Transformers Prime Season 3 16 episodes long but NOT final season says Jeffrey Combs

Sorry Duo... figured that particular abbreviation was common knowledge or I would have simply spelled it out.

Sometimes in replies it's difficult to get a handle on the moment, feeling, phrase that you want to convey and then someone else says it 1000x better. That's when I whip out QFT.

^LMAO. Anyway, cannot wait to see what happens in the next ep of TF: Prime!

Of course Prime is ending or rather phasing out....I think they're just double talking so the toys currently on shelves will keep moving.

Why else would there only be just 16 episodes?

Though I don't really care for it. No one can deny it's the most popular show the Hub has to offer right now.

I don't know whether to be happy with these words or not. Personally, I think Hasbro is trying to trick us. Combs did not say necessarily that the show was ending. He just said that this iteration is ending. Many people took that to mean the show was ending period after Season 3, which again, has been cut short. I think Hasbro heard us all bitching and told him to simply say the show is not ending and NOTHING more! I really think TF Prime as we know it will be ending in Season 3. I think Hasbro doesn't want a vehicle toyline anymore to compete with the TF4 toyline so they have decided to give Prime and his crew, and possibly the Decepticons, beast modes and possibly take them off Earth and put them on some jungle planet. If this happens, a lot of fans, including myself, will be very unhappy and Hasbro knows that. So they probably told Combs and everyone else to shut up.

Ultimately - logically - the show, in whatever form will someday end. I've held off posting on this thread until now and maybe something could be learned from going over the thread imploding under speculation and then turning out to be a rollercoaster for alot of fans.

For the sake of focused comments I'll just say that the panic and disappointment expressed by some fans is quite justifiable. On first learning this sort of thing it always seems abrupt and I was puzzled that TFP would appear to nosedive so suddenly when the Hub should be a safety net to prevent a repeat of Transformers Animated's truncated demise. Then again, GI Joe Renegades was scrubbed in season one. At the time I thought this was a survival of the fittest situation though it's going to be a thorn in the side of any assurance Hasbro gives for TF: Prime's longevity in the eyes of many fans.

I suppose it would be easy and probably fair many of us to compare TF: Prime with SW: Clone Wars: similar aesthetics, genre, format and so on. While Transformers has been exploring a relatively new alligned continuity, mostly tracking forward from the final conflicts on Cybertron, for Star Wars, Episodes II and III act as workable entry and exit points for what the creative team may hope to achieve with Clone Wars in the fiction's chronology. A quick scroll through the wiki page also shows that Clone Wars has always meant to run for at least five seasons. Conversely in TFP we do not know if there's a creative or production framework where the show has to advance the story x amount in y time.

So, who knows?

Anyway, my personal scrap of conjecture: Maybe the smaller episode count is making room for a feature length Transformers Prime production? This fits perhaps too easily into the margin of running length in minutes between a 26 and a 16 episode season: 22 minutes x 10 episodes = 220 minutes pretty obviously, where a feature film of this nature may run for 90 to 120 minutes. Naturally the production time for a feature may also be much greater than making 90-120 minutes of episodes! I had simply thought that if TFP wanted to a) do some immersive world building/ b) take us into space and/or c) introduce the Star Seekers for instance, this feature I've heard so little of would be a great opportunity - and just maybe explain the shorter upcoming seasons.

Glad to hear this won't be a shortened, or final season.

This show is too awesome to end just yet.

Season 3 will still only be 16 episodes

That's 3 more episode than most tv series

yay! i still have a reason to track down bulkhead.

You're not the only one.