Don't 100% buy it, but I love the crazy theories!

 

I see what you did there!

But no, I definitely am not Hazekiah. Nevertheless, I greatly enjoyed his threads and posts!

 

I wish I could hit "like" more than once. I like the absurdity of it as well. with the 1st trilogy, it's like the franchise grew up alongside You.

 

I mean, Sideways was originally suppose to be Barricade but for unknown reasons it was changed.

 

The entire Bay Movieverse actually parallels the universe of the G1 cartoon very well.

It starts off with the Autobots and Decepticons arriving on Earth and the former befriending a Witwicky, just like the pilot G1 episodes. It then proceeds with Decepticon plots to harvest Energon from the Sun and bring Cybertron into orbit, just like some Season 2 episodes. Then Chicago is like the Battle for Autobot City in the 1986 movie, where Wheeljack (Q) and many notable Decepticons die. Then the Autobots get hunted by alien bounty hunters for their creators, just like in Five Faces of Darkness, Part 1, and Galvatron is formed and new Autobots introduced, just like in 1986. Then the following movie, which has a shape-shifting Quintesson sorceress whose enemy is a powerful dragon as in Madman's Paradise, is very different from its predecessor, just like many Season 3 episodes were different from each other as opposed to the more repetitive Season 1 and early Season 2 episodes. And just like the original cartoon, in the movies the origin of the life forces of the Transformers (Allspark/Vector Sigma) come before the physical origins of the Transformers (robotic slaves built by the Quintessons/Creators).

So yeah, I'd say the movies are actually a lot like their source material, and the ridiculous things fans complained about in all five movies are really no more ridiculous than the ridiculous things that happened in any of the cartoons or comics, where there were singing aliens, time travel, islands in the present with dinosaurs, organic Transformers, Rumble turning into a tree, and so on. Therefore, I'd say Sideways and Barricade being the same robot, far from being too out there, is actually right at home in the brand.

 

I love a good theory! If you recall I used to be a vocal about a few myself. This is a cool idea! However the one thing I’ve come to terms with was paramount must have hired the shortest sighted team for the creation of the transformers movies.... and they were basically laughing at everyone. Especially the fans of the franchise and not just the movies. They had countless opportunities to expand upon something that happened in each movie, just like you have described above, the galvatron debacle and how it just results in another completely different Megatron, the dinobots the under used but over emphasised knight ship. They had literally created the vehicle to spark an entire new universe WITHOUT ACTUALLY MEANING TO....and the sad truth is....they didn’t even recognise that fact themselves. What they basically did time after time was nothing more than in essence ‘sell your own car stereo back to you over and over again’ I applaud your effort it really is cool.....but the more I see things like this and remember my own unflinching belief that there was a working framework underneath each movie driving it forward towards that much stated expanded universe....the more I remember that everyone involved failed massively and everything we see as things of interest or points to be expanded upon, eventually turn out to be nothing but filler fluff. Makes angry and sad at the same time that something that has so much potential can become so lame* because of a lack of foresight and interest.

* lame as in unworkable (like a horse)and worthy of cancelling.

 

I think the problem is multi-faceted and goes beyond just the production crew.

Within the production, there was the discontinuity in writers. RotF, for all of its script issues, had some overlap with Orci and Kurtzman on one hand and Kruger on the other. Kruger was then the solo writer for the next two films, which both made slightly over 1.1 billion dollars. Now on this site and others you had so many fans complaining about Kruger, and maybe that was the reason they got rid of him or maybe not. Then you have a writer's room, but Kruger is not one of them. Consequently, the ideas introduced in the fourth film to be explored further in the next - Creators, Galvatron, Dinobots, Knights - were minimized, ignored, or made incompatible with what Kruger introduced in the fourth film. This resulted in two back-to-back films that acted as spring boards for story threads, and funny enough the film by the writer everyone said they hated, did a much better job of doing it than the film that was supposedly by "better" writers.

I think that the films received so much knee-jerk and obligatory hatred from critics and fans on the internet that the film makers failed to see that they had made four very successful live action Transformers films. I'm sorry, but you don't make two 1.1 billion dollar films in a row if everyone hates your movies. They should have looked at what the people who liked those films liked about them, kept and built upon and improved those aspects, and continued the stories of those movies. So yeah, I don't agree with the new writers and production ignoring the plot threads and characters introduced in the fourth film, but I think fans and critics and their completely unrealistic expectations and knee-jerk hatred in some instances are also partially to blame here.

The morals of the story are these: 1) If you go in a new direction, stick to your guns. 2) Respond to constructive criticism, but don't listen to hatred. Most people who truly hate the Transformers movies were never going to like anything the film makers tried. 3) Focus more on the positives in making a new movies.

I also have good reason to think that before the Writer's Room the production actually had a framework. There is a lot of little information I have read or heard that suggested that.

For instance, in the AoE behind the scenes stuff it states that the Knightship came from a planet other than Cybertron.

There also was a picture during Transformers 4's production that depicted melee weapons seen on Lockdown's ship. The leak said that the owner of one of them was none other than Megatron, which suggests to me he was a Knight or had a connection with the Knights. That story was taken down by Paramount's request, which suggests to me it was true. He also has a new knight-like robot in TLK.

So with that said, I actually do think there was a lot of stuff fleshed out that was abandoned by the Writer's Room and production for whatever reason. Which is a shame, because I thought AoE actually set up things for the next movie much better than TLK.

 

Interesting theory, I quite am fond of the given thought of this @Galvatross
I once had a big theory covering of regard of Sentinel's betrayal, And Quintessa's involvement in DOTM.

 

I'll dig up the exact quote later, but the IDW writers who worked on the movie tie-in material actually planned for Barricade to become Sideways in one of the ROTF prequel comics, but were vetoed by Hasbro.

 

Funny thing is when I was 8 my cousin and I used to think this was true.Itrue.I also thought demolisher was brawl reformatted and rampage was bonecrusher...

 

If barricade was a herald of unicron then why would he have a cursive "keep calm and hail megatron" text on his alt mode?

You gotta remember that he was a mindless brute in the first film who wanted glasses and developed hatred towards BBB. If anything; he focuses on the little things and not really the bigger picture so serving Unicron wouldn't be his emo. As far as I'm concerned; he wanted the same thing Megs and Quintessa did which is to drain Unicron, make him powerless, and kill the planet. It wouldn't be a good call for him to backstab his fellow decepticons let alone quintessa because they would be all over him regardless of his death cheating voodoo and there's no telling if the so called "prime of life" would be able to somehow mystically get ahold of him.


As for Sideways; he's about as mortal as his peers. There's no point in running for your life if you can somehow respawn in the form of Barricade and have murderous desires the next day for bumblebee or que when they're not the ones that killed you before.

Nothing against your theory, it's just important details that you left unintwined between these two cons who's allegiance was never for some planet with horns.

 

I think that's an obvious answer: Deception. It's no different than Barricade disguised as a police car. Furthermore, Sideways as a character is known for his deception.

Furthermore, just because you can respawn based on the power of a robot deity, it doesn't mean that you can't run for strategic purposes.

I'm not saying it's likely this theory will actually ever happen...but it's certainly possible, and it wouldn't contradict anything about Barricade and Sideways from what we have seen in the films. If anything, as a crazy theory, I think it would actually make Barricade/Sideways a lot more awesome.

 

Did Alex Jones make this thread?!

Nah, just kidding.

But reading this was very interesting and things like this are fun to speculate on.

 

Remind me as it's been awhile, didn't someone who worked on the film confirm that Sideways was almost Barricade? I'm pretty sure I recall something like that, as it's quite clear his design was heavily based on Barricades.