I still can't get over seeing an entire aisle full of Star wars toys 2 hours before my local Toys R us closed for the final time. They couldn't give that stuff away.

 

Not for me certainly. In fact if they didnt exist at all it would make no difference to me whatsoever....

 

But it gave a more believable take on the Pretendahs!

 

G1 is like classic Star Wars, license to print money. In 2019, majority of G1 children are in there mid thirties to early fifties and this age gap has the most disposable income. G1 is also the core of the fandom. When the average person is asked about Transformers, the first names are more then likely to be Optimus Prime, Megatron and sadly Bumblebee.

 

What made Hasbro go back to G1? Why don’t you ask why 3P is mostly G1. Answer that and you’ll answer why Hasbro does it too.

 

My thoughts exactly. He was Snarf or Orko, the mascot of the group. And in the case of Bumblebee, a pretty bland one at that. Amusingly, Snarf was muted in the 2011 version, and too bad Bee wasn't fully muted as well. The whole "radio speech" thing was a complete ripoff of Short Circuit (Johnny Five alive!)

So many great characters have been overlooked in the past decade.

 

Nostalgia. Everyone's realizing that consumers are aching to go back to a simpler time and... there we go.

 

Hmm... I'm not sure about this. Snarf and Orko (you can add Bravestarr's Deputy Fuzz to that list also) were all just variations on C3PO, a cutesy 'pet' character who would often get themselves and their pals into trouble. Sure, they came in useful sometimes, but in general they were just there for light relief.

I'd argue that Bumblebee was never really like that. Even in the G1 cartoons, Bumblebee was a capable member of the team, superb at espionage, like the Autobot version of Ravage. Sure, he was easy-going and fun-loving, but he was hardly an out-and-out comedy character. Unlike Orko and company, Bumblebee was very rarely a liability (there were many Autobots who got into far more trouble in the G1 years than Bumblebee ever did).

Even in the Bayverse stuff, Bumblebee is a warrior. Sure, he can't talk and his difficulty with Earth customs is played for laughs, but it's not that far removed from, for example, how Kirk and company were played for laughs in Star Trek 4 (the old 'fish-out-of-water' syndrome). Bumblebee is the star of the show, the main attraction. If you're going to equate him with an old cartoon character, he's Denver the Last Dinosaur, not T-Bob. And there's a big difference between the two.

 

Bumblebee wasn't comedy. He was essentially the taxi service for the human Spike, and that tag-team duo was often in trouble, especially that 1st season. Bumblebee was the babysitter, though sometimes it felt as if Spike was also his pet. The main cast considered him the runt, charged with tasks not worthy of their time.

He's the runt of the litter, and not much of warrior.
In Bayverse, when he is the warrior, it's really quite unbelievable, this little munchkin bot that is (in robot terms) doing little more than tying shoelaces together. He runs drove away more than anything else. And still a human taxi service for the first few movies.

Not really. "double dumbass to you", the transparent aluminum scene, and maybe a couple of others. But it was just one-liners, not an overarching theme of the characters that went movie to movie to movie.

Yes, he is, and it's sad as fuck, seeing as how the TF universe has so many other (and many better) characters. Instead we're left with a mute Herbie the robot, who's biggest character trait is "don't touch that dial" and taxiing humans.

 

True and I liked that.

But the story itself was completely out of context of what it was supposed to be (a continuation of the original series and headmasters).

It conflicted so much with them that it wasnt even funny. Not the least to say, its plot was....lets put it this way: If the original series were for 8 year olds, those were for 3 year olds. Not a bad thing per se, but.....

 

My friend I think you were confusing the tech specs/comics with the G1 cartoon

“Very capable”?......At some things maybe but he certainly not their version of ravage


“Superb at espionage”.....really?when?
I can only recall two times in which where he was truly spying on anybody, the first was in “transport to oblivion”, Where he was caught and brainwashed.The 2nd was in “Autobot x”, Which I don’t really see his espionage since he was just worried about his friend

“Very ”?....I can remember a few times in which where he was either abducted And needed to be rescued, or injured or required some other form of assistance for falling into a casual or other things like that

 

I'm gonna guess and say "WE did it..." even so, you can see how many people are still unhappy. Who would ever expected the series built on characters who transform into vehicles would have the fans so unable to cope with change.

