viruscarnage wrote:Sabrblade wrote:It baffles me to no end as to how anyone could possibly consider something like Armada to be objectively superior to something like Animated.
It doesn't surprise me, if they watched Armada 10 years ago when they were a kid, it would hold a special place in their heart. This is of course assuming they are pretty young, and Armada being their first exposure to Transformers.
Yeah, when I was 5, Voltron was the only cartoon I ever (briefly) liked better than TF, so the Toonami reruns as I finished high school left me shocked at what a rushed mess it was in translation. When I was that young, I was blind to animation glitches, and weird inconsistencies made me assume it was just going over my head (the fact that Robotech genuinely did just that didn't help either), and Armada likely had a similar effect.
Watching it in my early 20s, I thought Armada's chief merit was that it started out so bad that it couldn't help but get better as it progressed, making it fun to follow. But you have to look at the bigger picture. What made Armada special was it being the one and only time since G1 that a leg of the TF franchise launched as a triple-threat, with an entirely new toyline, comic series, and cartoon, each medium charging full steam ahead onto its own blank canvas! (Note: G2's 'toon wasn't original, Energon's media were effectively rollovers of Armada, and Animated and Prime's comics are little more than appendices to their cartoons) Even if most other TF cartoons are better once the nostalgia blinders come off, that doesn't diminish the memory of the full Armada experience, of which the cartoon is just frequently the most-discussed.
This effect is multiplied further by the company Armada kept on Saturday evenings. I waxed nostalgic about that aspect back in the Armada 20 Anniversary thread, so I won't repeat all that except to clarify that it wasn't Toonami just then. I don't think any other TF 'toon was fortunate enough to be part of a block of cartoons that long and awesome (I think it was 7:00 to 1:00), not even G1. Even if you also have Justice League, HeMan, Samurai Jack, and classic G.I.Joe, there's surely some we've all forgotten, so I'll gladly buy all of Armada to help me remember.