The Energon Pub

Gauntlet101010 wrote:So .... that means that the Mini-cons could just emigrate to Giant all on their own, after it arrived? It'd be a bit of a coincidence that a small group of Minicons arrived on Giant, but I guess it could happen. Although all this does is connect all the UT Minicons to one source; it just complicated the matter as opposed to them just being another reality's Minicons with a separate origin.

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I begin to realize how little the theory of LOTM's Microns emigrating to Gigalonia works after all. We can toss that out and just say that Gigalonia always had Microns on it who originated from the Galaxy Force universe, even before the planet got pulled into the other universe.

And I forgot that that LOTM manga I told you about before, "Linkage", actually showed us what the new home of the Microns looked like after they departed for a new world: a flying city.



So yeah, not the Giant Planet after all.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:On Go:

...

I guess I can understand that it's edutainment. That doesn't save it from it's flaws; it merely explains them. I'm not sure how I'd solve the duplicate story issues the ending has. Both shows want a fight with Prime, Predaking, and their own main team. Maybe I'd have the penultimate one end more ambiguously with Prime just flying off. So he could land either to help the opposite team against Predaking (who also flies off) or to fight at the end of the show proper.

The issue was that both series had to advertise the DaiKenzan and DaiGekisou configurations of the toys.

How I would have done it would have been to have Optimus Exprime perform some special martial art in tandem with Isami and Tobio's willpower that would duplicate himself and the empowered Kenzan and Gekisoumaru into two of each of themselves, so that both DaiKenzan and DaiGekisou could be formed at the same time and tag team with each other together against Guren Dragotron. Just have the Samurai version of the fight have DaiKenzan's combination and attack sequences play first and DaiGekisou's play second, while in the Shinobi version have DaiGekisou's play first and DaiKenzan's play second. This way, both fights could be the same fight with equal advertisement for both toy forms, while still providing prominent advertisement for DaiKenzan or DaiGekisou depending on the version (and having both team up together would encourage kids to buy duplicates of Kenzan, Gekisoumaru, and Optimus Exprime's toys, theoretically increasing their toy sales ).

Gauntlet101010 wrote:I'm gonna watch RID next. Still in the Aligned continuity!

Oh boy!

Don't forget to also watch the eleven shorts that were made for it during Season 1. The final six shorts form a six-part serial that is vital to something that happens before the start of Season 2. A good stopping point to watch all eleven shorts would probably be right after Episode 17 of Season 1.

Also, there's a bit of confusion surrounding Episodes 13 and 14 of Season 1. A lot of places switch those two episodes' titles and/or numbers around with each other, as I think 14 was produced before 13. Just know that 13 is the one called "Out of Focus" and opens with a scene featuring some petty bickering between the Autobots, while 14 is the one called "Sideways" and opens with a scene of a street race at night.

Checking around, it looks like the entire series, shorts and all, is on the official Transformers YouTube channel.

Ok, finished season 1 of RID 2015. Since it's a couple of seasons I figured first impressions could come after season 1 instead of the first 10 episodes.

Right away I remember why I couldn't get into this. After so long with Prime I just couldn't accept the new, more lighthearted, tone. It's easier to accept after GO and GF.

It's kinda surreal to see how much the CGI advances as I go through these so quickly. Overall I did like Season1, but it took a while to get into it.

Also, Hasbro's official playlist is missing a few episodes, which they did upload. So you can't fully trust it.

Anyway, so far my faves are:

Windblade - I like her cocksure attitude and her penchant for giving out nicknames. We don't see much of her yet.

Fixit's vocal tick is VERY annoying. I wish they'd have dropped it after he was "fixed".

Steeljaw is my fav among the cons. I like that he's charismatic and that he has a relatable goal. TBH, it'd have saved everyone a bit of time if he just took over an uninhabited planet.

It's kinda weird that the Autobots seem to jail everyone indefinitely in this series. No parole, no second chances (unless you're Grimlock), you're just on ice. Forever. I do wonder what Grimlock did exactly. I mean he it must have been small enough to make up for, but he's still on ice ... forever.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:Ok, finished season 1 of RID 2015. Since it's a couple of seasons I figured first impressions could come after season 1 instead of the first 10 episodes.

