Heya gang. I know there's a review for the regular 2 disc edition, but with so many people curious on this version, I didn't know if it warranted its own topic. So if the mods feel the need, go right ahead and merge this or whatever . Anyway, on to my brief review. Packaging The packaging is TERRIBLE in design to be honest. It's made of your standard, semi-flimsy cardboard, only that there's this stupid, ugly gap in the centre of the case. This causes it to bend open, and gets the two halves all mashed up (mine got bent through shipping). Extremely stupid design choice IMO, a regular shiny cardboard box would've been WORLDS better. Disc 1 - The movie Pretty much what's been said before. Standard, good stuff here. Movie, commentary - the basics, but little else. Not much more to say here, so let's go on to the main curiousity here - Disc 2 - Beginnings First off, let's get this straight - this is NOTanimated. It's nothing more than a slide show of panels from the prequel comic, with narration and voice acting. It's presented real nicely for certain, with the dramatic score kept intact, the 'black screen with big words' effect, and the voice work by Mark Ryan (I think), Cullen, Welker, and Starscream, Barricade and Blackouts' voice actors, are all cool. However, the whole 'narrated by Peter Cullen' thing is a huge misleading, as if you've read the prequel comic, Prime is hardly in this one. Thus, hardly any 'Cullen narration'. Narrated by Bumblebee is more accurate. I hate to say it, but I'm quite let down by the Beginnings disc. It was mildly interesting for me as I've not read the prequel comic, but those who have, might feel really letdown expecting some animated special. IMO, trading a whole extras disc for just a menu-less, 22 minute voice acted slide show is just not worth it. Overall, the fact that it has the movie itself, just barely manages to save the set. It's great to have the movie in DVD form, but don't buy into the hype of the Beginnings disc - you can easily do without it. 6/10
Thank you for the review. Saves me a trip and some money. Off to Target for the transforming case tomorrow morning.
HA! I had a feeling the WalMart set, like the store itself, would be a load of crap. Thanks for taking the bullet on this one KYQ.
I'm not much interested in the "slide show"--I mainly just wanted to hear the voice actors some more. Barricade had like 3 lines in the whole movie. Did Blackout even speak? Starscream also only had like 1 line, but you get to hear a lot of him if you play the game. I'd be just as happy with just an MP3.
What a HUGE Let Down! Well, Looks like it will be Best Buy for me too! Even though I cussed some sorry ass bastard clerk out today for being a fucking prick when I asked if the figs were out on the floor. Damn!
Wow so i was going to get the walmart one but now not so much ill probably just go get the blockbuster one and best buy one
Actually, it's not that bad. I liked the extra DVD. It was voiced over strips, but the strips have movement in them. It wasn't like it was completely still. Imagine a comic panel of Megatron flying through space except he actually moves across the panel.
He doesn't specificy *which* Starscream and Barricade voices, though, because half of the movie character cast have different actors in the game, and this sounds like the game cast.
just to be fair, even though its not actually "animated"..........its pretty well done...... I would rather have the animated comic than 5 documentaries about how Michael Bay knew that this movie would be huge from the start, and its gonna be amazing, and the special effects are BOOM BLAM WOW!
I think Beginnings is really cool. The Decepticons get added lines, Starscreams parts are great and having the movie voice actors onboard made it special. Should have been billed as narrated by Mark Ryan instead of Cullen but thats OK. If you'll spend $4 for the IDW comic you'll enjoy spending the $5 extra bucks for this. The onlt dissapointing part for me is that it comes with the widescreen version of the film. I wanted the Fullscreen cause I'm getting the two disk widescreen/robot heroes at Bestbuy tomorrow.
