Rated X wrote:My point is the concept just won’t receive the same love as the Decepticon pretenders. I am an 80’s child so I can vouch for this. I had Skullgrin and Bugly as a kid. The Decepticon pretenders sold while the Autobot pretenders were shelf warmers.
What about Stranglehold? How well did he sell?
Rated X wrote:Now back to 2012. Thanks to Michael Bay, a robot can have any type of weird alien, bug, skull, or monster face and still pass as a robot. But a human face? It’s as stupid a concept now as it was 25 years ago. Scale wise, the robot inside the shell would have to be as small as a child, while the Decepticon pretenders could be any size since there is no scale for monsters.
[/quote]Why a child? In both the American and Japanese fiction, the Autobot Pretenders (and Stranglehold) all resembled adult males.
Rated X wrote:Unless you would be “fooled” by a 20 foot tall human walking down the block.
In Marvel G1, the giant sized human shells were used to fool the Decepticon Pretenders (rather than Earth humans) into think that they were giant humans so as to weird them out. They were also used to fool other giant alien lifeforms into thinking they were humans, and even visited a planet that was ruled by human female warriors of the same size as the Autobot Pretenders.
Though, Stranglehold, being a Decepticon, was an exception to this. He just used his Pretender shell for its added power, rather than for any disguising purposes (like any Decepticon Pretender did).
I don't know of what the other U.S. fiction did of with the Pretenders, though.
Rated X wrote:I never saw the 80's japanese cartoon, so I dont know if the humans played a different role than as the actual figures that portrayed them as huge shells. But judging from these photos posted, even a deluxe is way out of scale with other classics figures. Maybe if he were legends size.
In the Japanese cartoon, the human Pretender shells worked on a different level. Instead of a robot hiding with an organic casing, the robot actually shrunk down and physically changed on a molecular level into a human form. This was done as more than a mere disguise but as a means to actually integrate into human society (since these four Autobots were so fascinated by humanity when they first arrived on Earth during the Neolithic era). so, in this series, the Pretender shell was
smaller than the actual robot form (though, one issue of the Japanese comic related to this series showed that the Pretender shell could grow in size to be at the height of robot mode, but this didn't happen on screen in the cartoon itself).
Though, the Decepticon Pretenders, being monsters, didn't shrink down completely to human size, but rather, just a little above human size. They were still smaller than their robot modes, but not as small as a human.
Posted: Fri Jan 06, 2012 10:18 pm