Did you also watch the 11 shorts during it like I recommended?

Gauntlet101010 wrote:Also, Hasbro's official playlist is missing a few episodes, which they did upload. So you can't fully trust it.

Weird. They do have all 26 episodes uploaded. Guess they just never corrected the playlist. Other users on YouTube do have playlists with all 26 episodes from Hasbro's official channel.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:I do wonder what Grimlock did exactly. I mean he it must have been small enough to make up for, but he's still on ice ... forever.

IIRC, all that was said about it (and during Season 1) was that he caused some property damage, and apparently by accident.

Surprisingly, it would be the later series Rescue Bots Academy that would flesh out a little more of his backstory more than what we got in RID 2015.

Sabrblade wrote:

Gauntlet101010 wrote:Ok, finished season 1 of RID 2015. Since it's a couple of seasons I figured first impressions could come after season 1 instead of the first 10 episodes.

Did you also watch the 11 shorts during it like I recommended?

Gauntlet101010 wrote:Also, Hasbro's official playlist is missing a few episodes, which they did upload. So you can't fully trust it.

Weird. They do have all 26 episodes uploaded. Guess they just never corrected the playlist. Other users on YouTube do have playlists with all 26 episodes from Hasbro's official channel.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:I do wonder what Grimlock did exactly. I mean he it must have been small enough to make up for, but he's still on ice ... forever.

IIRC, all that was said about it (and during Season 1) was that he caused some property damage, and apparently by accident.

Surprisingly, it would be the later series Rescue Bots Academy that would flesh out a little more of his backstory more than what we got in RID 2015.

Yep, I watched the shorts. They were cute.

I might try to watch Rescue Bots, but I'm worried it'll be too kid-oriented and will burn me out since it's such a long run. Knowing that Grim's crimes were pretty much just property damage makes me thing Autobot justice is a bit harsh. Grim was ready to reform just about right away. But, I guess, we aren't meant to dwell too hard on the subject in the show.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:I might try to watch Rescue Bots, but I'm worried it'll be too kid-oriented and will burn me out since it's such a long run.

Believe me, it's a very smart show. It doesn't talk down to its audience or try to educate them at all. It is pure entertainment with action, excitement, comedy, and a lot of heart, with a bit of drama thrown in for good measure. It is very character driven along the lines of Beast Wars season 1 in terms of interpersonal character dynamics, and has an amazing voice cast consisting of seasoned veterans (Steven Blum, Maurice LaMarche, Jason Marsden, Lacey Chabert, LeVar Burton, Jeff Bennett, Kath Soucie), some at-the-time lesser knowns (D.C. Douglas, Parvesh Cheena, Imari Williams, Max Mittelman, Shannon McKain), and some then-newcomers (Elán Garfias, Diamond White), as well as some pretty notable guest/recurring actors (Peter Cullen, Michael Bell, Tim Curry, Billie Hayes, Mark Hamill, Jim Cummings, Alex Kingston, and more).

The actual show that is very kid-oriented is the first preschool Transformers cartoon that came out back in the 2000s during the Unicron Trilogy. In 2002, Playskool launched a line of preschool-aimed Transformers toys called "Transformers: Go-Bots". This toyline actually received a very short-lived animated series simply called "Go-Bots" (by the time it was released, the toyline had dropped the "Transformers" part of the title for some unknown reason). The show consisted of only four episodes and had a very weird distribution. The first two episodes were released direct-to-VHS on a video tape packed in with one of the toy releases, while the third and fourth episodes actually made it to television, but only aired twice, and only in the New York and Chicago areas.

This show is what Rescue Bots strove to not be. It is dumb, wacky super-heroics, but it's also kind of delightful in a "so bad it's hilarious" kind of way. I personally find it to be an amusing four-episode show in just how silly it is, especially since the voice cast of this show is made up of five Vancounver-based actors (Paul Dobson, Brian Dobson, Ted Cole, Alessandro Juliani, and Peter Kelamis) who all worked on the English dubs of the three Unicron Trilogy cartoons, as well as many other more serious anime like Dragon Ball Z, Gundam Wing, and InuYasha, as well as American cartoons like Ed Edd n' Eddy, ReBoot, Beast Machines, and more.

