The Girl Who Loved Powerglide

Coming soon 2045.

 

This one's a little different in that it's a) actually a cartoon series pitch, b) in a different continuity altogether, and c) something that I'm actually taking a stab at on-and-off.

The Autobot/Decepticon war has lurched along uncertainly across the universe since Megatron disappeared in action years ago, but the scales begin to tip decisively when the dying Throttlebot captain Searchlight crashes on Earth with the Matrix of Leadership. Found by intrepid teenage hiker Carly Spencer, the Matrix binary-bonds her with Searchlight's fading spark, allowing her to traverse the purely informational realm-- known as Infraspace-- that it exists as a conduit to. The Matrix is destroyed shortly thereafter, but Carly begins having visions of Optimus in Infraspace, and caught up in the action, she falls in with the Autobots' main outfit on Earth-- youthful scout Bumblebee, ancient warrior Arcee, kind but reserved medic Hoist, boisterous heavy hitter Sideswipe, and the polite but devious head of Autobot intelligence, Prowl. Flame-embossed big rig and lovable jock Rodimus actually leads the Autobots on Earth, but he and his amiable first lieutenant Jazz act as field leaders to the multiple teams across Earth and are rarely seen, with Prowl handling most of the command duties.

Besides Roddy and Jazz, supporting Autobots for season one include Glyph, a cryptologist and Bumblebee's long-distance girlfriend, Grandus and Sky Garry, vaunted aerial aces who are also unfortunately complete idiots and rabid Optimus fanboys, Windcharger, a deserter and opportunist survivor with powerful magnetic abilities, Trailcutter, Hoist's unpleasant classmate from the engineering academy, and Optimus himself. Maybe. What? No, of course you can trust Prowl, he'd be happy to set up a video conference with the big 'bot for you. Just don't go on the secret detention level, only the worst of the worst are there, certainly nobody you'd ever want to meet...

The Decepticons also have a heavy presence on Earth, mostly through acting leader Starscream and his Seeker armada. A few distinct subfactions also exist:

• The Destructicons, infiltration experts able to hide more powerful military alt-modes inside their civilian ones, but brought into frequent conflict with Starscream due to their inflexible loyalty to Megatron and stripped of their ability to combine into the mighty Devastator after losing team leader Barricade in the pilot. The three members I have a lock on for sure are new leader Blackout, bellicose warrior Brawl and the oft-destroyed, perpetually angry munitions expert Bonecrusher.
• Several of Soundwave's Mini-Cons also inhabit the ranks, keeping tabs on Starscream and various goings-on for the mysterious spymaster. None is more prominent than the sadistic, largely autonomous Bombshell, a mind-controlling mad scientist type tasked with restoring Devastator to functionality and major player in the second half of season one.
• The Pretender Monsters commanded by Bludgeon round out most of the Decepticon roster, tolerated by everyone else only for their sheer power. These 'cons fill a role the most similar to the Generation 1 cartoon, demanding resources and raw materials for their services and stealing from humans whenever faced with the opportunity. Whether this is because of greed or because they and the equally insular Autobot Pretenders seem to be under orders from someone else on Cybertron remains to be seen...

Tone would be somewhere between the IDW comics and TFA. You'd have morally grey stretches and horror throwbacks in one episode, followed by really silly shit like Sideswipe becoming a meme amongst rank-and-file Decepticons, or Carly and Hoist accidentally creating evil Johnny 5 in the form of Push-Button.

 

But disaster strikes when Lorenzo di Bonaventura incorporates Kiss Players in it in an attempt to pander to overseas audiences, and they're smarter than that and word-of-mouth torpedos box office returns:
Chinese: "What the hell is this?! What, do they think we're Japan?" *collectively storm off*
Japanese: "What the hell is this?! What, do they think we all like this crap?" *collectively storm off*
South Korea: "We'll just import Gundam, thanks." *collectively storm off*
North Korea: [citation needed]

 

 

That's how WW3 will happen.

 

"Dammit, Lorenzo!" is going to be my new, dark in-joke whenever something hugely scary happens on an international level.

 

Figured I should wrap it up...

Ninth pitch: Final chapter of the "Beast Wars" trilogy, with some shades of "Beast Machines" thrown in.

