This post looks like Perceptor and Sideswipe took turns writing it! So you have a noodle full of knowledge of inferior TF concepts and a ton of plastic bench warmers, non-starters and nobodies? Why would someone named 1984forever care about 95% of that shit? You stay old school, SMOG. I'm TRUE school.

 

What's the matter you couldn't find your dictionary so you had no idea what he wrote? Or did your Stegosaurus brain just have a meltdown?

What so you teach man? I wish I had a TF fan as hard core as you as my prof  

 

...You know, I'd love to see this supposed "perfection" that was G1-Season 1. What's so great about it that makes all else "inferior?" And don't give me anything like "because it came first" or "you wouldn't understand." I want real, concrete answers here!
Oh, wait, I just realized who I'm asking to give me real answers. Not going to get anything sensible out of him.

So on a unrelated note, yeah, everything I've read about this comic and the panels I've seen from it pretty much tell me that I would definitely like this comic. I just wish the closest place I could buy it wasn't so far away--that, and I wish I had a car. And knew how to drive.

 

See, with this kind of rhetoric, it's no wonder nobody feels bad about abusing you.  

I don't expect you to care about that stuff. I expect you to respect the fact that your "true school" of Transformers is a singular creation of your mind, one that represents the delusions of the faux-fans who have dogged the fandom since that one loud-mouthed kid on the schoolyard declared that the Dinobots could combine, or Soundwave's toy had a real radio in it, or there was this new guy called Roadimus Prime who was Optimus' brother. Or (more controversially) that Rumble was blue and Frenzy was red.  

In other words, you're wrong, and you always have been. You've been in a state of arrested development since you first stepped into the fandom/franchise, and decided it should never, ever change, and there should never be more than 7 main characters. But the biggest reason to feel sorry for you is not just because you're wrong, but because you are incredibly boring, and you insist on trying to impose that boredom on everyone else.

I went back to school to be a teacher, so now I'm grading papers as part of my TA work. My main focus is cinema.

I'm sure there are a lot of hardcore TF fan teachers out there. The common illusion is that we're all a bunch of basement dwelling nerds, but I've run into serious fans in all walks of life... from academia to health care to law enforcement, etc... you never know.  

zmog

 

Which it didn't even. The content of the cartoon was based on the bios written by Bob Budiansky that appeared on the toys. Budiansky also wrote the Marvel G1 series. Both of these things hit the market BEFORE the Transformers G1 cartoon did... at least in most places I know of. The cartoon is actually the deviation from the original source, not the other way around. Budiansky's work on Transformers is pretty much the closest thing that exists to "Word Of God" G1 canonical concepts.

(which is not to say that everything early-G1 is superior to what came afterwards... G1 was not perfect... it just happens to be my favourite. Unfortunately, 1984forever is incapable of such introspection.)

Also, while we're on the subject of deflating myths, Gobots also came first.  

zmog

 

I may regret this ... but I do have to say that not all the '84 characters are overused. Bluestreak, Huffer, Gears, Windcharger, Trailbreaker, and Hound could use some more love. Trailbreaker at least looks to be on the cusp of something.

If I had the writing chops I'd love to do a series on those guys. Of course, me being me I'd have to include the Pretenders. Cause they're damn awesome and also don't get enough love. Might toss in Minvera or the Powermasters too. For some reason the idea of Gears and Longtooth hanging out just really speaks to me ...

... And now I want to add Smallfoot and Pathfinder to my list.

 

Cinema eh? My best friend wanted to study cinematography but ended up with dramaturgy in the end   Well I guess we're on the opposide sides of the spectrum on that regard, as I'm hoping of getting a ph.d. in condensed matter physics myself  

We really are all over the place.

 

I totally agree, and interestingly, we've seen more of Trailbreaker and Windcharger lately in MTMTE than we've seen of them through most of G1. Of course Gears had his brief moment to shine back in Marvel's #3, when he teamed up with Spider-man to be the star of the issue, and basically sucker-punched his way through most of the Decepticon forces by himself.  

When I was a kid, Bluestreak, Hound and Trailbreaker were all sentimental faves of mine, probably because of their inherent "humanity" and their intimation of damaged vulnerability, in contrast with the usual heroic stereotypes of kid fiction. However, I wouldn't be surprised if they were considered to be too much "benchwarmer nobodies" by ol' 1984, if not "emo losers for brooding hipsters" rather than proper heroic marketing icons for kids, as they should be.  

Nerd! Get a job.... building... uh... rockets or something. Damn. Looks like it's community college gigs for me.  

I did film production in my undergrad, but now I'm doing film studies, which is more about the socio-cultural and artistic study of cinema as a medium. Sort of like being in comparative literature or communications. I wish it was as fun as that sounds.  

zmog

 

....

I tried to stay out of this. I really, really did.

'84, I grew up watching the cartoons. Not because I was around in the eighties, but because that's what my local movie store had for rent. The cartoons were, at first, my whole knowledge of Transformers. And I loved them.

