Sitting on their backsides waiting for their leaders to show up again? Yes, we do hear about what happened, but it seems like that's WAY too long a time to just be status-quo. Nobody built another ship to go looking for the first one, nobody (hardly) was killed, NOTHING! If I were to reboot TF, I'd have them crash at most 100 years ago or into a remote area, so that no humans know to come looking for something.
If memory serves, the war between the Autobots and Decepticons had drained almost all of Cybertron's resources. The last of those resources went towards the building of the Ark and the Nemesis by their respective factions. Ergo, when neither ship returned, neither the Autobots nor the Decepticons could build a ship capable of searching for them.
As for the status quo for four million years, what do we really know about what happened and who lived? By the cartoon continuity, who all do we know that was left on Cybertron? Off the top of my head, there's Shockwave, Alpha Trion, and Elita One and her little band of femmebots. The fates of five (or six?) Transformers is hardly enough to come to the conclusion that nothing happened.
-------------------- "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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Shik
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Speaking of Alpha Trion.....machine growing beards & mustaches?
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
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Krenim's right. After building the Nemesis and Ark, all the leftover transformers had little energy to wage a real war, or to go out searching for more energy to fight it. Most suppose that the intervening millenia were composed mainly of sporadic skirmish battles with few losses on either side. Remember, these guys don't experience or register time like we do, as they are effectively immortal to begin with. This oughtta help:
Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
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"Although Galvatron proved to be a rather irritating but inconsequential annoyance in the cartoon series, he was a nigh demi-god in comic series. He travelled back in time to alter the events of the mid 1980s in order to change the future that he came from -- thus beginning the Time Wars, in which Galvatron was ultimately destroyed."
There's no mention of his "BWAHAHAHA!!" powers.
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
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quote:Originally posted by B.J.: BTW, the teaser trailer is out.
I can't say I was enthused by it. If the shadow was that of, say, Megs or Prime, maybe I would be. But the generic bot just doesn't speak to my inner child (of the 80's).
-------------------- "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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Just watched the teaser. I will see it out of the same loyalty that took me to see Johnny and the Bug-Men -- er... I mean, Starship Troopers. But I am not enthusiastic about the music. I am not enthusiastic about the production design. I am not enthusiastic about the transformation effect (sound or visual). And I've been lurking over at the forums where all the movie development discussion has been going on. Michael Bay doesn't get Transformers. He's making some other movie. Might even be really good -- but it won't be Transformers.
--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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Here's a quick overview of the whole series. Spoilers!![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
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