Two years after the Transmetal conflict. The Maximals have joined the fight against the Quints in order to drive them from New Earth, while maintaining a tenuous peace with humankind while settlements are established back on Old Earth/Unicron/Eukaris/Whatever-Name-The-Quints-Think-They're-Gonna-Give-It. As you can probably guess from the latter, those five-faced b^$+^rds have plans to take the Beastformers out of the equation, and they've struck an alliance with Galvatron to achieve that. Galvatron, of course, has plans that ultimately will come into conflict with the Quints', but for now he's content to set his Predacons about on Eukaris finishing work on a second neural incapacitator while a Maximal delegation consisting of Primal, Carlton and their crew are on New Earth for re-negotiations. When the device is finally operational, Galvatron puts it to use on the remaining Beastformers and human settlers on Eukaris, as per the Quints' plan - but also uses his appropriated Pillar tech to open a second channel from the incapacitator array aimed directly at New Earth, betraying the Quints into zombified enslavement along with everybody else. But Primal and the major's team have already departed New Earth after negotiations failed; Galvatron discovers this and has a Predacon Seeker squad made up of Waspinator, Cicadacon, Manterror, Transquito, Buzzclaw, and Injector intercept them en route aboard a Quint attack ship previously docked on the Gigastorm. Only Carlton's flying skills manage to shake off the attackers, but the delegation's ship is badly damaged and is forced to crash-land on the first planet in range between the Earths old and new...Cybertron, long abandoned by its native species when they chose to seek out other lost colonies and spare their homeworld further depradations. Galvatron knows Primal's group is there, too, and after the Predacon leader upgrades himself further with Dark Energon and modified Transformium - mutating into a nightmarish draconian warrior-beast-THING capable of summoning Cybertron's buried dead from their graves with but a command - a final showdown for the future of all three worlds is set into motion, a final showdown which will tear all the way into the bowels of the planet, in which heroes and villains will die and be reborn, and in which - in the final battle between Primal and Galvatron - one shall fall...and one shall stand.

 

Sold.

Au contraire-- Every time I see the alert, I get excited about whatever terrific insanity you've cooked up next.

You've got a really good handle on keeping these scenarios in the context of preceding material, but you're constantly expanding the scope of this universe and keeping it fresh in ways the actual films have real problems with. And you don't just restate or reinforce existing concepts in a way a lot of the brand has fallen prey to over the past several years-- almost everything's got a new spin on it or has been reinterpreted entirely in the sort of fashion the best of Transformers-- Beast Era, Animated, the cream of IDW, etc.-- would do. I think Hasbro and Paramount are having huge issues with what they need to change about the films to maintain audience interest, but at the same time are afraid of taking risks that could further chip away at their already diminishing viewership. Optimus Prime pulling a Rako Hardeen and fighting a telekinetic in a Mad-Max-style setting might be exactly what we need. If you keep 'em coming, I'll keep coming back.

If the reason you've actually just run through everything you've devised for the continuation of this same series, here's a question: What completely uncharted territory would you like to take the brand to? What'd your TransTech look like? Where'd you go if it were technically the same continuity, but the the world itself had evolved into something so different that the traditional dynamic had dissolved and we'd never seen anything like it in Transformers before? What'd your factions be? New characters? Settings? Go nuts.

 

Here's a couple of quickies:

1) A spin-off series adapting the various IDW tie-in titles of the first three films: Rising Storm, Tales of the Fallen, Convergence, Sector 7, etc. May take some finagling as Last Knight did its level best to sledgehammer John Barber's house of cards, but there's great stuff in there-- the backstories of the Fallen, Jetfire and the Simmons family, Bonnie and Clyde in a robot car, pistol-packing badass First Lady Eleanor Lou Hoover, Nazi Transformer tanks getting their asses whupped, Shockwave being a cold-blooded harbinger of death, etc. One thing I would change, however, is preventing the demise of the sisterbikes, leading into my second pitch:

