Sucked for the most part. Cool battle scenes, somewhat rushed fights (Roddy throws Galvatron and that's it? LAME)

Prowl, and Brawn's deaths made no sense. Death from a shoulder shot? wtflol

 

I don't have much love for the 86 movie at all.
Main reasons for disliking it were the killing off of too many of my fave characters and the others being swept under the carpet and forgotten about. The other reason being I always thought the plot was horrible.

The first 20 mins are pretty cool (despite the lame deaths with characters dying from pathetic injuries) and Optimus' arrival and subsequent smackdown of the Cons and Megs is fantastic. The rest of it though, is awful. The wacky space adventures of Hot Rod and friends does nothing for me.

As for the new characters I liked Magnus but he was made to look like an utter moron in the movie.
Hot Rod is fine as a side character but the main guy? No.
Kup and Springer are fine but nothing special.
As for Blurr, Wheelie, Arcee, Daniel, Scourge and the Junkions... Ughhh.
I did like Galvatron, though mainly because he finally shut Starscream up.
Cyclonus looks cool... thats about it.

I hate how the Matrix pops up out of nowhere and the same with Unicron.

Some nice animation and good voice acting aren't enough to make me like the 86 movie. When I actually bother to pop in the DVD and watch it, it usually gets turned off once Prime knocks Megatron off Autobot City.

Is it a masterpiece? HELL NO. To many fans it probably is, to me it's pretty horrible.
It was the first nail in the coffin for TF's back when I was a child. Most definitely.

Oh just thought I'd add, the 2007 movie is a million times better than the 86 one.

 

I loved it and still do.

I loved the new characters. I thought the toys of them werent that great though. For me G1 got killed by Season 3 not being that great and honestly the toys post movie werent as realistic as the 84-85 bots.

 

I still like it, I mean, it has one of the best scenes in TF history!......Prowl's "Uguugh!!" face.

 

I'd say TFTM is a vital part in the TF world, fiction-wise and commercially speaking.
As a story, it's far from a masterpiece. But it was the seed to everything we got after that.
Wasn't for TFTM, Transformers would have turned into a forgotten series just like the Gobots.

 

I'd say it's a high point of G1 in spite of its issues but let's be fair and place the blame for the end of that squarely on season three where it belongs. The movie didn't kill off so many characters that we had to be forced into the joyless void that followed it. Honestly, I can't get over how much irrational hatred some people have for the pre-moive era even as Animated pushes alot of what made it so great back in our faces.

Another point rarely discussed in detail is how it compares to its contemporary film, GoBots: Battle of the Rocklords. The two have a fair amount in common, the latter being the literal end its series. In many ways, Rocklords was what TFTM might've been if it had taken a safer route. There's a place in my heart for both of them, but I wonder if the GoBot hating fanatics understand the implications of mucking with certain aspects of TransFormers not limited to the 1986 movie.

Oh, and Makoto, an awful lot of people seem to remember and take ideas from that so-called "forgotten" series...

 

If I view it from the eyes of my 6 year old self, the movie was epic on the scale of Star Wars.

However, my adult self now recognizes that the movie was the nail in the coffin for G1.

Still doesn't stop me from enjoying one of the great films of my childhood.

 

The first, what, 20 minutes? Great. As soon as Starscream dies, I can turn it off and jump straight to Dark Awakening. As others have said, the jarring leap from a bunch of characters I know and love from two years worth of fandom to a bunch of 'tards I've never heard of is off-putting.

What really does it for me, though, is how Hot Rod's journey to leadership is handled. In the original Star Wars trilogy, Luke goes from being a farm boy with dreams of adventure to someone who's learnt the price of those dreams, and has become wiser as a result. Hot Rod goes from reckless youth to reckless youth with a MacGuffin. There's no sense he's learnt anything, all his adventures are just marking time until the magic disco ball sorts everything out.

 

I totally LOVE the original movie, no comparison with the new one at all, dude.

 

To me TF:TM '86 has always worn better as a comic-book type story than as a proper spinoff of the original G1 animated series, because to me the movie itself simply does not age well, despite its key contributions to the Transformers mythology. So yeah, I think the erratic execution of the film really spelled the end for the G1 cartoon and, with its cancellation, left G1 on borrowed time.

 

I love it up until Megatron gets reformated. After that it's just all the replacement bots that feel like replacements instead of something new.

It's sort of like with the GI Joe movie it starts out really great and then leaps head first right into the dumpster. At least the Joes got the keep their characters instead of it ending up just a bunch of replacements. So yes the movie just totally killed G1. Or at least it killed it for me because I was out of Transformers then until Beast Wars came along.

 

Transformers 86' is the greatest movie ever made. Nothing else touches it.

everything I like in a movie is there. If it was just optimus prime and his bots making runs at decepticon strongholds becomeing stronger and fighting megatron towards the end of the film. Then it would be dull, and the care bears would have destroyed us all.

 

I did not like it because it took the series off the air in my region when I was a kid. It killed my enjoyment of TF for 20 years. Now, I have rewatched it and I am kind indifferent with it.

 

When I saw the movie back in 1986, I really thought it was excellent. I assumed the movie was just a "future TF storyline" and that season 3 would just take up where season 2 left off. I was pretty shocked when season 3 started up where the movie left off.
It wasn't quite the same after that for me but I still enjoyed a big portion of season 3 and although season 4 wasn't animated well, I thought the overall story and direction the series was going in was great. I expected a great new season after that, little did I know it was the end.

 

I rate the dump I just took as better then the live action movie. However, that's my opinion, and it's quite off topic.