The two episodes that released on limited TV instead of video were also screened at BotCon 2006 as part of the MSTF event that used the Mystery Science Theater 3000 formula to make jokes about the various Transformers cartoon episodes/movies played during the event, which (from what I've read of the reports from that year since I didn't start going to BotCon until 2010) made the viewing experience of those two episodes even more hilarious.

Truth be told, back when Rescue Bots first came out, I too was very worried about it. The night that the first two episodes premiered, I sat down and rewatched the four Go-Bots episodes first just so I could try to get myself in the right mood and mindset for watching Rescue Bots, thinking that I had to do that just because it was a preschool show. But, to my utter surprise, after watching those first two Rescue Bots episodes, I was stunned at how intelligent it was, how real and grounded the characters all felt, treating emergencies and life-threatening situations with as much realistic seriousness and severity as the show could get away with in its target demographic, while also embracing core family values and a genuine sense of fun and excitement. It blew me away at how good it was, not "for a preschool show", but in general. I was expecting something stereotypically wacky like that Go-Bots cartoon or Marvel's Super Hero Squad Show, and was surprised at how it was the complete opposite. Of course, there is a little wackiness in there that comes with the territory, but it's restrained, with most of the characters are even self-aware enough to avoid such tropes.

I'd even call the main human family of Rescue Bots a far more mature depiction of family than Denny and Russell are in RID 2015 (and I like Denny and Russell for the most part). In fact, RID 2015's characters are, like, ten times more wacky than Rescue Bots's characters are.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:Knowing that Grim's crimes were pretty much just property damage makes me thing Autobot justice is a bit harsh. Grim was ready to reform just about right away. But, I guess, we aren't meant to dwell too hard on the subject in the show.

Without spoiling anything, I'd say keep that "Autobot justice is a bit harsh" notion in the far back corner of your mind for the rest of the series.

Go-bots!? Dang, I missed one. 4 episodes, eh? I guess I can suffer through just four episodes.

Well ... I guess I can give it a shot on your reco. I remember how I tried to watch the last Ben 10 series (the reboot) and just ... couldn't get through it. It wasn't bad, but just way too childish for me. Couldn't hold my interest. I also watched Rise of the TMNT. That was also tough to get through at times for similar reasons. So, hopefully, it'll be better.

Maybe I'll watch it after RID. At 6 combined seasons it's a real beast of a series!

Gauntlet101010 wrote:Go-bots!? Dang, I missed one. 4 episodes, eh? I guess I can suffer through just four episodes.

TFRaw has all four eps in the best quality possible here.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:Well ... I guess I can give it a shot on your reco. I remember how I tried to watch the last Ben 10 series (the reboot) and just ... couldn't get through it. It wasn't bad, but just way too childish for me. Couldn't hold my interest. I also watched Rise of the TMNT. That was also tough to get through at times for similar reasons. So, hopefully, it'll be better.

Yeah, Rescue Bots is positively grounded compared to those shows. I mean, It's still got plenty of larger-than-life action and heroics, but the cast all feel very relatable and very likable. It's a far cry from the "bottled ADHD" that Rise of the TMNT has been called. It also probably helps that it's set in a small town that feels a lot like a more sci-fi/modern-day version of Mayberry from The Andy Griffith Show (there are even a few references to that show thrown in, as well as a ton of loving references to Back to the Future, with one of the main human characters being a deliberate homage to Doc Brown).

The Autobot Heatwave and his human partner Kade Burns even have a sort of "Dinobot & Rattrap" kind of dynamic, with Heatwave being grumpy, no-nonsense, and bad-tempered like Dinobot while Kade is obnoxious, snarky, and full of himself like Rattrap, but they're also both too macho to admit how similar they are to each other at heart (and they're voiced by the ever charismatic duo of Steve Blum and Jason Marsden, making their interactions even more enjoyable). Oh, and they're both adult characters; Rescue Bots is surprisingly light on actual child characters (only two humans in the main cast are kids, the majority of main characters are all grownups or Autobots with adult mentalities).

Gauntlet101010 wrote:Maybe I'll watch it after RID.