2) An affectionate semi-parody of noir/neo-noir, sort of similar in tone to A Simple Favor from earlier this year.
It's been a rough week for mutant Autobot Nightbeat. The strange-looking detective has only just settled in on New Cybertron, and now a spate of Energon poisonings have strained human/Cybertronian relations yet again. This takes on a new dimension of unsettling for him when he discovers evidence that mad Decepticon experimenter Flatline, whose biochemical weapons program is responsible for his current freakish appearance, may be behind the attacks, and he is even more dismayed to be partnered with the scientist's most (in)famous victims, Mudflap and Skids, who have badgered security chief Ironhide into letting them be part of the investigation. Though the three of them get off to a rocky start, they gradually bond over the trauma they all share at Flatline's hands (amnesiac Skids is kinda playing catch-up here) and get appropriately serious when black market kingpin Swindle discovers an Autobot holy grail in the Louisiana bayou: a bolt-hole of Ratchet's, filled with stasis-locked patients and fellow survivors of Cemetery Wind's purge, including Arcee's heavily damaged team and Sideswipe. It's a race against the clock to make sure that their comatose friends don't end up sold to Flatline as medical fodder, and unfortunately, there's probably going to be quite a gut punch for fans wishing a certain character was still alive. And what's this about a "sister" Mudflap is uncharacteristically quiet about...?

 

You can never have too many Bugformers.  

To be fair, the "wrap up" comment only applied to the "Beast Wars" story.  
As far as what would happen AFTER that, though, haven't thought that through yet. I'd still like to play with the gap in between my two trilogy ideas --- already I'm thinking of a loose TF-style remake of "3:10 To Yuma" involving Sharkformers.

 

When I saw The Last Knight, and I was so disappointed for a story that could have been good...

The story should have been in 2 films: search for the talisman + stick in the first part with defeat of the humans and the Autobots, then in the second, set up of Cybertron, return of Optimus at the Autobots and rescue of the Earth from Cybertron.

This would allow this focus on the Optimus Prime / Megatron relationship, now in the same side in first part with a kind of fraternal rivalry. Everyone wants to be the leader, Optimus Prime must also be respected by other Decepticons (their "show fangs" and being the most violent with humans, the poster "Ennemy" with the head of Optimus taking all its meaning ), while being "brothers" and explaining in the process what it means and showing it. After we could get inspired by Shattered Glass for the personality of Nemesis Prime who would be the main protagonist of the story, then at the arrival of Cybertron, Unicron would wake up.

It would be benevolent (humans would be somehow "his" children, so he wants to protect them) and release Nemesis Prime from Quintessa's grip to become Optimus Prime again and save the Earth because only a Prime can use , in addition to herself, the Quintessa's stick and stop it.
Then emotion sequence where Megatron and Optimus Prime will again face reluctantly, each trying to reason the other. In the end, Cybertron is placed in orbit of the Earth, a little further than the Moon. Megatron back to his normal state and kill Quintessa (no one give orders to me !). The Knights give Optimus the supposed location of the Primacron planet, which they believe to be the creators of Cybertron, Unicron and AllSpark. He would make the decision to go there with the hope of finding help to bring Cybertron back to life.

In the end Unicron and Primus will make a temporary peace for the next billion years. Which is not huge for them.

The Autobots would then find on Cybertron a huge abandoned ship in perfect condition called the Ark, built by the Autobots at the end of the war but never put into service. They decide to use it for the trip. But the vile Decepticons led by Megatron decide to do the same with the ship Nemesis. There follows a space pursuit where the Decepticons take the Ark of Assault, the battle destabilizes the ships that crash on an unknown planet.
The Ark embedded in a volcano, shock put everyone in a state of stasis before 4 million years later, Teletran 1 repair and wake up...  

 

Wheelie and Brains open up a detective agency.

Simmons keeps trying to elbow his way in.

 

Following this up with a few episode ideas for season 1:

