Welcome Mr. Roberto Orci, you may ask him questions

You might want to turn on the subtitles

This reminds me of the time some anonymous user on the TF Wiki attempted to change all references of 'sabot' rounds (the shells used by the military against the Decepticons) into sable rounds, because that's what he heard

*polite snort*

Someone else already took a look at the subtitles. Apparently they're not perfect - in the same scene, some dialogue is assigned to the wrong Autobot.

Like I said, I assume I'm wrong. I was just curious.

Dang, you beat me to it. Though I think it could be pretty dramatic if the hologram Cullen actually stepped out of the truck, started a line as Prime transformed in the background, and then faded away as Prime finished the line. Ha, sorry, another fanboy giving the masters unnecessary advice


Mr. Orci, most of the questions I'd love to ask I know you can't answer, but I definitely want to thank you for participating in this thread, and answering other people's questions. I now know things I didn't even know I needed to know, but now know that I do

Okay, now I have thought of some questions, which I don't recall being asked. I for one think it's really interesting how we have the extremely highly detailed robots and darker stories of the Transformers movies, and the much simpler style and lighter tone of the Transformers:Animated show at the same time. What is your opinion of Transformers Animated? Will there be any TF:A references/inspiration in this or future movies? Have you had any interaction with the TF:A team at all, discussing plot ideas that might work better in each other's mediums, etc?

Hey Bob, more movie 1 trivia time.

Sam's home town is "Tranquility, Nevada" in one of the early drafts of the script.

In the final movie, it's not identified by name.

In IDW's movie prequel comic and some other tertiary media, the name "Tranquility, Nevada" is still used, but IDW's movie adaptation comic simply calls it "Tranquility, USA", and the "Beginnings" bonus DVD has the "Nevada" part edited out of a panel taken from the IDW prequel comic.

Any particular reason why Tranquility was chosen to be state-less? Is it because Bumblebee managed to take Sam and Mikaela to Griffith Observatory (which is located in California) and then back to Sam's home, or just so it would not be state-specific, kinda like the Simpsons' "Springfield, USA"?

Sho' you right!


Orci......you watchin' this?? This would be an insanely good idea! I know you're not the director, but you prolly have a lot more pull than we do! Haha, make it happen!! Hahaha, j/p...but not really.

I knew I should have finished writing up that loooong blog post on Tranquility and Mission City last week.

Apologies if this is too much third-party content in Mr. Orci's thread....

Tranquility looks a lot like L.A. Thanks to this website, almost every "Tranquility" location has been matched to its real-life L.A. counterpart. The only exceptions are Mikaela's street, the lake, and the viewpoint with the tree. They may be in L.A. too, for all I know.

Reflecting this, Barricade's monitor indicates that Sam's home is in L.A., zooming in specifically on South Gate (a Latino area that doesn't look a lot like West Adams, where his home was shot). If we can believe SciFi Wire, Megan Fox thinks it's in L.A., too.

However, Prime says the distance from the "Griffith Observatory" to the Hoover Dam is 230 miles. Google Earth tells me that the real distance involved is 250 miles (I suspect someone just took the L.A./Vegas distance for the script).

Additionally, the motto on the local cop cars is "to serve and protect", as opposed to the LAPD's "to serve and to protect". If we can trust the shield on Barricade's modified version of the bodywork, the city was founded in June 1865, which doesn't fit with Los Angeles. Add to that the fact that "Tranquility, Nevada" seems to have been embraced to an extent by the fandom....

I'll admit, I'm probably biased on this point, but if you squint a bit, you can put it somewhere in northern Nevada instead (probably White Pine County or Mineral County).

I'd also be interested to know just where the lake and the viewpoint with the tree were shot. The only place that really fits on the standard list of movie locations is the Big Sky Movie Ranch, which is near L.A., but which was used to represent a fictional Nevada in Bonanza....

Oh, and, obviously... just because a city in the TF movie looks just like LA, that doesn't mean it's not in Nevada....

Mission City is downtown L.A., only with the Detroit Central Station where the old May Department Store should be. It's also just 22 miles from the Hoover Dam by Lennox's reckoning, and the good guys get there by heading north-east and then east, through the Valley of Fire State Park. Its name suggests that it grew up around a Spanish Mission, and both the route to get there and the implications of the name would place it on the waterless stretch of the Old Spanish Trail between Las Vegas and the Colorado River, the Jornada del Muerto (now I-15).

In real life, there are no Spanish missions in Nevada, but assuming that their world's history follows ours (except where giant robots, Secretary Keller, and two major metropolitan areas in Nevada are concerned), the historical window for the establishment of a mission here would be 1829-33, between the establishment of the trail and the suppression of the California mission system. Most likely date is 1831, when the trail was moved inland from the river and the a pro-Mission governor was briefly installed in California.

More than the production team ever planned, or you ever wanted to know.

Still, that time I spent confusing myself last week wasn't entirely wasted after all....

Now I feel outgeeked and congratilate you on your brilliant observations, sir.

Feel free to add any of your discoveries to the corresponding Wiki articles:
Tranquility - Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki
Mission City - Teletraan I: The Transformers Wiki

Just make sure that you condense your writeup somwhat, because less geeky fans than the two of us might feel alienated by a big wall of text (a problem my own writeups often suffer from as well, mind you).

i posted that on bays site before it went bye bye... might be an easter egg

Bob, with Michael Bay's torid love affair for product placement, have you ever had a problem working so many specific goods and services into a script? How many times do you have to go back and revise it because Bay needed to give a new business partner some face time? I'm not hating on commerce, just trying to understand the effect such pandering has on the creative process.

How does this film stack up against Bay's other films? Anything like the impoverished, subterranean clones in The Island digging on X-Box? Or can we expect a more subtle direction with the ads?

i dont see why Peter cant have a cameo, Stan lee always makes 1.
2 seconds....thats all we need...................