Okay, but keep in mind that Rescue Bots ran simultaneously with both Prime and RID 2015, and had multiple crossovers with both of them. In its final season, RID 2015 reciprocated and had a three-episode guest-starring appearance from Rescue Bots Blurr, in which the events of the two RB crossovers episodes with RID 2015 were recalled. I'm telling you this now because, otherwise, you might have been confused when Blurr showed up and he, Bumblebee, and Sideswipe, all recalled the previous crossover eps in Rescue Bots, without knowing about the crossovers beforehand (TF: Prime was the only one of these cartoons that didn't have a crossover episode of its own).

Gauntlet101010 wrote:At 6 combined seasons it's a real beast of a series!

Six?

Rescue Bots (4) and Rescue Bot academy (2).

Fair enough on the warning. It doesn't make sense to stop now and continue with RiD after a long break.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:Rescue Bots (4) and Rescue Bot academy (2).

Ah, right. They're still two different shows, though. Set years apart from each other, with slightly different art styles, completely different voice casts (even for all the returning characters from the first show since Academy came out when Hasbro decided to switch from union actors in LA to non-union actors in New York), and the episode runtimes switched from 22 minutes in RB to 11 minutes in RBA.

The era of RBA and Cyberverse was when Hasbro decided to go cheap with its cartoons, but the creators of both did the best they could with what they had to work with, resulting in RBA being a pretty charming show and Cyberverse becoming "the little epic that could" in the long run.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:Fair enough on the warning. It doesn't make sense to stop now and continue with RiD after a long break.

Right. Aside from the four Go-Bots eps that could be a brief aside, I'd say continue through RID 2015 to the end first and foremost.

Although, there is actually one other show out there that isn't widely known about: Transformers: Portal, a Russian-original 13-episode web series with very limited animation (more like a motion comic, if I'm being honest) that only recently got subtitled in English a few months ago. It's a spinoff of RID 2015 set roughly during that show's second season, and is actually a trans-dimensional crossover with another universe inhabited by the G1 characters in their Titans Return and Combiner Wars toy bodies. And while all this is going on, a live-action multiversal being simply known as the Observer breaks the fourth wall by providing commentary on these events and taking time out of the main story to advertise then-new toys to us viewers watching at home.

The whole series is available to watch in its original Russian form on YouTube, but the English-subtitled version is not. TFRaw does have the English-subbed version, but due to concerns regarding copyright, Walruslaw (the man behind TFRaw) has put the episodes on TFRaw's main website instead, free to watch (or download) via MEGA.

I actually first watched it myself back before the English-subbed version came out, by turning on YouTube's auto-generated subtitle captions and then switching the language from Russian to auto-translated English. The result wasn't perfect but was just accurate enough for me to understand the most important parts of what was going on in each episode.

If you plan to watch Portal, I would definitely hold off until after watching at least all of Season 2 (including the "Season 2.5" six-episode mini-series), if not after the whole series.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!?

Ok, sounds cool. I love me some weird localized oddities. Ok, after I'm done with RiD it's on to Portal. Then I'll try to tackle the kid's stuff.

Okay, this just in. The entirety of Q-Transformers has been subtitled in English by Karyuudo Fansubs as of last Thursday, and they've also uploaded all of it to their YouTube channel.

I just finished binge-watching every episode and it is hilarious, a total hoot and a half for any longtime Transformers fan.

I definitely recommend you add this series to your to-watch list, as a few episodes actually cover some of the very topics that you and I have discussed previously in this very thread.

Since you're currently in the middle of RID 2015 and plan on watching Portal next, I'd say a good place to slot Q-Transformers would be after Portal and before you proceed to Go-Bots, Rescue Bots, and Rescue Bots Academy (I presume Cyberverse would be after all of those, too?).

Q-Transformers, eh? I didn't know they had an animated tie-in. Sure, I'll give it a watch. I actually have Hot Rod as part of my Hot Rod collection.

Robots in Disguise (2015)

This took a while!

It was kind of a trip being in the Prime era. Overall it was alright. The Optimus "past his prime" arc was painful to watch. It was cool to see Bee grow into a leader with his team and watching the dynamic grow, but the various run on gags ran on for too long. Bee did NOT need to invent a new catchphrase every episode. Fixit's verbal tic, similarly, did NOT need to be highlighted all the damned time. And what's with his helplessness? It would have been nice if he was ever, fully, repaired. Even towards the end of the series.

