Don Murphy wrote: Murphy: Specific episodes? No. And not to sound like a pure internet geek myself even though this is the whole internet geek press, but obviously it was G1. Everything. Like the original writer John Rogers had grown up on generation one. When Roberto [Orci] and Alex [Kurtzman] came on to do the subsequent drafts it was all the first season because that's what had been earmarked as like the traditional thing as far this being what kids grew up on and everything like that. But I would say that it wasn't one individual episode. No.
I'm pretty sure John Rogers said in a recent interview that the whole 'protoform/comet mode' and 'coming to Earth to find a magic whatzit that turns stuff into little robots' aspects, among others, were his ideas and part of his so-called "pure G1" script, didn't he?
Don Murphy wrote:Murphy: He's not a gun and that's not something that I'm going to give away at the moment, but he's definitely not a gun. He hasn't been a gun since G1. Then he became a tank and then he became some sort of combat boat or a jet. Megatron was the one from the beginning because he became a gun, and then they were like, 'Wait, we're selling guns to kids.' He's always been a different thing and he is a different thing in our movie too.
This interview looks to have been made pre-trailer but this is still further indication that Megatron's alien jet mode, which we're really only privy to due to leaks,
is the big 'hush-hush top-secret' alt-mode.
Don Murphy wrote:Murphy: I'm only speaking for my producing partner Tom who I think that you're going to talk to next, but from the beginning we've tried to, through the message boards and through the fact that you guys are here and everything else, we've tried to be very, very attuned to the fans because at the end of the day if you make a good movie and you can appeal to the fans then you've got everything. There are going to be a lot of people who are going to see the movie because it's cool cars turning into robots smashing each other, but the people who are going to go again and again and bring their friends are the fan base. So we've been trying to appeal to the fan base.
Don Murphy wrote:Murphy: I mean, character wise I think that StarScream is probably the most bad ass villain next to Megatron. There've been a lot of people complaining on the web about the design, but again it was like they're complaining about a toy mold that's not finished yet. So that was weird.
Yeah, seeing as that unfinished toy looked nothing like the final version or the version in the film....
Di Bonaventura wrote:Did the luke warm reception to 'Snakes on a Plane' take some pressure off of you in terms of listening to the fan community online?
Di Bonaventura: I was involved in 'Doom' which had some of the similar experiences that 'Snakes on a Plane' had and I think that Hollywood has to both listen to the voice and not overvalue it. I think that's the lesson of it. But again, it's a little bit of what we were talking about with surprise. It's like, they sort of sucked the surprise out of that movie by the sheer quantity that was out there. So that particular part of the fan based had been oversaturated.
So Doom... which had practically nothing in common with the video game apart from the setting... sucked because they listened to fan input?