The Energon Pub

call me nitpicky, but i am the guy who wants realism in most things. Batman movies should be nippleless and still R rated, Judge Dredd movie should not have had Rob Schneider, and...Transformers should never be babysitters.

why is it that the latest incarnations of my beloved TFs have the dumbest, most insipid element ever?

it is nowhere remotely realistic, (G1 had some doozies as far as realism issues but...) and immediately renders anything remotely robotic impotent.

don't tell me in a character bio that X transformer has a cannon that destroys a city block, but on the cartoon, cannot kill a f-in kid he aims for.

lemme calm down a moment.
let's try this again.
i know since the 80s most cartoons were intended to move product.
but in the present, i think great storytelling can do that better than putting an element such as kids tagging along on the old spaceship.

I just wish that TF would try to do what gundam did a long time ago with War in the Pocket.
Giant Robots, billion year long wars, and kids do not ever mix.
things end badly.

kids just cannot run around guys like Cybertron Metroplex without asking to be a stain on the ground.

i hated Cybertron as a series because of the kids (and not to mention there was more smack talk than an episode of WWW Raw) and the way they made the whole series fall apart. they appeared and acted stupid, they had to have babysitters, they made the autobots look like chumps- optimus, if ya really cared about the kids, you woulda made Vector Prime fly them the heck home- and well, back to my original point. Kids and wars don't mix.

even the bay flick had elements of that, BUT
it was understandable because spike was crucial to the story because of his owning what they needed.

sigh. i guess the only thing i can do is read the comics and wait until hasbro or whomever grows up and ditches the kiddie crap.

Putting kids in creates that "it could happen to me" aspect. It worked for Harry Potter, he had no idea anything was out of the ordinary until he got that letter. It's great for the kiddies but annoys the crap out of us older folks.

I'm curious.

If you watched it, what did you think of the Beast Wars? The way the Maximals handled the early humans.

Well, the newer series are aimed for younger audiences. Why do you think no one really Died in Cybertron?
That'd be "Politically Incorrect"

Some kids did die in the cartoon Movie. Robot kids, that is.

Spike Witwicky was a great and memorable character because he not only helped Transformers connect with the humanity and the Earth in general; he was also a good friend of Autobots, especially Bumblebee, who ended up stealing many of our hearts. And, Spike spent most of his whole life helping the Transformers. But he's not the only human who did that - his middle-aged father and his plucky girlfriend were part of the whole action, too.

About the other shows, however...as an older fan, I agree that young rugrats running around underfoot and getting all chummy with the grim, battle-torn mecha robots is quite irksome to me, too. They SHOULD be in school, for crying out loud!

Actually, I'm just plain sick of anime kids in general. They are EVERYWHERE with their stupid punky hair, big shiny eyes, innocent baby faces, and an endless parade of school uniforms that includes too-short skirts on underaged little girls in impossible pigtails.

Not to mention the fact anime kids are always picked to DO WAR, too!:MAD: (No matter how young and inexperienced they are!)

I wouldn't mind the kids so much if they weren't so stupid.

Siren Prime wrote:I wouldn't mind the kids so much if they weren't so stupid.

The Armada Kids have to be blown up about every Kid but Cybertron Kids have to go!

never saw it, so i can't say anything.

good point about the "it could happen to me" aspect; still, and i am being wayyyyyyy too nitpicky, getting hit by a blast from megatron's arm cannon "Could happen to me, so i should get the hell out", ya know?

ever just wish that transformers would just use the classic Indiana Jones line, "it's not the years, it's the mileage" in regards to how things are done?

at least to a small degree you saw it in the LA movie.

I do understand that when aliens come to Earth, they usually require a "local connection" and all that, but why, oh why, could it not be an adult? When you're dealing with HUGE metal aliens built for nothing but combat, children should be NO WHERE AROUND! Then comes the people telling me that "it's a show geared to a child-audience and a toy-line...blah blah blah..." My opinion still stands! *gets off soapbox now*

I think kids shouldnt be in every series....

Spike just brings stray tapedecks into the Ark, Daniel is simply idiotic...

Rad in Armada continued running and talking when Alexis told him not to...

The kids in Cybertron were crappy like heck....


Beast Wars was great due to the lack of talking, dumb human characters...

Pyrostrata wrote:I do understand that when aliens come to Earth, they usually require a "local connection" and all that, but why, oh why, could it not be an adult? When you're dealing with HUGE metal aliens built for nothing but combat, children should be NO WHERE AROUND! Then comes the people telling me that "it's a show geared to a child-audience and a toy-line...blah blah blah..." My opinion still stands! *gets off soapbox now*

precisely, exactly.
for those of you in your late 20s and older, remember when as a kid you knew EVERYTHING, everything anyone older than 14 said was stupid?

well, hate to say it, but that is the impression i get with kids in these 'toons. they know way tooo damn much, and am amazed that people who demand a certfied techncian changes the oil in their AMC Pacer finds it okay that 12 year olds are screwing around with Cybertronian tech or telling war machines (who have billions of years of off world experience) ideas or strategies.

i had a boss once, before he fired a coworker, "you are still a virgin (at just about everything) yet, so how the heck do you know about the world, much less how to run a salad bar?"
i share the opinion about kids hopping galaxies with Prime and posse.


i just hate the kids in every aspect. besides, when a kid tells you, I have a 75 foot tall walking combat machine that turns into a flying combat machine, what would you do?
you'd laugh at him and tell his parents to up the ritalin.
(even do that with some adults.)


one more thing- about kids hanging with TFs: shoot em. In Men in Black, during the MiB test, he shot the little girl.
an 8 year old running around with quantum physics books, she's about to start something.

One of the good thing about Beast Wars is the lack of human presence. And of course, the CGI graphics.

Auto Bot wrote:One of the good thing about Beast Wars is the lack of human presence. And of course, the CGI graphics.

agreed!

If you thought Cybertron was bad with the kids, just wait till you see the tricycle riding tyke in Animated D: Granted that show is delibertately aimed at kids, but still

Why do they always put kids in harms way? It gives bad ideas to kids.

kids in harm's way, that is yet another plot device/cliche` that is overdone.
look, name no less than 10 shows or movies where a preteen/teen is told by the old person, "stay here, do not move one inch" and five seconds later, the punk has an epiphany or some other lame duck excuse and runs out into danger.
writers have done that with women, p.i.'s, etc.

goes back to my gripe that kids are too smart for their own good and are never shown the consequences of not thinking- or in their case, overthinking, right?-
and it ruins an otherwise good story.

heck, yesterday morning, after work, i saw a 1959 western where a girl is told to stay put during a gunfight. she naturally starts sneaking around and gets bit by a rattlesnake.
at least there was some justice served in her case.


the only time children should (not really, but should is for lack of a better word) be in harm's way is during a war. like during the Bosnian conflict of the mid nineties.
the problem with children getting into danger was that in all the cities, snipers lived everywhere and took shots at anything moving- so children had to race for their lives, parents dragged them through the alleys to shop for food, to even get to a church.
those children, as opposed to the anibrats, didn't ignore their parents and just run out to look at a pretty fight, they ran out into it just to try and salvage what they could of a life. to save their own.
sadly, even some of the most streetwise of these people never made it.

okay, enough preaching/gloom. the point was made.
anime kids just don't listen.