Initially my favorite was Widnblade, but she disappears. It's clear she's more of a "guest star". My next favorite is Drift. His attitude leaves a lot of funny moments for the team and a lot of room for good character interactions with everyone.

Grimlock gets on my nerves. A lot. He took the stupid ball and just sorta ran with it, huh?

The show forced to the Autobots to be pretty incompotent, huh? Windblade just leaves her weapon caches all over the place when she leaves and the rest figure that's good enough.

The Decepticons were wide and varied .... but also only appeared sometimes? There was Steeljaw's pack, which got the most character highlights, but also the Stunticons. The Stunticons were a nice change of pace, but I felt they were really one note. It was weird that they wanted to "rule the roads" on a planet like Earth. It's a weird low level threat with highly competent villains. I kinda like them, but the whole "robots in disguise" elements really limited them.

My favorite is still Steeljaw. He just gets the most of ... everything. It's hard to compete with him, although I like the pack he manages to surround himself with.

I guess I like Bisk too, but only for looks. I like the animalistic robot modes of the Decepticons for most of the series. It's unique. Again, though, we don't get enough. We don't see them form a full army where they interact with each other.

But I also feel like the Decepticons also got shortchanged because we saw so little of them. We had a few episodes with the Decepticon Island crew and the ones who followed the Mini Cons around, but it's hard to say much about 'em. They're fine, I guess.

I can see why I lost patience with the show when I first tried to watch it. It's far more aimed at children than Prime. Also, the playalists miss shows. As I was typing this up I relaised episode 21 wasn't on the master playlist on the official channel's youtube. Geez. Makes it frustrating to watch.

All in all it's ... okay. I like the character interactions, but the stakes stay level throughout. Being "robots in disguise" limits the show. Everything's run on AI! Somehow nobody ever notices the Transformers and it breaks immersion at times. But the cast is enjoyable enough. So it's okay.

Yeah. RID 2015 has basically the opposite issues that Prime had. Where Prime (or I guess more specifically the Aligned continuity behind the scenes) had too much ambition for its own good, RID 2015 didn't have enough ambition. Characters constantly learn the same lessons over and over again (Strongarm having to learn how to bend some rules sometimes, Sideswipe having to learn to be a team player, Grimlock having to learn grace and carefulness, etc.), it made the show too safe at times.

The Starscream arc at least tried to tie the show back with Prime a bit more, and explored some more lore that even Prime didn't tackle (like the Autobots' first arrival on Earth and having their first base inside Mount St. Hilary, when the original plan for Aligned was to have events akin to the 2007 movie be the Autobots' arrival on Earth).

I will say that the combiner arc did try something new by having the Bee Team, who was never a combiner team before, become one and have to get used to actually being a combiner instead of it just coming naturally to them, which is something that most writers just take for granted with other combiner teams.

What did you think of Blurr's little guest-starring arc in the final season?

I would have appreciated it more if I was also watching Rescue Bots which will come soon enough I suppose. I did like watching his interactions with Sideswipe.

I don't really like that Bee has to manually tell each bot how to move. Maybe if we saw them lose that as they trained more in combined form I would have liked it more, but it was weird. Maybe if, in the final episode, the combined form chose a name and had a unified personality I could have appreciated it more, but it really was more Voltron than Transformers, but in a bad way.

It was nice to see our old pal Starscream again. All our old friends in Prime. I did like the way they tied back. Just enough to have connectivity, but not too much so this show could keep it's identity.

Speaking of that arc, I did see some fallen Autobots. We don't get many, but I do like it when we see them. If this was later on I would have liked to have seen the mercenary faction see a return.

But it also highlights the failings of this show. Strongarm's friend would have made a great rival. As would drift's old mentor. It woulda been nice to see them meet each other.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:I would have appreciated it more if I was also watching Rescue Bots which will come soon enough I suppose.

I'm guessing Portal is next on the watchlist, right?

