IDW Cyclonus > G1 cyclonus design wise.

 

G1 Cyclonus > IDW cyclonus design wise.

 

At this point you're just racking up likes for Nova. Can you get into why you think that instead of the Ah-huh Nah-uh debate style?

 

G1 doesn't look like he hasn't eaten in 40 years.

 

I assume then you are referring to his skeletal face. Can't account for taste, but I like it especially with the whole samurai motif and the fact he has actual horns instead of bunny ears.

 

Dad bod Ultra Magnus is starting to grow on me.

 

G1 box art be like

 

Dunno if your a 40k fan,but you essentially just described the planet "Barbarus" from their universe - the idea of that hellworld then turning into a giant rusted leviathan of darkness and doom is a very cool image.

 

It's been 20 years since I played but you're right. Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaan.

(I played the table top RP version, not the pure wargame version. Same universe though.)

 

all this heated cyclonus talk.... were they ever that different cosmetically? Ones got a skull-ish face and a busted horn the other's gotta gun seems like the kinda thing not worth giving a shit over.

 

Yeah, I don't get it either. Sure they are clearly different designs, but they aren't as radically different as people make them out to me imo.

 

This is the first I'm realizing it's considered that much of a difference.

 

So, bit of a random one and I'm not sure its popular/not popular because nobody discuss it but: the visual and sound effect of 'energon expoure/overload' from the Beast Wars cartoon is one that's engrave in my mind as one visual-auditory cue that something is starting to short out in a Transformers body. Yet I'm not entirely sure if its ever been reused elsewhere in another show. You know, this white-vaguely blue crackles that appear to twist and curl around their body when Energon or similar radiation/energy sources are starting to overload their bodies. Its really cool and I wish it was used more, even if it was much more minor in context. Like if someone was holding some energon cube in a show it would briefly spark around their palm.

 

He has a neat style, but he's still a bad storyteller. His layouts are awful.

 

I do respect G1 as "the one that started it all" of Transformers, but at times I do wishes that both HasTak and the fanbases didn't treat G1 as if it's the only portion of the franchise that matters merchandise-wise (Like how HasTak and 3rd parties nowadays seem to love making 4-5 G1-style Optimus Prime every single year, all of which looks exactly the same), especially when there are potentially good designs from other AUs such as the Unicron Trilogy, Animated or Car Robots that never gets any love and good figure representations for decades.

I don't dislike G1 or anyone who does, but I do dislike the "oversaturation" of G1 from the aesthetic to its inspiration for TV shows, movies, games, and comics in the last couple of years. I feel that HasTak, third parties, and the fanbase are too busy indulging "1984 G1" to be creative and drive the franchise forward. Is focusing on G1 over and over the best idea for the franchise to survive in the long term? I don't know, however, I do miss 2000-2010 when we got so many different interpretations of the franchise: Car Robots, Unicron Trilogy, Animated, etc.

The saddest part was how Transformers as a toy franchise prided itself upon constant reinvention and innovation because it had to in order to survive (Like Beast Wars saved the brand to survive the flop of G2, or how the Unicron Trilogy supported the brand long enough to afford the Bayverse live-action movies that make the franchise popular once again). Sometimes the quality of the toys, and especially the fiction, fluctuated but at least it was always trying something new, and wasn't just retreading the same thing over and over again.

 

'80 nostlagia is a big sacred cow of current pop culture and merchandising. In particular the Gen X G1 fans are getting much older and are in the main demographic who still even have something resembling disposable incoming with the Gen Y Beast Wars fans having entered said age group too. However I do understand the sentiment, as it seems that post-2010 Transformers has been so focused on said nostalgia that it has failed to produce something worth remembering. As many others have written, T30, Prime Wars and War for Cybertron (plus Kingdom's BW 25th anniversary status) is nice and all but if everything is an anniversary or celebration of everything else, will we have anything worth celebrating and homaging later? Honestly I'm not sure and I think Transformers need a major break as a franchise to reinvent or reinvigorate itself. Sure, we know any new reboot is bound to have an Optimus Prime and Megatron and Starscream and all that but Rid2015 kind of sucked hard and Cyberverse/Prime Wars/WFC were some of the dullest shit out there.

 

By the way I do think a new reboot wouldn't just need to do things differently for the sake of different. What we need is something which has a reason to be different, with a strong vision on what it wants to be while still being true to the roots of the franchise and, most importantly, a fun show. Animated did things very differently than G1 but was still in my opinion true to the spirit of the series as a whole and everything it changed it did so with a solid reason why. All in favor of the over arching story of its cast that it was telling through all three seasons.

I'm not sure what form this would take yet since I'm not an executive or showrunner. However parroting G1 (or even Beast Wars!) is not the way the go anymore than changing things for the sake of changing. Any change to format, pace, lore or character archetypes need to serve at least some baseline purpose to the plot, just so people understand my stance better.

 

At some point, that nostalgia ouroboros is going to start swallowing its own tail.

This. Change for the sake of change is just as bad as a hidebound refusal to change things. I may disagree with how Animated handled things, but I could never deny that it had its own vision. Any future series needs to have that same kind of vision: it needs to know what it's about. Everything that's kept, altered, or discarded must be done so in order to accommodate that vision.

 

One thing which bugs me is that, even if tv shows stuck to GEEWUN I'd love to see them tackle less-used characters which is one aspect I'll concede Cyberverse somewhat got into. I'd want to see them utilize more than the bare bones of G1. Give me a cast with Hoist, Bluestreak, Doublecross,, Mainframe, Banzai-Tron, the Seacons or any kind of less famous character!