Pilot (Two Parter): Searchlight crashes on Earth in front of Carly Spencer. Mortally wounded by Bludgeon, he passes the Matrix off to her, only for it to be stolen by the Decepticons shortly thereafter. It's up to Carly to make sense of the mysterious visions in imparts on her, and her and the Autobots to foil the joint (and sometimes conflicting) plans of Starscream, Bludgeon, and Barricade and recover the Matrix.
Far Out: When Prowl's latest Decepticon lead points to the renowned Dr. Arthur Arkeville, Carly begins to suspect that business mogul and space travel proponent has made a terrible bargain in his quest to find extraterrestrial life.
All Hail Sideswipe: The Autobots discover Sideswipe has achieved legendary status amongst Decepticons after pegging Starscream in the face with a broadcasting camera in the pilot. Burned by the humiliation, Starscream pulls out all the stops to destroy the Autobot bruiser.
The Gulf: When the Pretender monsters step up their attacks on oil tankers in the shipping lanes, the team joins up with Rodimus and Jazz's forces to take down the massive Octopunch. We get an idea of just how much of a figurehead Rodimus is to Prowl, and how uneasy Jazz is made by it.
Happy Trails: Things get difficult for Hoist when flashy superspy and former roommate Trailbreaker shows up, renewing the unpleasant dynamic from their academy days. Unfortunately for Trailbreaker, he's about to learn what it means to be compromised to Prowl...
Iron Barons of Fortune: "Optimus" manages to broadcast a signal from outside of his prison, causing headaches not just for the Autobots when Grandus and Sky Garry heed the call, but also for Starscream when anemic Megatron clone Megabolt follows suit and the Destructicons forcibly try to install him as the new Decepticon Leader.
The Cabin (Two Parter): Dr. Arkeville escapes from custody to a bolt-hole in the Rockies, prompting Prowl, Hoist, Bumblebee and Jazz to track him there. Carly persuades them to let her and her father tag along to the snow after their vacation plans fall through, but this proves to be a terrible idea after the team begins making horrific discoveries and it becomes obvious Bombshell has set up shop in the area. First appearance of Windcharger.
Unplugged: In the wake of her father's abduction, Carly basically abandons civilian life in her effort to find him, turning her academic workload over a protoform Hoist has rescued from Bombshell's lab. Unfortunately, he absorbs Carly's various notes and doodles directly into his personality, and she has to bring her eccentric science teacher, Mr. Hallett, into the fold to prevent nascent Targetmaster Push-Button from destroying the school.
Only Human: Prowl being Prowl, he's content for the other members of the Arkeville posse to blame themselves for Mr. Spencer's kidnapping, despite knowing his own dubious decisions bear the lion's share of responsibility for the disaster. However, he's forced to to do a right thing when discovering an inconvenient truth about Windcharger puts Carly in danger.
Rouges: Exhausted with the unrewarding minutiae of being a leader, Starscream takes a solo scouting mission to ease his nerves. A run-in with Windcharger damages both, and they are grudgingly forced to work together to survive being sucked into a mine, Lake Peigneur-style.
Double Meanings: Bumblebee is overjoyed when Glyph comes to Earth to help Prowl with encryption of an Autobot High Command teleconference, but his clingy eagerness leads to him neglecting his duties to spend time with her (and begins cutting into her important work, as well). Glyph has problems of her own when she realizes not all may be well with Optimus Prime...
Fallout (Two Part Season Finale): Newly suspicious of Prowl, Carly and Bumblebee try getting to the bottom of the matter as shadowy Decepticon spymaster Soundwave comes to Earth. Starscream, thoroughly done with being a leader and terrified of being liquidated for the Megabolt affair, deserts the Decepticons, but Soundwave is, like Carly and Bee, on the trail of who he assumes to be Optimus Prime. As Bombshell brings Carly's father out of the fold again, the origins of Nemesis Prime are revealed and the Autobots decide where their loyalties lie, nothing will ever be the same again.

 

And here we go...

Tenth pitch: SHARKFORMERS!!! Oh, and it's an Ultra Magnus/Elite Guard sequel, too.