Gauntlet101010 wrote:I don't really like that Bee has to manually tell each bot how to move. Maybe if we saw them lose that as they trained more in combined form I would have liked it more, but it was weird. Maybe if, in the final episode, the combined form chose a name and had a unified personality I could have appreciated it more,

But see, Ultra Bee becoming his own new unified person would make him just like every other combiner we've ever had. A run-of-the-mill combiner. The whole point was to do something new and original by having each member conscious and needing to perfect their teamwork and coordination as individual parts of a single body. That's something that's never been done before in Transformers.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:But it also highlights the failings of this show. Strongarm's friend would have made a great rival. As would drift's old mentor. It woulda been nice to see them meet each other.

Yeah, after coming off the back of how serialized Prime got with its storytelling, it seems like the writers of this show either wanted or were forced to make the episodes as standalone as possible, only saving multi-episode arcs for the season finales. I have to wonder if it was something like a mandate on high from Hasbro executives since, as I recall, the writers of Prime had to constantly fight with Hasbro to let them tell long-running narratives while Hasbro wanted Prime to be standalone eps that could be watched in any order. If the same was true of RID 2015, it seems like the higher-ups got their wish this time.

Probably also didn't help that Cartoon Network was only airing the show at 6am dead slots on Sunday mornings when nobody would be watching it (this was around the time that CN was constantly marathoning Teen Titans Go! non-stop from morning to night, much to the ire of many CN viewers). During its initial run, more than half of the series' episodes even premiered in other countries ahead of the US, such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK, so a majority of viewers were tuning in to watch it online instead of on TV, and it's kinda been that way since thanks to all subsequent shows either airing on Cartoon Network at unwatchable times (Cyberverse), airing on Discovery Family at unpredictable times (Rescue Bots Academy), airing on streaming services that not everyone has (the Prime Wars Trilogy, EarthSpark), or just straight up airing on YouTube (Cyberverse again).

Yes, Portal is next, for what it's worth. It's super short.

I know taking away that aspect would make Ultra Bee more typical, it would also make him less ... annoying. I wouldn't have minded the teamwork aspect so much if it led up to them becoming a merged combiner. Galvatronus was, at the end, even if he didn't say his name. He dind't have to tell his limbs what to do. It just seemed like it should have ended on this note. Just like Fixit should have ended up fixed. When it was clear the show was going to end they should have let these things end.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:I know taking away that aspect would make Ultra Bee more typical, it would also make him less ... annoying.

That's fair. I was speaking more in concept than execution. The end result may have been a bit on the hokey side, but I appreciate that they at least attempted something new and bold than not try at all, as I felt the rest of the show played other things way too safe.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:I wouldn't have minded the teamwork aspect so much if it led up to them becoming a merged combiner. Galvatronus was, at the end, even if he didn't say his name. He dind't have to tell his limbs what to do.

Just goes to show how more disciplined and experienced Cyclonus's team was as a combiner that he could do all the talking for Galvatronus by himself.

Transformers Portal

Well. That was a thing that exists and that I watched.

Fron the name and placement I expected something like Robot Masters. And did not get it. Apparently this was made alongside a fan group and why they didn't just grab a bunch of then-current toys and mash them all together, I do not know. I would have liked to have a few scenes with Bumblebee fighting alongside Generations OP, Steeljaw and Generations Megatron fighting beside each other, Fixit and Wheeljack actually ... together! Not separated by universe. I know it's fanwank, but this is literally made by fans!

The premise of this ... show? Set of ads? Is that the RID Autobots finally reveal themselves to the world. But they never have to deal with these consequences, so why put that in there? The consequences of portals actually opening all over the entire world is never actually addressed and it's like they really open up in just one area.

The titans attacking seem more like a forced in ad than any real in-universe threat. Maybe if the RID heroes had to deal with THAT problem it'd be interesting? Instead I feel very disconnected by that since the solution is just "let fixit and Wheeljack put their heads together and make a search engine to find the Titan Masters and - oh, they are in the Generations Universe, what a surprise". It just has nothing to do with the portal problem and it's resolution has nothing to do with the portal problem.

The RiD continuity is pretty bad. The best place to fit this is Decepticon Island because most of the cons are from that point. At one point Prime powers up with that one bird Minicon, but it's treated like his own powerup. A deeper understanding of RiD would have been nice for this to work.

I feel like a smaller story would have been better than such a large one. Like, members of the RiD cast get flung into a portal and meet the Generations cast.

