by Sabrblade » Sat Apr 20, 2024 12:48 pm
- Motto: "Can't do a job halfway. What's worth doing is worth doing well, I say."
- Weapon: Saber Blade
I'm gonna be honest, this happens every single time we get the first reveal of another new show or movie that has a lighter tone, and I'm sick of it.
Transformers is, has been, and always will be a family-friendly property meant to sell childen's playthings to youngsters, first and foremost. And many of us adult fans were once part of that original age group, and we LOVED it when we were that age. We loved it so much that we're still here with it so long after we've aged out of that age group, because no matter how much taller and deeper-voiced we've become on the outside, we're still just a bunch of kids on the inside.
That inner child has stuck with us because we've defied society's peer pressures that have told us to "grow up" because we're "too old for toys/comics/cartoons/etc." And because we've embraced our inner child, we have become what society has come to refer to as "geeks", "nerds", "dorks", "fanatics", "enthusiasts", "afictionados", and so on. And most of those terms were once derogatory, meant to label us as societal outcasts and abnormals. "Freaks", if you will. Yet, as the years have gone by with the growing rise of nerd culture, we "geeks" have come to wear those labels on our sleeves with pride and dignity, having risen past the derision and bullying that were once (and, sadly, still are) common reactions from those outside of geekdom.
So when I see so many of those supposedly self-proclaimed nerds and dorks who openly collect and geek-out about children's toys and cartoons reacting so negatively to the next new thing in Transformers that has even a slightly lighter tone (e.g. - Animated, Rescue Bots, Robots in Disguise 2015, Rescue Bots Academy, Bumblebee, Cyberverse, BotBots, EarthSpark) and isn't some miserable grimdark edgelord "Gritty and Mature" depression-fest (DOTM, Prime, AOE, TLK, Machninima's Prime Wars Trilogy, Netflix's War For Cybertron Trilogy), I see nothing but hypocrisy.
I'm not saying everyone has to like everything, but we should all at least recognize that we're fans of something that is still intended for children, and have no shame about that. If those same naysayers give the super-wacky lighthearted G1 cartoon with all its goofy-voiced Saturday-morning-cartoon characters a pass just because of rose-tinted nostalgia, then I'm calling out the hypocrisy where I see it.
Even Beast Wars lived and breathed Looney Tunes style humor. "The Low Road" wasn't an isolated case of silliness. The whole show made use of Bugs Bunny-styled and Tom & Jerry-styled comedy gags to get around the US networks' broadcast standards and practices for violence in children's television. Even Beast Machines, as dark and mature as that show was, still made occasional lighthearted quips, jokes about sports and music, and even pop culture references. Oh, and Prime had Miko; I shouldn't even have to say anything about how super-wacky she was.
Every time Transformers has produced a show or movie that was uber-dark in tone, it's always, ALWAYS, been a depressing piece of garbage. Like, why would anyone want to watch something so miserable? Where's the fun in that? What kind of inner child just wants to watch the world burn? That's horrible.
Which brings me to the question of "Where's your inner child?" People are saying this movie looks like it's only aimed at kids and has nothing of value for adults, when if you looked past all the jokes (which the director admitted were crammed into the trailer on purpose because of how serious and real the movie gets as it goes on), you'd recognize that this movie is likely going to tackle some serious subjects, like free will, the rights of the oppressed, the social inequities and moral injustices of a class-based caste system, slavery, the amount of power and control that entities of social authority and governance should have over the people, and so on. That's a bunch of stuff that would go right over the heads of little kids.
If we really want to feel "grown up" and "mature", then whining about a children's property making something that isn't Grim & Gritty isn't the way to go about it. This whole attitude of "I DEMAND to be taken SERIOUSLY and that MY children's media be the Transformers equivalent of SIN CITY!!" just reeks of juvenile insecurity. I mean, we like a children's property but not when it's being a children's property? That doesn't make any sense! Are we geeks or aren't we?
Though this isn't a Disney movie, I'm reminded of a quote Walt Disney once said that I feel still applies to this film:
I do not make films primarily for children. I make them for the child in all of us, whether we be six or sixty. Call the child "innocence". The worst of us is not without innocence, although buried deeply it might be. In my work I try to reach and speak to that innocence, showing it the fun and joy of living; showing it that laughter is healthy; showing it that the human species, although happily ridiculous at times, is still reaching for the stars.
"When there's gold feathers, punch behind you!!"Shadowman wrote:This is Sabrblade we're talking about. His ability to store trivial information about TV shows is downright superhuman.
Caelus wrote:My wife pointed out something interesting about the prehistoric Predacons. I said that everyone was complaining because transforming for them mostly consisted of them just standing up-right. She essentially said, 'So? That's what our ancestors did.'
