by joesaysso » Sun Nov 15, 2009 1:04 am
- Weapon: Plasma Beam Rifle
When I was a boy, I loved the 86 movie. I'm pretty sure I cried a real tear when Optimus Prime died. I didn't think too much about all of the original characters getting wasted. I just never read into it that much. The things I took from that movie were: the autobots have a new leader, Galvatron is bada$$, and Unicron was the craziest thing I had ever seen up to that point in my short life. It was a transformers movie and I loved it, plain and simple.
These days, I still like it for what it meant to me back then. And I probably watch it more these days than any 30+ year old should but now I know more about what it is. I get the feeling from some of the responses in this thread that some may not. The 86 movie is a victim of Hasbro/Takara. When I was a boy, I got every transformers I could get my hands on because I loved that cartoon. And that was exactly the point. I'm sure most people here know but the cartoon was nothing more than a vehicle to sell the toys. Takara/Hasbro came up with this new line of toys that transform from vehicle to robot. How do they get these toys sold to the kids? Lets come up with a cartoon. If the kids see the cartoon, they are going to want the toys. And thats exactly what happened. When they came out with some new toys, they got written into the cartoon to be exposed to the kids.
Well, after two seasons Transformers got huge. To keep the money flowing, Takara/Hasbro came out with a whole new line of toys. A whole new line of toys presented a problem: How do they get the kids to buy the entire new line? They couldn't just write off/replace every single character in the cartoon. Kids would be confused and angry about what happened to their favorite characters. They couldn't just phase the new characters a little at the time. That would take too long. They toys were already made. They needed to start making money off of the molds now to get a return on their investment. Oh, a brilliant idea. Lets make a movie! In the movie, we will introduce the kids to the new line of characters. At the same time, we will kill off all of the old characters. This will give the kids enough closure they need with the old characters to accept the new characters. This way they won't have a problem buying all of the new figures, plus we get returns from the movie too.
Some writer didn't sit down when penning the movie and think that it would be a good idea to kill off every character that the kids loved. The writer did it because Hasbro told him to. Hasbro created Rodimus Prime, therefore Optimus Prime had to go. No kid would accept Rodimus Prime as the leader of the Autobots and, in turn, buy his figure if Optimus was still around. The movie, like the cartoon before it, was nothing more than a vehicle to sell already made toys. This is why it turned out the way it did. There's no transition at all between the end of season 2 and the movie other than the voice over at the beginning telling us what happened when we last saw the transformers. The majority of of our favorite characters end up getting wasted and the ones that do survive, pretty much just disappear. And there is really no good explanation to where all of these new characters have been.
Back then, Hasbro didn't care too much about the final product of the movie. They stood to make a lot more money from the toys that the movie would sell than the actual movie itself. However, Bay has a lot more control of his movies. Yes, Hasbro has input and yes the movies sell toys but the purpose of the movies isn't to sell toys. Selling toys is the byproduct of a hit movie. Bay and Hasbro care a lot more about these latest movies than anybody cared about the 86 movie and I believe that it shows in the final products. If the 86 movie had been written with the sole purpose of making a good movie like the 07 movie was, there was definitly a better story that could have been told. ROTF has its problems but at least Optimus didn't get whored out for Rodimus Prime.
One man's two cents
. So, I can totally understand how someone who's 20 now would find it terribly corny.
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