Shockwave wrote:Fair enough, especially if you were unaware of G1 at the time (although I have to now ask the obviously stupid question that did you not think it weird that it was called "Generation 2")?
Have I emphasized before how monumentally stupid I was as a child? I literally never noticed the words 'Generation 2' on any of the packaging. I seriously never saw it on there. It was a miracle I even knew the names of most of the toys I had, and the only reason I recalled the faction names for them was because they were printed on each one of the toys. At the time, I thought the 'Transformers' toys I was getting were the only ones there had ever been, so I was obviously struck by dissonance of the Dinobots being grey in the cartoon when the Grimlock I had was blue, or that when they 'finally' made a toy of Megatron, he looked nothing like that white guy who turned into a gun I'd seen in the show. When I was watching Beast Wars, the few times the G1 Autobot symbol popped up I didn't recognize it as such, only vaguely recalling it as a general 'Transformers' logo, since to me, the Autobot logo had always been Optimus Prime's head. It never occured to me that there had been Transformers toys before the ones I had, or that those had been part of a 'revival' of an earlier brand.
We want them to keep updating characters from G1 that haven't been updated and continue to give us new characters as well (like Drift, Junk Heap, Black Shadow, etc...).
Just an FYI, Black Shadow's not a new character. His original toy came out in TF VIctory over in Japan as a retool of Thunderwing, hence why Hasbro appropriated the new Thunderwing mold into a new Black Shadow.
Actually, now that I think about it, RID was mostly new characters and the UT had some retreads, but a lot of new characters as well, I guess things didn't really start to get stagnant until the Movieverse came along.
New characters are super-cool, but I still want to see them take it all the way and reinvent the entire franchise from the ground up. Beast Hunters is kind of a happy medium, I supposed, keeping the same ol' guys around in new hats and giving them a whole new faction of new-altmode, new-design-philosophy, new-character guys to fight.
I think maybe this is why some people say that Michael Bay ruined the franchise, because his movies effectively proved that certain characters sell and so now Hasbro has to put those same characters into every Transformers toyline.
You're giving those people too much credit. They say the movies ruined the franchise for the same reason they said Armada ruined the franchise, or Beast Machines ruined the franchise, or Beast Wars ruined the franchise, or Headmasters and Powermasters and Pretenders ruined the franchise: because it was different from what came before.
JT wrote: What he wants is not robots, not Optimus and Megs, just things turning into guys. He likes that the Beast Hunters beast characters don't look like robots in bot mode. He's said as much in a few posts. He's burned out on the Transformers as an idea and a lore.
Hey now, I appreciate the ‘robots’ angle of TF and feel that it’s essential to the toys working as well as they do. My appreciation for Beast Hunters isn’t that they don’t look like robots, I think they do still have robot nature prevalent in them and appreciate that, but more that they don’t look like what’s become the standard ‘stack of boxes’ old-school robot look that’s dictated TF aesthetics since RiD. To me, they still look like Transformers, but Transformers I’ve never seen before. Which is exactly what I want.
I have no problem with the lore itself, I’d just like to see it move *forwards* rather than backwards. I got all excited when we were first hearing about Transtech, before they scrapped it, because we were going to go ahead and see what would happen on the new, technoorganic Cybertron and the reformatted Transformers there, with altmodes that blurred the line between beast and vehicle, weapon and transport. Instead, they scrapped that and took us back to basics with Armada: cars and planes fighting on present-day Earth.
So Prowl, what's "new" then as a concept? Aside from Transtech, what can you do with the Transformers concept? Do you want to go back to Microman/Diaclone-style storytelling, where Bumblebee and Soundwave are actual size? What elements of Transformers do you feel still hold up and should be carried forward: aliens, robots, changing, stealth, disguise, everyday recognizable objects, unending war, what? How does a new iteration of an idea such as those in the Bay films not feel new to you?
Interestingly, Six asked a similar question of me when I brought this up some time ago, and I responded by starting
this thread Where I threw out a bunch of hypothetical ‘new’ TF lines just to show that it *could* be done, that the franchise still had plenty of options left to keep life into it. As for specific elements, aliens, robots, and changing are about all I need. As long as you have alien robots from planet Cybertron turning into stuff, you can go pretty much anywhere as far as I’m concerned.
Don’t know how the Bay movies seem terribly ‘new’, they were still focused entirely around yet another retread of ‘Autobots and Decepticons turn into trucks and planes and fight on Earth’. It did focus heavily on the idea of one team working directly alongside the Earth military, which was an interesting idea, but that didn’t get pushed as far as it could have (no Autobots turning directly into troop transports or something, no humans using transforming mech-suits to fight alongside the Autobots on a more level field, no Decepticons with their own armies of human allies, only a few dissenting interlopers). The fresh robot designs were nice, but those have mostly run their course and I wouldn’t mind seeing the looks tweaked again when Trans4mers comes out.
I wasn't the most attentive kid either so no worries.