by Bumblevivisector » Sat Dec 14, 2013 7:20 pm
Never heard of this site, but they have an article about hydro-fracking that claims it "arguably saved the U.S. economy", so I'd take any of their advice with a grain of salt...and a glass of flammable well-water.
As to how cramming a lost season into the middle of the Sunbow cartoon might go over, let's look back at the last American TV show to even imply serious continuity with it: Beast Machines. While much of fandom is apparently OK with those 2 years of the franchise, I mentioned hydro-fracking in part because that's also a good analogy to BM's approach to storytelling. Yes, the show did produce several ounces of decent drama, but extracting it required forcibly retconning several tons worth of an organic core into a planet which had been entirely cybernetic in cartoons and comics for the previous 15 years. Was it really worth the cost? Enough fans said "no" that a tradition of fiction restarts began immediately afterward.
And no, Beast Wars didn't really have those problems because it tried to remain vague enough be connected to either the G1 cartoons or comics, preventing significant retcons. Of course, Japan just had their version of G1 cartoon continuity without another TF universe running parallel from the beginning, so they've been cramming new stuff into it for almost a decade now. And what's been their most infamous addition to the gap between Sunbow seasons 1 and 2?
KISS PLAYERS.
Now, it's easy to say that there's no way Hasbro would allow something that inappropriate, but in addition to occurring in the same time gap this article suggests filling, Kiss Players was also clearly targeted at an older audience, technically fulfilling the suggestion for the live action TV show.
The point I'm getting at is that these authors are proposing something which makes business sense on paper without any "boots on the ground" understanding of how that would be implemented in order to please fandom. They've clearly heard the chorus of "Bring back G1!", but if they asked any two fans what that actually means, the answers would be as different as night and day. I think this is genuinely more true for TF than other long running scifi franchises, in part because the original treatment wasn't so much "high concept" as O'Neil and Shooter projecting then-current events onto pre-existing robot toys in the manner of a creative-writing exercise: The oil crisis as relevant to a robot's fuel source, and the eruption of Mt. St. Helens as an expression of ancient power we never knew was right under our feet. (The resulting 4-million year time gap and fighting over fossil fuels have largely faded from prominence in recent years) Therefore, the Sunbow cartoon ended up being just loose enough in its value system that fans could project a LOT of different ideas onto it.
For me, the whole appeal was misanthropy. The general rule of toy-characters in 80's 'toons being decently developed while non-toy-characters were extraneous, when filtered through TF, resulted in a vision of humanity as a bunch of dumb animals who more-or-less deserved to be squashed and have "their" fuel seized by these superior robots from space, with the Autobots being the good guys because they valued protecting lesser species. Since I was already getting fed up with human nature as early as kindergarten, this idea seemed downright empowering, since it forced the viewer to look down on their own race and consider the flaws we might fix so that we might one day be as awesome as these robots. I don't expect anyone else to share this view of the cartoon, but even if it was unintentional, that subtext was there, so I'd consider any TF series totally devoid of misanthropy to be flawed. And yet, TV producers would probably consider removing it a way of making TF mainstream enough for primetime.
And yes, the two most recent American series have misanthropy too, just in different ways. Rescue Bots' only antagonist is a human who would subjugate the rest of his kind if not for the intervention of superior alien robots. Prime just plain never had many humans, and the majority that we actually ever saw do anything were terrorists; KILL 'EM ALL!
And no, even Raksha's take on TF isn't more outlandish than anyone else's.
See, we all agree that there were some flaws in the G1 'toon that a lost-years season should fix: Animation errors, continuity, etc. But no one will ever agree on how to fix them. Someone mentioned Dreamwave, but even its flawed G1 universe reads like Shakespeare compared to much of it's fellow '80s nostalgia boom books. Just look at Wildstorm's Thundercats: that was a "more mature" continuation of a cartoon classic, right?
I think Hasbro's already on the right path; Transfans have it pretty good now, right? If they want to expand their empire, they should focus more on having MLP chip away at Mattel's lock on the fashion-doll market, and experiment with reviving some of their forgotten boy's franchises. M.A.S.K. was already name dropped in Prime, and the current popularity of zombies points to a lot of untapped potential in Inhumanoids and Spiral Zone.
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