In the end the 13 Primes rewind time and make it so nothing ever happened because THEY care about keeping TFs a secret from humans. Don't you just love ending like that?

This series is rough. You need to know RiD AND you need to know G1 because there's nothing in this to get you to care about the characters otherwise. Even then it's not told well. The characters never actually interact and you have to have a narrator explain what's going on all the time.

Yeah, Portal really isn't anything great. The main appeal was just the fact that it was a dimensional crossover between two completely unrelated Transformers series and the fact that it was some weird foreign thing that very few English-speakers had ever seen in an understandable form.

At the very least, the idea of a Transformers character like the Observer sounds interesting on paper. Like DC's Monitor or Marvel's Watcher.

So what's next? Q-Transformers, I think?

EDIT: Oh, wait. I just remembered. Have you seen the 13-episode Movieverse web series Transformers: Cyber Missions, which first released back in 2010 as a bridge between ROTF and DOTM?

You're right, I ignored those. But I'd rather move on to Q-Transformers and keep it in the kid realm. Because it loops into Rescue Force and back into Aligned. So it'll be back to where I was. I don't think Q Force will take me too long. This feel like it'll be something totally different.

I think the Observer could have been alright, but let's be honest. Here's there to sell toys and save on the "animation" budget. And to shoe in exposition that isn't clear, which is most of it.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:You're right, I ignored those. But I'd rather move on to Q-Transformers and keep it in the kid realm.

Alrighty. In that Q-Transformers playlist I shared with you above, there are also some extra behind-the-scenes bonus features that were included in the fansub batch. I recommend watching those in addition to the episodes as they provide some additional context and insight for the episodes themselves.

Also, I presume your plan is to watch the cheesy Playskool Go-Bots episodes after Q-Transformers, right? Well, before watching those four Go-Bots episodes, I recommend watching the toy commercials for that line before proceeding to the episodes, as they give you a taste of what that toyline and the animation for its cartoon episodes were like, so that you'll have a better idea of what you'll be going into with the episodes.

Luckily, there were only three commercials for the toyline (BUT I also recommend getting through Q-Transformers first, before moving on to view these commercials and then the four episodes):

Q Transformers

Starting on the kid's stuff with Q Transformers. This is a really different series, but also a whole lot of fun! After watching a whole lot of Japanese Transformers I got a lot out of Season 2. Season 1 was all about them promoting the Flash remake of Mystery of Convoy. I wonder if that was preserved on one of the Flash preservation sites.

It has the same sort of energy as Super Hero cafe (from How it should have Ended). It's just Optimus, Bumblebee, and Lockdown all hanging out. Out of the three, I liked Lockdown the best, he keeps it real.

I was surprised that Beast Wars 2 and Neo weren't mentioned in their rundown of Transformers series, but Beast Machines was. Even Kiss Players was! Those were the first full Japanese series in a long time. I thought they'd be worth a mention.

And, they were wrong, Reboot was the first 100% CG show, not Beast Wars. But I guess it's fine to overlook that, lol.

No mention on Zone either, but there was just the one episode, so whatever on that one too.

All in all it's a really fun series that doesn't overstay it's welcome. Just as I was getting tired of the dynamic of our three mains, they introduced guest stars! And Season 2 introduces even more guest stars in their own segments.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:Q Transformers

Starting on the kid's stuff with Q Transformers.

I really wouldn't consider this a kids show. The toys may have been chibi, but this is more of a comedy sketch talk show with jokes and adlibs that mainly longtime fans and adults would get.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:Out of the three, I liked Lockdown the best, he keeps it real.

Especially during the adlib portions when he could just go all out.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:I was surprised that Beast Wars 2 and Neo weren't mentioned in their rundown of Transformers series, but Beast Machines was. Even Kiss Players was! Those were the first full Japanese series in a long time. I thought they'd be worth a mention.

Yeah, it's weird that they forgot about those two, especially since they did mention Car Robots. Maybe they just couldn't find a way to seamlessly transition into those two without feeling too much like an interruption of Beast Wars, Metals, and Returns.

Gauntlet101010 wrote:No mention on Zone either, but there was just the one episode, so whatever on that one too.

Yeah, they were focusing on TV series. Zone was a direct-to-VHS OVA.