 

I see a lot of comments saying it's a nostalgia thing. I have to disagree. G1 is the foundation. Regardless of how things went post G1, whether it was The Beast Wars era or Aligned or Bayverse, in the end EVERY ONE identifies the characters by their G1 designs. Even if you grew up on Beast Wars you knew Optimus used to be a red semi truck. That Megatron was a gun. For Hasbro to "return" to these concepts is just building upon the G1 foundation.
The mandate from Hasbro to Bay and Spielberg should've been to make the designs closer to G1. If you want to create new characters to keep expanding G1, great! But that's the problem with trying to build a single continuity to a franchise that is toy based. The stories don't dictate what toys get made, it's the toys that everything has to be based on. And everything goes in cycles. So Hasbro has to soft reboot the characters periodically.
I read comments and people make it seem like G1 prevents the franchise from growing beyond those concepts. It should be embraced! But don't go out of your way to create something and say "were leaving G1 behind, this is a new era" and then give up on it and "go back" to G1 because then it seems like a crutch.
But like I said, you're trying to base a mythology on a toy franchise which only has a short lifespan before the next reinvention of the line rewrites it.

 

And for 3 year old target demo, a lot of people were killed off screen (Mega and Giga's lightning attacks on those passenger planes among others).

There is a sort of wrinkle in the plot that I too need clarification, Metalhawk and team hiding on Earth since the Neolithic period. Was it a straight assignment non broken up until 2021? Or was his team just reassigned to have a sort off garrison presence once Fortress chased of the original 'cons?

Another plothole with the sending of the transtectors to earth. Didn't they(Autobots) have Space Bridge tech already or was that Shockwave's TM tech which had Autobot High Command from planet "Master"? or the G Nebula send them via standards sublight or transwarp tech? It was later retconned with Z stealing the transtectors from their GNebula storage but in the show, iirc, the transtectors were being send via the long method to somewhere. The plot did had Devil Z stealing several Godmasters and hiding them on Earth soaking up on the planet's Chokon energy (which should have taken thousands of years). Why then didn't he just attack the helpless Ark a thousand years before the explosion of Mt. St Hillary?
Don't get me going with the jarring abrupt end with the transtectors suddenly gaining sentience. 

Well, the characters were just well made that the fans just emotionally bonded with them.

Paramount and Hasbro overdid the 'bee. 100% agree.

Verily!

 

If you ever start a cult, I would like to join.

 

And let's face it, G1 toys looked better, felt better, transformed better. Imo to beat the G1 toy line you have to look at MP and 3rd party. Some of the new Hasbro stuff is okay, Power the Primes, Titan Returns, and this siege line. I do like the Titan scaled pieces, but the best stuff are the 70s Diaclone and Takara pieces.

 

I just remembered that Bumblebee was literally the first bot injured in G1, and had to crash into Wheeljack's medbay. He was "the little engine that could", but in that pathetic 80s "and now you know" sort of way.

- The "full sized" carbots were mostly the warriors.
- Huffer was probably the only minibot with warrior tendencies.
- Beachcomber was probably the only bot worse than Bumblebee, between playing with butterflies, and seemingly high off purple sticky energon.
- Wheelie largely supplanted Bumblebee after the movie, and Wheelie had a much better fun personality.

I've not read the comics in probably 30 years. I still have them, and recently pulled them out to read again this year. I know most characters had better or different treatments, but I still don't recall Bumblebee being anything special.

 

Uuuuuum we're all fans as in FanAtic. The root word for fans. TF fandom can be split into many sub genre just like mainstream religion. 'nuff said.

In the Marvel run, Bb did have a BBcentric story in TF#16 Flight of the Bumble Bee. Sadly, it was never fully expanded.

 

He had more development as Goldbug

 

Yeah, now Goldbug was more warrior that I can remember, in the Marvel comics. But Goldbug wasn't just Bumblebee with a new coat of paint, but a rebuilt bot, a new character with some memories from the old one. I've always liked Goldbug, along with the other Throttlebots.