Then i started to look beyond them to the modern shows and the comics. I read the Ultimate Guide (However biased it was...), and I started looking outwards from what I knew.

You claim to be true old school, but that is wrong on so many levels. The comics you claim to despise came out long before the cartoon, the personalities and characters you worship imagined by Marvel and Hasbro before the cartoon was even a twinkle in an executive's eye. Your idol is placed on a broken base, one founded on your own misguided perceptions. Your self-delusions.


@SMOG Why can't my teachers be TF fans? XD

 

Not only that, but the cartoon's creators have said on camera that the cartoon was intended to be "Cliff Notes" to the comic.

The problem, as we're seeing here, is simply that more people saw the cartoon then read the comic, so many are treating the Cliff Notes as the Bible. Growing up, NONE of my friends read the comic, so when I would point things out that the cartoon was getting wrong (like Rumble being blue, for instance), they just thought I was nuts.

 

And just cause we are all sharing:

studied art for five years.

now I work at a funeral home.

 

Yeah, my circle of friends all read the comics, but the average kid only knew the basics from the cartoon, not the "whole true story".  

Still, there is no escaping the basic truth that the cartoon reached a MUCH wider audience than the comics. And for what it's worth, the comics weren't exactly a masterpiece of consistency either. The monthly release schedule pretty much guaranteed that it took forever to develop a larger story arc and that background characters got the spotlight only very rarely. In that sense, the G1 cartoon allowed guys like Hoist or Powerglide or Ramjet to shine much more often than the comics did.

Even then, the fiction (cartoon and comics) never seemed to live up to the promise of the concept or the immense cast of interesting characters created by Budiansky. It's only now, when grown-up G1 fans are finally writing Transformers comics, that we're starting to see that stuff we REALLY wanted to see as kids come into the mainstream fiction (or semi-mainstream). The fact is, every kid had a different favourite character. Sure, we all thought Prime was cool, but chances are, you had a Pipes or a Snarl or a Ransack toy that was either the first, or the coolest Transformer you owned... or whose TechSpec bio made personally appealing. That's the real heart of G1's appeal... and that's why we're seeing all those obscure players now finally coming into their own in the comics. All those kids are now the custodians of the fiction, and we want to see it all... not just the same half-dozen characters we saw over and over again in every episode.

However, in a way, it's interesting that the comic book diverged from the basic formulas inherent in the TV series very early on (Grimlock replacing Prime, Blaster becoming a major character, Megatron replaced with Shockwave, replaced with Ratbat, replaced with Scorponok... Prime being dead more often than alive... Starscream not becoming a significant player until very late in the run, etc). It's as if the cartoon became the default setting, the status quo, while the comics became the ongoing story... one where stuff actually happened, and consequences actually existed.

Granted, the bi-weekly schedule of the UK comics helped flesh out the comics continuity tremendously, and gave us a lot of interesting stories as well.

zmog

 

Hey, me too. Studied Fine Art for 5 years, I mean. Then film for 3. Then my MA, which is what I'm doing now. Over-educated and under-employed... that's me.  

The funny thing is that I think I know another TFW board-member (once prominent, less active of late) who ALSO worked at a funeral home IIRC. Odd coincidence.  

zmog

 

  Well my friends over at the robotics department do tease me for not going there because of how big a nerd I am for giant robots  

My friend from dramaturgy actually did a term paper on that subject, I know I was helping with the presentation  

Small world huh.

 

OT

4 movies yggdrasil and smog have to watch (if they haven't already)

Wings of Desire (French German collaboration)

Departures ( Japanese)

Tampopo ( Japanese)

And more recently, 7 psycopaths ( Tom waits and Christopher walken in the same film!)


Also, if you want your head turned inside out, track down "even dwarves started small" a film set in an insane asylum populated entirely by midgets. Probably the weirdest movie I've ever seen.

 

Well I'm not big into the Japanese cinema but I have seen Wings of Desire (even though I had to google it because I knew is at Sky Over Belin) and I loved that movie!

On topic I am really glad for the fact that Hasbro loves all the crazy shit Roberts and Barber are doing, even more the fact that they jump in with their crazy ideas.

I guess that the comics are some kind of a "crash test laboratory" for them where they get to experiment with all the different little things and see what works and what doesn't so that they can put it in the more mainstream media like the cartoons and movies.

 

Quick OT reply:Wings of Desire and Tampopo are old art-house favourites. Departures I haven't seen, but it's on the radar. I liked In Bruges, but haven't gone for McDonagh's new one yet. Even Dwarves Started Small is one of the Herzog films I haven't gotten around to... but I'm a fan of his work. It sounds weirder than usual, even.

I'd throw some of my faves out there, but I think that would derail us... though only until Wednesday puts us back on track, finally.  

zmog

 

Man that was a good interview, it's nice to see the franchise in capable hands. As for the teased bot not being who we think they are I'm betting on Rung. The bright spark a constant face through out history, the rarely damaged body something doesn't sit right.