Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Less to Meet The Eye

In a few weeks the world will be exposed to Michael Bay's vision of Transformers, which I'm not entirely sure about. Bay has a good eye for over the top action, something really needed for this film. However, things can go a bit wrong in his films just look at the Cuba sequence in Bad Boys 2 and most of Pearl Harbour.

That's not what we're here to talk about today. No, it seems Hasbro are moving away from Takara and giving Cartoon Network a shot at a animated show. On a very basic level I'm happy, I've never really given any time to the imported show made by Takara but the few I caught bugged me with their weird and long plotlines. Usually I'm a fan of such things but they just seemed to crawl along like Dragonball Z. All very Japanese, which of course does make sense. On the other hand, there were many things that I mentioned a long time ago that needed to be fixed with Transformers that Takara actually did.

The news that Cartoon Network have released is very worrying for any long term Transformers fans. No longer will the Autobots be fighting their long term enemies the Decepticons, instead they'll be fighting evil humans and "basically turning it into a superheroes story". This is totally against everything that has gone before where the Autobots are a peaceful race and are really bothered about getting back to Cybertron, but have to fight so humans doesn't get enslaved by Megatron and his cronies.

The art is, erm, different for Transformers as well. It's what I call Americanised anime so really its just following the trend the majority of the industry is going. The character design is where things really change. Prime's got a chin that would make Bruce Campbell jealous and the military bot (I want to say Hound but since no names have been released and its just a departure I'm not going to guess with any of the old names) looks like a metal version of The Thing.

The show also seems to be going for a Emergency services theme, Prime's once again a fire truck and there is also the military vehicle and a Ambulance. There's also a small yellow car and a motorbike which don't look to be anything emergency service related but look like they could have sirens as well and I'm willing to put money on the yellow car being Bumblebee since he somehow always manages to be popular. It's an interesting direction and one of two things that make me wonder if they can pull this off.

The other thing is some of the people involved have some good pedigree with shows like Teen Titans, The Batman, X-Men and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. At the end of the day we'll just have to wait and see if we finally get a good Transformers show. I'm not holding my breath though.

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