If I was in charge of an established franchise movie, I would probably 100% change things ENTIRELY to drive the message boards insane.

"You realise the original Death Star was ping-pong tables with battleship airfix kits glued to it right? There is no Death Star, or X-Wing, or Boba Fett. It's just fun. Maybe have a think about why this makes you so angry, as opposed to how angry it makes you?"

I'll admit my inner child kicked back at "Prime looks wrong" on watching, but not anywhere near as much as his continued roaring "JUST DIE!" "I will take your face!" "YOU'RE DEAD!" It's like having the world's best step-dad then one day he has a bad reaction to a drink or something and starts staggering around, knocking vases off the mantelpiece.

 

Changing things just to spite people and go "Haha fuck you fanboys!" is exactly the mess we are in right now in many aspect of pop culture. I think the issue here is people are seeing a glut/stagnation to Transformers that wasn't present fifteen years ago. Transformers as a series spent quite a lot of time juggling reinvention and tradition to keep itself fresh for the current generation, from the Japanese-only series to Beast Wars to the Unicron Trilogy and, yes, even the Bay movies. I think what's going on here is people are starting to find the same rehash of neo-G1 increasingly boring from a storytelling perspective. Increasingly this balance of reinvention versus established is weighting more and more toward the established.

 

The colorscheme for the Torchbearers isn't that bad.

 

Starscream should use a sword more.

 

I entirely blame the Star Wars sequel trilogy for enforcing the whole "true fan's perfect checklist story nostalgia" movie pop-culture era we're in. It's pure stagnation with no creativity because of the whole early 2000's "crappy reboot rant" culture. Transformers caught a stray bullet for it too, it's clearly how the Netflix Siege trilogy was made with the whole: "No stupid ass humans, DARK, set on Cybertron" mindset. These people running these things are just so delusional.

I thought Blitzwing's "Now you'll die screaming, like your friends!" in the Bumblebee movie coincidentally sounded like a Furmanism after rewatching it a few times. Intentionally or not, it's a funny callback.

 

yes

 

I imagine a cocky Decepticon saying "it's over...FINISHED" but getting interrupted 

 

Do we live in the same reality? Disney Star Wars is only surface level at being nostalgic. Its entirely built to hook suckers and then sucker punch them and tell them their heroes suck and fuck you, they got new and better heroes to market to you and you are a bad person for not liking these terrible characters. The Transformers equivalent would be a cartoon that start off with G1 nostalgia and then Drift, Windblade, Squeek and other characters replace Optimus because he was a deadbeat husband who was shit and Elita-1 (now given a completely different personality that is now aggressive and spiteful) is deserving of the Matrix. Then he become Orion Pax again and apologize. That's what Transformers would look like if it followed Disney's 'winning formula' for Star Wars.

It would make killing off Optimus in Transformers the Movie and his replacement with Hot Rod feel tasteful by comparison.

 

i hate disney for this, they killed off my boy admiral ackbar 

 

So IDW-2005 then?

 

I want to be snarky and say 'yes' but IDW is a trainwreck that ended that way over an entire decade whereas Star Wars managed to do it way quicker. But yes, same energy the only difference is it was done in a single universe which hasn't affected the entire fandom completely. Fortunately for most us, I'd wager IDW's influence on perception of certain characters only work if the character was particularly obscure or not-quite-used such as Rotorstorm, Pyro or Ironfist. The more mainstream/central to TF mythos a character is the less likely IDW has caused lasting damage.

That said I know this will piss of the IDW fanboys.

 

Again - I'm not saying lore isn't important or should be half assed. I'm saying that fans place WAAAAAY too much importance on it, to the point where there are just lore junkies that don't ever read the stories, they just skim wiki articles so they can say they know things. I love Tolkien's dense lore and world, but what I care about are those moments that make me and my dad cry when we watch Return of the King - Aragorn rising to the throne, Sam carrying Frodo off Mount Doom, the Hobbits returning to a Shire they no longer recognize because of the journey they've been on. I don't give two fucks about Twinky-Winks the Hobbit who was in Frodo's college biology class or Buttfucker the Orc commander that got eaten by Shelob and had two lines. Nobody should. It's cool that those bit characters have names but they didn't carry that ring soooooo fuck 'em.

