You know, if anyone ever wanted to torture me, they wouldn't need to need to waterboard me, they wouldn't need to deprive me of sleep, all they'd need to do is make me sit through the original Transformers cartoon as it's horrible on so many levels and manages to make my heart sink whenever I have the misfortune to have to sit through it.
It's a wasted opportunity that somehow managed to run for nearly a hundred episodes, only a handful of them anything approaching watchable. The rest were an ungodly mess, filled with dodgy animation and zero continuity, with nearly all the characterisation provided by the voice actors. In three and a bit seasons, only one character received anything approaching growth, Rodimus Prime, and that was wiped out before the end to make way for more Optimus Prime. I wouldn't mind that much if it weren't for the fact that a huge chunk of Transformers fans want everything to be just like it, or their hazy memories of it, and sadly the people in charge of Transformers Generation 1 fiction want to actively target these people, throwing out interesting stories in favour of making everything like that mess and it breaks my heart. There's are so many potentially interesting stories to tell based on the first generation of Transformers, but people seem to favour an incredibly stunted version where every story ends with Autobots cheering and waving their arms in the air over letting the series have anything approaching depth. It's a lot like expecting all Spiderman or X-men fiction to be based on Spiderman and his Amazing Friends as that was popular back in the day.
In the early 80's, a reasonably decent writer at Marvel, Bob Bundiansky, was assigned the task of fleshing out the Transformers universe, he assigned names, detailed characters and made an interesting universe and it was all ignored by writers with zero passion for their art, writing stories that even they will admit were weak. All the characters intended to have depth were relegated to the role of stooges and crowd filler. I know this was standard for cartoons of the time, but the comics that ran simultaneously handled everything so much better, working from the same material aimed at the same audience.
To give it it's due, it was good at what it was made to do, to sell toys, it was better at that than a lot of it's contemporaries, it was a heck of a lot better than Masters of the Universe, or Go-Bots, but that doesn't make it any more netertaining. Comparing it to the Franco-Japanese productions of the time shows just how poor it was, heck, even comparing it to other Transformers fiction from the time does too. As a kid, I hated the way that ITV treated Transformers, breaking each episode up into small chunks, to make room for more Timmy Mallet, then giving up most of the way through the first season, but as an adult I'm glad they did as it made me seek out the comics which made me forget all about the toon. The comics were decent fiction for the day, that tried to treat intelligence of the audience with some respect which treated Transformers the same as any other Marvel property at the time... Thinking of which, I can't help but feel we'd have gotten much better modern day film adaptations (I am quite fond of the 86 Movie, it falls into the 'handful of good episodes' category) if the rights to Transformers were owned by Marvel, but that's a different rant.
-Ryco.
Monday, 19 April 2010
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