If you don't know, or haven't gotten the titles meaning, what was the darkest period or the darkest time for transformers as a franchise. (Dark alluding to when Transformers was not that great or absolutely terrible) In your opinion.
Emphasis on opinion.


I am not asking for ruined forever.


REMEMBER THIS IS "NOT" THE LIVE ACTION TF MOVIE FORUM, BASHING THE MOVIES HERE WILL BE DELETED, TAKE IT THERE IF YOU WANT TO CONTINUE BASHING THEM.
thank you, moreprimeland

For me it was definitely the live action movies.
They were not good movies with to much action, bad jokes, horrible stereotypes, offensive stereotypes, offensive jokes, and bad writing always plaguing the movies from 2007 onwards.

 

We survived the Unicron Trilogy, We will survive Bay. After all the prophecy has been foretold: One day a director will use the power of the matrix, to put some sense into Hazbro and he will light our darkest hour.

-Steve at Hazbro Arizona Acounting.

 

nothing wrong with the unicron trig espelly when you look at some of the recent stuff

 

Well it is the low end of the spectrum, but yeah comparing it to recent events.....

 

Your age is betrayed by your choice of the live action movies.

This isn't a dark time. It's a dim time, but far from dark. Darkest to me was likely pre-BW, where Transformers had all but faded away, barely scraping by and at one point absent from the US entirely.

Imagine that. No Transformers anywhere at retail domestically. Not even cheapo gimmick figures. Just nothing, with no hope or knowledge of what's to come. We haven't experienced a dark age like that since.

 

Gotta agree, but one cool thing that emerged from that dark period was the sheer quantity of fanfic. People had to make up their own stories, because there was nothing else. We got some cool stuff out of that era.

But I'm still glad we haven't had another drought like that.

 

Yeah....... I am lucky to have not experienced that.....
Sounds like hell.

But as I said. Opinions.
My opinion is definitely swayed by some things. Especially my age race.

 

No one has ever opened the Matrix of Leadership yet, so we can't exactly be in dark times.  

 

To me? It was every time the Transformers shows went off radar for a period of time. The situation might seem bizarre, but it happened in the past decade, when people still used VHS, floppy disks and Internet wasn't that widely accessible. So when the show went off the air you had nothing to fan over and when you lived in the countryside you didn't have any other fans around (Internet and mobile phones weren't a thing back then). First there was that break between the 2nd and 3rd season of Beast Wars. Than it took the TV station a year to air the reruns of BW and you could finally catch the episodes you missed the first time! I remember keeping track of the station slates to catch them, waking at 6 a.m. on vacations only to discover that they hid a different cartoon under the same name (in my native dubbing Beast Wars were called Space Wars). They totally skipped Beast Machines. It took them a while to air Armada but they skipped both Energon and Cybertron (that's a few years without anything!). Then the first live-action movie happened and I got full-time Internet access. To sum up, right now I am having a field day. There are movies, up until recently there were two cartoons, 3 ongoing comics and some games. It's pretty great once you know how it feels not to have any of those.

I've read some of those probably! I copied the fics on my floppy disk from the computer in school library to read at home. I picked an English dictionary as my birthday gift so I could understand them better! Those were fun times  

 

I did the same thing! I still have a collection of my favorite ones sitting on my hard drive. A bunch of essays & analysis too. I don't really see too many of those in-depth analysis anymore, but every now & then a real good one turns up.

I kind of attribute it to having so much content to take in these days. It seems less people are interested in doing in-depth examinations of the various shows, when they know it's eventually going to be replaced with something else in a few years. Just speculation. I have nothing to back that up.

 

I'd say, post DOTM, we're on a decline a little bit, with shelves at retail being rather sparse and so much emphasis on one step changers and other BS. For me, since I didn't live through the post G2 drought, this is a dark time for me. I remember when you could actually go to a store, and see so many different figures to spend your money on. Now, if there's anything at all, it's 1 step changers and Bumblebees. I thought a new movie would help things pick up, but that hasn't happened. At my local TRU, they usually will have a big honkin display for the latest movie, but for Transformers, that didn't happen. There is one four foot section still up front, where the movie stuff is moved after a while, and then, back where TFs would normally be, there are like 3 items jammed between Ben 10 and Voltron. And keep in mind things are usually moved aside after the movie ends its run in theaters, but with Transformers, it is happening while the movie is still out. I take that to be a very bad sign. Also, there is the fact that most of the first TLK toy waves are repaints, and of characters that were hardly in the movie, some Decepticons might not get toys at all, some prominent characters are retailer exclusives for no real reason,and the price increase, and I think it's pretty bad. I mean, seriously. If you want to do repaints, have those be tailend stuff, not the first things on the shelves. So,not the darkest days, but somewhat dark ones.
On the other hand, I never would have thought when I first laid my eyes on FansProject's City Commander that the 3rd party scene would have taken off, but it did. It's not my thing, but there are more options for high end fans now than ever, and that's pretty amazing.

 

So in the early 2000s? When was that?

 

I wasn't really there in the spot between G1 and Beast Wars, but that's probably the best answer. For me it would have been the Unicron trilogy, sometime before the movies, and Maybe before Cybertron. The movies straight up revitalized the brand, kind of like what Beast Wars did. We are not nearly in a dark age right now, though.

 

Totally agree. After G2 it looked like that was it for a toy line and story that fascinated the heck out if me. From that dark time emerged BW, and it's been pretty solid since. It's had its ups & downs since, but never like that between G2 and BW.

