New Trailer for Machinima's Transformers Power of the Primes Animated Series

I still wished Star Saber had won the Power of the primes poll #NotmyPrime

shocksound96 wrote:I still wished Star Saber had won the Power of the primes poll #NotmyPrime

Optimus Primal will Make Cybertron Techno-Organic Again!

Well, at any rate, the show will most definitely be garbage like the other two yet I'm still curious to see what happens, namely because this is the return of Optimus Primal to an animated serie for the first time since the end of Beast Machine in 2000, a whopping EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO! Now obviously this is not the same Primal, different continuity and all, but he's still a character which had not been seen in any incarnation outside of mobile games, tie-in comics, manga or the Beast Wars Uprising stories. Beast Wars haters will forever scorn him but let's not forget that before we got all these new continuities (RiD 2001, Unicron Trilogy, Movies, Aligned, Animated...) he was THE other 'Optimus' of the franchise. Love him or hate him but big bot was the original heir to the namesake of Optimus before the big old truck guy got rebooted.

Even if, admittedly, Star Saber would have been nice too...

Obviously I'm all too aware that Chalk could most likely not return due to the whole Canadian actor stuff which is admittedly a shame but expected. Oh well, this stuff happens. Given they depicted the base form Primal with fur I'm hoping he's shown turning into a gorilla and not the 'space log' at least initially.

That said I'm not sure if I like Hellboy Ron Pearlman in the role based on this clip alone but it could just be from how rushed and low quality if the PotP Cartoon but Perlman's line came off as all off and stilted and if his whole performance is like that it will lack everything which make Primal...well, who he is.

Randomhero wrote:

shocksound96 wrote:I still wished Star Saber had won the Power of the primes poll #NotmyPrime

Yeah except it was fixed. These things always have been. I mean come on. Look at the gimmick for the leader class. That might have worked for Star Saber by how would it have would have having a smaller bot turn into a bigger one have worked for Hound, Megatron, Deathsaurus, shockwave and Arcee. Like I said a couple of the others sure but it was always gonna be primal due to the gimmick.

While the gimmick may have been set in stone, I doubt Hasbro were expecting Primal to win since it is known that Warden and his team don't think that highly of Beast Wars. If anything, they were probably anticipating Star Saber or Deathsaurus to win, the latter due to how they seemed to force "Unknown Evil" into the final round as a wildcard.

Randomhero wrote:Oh come on. I dont mean to sound like a conspiracy person but the fan votes have never been real. Windblade was chosen way before hand because they wanted to push female transformers in the media and it was never gonna be a male decepticon or decepticon for that matter because they wouldn’t have been able to promote a decepticon like Windblade. Same with Victorion.

Which is why Primal winning is so goddamn weird because the current Hasbro team don't really like Beast Wars that much.

I'm not so sure, man, simply because with Hasbro constantly moving toward a 'unified brand' that it would seem weird to keep around a guy like Primal around. They'd go "but the kiddies would be confused by two Optimus". Corporate suits think everyone is a moron.

UNLESS! And hear me on this: unless this Optimus Primal is, somehow, a reborn/reincarnated Optimus Prime in a callback to the original Beast Wars story. You see, before the show existed, the early BW material had made it a direct sequel to Generation 1 and Primal was just a renamed Optimus Prime.

ZeroWolf wrote:Actually I can see people voting that way, I would have, having more female bots would be more interesting besides designs will have been done to some degree as we know the full life cycle of a figure is two years so the ones that didn't win will have been put away for a rainy day still one thing that bugs me about fan polling is why we have to jump to conclusions and say votes are rigged? So what that we got some more girls? So what that primal won? End of the day we got more TFs that people can buy if they like them.

TBH, for all the fan polling they've done, I've always picked the female bots pretty much because I thought they would be more interesting. I also Voted originally for Arcee to be the new prime.

But I can see with the choices given at the beginning of the fan polls, why people would think it was supposed to be rigged.

Look at back in the day when Matty Collector did their fan poll. We know that one was rigged because Toy Guru closed to poll a couple days early, because the character he didn't want was close to winning over the character he did want. At least the Hasbro team didn't try that.

I would say, the gimmick does seem perfect for Star Sabre, and I'm surprised they didn't make him for this run for that reason, unless they really were pushing for him and decided not to make him out of Spite for the fans.

Randomhero wrote:Like I said I don’t like sound skeptic and such it man I don’t believe the fan contests are anything to boost fan morale

I'm not going to try to argue that the 2013 and 2015 polls weren't rigged, but I find it very hard to believe that Hasbro rigged the vote in favor of Primal, considering Warden's hatred of BW and Hasbro's obvious pushing of Deathsaurus.

For as bad as the prior 2 have been, I really enjoyed that trailer, especially Overlord and the combining Dinobots

Bronzewolf wrote:It all looks promising, but man, the way Primal talks just reminds me of all the bad things these shows offered. Just so blocky. Open-shut-open-shut-open-shut. Hardly any shape to it at all. Looks like a dubbed anime.

It took me a while but I know why this single sentence of Perlman as Primal had bugged me. It's not so much the different voice as the way the whole thing is said: so blocky, choppy and simplistic in tone. Lifeless. Now do keep in mind that I'm aware this is not the same Optimus Primal and that I'm all too aware that changing the voice for a character in this franchise is hardly new. However, it seems that upon a more serious analysis that if all the lines he say will be this stilted, the core of the character will be lost.

Primal, in general, a much more 'casual' leader than any incarnation of Optimus Prime short of the young and unproven Animated Optimus. His lines were generally full of intonation, emotion ranging from a general pleasantness (when in a good mood) to irritation and clearly holding back his pure annoyance (usually at Rattrap's whining). This choppy, stilted and pause-heavy and almost robotic sentence just doesn't sound Optimus Primal. It's not the voice which bug me, it's the way he intone his sentences.

In general, Perlman has a good range and he'd be very well suited to voice Optimus Primal but the impression I get out of this is that the voice actors weren't given any goddamn clue on how to properly voice the character and are just reading off the script with no context.

The terrible voice direction is, once again, hurting the performance of someone who SHOULD have been quite good in the role. Granted it's just one line for now. I also suspect these Machinima models don't quite have the range of even the old season 1 Beast Wars models who coult still show emotion and expression. Yes, even a guy with a half mouthplate like Primal.

Now he look so bored that, combined with the phoned in voice acting, he look more like a Mass Effect Andromeda character. But that's, of course. a general issue with Machinima's Transformers series.