by Fires_Of_Inferno » Tue Dec 14, 2010 4:27 am
- Motto: "Minor things aren't worth being mad over."
- Weapon: Venom Blaster
Not that anyone really cares what some random tosser thinks when they can go watch what people with youtube reviews thinks or when people with higher post counts than mine thinks, but I just felt like sharing my opinions of what we've seen in the miniseries that was presented to us. I also realize that there have probably been twenty dozen other people who's thoughts on this matter you've already gone through. Trust me though, my opinion is much more important (especially to my mother and I). Read it, ignore it, flame it, like it, reply to it, print it out make an effigy of me out of it and burn it with flaming projectile fecal matter, doesn't matter to me, I'm just putting this here because I like seeing my thoughts in textual form.
A warning to people who haven't seen it yet, there are/may be spoilers and I will kick you in the beans with my size 14 steel toed boots if you bitch about not liking my sexy words.
Now then, I had put off checking out this series for a while, mostly because I still had the bad taste of Animated in my mouth. The early art work put the character designs somewhere between the smelly leavings of out-of-work Teen Titan animators of Animated and the blurry, epileptic camera work, twisted, barely-recognizable-as-things Bayverse characters with a little bit of Pixar-styled humans in there too. Yes sometimes I do judge a book by it's concept art, we all do.
After getting over the new designs, and figuring that they weren't SO bad, I checked out the show, and f*c% me, it instantly replaced Beast Wars as the best Transformers series ever. The animation is great, the voice acting is right on, and I'm all for the story line in this. I hated everything about Animated, I hated the character designs, I hated the story, I hated the Autobots (except Jazz and Perceptor), I hated the Decepticons (except Blitzwing), I hated the guy(s) who conceptualized the idea, and I hate their dogs. So when I saw Bulkhead it took all my strength to not turn the monitor off and hurl my laptop at the nearest living creature.
So I repressed my rage into a nice healthy tumor an continued watching, as I did and the series went on I realized very quickly that, while he has the voice and body of Animated Bulkhead, they almost did a switch around with his personality. Rather than being the retarded kid who turns out to be an idiot savant at something, he's more like a stupid linebacker who's only in college because of a football scholarship. I think that simile got away on me there but my point is that I suddenly found myself liking the character. So after the entire cast of robots is presented to us and I find out that I like each and every one of them (yes including Bumblebee, I don't care what anyone says, I much prefer the R2D2 beeping Bayverse Bumblebee as opposed to the dumbass ego-fu%#er Bumblebee from Animated). Then we come to the weakpoint in any Transformers universe, the Humans.
Interestingly enough, out of the five Human characters we're introduced to in the miniseries, I only hated two of them, the others I really enjoyed, however I'll only talk about the three main ones here because this post is already going on longer than I have the attention span to actually read in one sitting.
First off: Raf. I hate the child the most. There is no way a 12 year old would know anything about computers. How in the hell a child is able to hack into a heavily guarded computer system is never going to be explained and that is what bothers me the most. I hated it in G1 and it's even worse now, I mean at least you could say that Chip could do it because he was using an advanced alien computer. This kid is using his laptop. Also, the fact that he understands Bumblebees beeping makes me want to regurgitate my organs through my nose.
Second off: Miko (generic Japanese sounding last name). If she's an exchange student who's only been in America for a little while, why does she not have an accent? It's not like she's been living there for years, exchange students are around for a few months, or at most a full school year, then they're shipped back to their home! So she's in there as the reckless, spunky female human lead in the group who's only there to #%ck things up for the people who actually matter. The kind of behavior she demonstrates can ONLY be tolerated with a small group of giant robots and only with the personalities the Autobots present have. A larger group would have realized how much of a security risk she was and that her recklessness and squishyness were a bad enough combination that she becomes a liability and should be barred from every being around any of them ever again, even so far as to put her into some sort of protective custody. Where's UK comic Grimlock when you need him?
Third off: Jack. Sexual tension between him and Arcee notwithstanding, this is one of the few times I can say that I actually enjoyed a human character in a Transformers series (the other times being Sparkplug from G1 and Maggie Madsen from the 2007 movie). The other aforementioned humans are copy-paste personality arch-types that I hate, and the same could be said of Jack here, but it's at least one that none of the other Transformers series never used yet (but prepare for them to use it to DEATH and beyond). He probably reacts to this as most of us would have, pissing himself in fear at the start, reluctant to get involved, then saying "F*&k this!" and going home. The part where this and reality diverge is when he returns to them to get himself into more of a clusterfkuc than if he had stayed home and played video games (which is what most of us would do, the playing video games bit I mean).
So the last thing to talk about before wrapping this up is what every good army needs, henchmen and lackeys. In this case the dime a dozen generic Decepticon clones (I like the term Decepticlone used in the Armada video game, so that is what I will use). Usually when you see a faceless lackey in any form of tv show or movie they get their hindquarter removed from their loin section and then returned to them after getting the trim and waist removed from it (sorry I'm just getting out of a college meat cutting course), and normally that is all they are supposed to do, just to make the good guys look even better. However this series takes that idea and smacks it across the face with it's big Cybertronian willy right away by having a two-on-two fight between a couple of Decepticlones and Arcee and Bumblebee. The fight proceeds to the point where the two Autobots are getting their metal asses recycled back to them, seriously, the faceless badguys have them on the ropes until the effing iron giant shows up. At that point the lackeys actually do something intelligent. They see that they're outnumbered and probably outmatched, and they bugger off! This to me was actually quite amazing and made me really anxious to see how a main character on main character fight would go. Sadly the show just teases our tenders with a couple of quick confrontations and no real fighting between main characters. An irritating, but clever way of getting us to want more.
In closing, this series has parts that I greatly enjoy and parts that make me want to s#!+ with such epic fury that all of my internal organs and some of my bones end up in the toilet. Thankfully the good outweighs the bad in this case and I will gladly tune in when the series begins proper. The way Hasbro presented this series was actually well done. Instead of immediately signing up for an entire first season, they test the waters with a short little bit of story that can just end right there or continue on. Very smart of them and very little risk too. If it was disliked they could have pulled the plug very quickly. I have good hopes for this series.
Now them I have a hard time making closing statements so I'm just going to stop now....
[ Click to attempt signal recovery... ]