"Maybe have a think about why this makes you so angry, as opposed to how angry it makes you?" Fucking BEAUTIFUL quote, I might make this shit my signature. Star Wars fans, especially - feeling 'betrayed' because Disney didn't make your Star Wars EXACTLY how you wanted it is literal psycho shit. Why do these manchildren think the corpos are their friends? Motherfuckers suffering from Peter Pan syndrome.

Okay but fuck the fanboys. Seriously. Fuck them. What, studios have to make their entire products worse to cater to a bunch of entitled manchildren who are gonna die out as a demographic one day eventually, only to realize when that day comes that they spent all that time catering to old fans that they never bothered to bring in new ones?

Yeah. Change it. Change it all, please. I'm a longtime fan and I'm so fucking sick of every Transformers story being the same fucking thing. It already killed my interest in Marvel and Star Wars (though again the fans are to blame there too), and I guarantee you it killed a lot of other peoples interests too and it's gonna keep on going like that until they ACTUALLY do something new and inventive.

Agreed - I'd generally like to see Starscream portrayed more competently than he's usually portrayed, and making him an expert swordsman a la Armada is a great way to start. A sleeker, more agile G1-ish Starscream design with a big sword or two medium swords? Boom. You just made Starscream cool.

It's funny - Force Awakens is LITERALLY just a remake of A New Hope, right down to Rey being Girl Luke in that movie and Kylo being Darth Vader but Hot, and with such a needlessly large and unnecessary focus on the past. But guess what? At the time, fans ate that shit up. Only in retrospect will they say "no I ALWAYS hated it" because they are such weak willed cowards. The only time they TRIED something different was The Last Jedi, which is, all things considered, a pretty tame and light jab at pointless nostalgia and romanticizing the past. And the fans, being the psychotic animals they are, had none of it. "whaaaaat? You're telling me my nostalgia maybe isn't as good as I thought? I'LL SEND DEATH THREATS TO EVERYONE INVOLVED". Psycho shit, the only good one of those sequels and these tired wheezing manchildren burned it at the stake. And don't even get me started on Rise of Skywalker, absolute fucking horseshit apology tour for the only good movie the Mouse made built on pointless fanservice, callbacks, reference lines, dumb twists... legit one of the worst movies I've ever seen and the penultimate nail in the coffin for my love of Star Wars. The final nail was Luke's Dumbass Cameo in Mandalorian's S2 finale. That's when I realized Disney never gave a fuck about making something good and just appeasing the bloodthirsty lunatics and manchildren who are still mad they made Luke into an actual person and not a god.

Also yeah Blitzwings little Furmanism was funny I agree lol

Buddy it sounds like you're projecting a lot of your own insecurities onto a Star Wars movie made by people who don't give a fuck about you or what you think Star Wars should be or even know who you are. To paraphrase myself from earlier in this thread - The Last Jedi came out almost four years ago. Let it the fuck go.

(Also - Disney Star Wars isn't nostalgic? Are WE living in the same reality? Did we not watch that same terrible ending to Mando S2? Did we not hear all the shitty prequel memes they references in The Rise of Skywalker?)

 

"I..still...function.."

 

@agent j 15 summed up my thoughts on this better than I could have.

One thing I'll add is that lore and mythology mostly exist to add extra flavor and an illusion of history to a story. Sometimes it's cleverly used to convey something else. Like, take Luke Skywalker's line about bulls-eyeing Womp rats in his T-16. The point of the line is to convey that Luke is an above-average marksman (which helps justify why he's able to hit the Death Star exhaust port later). Having a line like that is funner than just having Luke say "I'm a pretty good shot" or something. What exactly a "T-16" or a "Womp rat" is doesn't matter. But then they write guide books explaining the breeding habits of the Womp rats and whatnot. Which is fun and harmless, but I don't think people should lose sleep if a future story decides to make the Womp rats cloned creatures that don't breed or something. It's just silly to expect every single meaningless technical detail created over the course of years (if not decades) to be taken into consideration.

