The Energon Pub

Hi, there. Something I noticed while watching the three-parter from G1. 'The Ultimate Doom'.

Never once did they say anything to the effect of all humans making it to shelters, or anything like that. We have short scenes of massive destruction, of an entire town being washed away, in one instance. And never once was there any assurance of no casualties.

So my question is, how many people were killed when Megatron used the space bridge to get Cybertron into orbit?

No one was harmed in the making of the Ultimate Doom. Any similarity between persons living or dead is strictly coincidental. Because after all, it's just a cartoon.

Ok ok, I kid, I kid. But seriously, no one getting hurt is just one of the hallmarks of 80's animation, and 80's TV in general. I'm not familiar with the A-Team, but apparently there were loads of explosions, hundreds of bullets spent, and numerous car/helicopter crashes. Yet at the end of it all everyone walked away. Then there's G.I. Joe where everyone magically parachuted out of their exploding plane. I'm sure with enough time I could come up with a baker's dozen of other examples too.

The point is, Transformers was a program specifically designed for children's entertainment, and to sell toys. There was a HUGE backlash against Transformers The Movie(86) because of it's violence, and if they'd instilled that kind of violence in the TV show prior well quite frankly we wouldn't be here today.

lol, I know it's a kid's cartoon. But there are layers to it. Alternate interpretations as to what happened onscreen. And mine is without specific 'No one died, thank Primus!' statements, I'm guessing this is one of the reasons they never visited Los Angeles during the cartoon...

It's a quantum leap of realism up from GI Joe and Voltron, that's for sure. And for the record, there were occasional deaths in the A-Team. I've got all five series on DVD.

There is something else about "The Ultimate Doom" that is quite puzzling. Specifically, how it was handled in the Japanese version of G1 seasons 1 & 2 (Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers).

Over there, the three-parter was called "Day of Distruction" and (like many seaon 1 & 2 episodes) had its placement reordered differently from where it had previously been placed in the Amercian version. Instead of taking place early on during what we would call our first season, "Day of Distruction" was moved to the very end of the whole series to serve as the series finale.

While this does sound like a cool idea to do (considering how we got the lame B.O.T. as our season two finale), it complicates thing with an episode called "Countdown to Extinction" (known in Japan as "The Earth Obliteration Plan"), which takes place directly after "The Ultimate Doom". Since "The Ultimate Doom"/"Day of Distruction" was used as the FSRLTF finale, "Countdown to Extinction"/"The Earth Obliteration Plan" was shown much much earlier than its three-part predecessor. How on Earth does that work?

And since 'Countdown to Extinction' was the perfect follow-up to 'The Ultimate Doom'... it doesn't work at all.