Couldn't agree more. It's like "fast food packaging" terrible: cheap, flimsy, and second-rate. Furthermore, when I got the packaging off, the slipcover for the movie DVD case had silver spots where the cover paint had flecked off. It looked horrible...and damaged. Excellent assessment. I agree completely. Even the soundalike voice cast for the Decepticons was well-done, I thought. However, the performances for the human characters is rather poor. They're all relative unknowns. I recognized only one of them: Brian Stepanek, who has quite a few voiceover credits. Kevin Dunn (voice of Ron Witwicky) is the ONLY non-robot cast member who reprises his movie role. And the actor who attempts to do a soundalike for Shia LaBeouf doesn't even remotely come close. He's not credited either. And to clarify, there is ABSOLUTELY ZERO narration by Peter Cullen. He has a few lines of dialog as Optimus Prime, but it's not narration. So Wal-Mart is guilty of two counts of deceit: 1) It's NOT animated. (Sorry, but putting photoshop effects on still comic book frames does not count as true "animation".) 2) Peter Cullen is not the narrator. Here's the complete voice cast list from "Beginnings": Optimus Prime: Peter Cullen Megatron: Frank Welker Bumblebee: Mark Ryan Starscream: Patrick Hallahan Agent Simmons/Blackout: Brian Stepanek Ron Witwicky: Kevin Dunn Captain Witwicky: Patrick Viall Bald Sector 7 Agent: Harold Hayes, Jr. Additional Voices: Justin Foley, Patrick Hallahan, Kenny Lupor, Ryan Pfeiffer, Patrick Viall Again, I'm in complete agreement. For me, the only redeeming quality was hearing Welker as Megatron. But the middle part is so human-heavy and their vocal performances were so sub-par, that it's honestly not worth the extra 5 bucks. It was a decent production, but not worth the money. And WMT deserves to be leftover with pallets of backstock of these for misleading customers and misrepresenting the content of their product. If it had said, "features the movie voice of Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen", and had better described the production as graphic presentation or animatic of the prequel comic, then perhaps I wouldn't be so harsh with my criticism. Instead, I feel like I was lied to and deceived. 6/10[/QUOTE] Except for Cullen, Welker, and Ryan, none of the cast is from the videogame. In "Beginnings", Blackout and Barricade have about two lines each. Starscream has 3-4. No, it's not okay. Wal-Mart completely misrepresented their product. Words mean something, and a lot of fans will be duped into buying this because of the way it's worded on the packaging, and will furthermore be very disappointed that Cullen is NOT the narrator and that it's not fully animated either. And again, only three of the original movie actors reprise their roles: Cullen, Ryan, and Dunn. I'll never understand why anyone would *want* a fullscreen version of anything. Don't they realize how much they're missing out on? Furthermore, you're not even able to see the film the way it was intended to be seen.
Question. I thought I read somewhere that some extended and deleted scenes were added into the actual movie... however, a friend bought the 2-disc edition from Hastings (kinda irrellevant to the question), and it was just the theatrical version. Is there or is there going to be a "extended" cut release?
While this is not animated, I wouldn't call it a slide show, either - it's more like, as I've said elsewhere, Transformers a la Reading Rainbow. Aside from the blatant false advertising - and it is pretty bad - I don't mind that Beginnings isn't narrated by Peter Cullen. We all know what Peter Cullen sounds like. This instead gives us a really good chance to hear Bumblebee's voice, which I like, since he only had 2-3 lines in the film itself. Although I appreciate Beginnings as a collector of the strange and obscure, this definitely will not be my primary version of the film. Finally, here is a 3-minute clip (2.9 MB) from the opening of Beginnings, including dialogue from Bumblebee, Optimus Prime and Megatron. http://s90690880.onlinehome.us/sounds/TransformersBeginnings.mp3
I have to say thats quite disappointing. I was looking forward to this, but I'll likely just get the DVD at Target now. Thank you for the review KYQ. IMO it was tremendously daft of Paramount to OK all of these different store exclusives. This feature in particular ought to have been on Disc 2 of the standard 2-disc release.
While I agree that Beginnings isn't 100% terrible, as I've said earlier the voice acting is cool and it seems to have reasonable effort put into it, it's the fact that Walmart's info on this was so cryptic and scant, that it resulted in people here speculating and overhyping it. And understandably so. I was extremely eager to receive my copy and popped in Beginnings from the get-go, only to be met with great disappointment. It's not that it's bad, it's that Walmart just, as what's been said here, misrepresented their product here, that rubbed me the wrong way. Hearing Mike Bay blab on about how cool his movie is gets dull too, but the extras disc sounds like it has so much more than that - how they made stuff, why they chose stuff - I like shit like that . Instead, we just get a 20 minute slideshow that you can easily see off youtube. Absolutely my pleasure in informing you guys, and I'm glad that it's helped out some of you immensely. I've got a lot of great feedback on tentative purchases from this board, so it's great to give a bit back .
So they cut out the Autobot torture by the Drones. Sounds good. Any chance we can get some Starscream?