Another thing I'll add is that I feel like the continuity within an individual self-contained story is way more important than continuity between movies in a series. For instance, an early cut of Bumblebee (when it was still a Bay prequel) had a post-credits scene with Megatron frozen in Hoover dam. Yet Megatron's design apparently looked more G1. Which makes no logistical sense, considering he probably can't reformat himself while unconscious and paralyzed. Yet...this change wouldn't have bugged me at all (had they left it, and had they kept the movie a Bay prequel). Why? Because Travis Knight was going for a very specific style with his robot designs. Using the very detailed 2007 Megatron design would have been jarring since he'd have been the only robot in the film to look like that. I feel like maintaining visual continuity with the rest of the film is more important than being beholden to a design from another movie...I think it's a tradeoff that would have been justified. Especially since the general audience probably doesn't even remember the 2007 design clearly enough to realize or care that it's been changed.

 

No, Agent j15 I didn't watch Mandalorian because I've been done with Star Wars for a long time but I'm going to guess you're going to project on to me being some sort of ******ed 'fandom menace' type. Still, Last Jedi is a fucking abomination and no I won't let it go as long as post modernist hack like you think important parts of a serie's mythology is just shit you change for no fucking reason other than to spite people for the sake of spiting people. Certain things stick the way they are for a reason. If I was such a 'canon purist' I wouldn't actually like Beast Machines despite its flaws.

Its just that if/when you change things purely for the sake of cultivating antagonistic audience reaction you're nowhere as clever as Hollywood think. I'm fully aware obsessively nerding out and giving a backstory to every fucking cantina alien that appeared for 1.3 second is pointless at best and cash grab at worst but you can't just go around and change things if you are doing it just for the sake of destroying something and going "Hahaha, I ruined that thing you like." Yeah, fanboys and fangirls can be pretty bad but let us not throw out the proverbial baby out with the bath water. If I made Transformers a love drama about shapeshifting wombat and name a sentient neon green traffic cone from an alternate timeline where Nixon was never president 'Optimus Prime' and if he was a serial killer I wouldn't be doing anything clever or good. It would be the equivalent of people who throw random paint splotches on a canvas or who take a pile of garbage and call it a modern art master piece. Every single story/universe/mythos need clear touch stones.

Edit: As for continuity its important within a specific work to have continuity or else its just nonsense on par with Silver Age Superman stuff or a bad episode of Generation 1. You need a clear enough understanding of what is and isn't, at least enough for the story to make sense. Now, again, screeching about plot holes born of writing mistakes is counterproductive but you need at least semi solid continuity within a singular movie/tv show/comic universe or else nothing make any sense narratively.

 

Well this is a heated debate going on...uhhh

I like Optimus Prime better with more muted robin eggish blues instead of the more common vibrant blues.

 

And I like the yellow eyes from the toy. Or is that a popular take? Don't really know anymore but it has nice color contrast.

 

I'd say it's a neutral take at this point really, now if you want to really be an animal, you gotta suggest he should have either A) Red, B) White, or C) Green eyes. I'm partial to the white eyes myself since they looked so good on the Netflix ER Prime mold, but it's not a choice that'd fit every Optimus design, and red eyes look good too but I prefer them to be saved for a powered up final battle type Optimus like in Armada or the Powermaster version.

 

I liked the seq- *is shot*

Combiner ranks (Sunbow years)
1. Defensor
2. Menasor
3. Abominus
4. Computron
5. Predaking
6. Bruticus
7. Superion
8. Devastator

 

Long nose > Cab over

MP-3 was a good design for starscream, Add swords in those pylons and that would be perfect.