Burn wrote:A single father, busting his arse to raise his son. I'm ashamed I never saw this aspect of the series until now, I've allowed myself to get so caught up in the Autobot/Decepticon crap that I never paid attention to this character who may very well be the best human character we've gotten.
I'm with you there. For all his silliness, Denny's been very good at trying his best to be there for his son while also running a business (which just got scrapped) and helping their giant alien friends fight the good fight.
A standout fatherly moment for him that calls to my mind was back in the second episode of this season when Russell was having difficulty playing football against that one really tall kid. Though the solution was so simplistically eye-rolling ("just kick the ball higher"), the father-son talk Denny gave Russell really hit home for a lot of people:
Denny: "Why'd you lie?"
Russell: "If I go out there, I'm just going to hurt the team and make myself look silly."
Denny: "You'll hurt them more if you don't even try."
Russell: "But I did try."
Denny: "You know, I was a good student when I was your age. Made all A's. But then, I got a D. It floored me. For a long time after that, I didn't think I could ever get an A again."
Russell: "So you quit school and started a successful business selling vintage stuff?"
Denny: "Nnnnnoooo. I realized, that if I quit then, I could find a reason to quit
anything for the rest of my life, and I didn't wanna do that. So I went back, figured out what I was doing wrong, and worked at it. Hard. I started getting A's again. And after I graduated,
then I started a successful business selling vintage stuff.
"
Between Denny on this show and both Chief Burns and Doc Greene on Rescue Bots, we really do live in an age of good father characters--good
single father characters, no less--getting their time to shine in the Transformers cartoons.