Six years after Patricia Morgan's sacrifice brought an end to Hall McBregg and his legion, Magnus and his surviving crew have remained on Earth hunting down the rest of Straxus' remaining "clientele". Lately they've tracked one of his biggest clients all the way to Maui, which is gradually on its way to being reclaimed by its native flora and fauna by the time the Elite Guard arrive. There are still populated villages there, though, and one of them turns out to be very close to the dropoff point for some of Straxus' Transtech. But the militant gang using that Transtech has already been putting it to use against non-human enemies, as Magnus and his men discover when a few of the thugs advancing on the village by sea are promptly attacked by a VERY intelligent and selective wolfpack of large sharks. Naturally, they're Sharkticons - Cybershark, Gnaw, Hammerstrike, Overbite, Sharpedge, and their leader Skybyte - and their very presence on Earth disturbs Magnus, as the logical conclusion he draws from this revelation is that the Quintessons have been rather more proactive in their designs on Earth than it would have appeared. But the truth is a little more complicated than that: while they DID come to Earth originally at the behest of their Quint masters, the truth is, none of the Sharkticons really care for the Quints, and rather than risk taking the brunt of anti-Quint hostility back on Cybertron they decided to take their chances on Earth and tell the Quints to F.O. They happened upon the villagers here, who've been leaning back toward their native religious beliefs for comfort in the wake of being almost totally cut off from the outside world, and essentially passed themselves off as shark gods, "protecting" the villagers in exchange for a share of their resources. Except since that ugliness is comfortably out of the way (barring an incident here and there), the Sharkticon racketeers now have an actual threat to deal with: a bunch of Transtector-armed mercenaries led by an ex-con named Rand Horton, ostensibly employed by the POE to seize the village's resources and punish the natives, and are sufficiently equipped to achieve both ends. For their parts, the rest of the Guard would be more than happy to let Horton have at the Sharkticons - as would the villagers, once they discover the truth - but Magnus has his doubts that that's such a good idea, especially when the Autobot begins to pick up clues that suggest the bandits' real employer may be using the POE as a fake beard, as it were, and that said real employer may have something rather more destructively ambitious than just looting and pillaging on their minds. Fortunately, Magnus is a sharp guy as well as a tough cookie, and his eventual arrest of the Sharkticons turns out to be merely part of a larger plan to lure whoever or whatever he suspects to be the REAL enemy out into the open, and everyone on the island - including and especially Horton and his men - is gonna be in for a shock: it seems someone didn't end up quite as dead during the battle against the Blackzarak as everyone thought...

 

Third major TLK sequel idea: A Movie-Megatron-centric story loosely inspired by John Barber's current take on IDW Optimus. A reconstruction of the character from "alliance-shifting punching bag of the universe" to someone who's... still that, but with an eye on making sure his actual legacy outlasts him. Picks up after his incarceration following Unicron's defeat.

For those keeping track, movie Megs has had a lot of lows over the past few years, but being imprisoned in a drop shaft miles underground as a disembodied spark and brain module have to rank highly among them. There's not much to do besides ruminate on his origins as Optimus' (canonical) twin brother, how his ambition eventually led him to fall under the Fallen's sway, and how his physicality has deteriorated since his first resurrection, until the day Megatron's psychic link allows him to feel Optimus' near-death and narrow resuscitation. The surge of awareness in his brainwave patterns is picked up by a Cybertronic mole tank hidden in the asthenosphere, who breaks him out. Claiming the moniker of "Soundblaster," his mode-locked ally purports to be a shell program of the deceased communications officer Soundwave, stationed on Earth as a sleeper agent in case of the original's demise. Megatron is taken to the elite Predator unit and reformatted into incredibly powerful new bomber form by resident scientist Stalker, with "Soundblaster" informing him that rogue Decepticon general Overlord, a recurrent enemy from his days as Lord High Protector, has rallied an army of Cybertronian malcontents from across the galaxy, and intends to move against both the stricken Optimus and Megatron to become self-appointed "Emperor of Destruction." However, Megatron is no fool, and deduces from various clues that "Soundblaster" is actually Overlord's tank half, maneuvering Megatron into position for a climactic, ego-fueling battle for control of the rebuilt Decepticons. And for all his power, Overlord is about to realize the colossal mistake he's made in handing Megatron a bigger gun... especially with Megatron's new epiphany about the permanence of the Decepticon cause, and what he has deduced about Optimus' health.

 

With all the talk of the franchise possibly backpedaling toward a sequel to TLK, I finally came up with another idea, one that finally picks up on where to go with Blaster after kind of leaving him behind there for a while...

Eleventh pitch: Sequel to my fourth pitch, set parallel to my tenth pitch.