 

Yup, I still have all those .txt files   And you're right there was a lot of gems in there (or perhaps my perception is skewed by nostalgia goggles). Back in the day there was FF.net, but I remember finding a lot of fanfics and general Transformers conten on private sites. There were such sites like Realm Library, Transformers Lexicon or bwint. Once I went through all the fics with characters I recognized I moved to others that were available  

Fanfiction and generally fan content were huge part of my Transformer Fandom and people could really write some great things. I especially liked the long ones that focused on ensemble casts. It's a bummer that the activity kinda died down a little. There were up-surges when the first movie premiered and when Prime rolled around, IDW is also quite popular, but not many people write epics nowadays and some shows pass by without making much of a stir (like current RID).

Yes, 90s going into 2000s. Beast Wars is the first TF show I've watched. I've watched all three reruns, and I missed the first part of Other Visitors and the one introducing Inferno every time   The next show that was aired on ground network was Armada. Color me surprised when those Transformers didn't turn into animals, but I still enjoyed it (and tried to catch those reruns, too). Energon and Cybertron were moved to satellite network, so I couldn't watch those. At some point I hung up my hat, because there was no new Transformers shows for me (I even threw away my collection of Armada playing cards from chips), but then I spotted a huge promotional poster of the first movie on a double-decker bus and I was back in the game, because Transformers.

I don't remember Generation 1 from any network or VHS tape. Which is strange, because I've watched the first generation of MLP, when I was little as well as TMNT (I had some comics), Carebears, He-man, Dinosaucers, and Saint Seiya. It's a little strange I haven't noticed them in any form. (Okay, I fact-checked and apparently they were available on VHS back then).

 

We were certainly up shit creek before Beast Wars saved our asses.

My favorite recent "age" of Transformers was probably 2011 and 2012. Prime wasn't sucking just yet (and was still fairly okay in early 2012). Dark of the Moon, the best Bay film, came out. I was on the Formspring Transformers RP with some great friends. Toys weren't bad. Rescue Bots was cool. Fall of Cybertron was great. And even though I wasn't into it back then, MTMTE started. It was a good little golden age.

Right now it feels like we're really hit and miss. IDW when it delivers really freaking delivers. You get issues like The Life of Sideswipe, The Price Of You, Do Not Go Gentle. Then you have a pretty mediocre show in RID 2015. The Last Knight coming out and pretty much dooming the movies with how much it didn't give a shit. MTMTE is in general suffering a drop in quality. Till All Are One is ending despite really hitting its stride lately. It's a dim time, like Split said, but we're not bad off.

 

I was younger than my son is now during that time. I'd go to KB Toys at the mall...(ouch-that's another memory bruise). There would be nothing. I remembered how good those transforminator things I saw on the morning toon shows were for a while, then there was a void of nothingness.

Then I got an actionmaster at KB one day. An actionmaster. So excited because transformers were back and then I got home to open it. WTF? Thing didn't even transform! (Duh, but my child mind could not process a non-transforming transformer).

Then truly nothing for what seemed like years and the line was dead except for cheap flea-market knockoffs.

Then Beast Wars. Transformers were back eith a mew look, new lore, and new level of awesome that I think saves the brand. The rest is history.

The darkest hour is just before dawn. This is barely an overcast sky.

-Kronatron.

 

I've always been a multiple product line collector, so if Transformers ever seemed to take a dive, I'd switch over to Power Rangers, and if Power Rangers ever seemed to take a dive, then I'd take a look at what Dragonball toys were doing, and if those seemed to take a dive, then I'd see what Gundam was up to, and if THAT seemed to suck, then I'd see what the latest Marvel/Iron Man toy was- I'd just hop around, from one to the other, depending on how shitty or great things seemed to be.

I CAN say that the AOE toy line DID seem pretty half-assed, so that was rather disappointing- but I'd say they've redeemed themselves with the TLK line- because I can't put TLK Voyager Megatron down, he's awesome.

 

I don't remember it being THAT bleak. I was buying Gobots, Cyberjets, Autorollers and Laser Optimus during that time. It seemed like it was only about a 6 month gap before the Beast Wars Bat Primal/Megalligator packs started showing up at Target. Kind of a shame Hasbro didn't kick out the last wave of product, though. Missed out on new Gobots (including a stunt playset), Autorollers, Laser Cycles Jazz and Soundwave and Stealth Megatron w/Starscream. Thankfully, most of the new molds eventually saw release in BW2 and RiD and Meg/SS was re-purposed as Starscream and BB...but still.

Much bleaker was 1991. The comic drew to a close, the line ended with Actionmasters being clearanced out everywhere and Power Rangers apparently filling the transforming robot gap left by Transformers. Meanwhile, Transformers was still going strong in the UK and Japan, unbeknownst to most Americans. There was a pretty interesting learning curve on international product during the 90's at Botcon.

 

I wasn't into the franchise yet, but I'd say the end of G2 and the apparent death of the franchise is the only reasonable answer. We're not in a good age right now, with TLK's failure, the fact that we still haven't had a truly great cartoon since TFA (which was almost ten years ago), the comics not being as good as they used to, and the fact the only future cartoons we currently know of are A) a Rescue Bots sequel with none of the original cast and crew, and B) the inevitably god-awful sequels to Combiner Wars... Plus we still haven't gotten toys of many of the cool animal Decepticon designs from RID. Legion Springload is great, but I really want a Warrior so he can be in scale with his partner-in-crime Quillfire.