Anyway, as a fan at exactly the right age group, with friends into it, a member of the fan club, you'd think I'd be a GeeWhiner, but I'm not. I don't think everything ends with G1, and most of the episodes are pretty silly now as an adult. Heck, on my DVD shelf, I've got the Animated movie and next to it, all three seasons of Beast Wars. I don't own any of the G1 series on DVD.

However, the movie was for me, the climax of the G1 series, and it was done very well. Oh, sure, it's pretty transparant at times the plot devices, and we all know the reasoning for most of the plot, but still, it's got a core message that I think endures, just as E.T. is a story about divorce, TF:TM (The real one, not the live action crapfest), is about the emotional growth as you leave childhood, rather then the unqualified kids persuit of the ultimate MacGuffin. It had a great soundtrack, strong voice acting, good humor, and a dose of action to make an enjoyable flick, as well as enough content to feel more then just a long episode you paid to see.

Personally, I don't think G1 fell at the movie, it was after the movie that it fell apart, almost entirely because after that, we didn't have a credible antaganist. The Decepticons became an unsorted joke, the Quints seemed serious at times, but never really took the spot as the new big bad, and the Autobots didn't have enough strong characterization; The Dinobots got nerfed, Ultra Magnus chewed scenery most of the time, and Rodimus doubted himself too much. Had Rodimus doubted himself just a little less (Doubt is good, doubt can lead to great developement), and either the Quints or the 'Cons got their act together to form a serious threat, then perhaps things would be thought of a lot differently.

However, that again is venturing off topic.

So, to answer the question, yes, I think it's one of the great stories of Transformers.

 

When I was 8, I thought the movie was great; however, watching it again roughly 15 years later, not so much. As an adult, there are a lot of points in the movie that don't make any sense whatsoever. Why was a doctor and a so-called strategist on the shuttle trip to Earth? What the hell? Is the radar broken or something, how did they not react to the Decepticons breaking through that thick hull until they were finally in? They weren't even set-up for a half-arsed, half-arsed (quarter-arsed?) counter-attack. Why does Astrotrain need to jettison weight when he's in space? It's really sad if a whiner like Starscream comes out on top of a Decepticon free-for-all for leader. Wow, Galvatron sure took care of Screamer with a disintegrating shot! Too bad we never see that again. Why the hell did Unicron swallow the damn Matrix? The one thing that can kill him, which he knows, and he swallows the thing? Ai yai yai!

The movie, in short, didn't do Optimus Prime any favors showing anything that resembles planning abilities of a leader but it did show him as a really good warrior. Prime's charge through the Decepticon ranks is still one of my favorite scenes where he takes out nearly the entire invading "army" (using that term loosely) single-handedly. Too bad he didn't do that 20 years earlier in the timeline. All in all, the first and last 15 minutes are decent to good, with an hour of filler in-between. Hell, for roughly half of the existing Autobot "army" we're not sure what happened to them. For the ones we do know of, we were shown rather grisly deaths. Even as an adult, Prowl's dying face caused a slight "woah" reaction with me.

There was a lot of change, but I don't think it was the fact that these new characters are replacing the old ones so much that they were rather crappy replacements. Rodimus Prime turned out to be a whiner that never fully accepted the role of leadership though he definitely had the potential. Say what you will about Optimus since he wasn't a great leader at all in the TV series, but at least he didn't whine. Blurr was godawful annoying. Wheelie is Wheelie and there's no other way to describe him. Arcee was a rather stereotypical mother-figure. Springer and Ultra Magnus were actually decent. Just about all of the new Decepticons were terrible save for Cyclonus. But now, I'm rambling.

The movie for me was decent. It's an entertaining piece of rubbish with some genuinely good bits of animation. It was sort-of-a-masterpiece for its day but when you compare that to a bunch of crappy cartoons that were all toy commercials, that really isn't saying much. Do I consider it better than the 2007 movie? No, not by a longshot.

 

Personally I love the 86 Movie, but it does have some flaws;

Pros -

Amazing animation quality and voice work
The first 20 min could be the most badass G1 episode ever
The awesome cheesy rock soundtrack
Galvatron seemed quite menacing and a genuine upgrade from Megatron (pity he lost that edge straight away in S3)
The Quintessons were also interesting additions to the mix.
Unicron was an original idea at that point and his design is brill.

Cons -

Loses its way plot-wise in the middle
Annihilates pretty much every great character from S1-2
A lot of the new characters were either boring or annoying
The movie toys were a definite step down from the diaclone/microchange stuff quality-wise

 

I quite enjoyed all the movie characters in the Marvel comics. All that time-hopping gave us some great stories.  

If memory serves, there used to be a bit in the script where the Decepticons attacked while the shuttle was going through an asteroid field, so the sensors couldn't detect the incoming Decepticons amongst all the space debris. Pity the movie lost that point.

 

I enjoyed the Movie opening day in 86. I still enjoy it today, but I still believe the death of Optimus Prime and the first 2 season Bots, and even Starscream lead to the end of G1. Even bringing back Optimus Prime was not enough. Like some others, I believe Season 3 should have started with Dark Awakening and TROOP. BW/BM and even Animorphs almost ruined the Transformers for me even though though the storyline for BW was great. It just wasn't the same. I was very happy when RID was introduced.

 

excellent. Some of the plot holes I largely ignored until someone pointed them out. But many of them pull though thanks to old scripts and other supporting fiction. I may have just gotten this off the dvd commentary or something but:

Starscream wins the battle on astrotrain by hideing in the corner until he can take down the last bot standing easily.

Sounds like starscream alright.