How good is the Transformers series? I watch the Michael Bay movies and kind of liked them as a guilty pleasure. It made me interested in looking into the comics or cartoon show.
The 1986 animated movie still holds up well, right? It’s been awhile since I’ve seen it, but I remember it being decent. I don’t remember the old cartoons so much, so not sure about those.
It’s decent for the nostalgia factor and has some bops but it’s essentially a children’s movie so things like dialogue and plot suffer from that. I feel like the main purpose of that movie was to market toys to children.
I love it and I’ve seen it a thousand times, but a lot of that is the nostalgia factor. However, it was refreshingly edgy for a film marketed to children and it didn’t hold back on the violence.
HBomberGuy did a great review of it, explaining why it appealed to a generation despite it not being a particularly good film.
beast wars, prime, animated and earthspark are my fav. earthspark especially annoys chuds because it has a gasp nonbinary transformer in it. im a fan of the new new transformers comic by daniel warren johnson as well, its like if g1 was written well and not as a toy advertisement. i have some gripes since its a G1 story AGAIN, but the writer promises that theres going to be some new twists and turns
the image above is from lost light, the sequel comic to more than meets the eye, both of which arent just my favorite transformers media ever, but my fav comic book and my fav media thing in general
I’m a ginormous Transformers fan, and I admit that most of the appeal is due to nostalgia.
However, there are cartoon series such as Beast Wars which had some experienced writers on the team (the story editor, Larry DiTillio, had just come off five years of Babylon 5), and made a reasonable effort to create appealing characters and engaging storylines. The CGI animation meant a smaller cast than previous shows, so individual characters got more development, and the voice cast was absolutely stellar.
The comics have tended to go at a slower pace than the films/animation, doing more world-building and deep character analysis. They’re still hit-or-miss, and there are several distinct long-running comic continuities, so it’s hard to recommend a jumping-on point.
But I second the recommendation of More Than Meets the Eye/Lost Light, which goes into a lot of depth on the psychological effects of being a four-million-year-old transforming robot, what kind of society it creates, and how the characters relate to each other.
I love how they actually built something of a scifi mythos around the toy robot cartoon in Beast Wars, especially how they tied the Generation 1 world to it. They didn’t really have to do that just for something made to sell toys. There were the references to the good guys doing unethical experiments and (possibly) making the bad guys second class citizens on Cybertron.
Too bad the writers never got to implement all of their ideas because of deadlines: supposedly the Vok, the aliens from Beast Wars, were going to be the origin of the Swarm from the Generation 2 comics.
I think the Vok = Swarm was a later retcon by writers of convention/magazine fanfic (which makes its canonicity dubious at best). However, it was one of the earliest points at which the writers interacted with fans via BBS’s, and at least one member of the fan community was credited as a lore consultant, and helped them add more details from the original cartoon and comics. Simon Furman, who wrote most of the original Marvel run, actually wrote the S3 finale.
How good is the Transformers series? I watch the Michael Bay movies and kind of liked them as a guilty pleasure. It made me interested in looking into the comics or cartoon show.
Definitely read the comic book series I link here https://hexbear.net/comment/4447423
The cartoons are not worth watching imo
The 1986 animated movie still holds up well, right? It’s been awhile since I’ve seen it, but I remember it being decent. I don’t remember the old cartoons so much, so not sure about those.
It’s decent for the nostalgia factor and has some bops but it’s essentially a children’s movie so things like dialogue and plot suffer from that. I feel like the main purpose of that movie was to market toys to children.
I love it and I’ve seen it a thousand times, but a lot of that is the nostalgia factor. However, it was refreshingly edgy for a film marketed to children and it didn’t hold back on the violence.
HBomberGuy did a great review of it, explaining why it appealed to a generation despite it not being a particularly good film.
beast wars, prime, animated and earthspark are my fav. earthspark especially annoys chuds because it has a gasp nonbinary transformer in it. im a fan of the new new transformers comic by daniel warren johnson as well, its like if g1 was written well and not as a toy advertisement. i have some gripes since its a G1 story AGAIN, but the writer promises that theres going to be some new twists and turns
the image above is from lost light, the sequel comic to more than meets the eye, both of which arent just my favorite transformers media ever, but my fav comic book and my fav media thing in general
I’m a ginormous Transformers fan, and I admit that most of the appeal is due to nostalgia.
However, there are cartoon series such as Beast Wars which had some experienced writers on the team (the story editor, Larry DiTillio, had just come off five years of Babylon 5), and made a reasonable effort to create appealing characters and engaging storylines. The CGI animation meant a smaller cast than previous shows, so individual characters got more development, and the voice cast was absolutely stellar.
The comics have tended to go at a slower pace than the films/animation, doing more world-building and deep character analysis. They’re still hit-or-miss, and there are several distinct long-running comic continuities, so it’s hard to recommend a jumping-on point.
But I second the recommendation of More Than Meets the Eye/Lost Light, which goes into a lot of depth on the psychological effects of being a four-million-year-old transforming robot, what kind of society it creates, and how the characters relate to each other.
I love how they actually built something of a scifi mythos around the toy robot cartoon in Beast Wars, especially how they tied the Generation 1 world to it. They didn’t really have to do that just for something made to sell toys. There were the references to the good guys doing unethical experiments and (possibly) making the bad guys second class citizens on Cybertron.
Too bad the writers never got to implement all of their ideas because of deadlines: supposedly the Vok, the aliens from Beast Wars, were going to be the origin of the Swarm from the Generation 2 comics.
I think the Vok = Swarm was a later retcon by writers of convention/magazine fanfic (which makes its canonicity dubious at best). However, it was one of the earliest points at which the writers interacted with fans via BBS’s, and at least one member of the fan community was credited as a lore consultant, and helped them add more details from the original cartoon and comics. Simon Furman, who wrote most of the original Marvel run, actually wrote the S3 finale.