After putting an end to the center of Straxus and Forbes' operations, Blaster and Raoul (the latter of whom realizes that, for lack of actually killing Forbes, he may live at least a little longer by getting the hell out of L.A.) make their way to central Florida in the grip of a particularly terrible storm season. The area in general has become a bit of a swampy no-man's-land, a waterlogged cluster of abandoned theme parks now being enjoyed by the local alligator population and the occasional marine-park escapee that manages to elude said alligator population - making it kind of a strange place to be picking up activity from more of Straxus' Vehicons. It turns out that the not-so-errant drones have been working with a squad of Zarak's Hive troops to concoct a new variant of Zarak's corrosive contagion - one designed to mutate sufficiently enough to destroy Earth's animal life, including humans, as well as its machinery and fuel sources (thus, the abundance of marine creatures provides a handy stockpile of test subjects). Blaster and Raoul are found out and scuffles ensue, but they're quickly aided and abetted by Bumblebee, back on Earth to assist in the human evacuation. Something's wrong with the lil' yellow b^$+^rd, though - his reflexes aren't quite as fast as they used to be, and he seems to be suffering some serious wear and tear, and in fact he's insistent that Blaster keep his distance. It comes out that during that last climactic battle with the Blackzarak over Earth, 'Bee apparently was exposed to a slower-acting-but-still-potent strain of the previous corrosive agent, and by the time anybody caught it in his system there was nothing that could be done to either stop it or reverse it - even Daniel Witwicky's "cyber-kinetic" powers could do little but slow the infection's progress. It's not looking like 'Bee's going to survive this mission, and in fact he's counting on it - but he's also counting on taking as many of Zarak's horde with him as possible. There are, of course, other complicating factors to this quest. First is the fact that there's a local sect of the Heralds that's gotten wind of what the Hive's up to, and as much as they despise the 'Bots and their human confederate just for their sheer presence, they hate the Hive's interference on Earth even more...which STILL doesn't make them trustworthy enough to be considered allies. For that matter, there's also one of the Hive's increasingly-less-enthusiastic soldiers, a thorn-covered ne'er-do-well named Spike who was all for blasting the crap outta these damn robots before his AWOL boss decided to add pretty much ANY life form that's so much as seen in an Autobot's company to the hit list. Then there's the matter of four Dino-Combiner deployers of Soundblaster's that the Heralds had been taking care of until the beasts up and fled - Dile, Zaur, Graphy and Noise, none of whom cares any more for their human "masters" than they did their mechanical one, and have already figured out how to scan their own alt-modes to make it more difficult to see them coming when they decide to lash out at what they perceive to be interlopers. There's also the presence of a couple of Decepticon Triple-Changers, Astrotrain and Tankor, who are basically there on Megatron's behalf to try to recall the Vehicons (under the pretense that, with Jhiaxus removed from power, the still-living Megatron by default is Lord High Protector, rather than Nova Maxima). And THEN there's the massive storm front that hits the area on the edge of a hurricane, pounding it with more flood waters and making a standoff between the factions that much more intense - especially when some of the more intelligent (and more temperamental) of those marine life forms decide that they've had enough of being poked, prodded, poisoned and even shot at. On the other hand, there may also be a distinct advantage in the fact that one of Blaster and Raoul's would-be partners-in-tyrant-toppling happens to be partially floronic, therefore possessing marked immunity against the chemical mechanisms of the corrosive, a trait that could even be extended to a machine-being via the Nebulon binary-bonding process...like, say, to an ailing Autobot Camaro who's at Death's door...

 

The Transformers equivalent of Days of Future Past. It would serve as a continuation of The Last Knight, but would find the Transformers traveling back in time.

The twist would be, all that secret history of Transformers stuff Last Knight brought up would have been caused by the characters previously tampering with the past in this film, and would explain why Megatron looks the way he does, but at the same time it would lead the series in a whole new direction in later sequels. You could reboot characters and ideas here and there because of the time tampering.

TLDR version - The Transformers go back in time for some reason (likely Unicron) and their tampering with the past shows that Age of Extinction and Last Knight are the results of a previously tampered with different version of the future, one separate from the first three films.

 

^I don't get this constant fandom desire to de-canonize certain movies or do some DoFP stuff to get rid of certain movies. Just enjoy the movies you do and don't care about the movies you don't. The movies fans dislike exist just as much as the movies fans do like.

 

Actually I love Age of Extinction and Last Knight, but I'm going by what I think a studio would do.

Personally I want a Michael Bay directed finale film where Autobots and Decepticons have to team up to defeat Unicron (which would be a combination of Armada and Prime Unicron) with Prime and Megatron sacrificing themselves and Bumblebee becoming the new Prime (which seems to be the direction the series was heading towards).

 

Fair enough, although I don't think that such a film is going to happen. But I think that if a film series is going to be rebooted or not, either reboot all of it or none of it.

 

mate have you heard of paragraphs?