Hello. And before anyone says it, yes, i am a newbie who grew up with the Michael Bay movies.
I recently watched Bumblebee, and loved it.
The designs, at least. I decided to rewatch the Bay movies and ended up hating it.
I really like the G1 designs, and the Bumblebee revisions.
Should i watch the original cartoon?

 

As someone who watched the G1 cartoon decades after it ended and right after the 2007 movie, I say yes it’s worth a watch. The writing is pretty cheesy since it’s from the 80s and it’s filled with animation errors up the wazoo, but I think the voice acting is top notch and has pretty great episodes like the ones focusing on the Dinobots, the ultimate doom three parter etc. I think it’s worth a look especially since it’s up on Hasbro pulse’s YouTube channel.

Also you should watch Beast Wars as well 

 

I've heard about beast wars but i've never really looked into it.. Thanks for the heads up, though. Much Appreciated.

 

The cartoon’s cg hasn’t aged well but it has a great cast of characters who oozes personality and has a epic story arc. Season 1 can be a bit of slog but it’s worth it in my opinion.

 

The CG just screams PS1 graphics.
I like it.

 

I am biased since I grew up with Beast Wars as a child but I do love the old cg it has. It has a nice look to it no other cg series have except Reboot who was made by the same team who did beast wars.

 

You grew up with the Michael Bay movies you say? Have you watched either Animated or Prime? If not, then I would recommend watching those.

 

how about cyberverse?
I heard a lot of things about it, both good and bad.
but most people are saying it's bad

 

Yes, But doesn't mean i liked them.
Prime i've seen, i liked it. Ish.
Animated was just something i watched due to my boredom, never got around to finishing it.

 

I liked Cyberverse a lot actually. Humor is hit or miss but I thought it told an interesting story through its run. My major complaint is how short each episode is. Seasons 2 and 3 is when the shows gets pretty good.

 

If @CaptainSlayer is still on these forums he did prety much exactly what your describing. and hes a damn nice person. message him and talk. He essentially started the community rewatch. It all started with him getting a wee bit tipsy and watching g1 s1e1 and detailing his thoughts. we all thought it was the funniest damn thing so he did the whole series. Bayformer fan watches G! i believe it was titled.

 

Cyberverse is great! But you have to slog through half of Season 1 before the show starts to hit any kind of stride. The short episode length does kind of benefit the show as it doesn't overstay its welcome if you think the episode sucks - just wait a few minutes and the next episode will probably redeem the series a bit. It's rare and refreshing to have a Transformers show that carries as much death as it does and not fall down the grimdark hole.

But as for the original question, absolutely yes, watch G1. At least, give the first season a try. Really, you can almost divide Season 2 into a 1.5 and a 2 as the back half starts featuring more of the 85/early-86 cast instead of the 84-85 cast. You can clearly see where the writers began on TF:TM as none of the Scramble City combiners are featured and Omega Supreme is nowhere to be seen. Skyfire is also notably missing but I think that has more to do with trying to avoid further incursions with Harmony Gold at the time.

 

I love G1, but I'm biased because it was the show I watched most as a kid (even though Animated was the show that was on the air when I first started watching and the show I watched first). Also, my dad watched it when he was a kid, so I also inherited his nostalgia for it, and since he was the one to explain the franchise to me, most of my assumptions about characters are based on the G1 cartoon.
The animation ranges from decent (there are a few episodes where it's actually good, but those are relatively few and far between; most of the really well-animated ones are at the start of Season 2) to terrible (AKOM episodes, I'm looking at you.) Animation errors of the most ridiculous kind abound. Things get especially bad in Season 3, when AKOM took over most of the animation duties; some of the best-written episodes in Season 3, like "Dark Awakening" and "Five Faces of Darkness", had the misfortune of being terribly animated by this company.

Season 1 has the most continuity between episodes; Season 3 has the best character development...but Season 2, my personal favorite, has the widest range of plots (even if some of them are completely bonkers). I'd suggest watching at least a couple episodes from all three seasons, there's a distinct (if subtle) tonal difference between the different seasons.

The show really doesn't have an overarching, series-long plot (even in Season 1, things are pretty episodic); character development likewise only really exists for two or three characters. And you have to be aware going in that this was a Saturday morning cartoon...most episodes are full of plot holes and an astonishing lack of logic and/or braincells on the part of the players. Some of this (and the many, many, many animation errors) can be chalked up to the fact that the writers and animators had very little turnaround time when producing episodes...we're talking three months or less from the first draft of the script to the episode airing! It also didn't help that the movie and Season 2, the longest of the three seasons, were being produced at the same time, or that the show's budget seems to have been...questionable...at points. (Again, AKOM.) Sometimes, the errors were the result of simple lack of interest, but in a lot of cases, they basically had no time to fix problems even if they had wanted to do so.

The characters aren't usually very deep or complex, but they are quite colorful, memorable, and fun. There are some surprisingly effective interpersonal dynamics between Optimus Prime and Megatron (actually, G1 may have my favorite Optimus/Megatron dynamic of any series) and between Megatron and Starscream, the latter of which is probably the most entertaining part of the whole series. A large part of this can be chalked up to the excellent work of the voice actors, who breathed life into characters simply by giving them a unique voice.

I really like the show, but mileage will vary.

 

I say G1 is a fun show to watch. Like you said, it doesn't have much deep characters or much in character development. But I feel like each character has their own unique personality that makes them stand out from each other. Jazz and his love of music and earth culture, Cliffjumper being the hot head, Starscream being the back stabbing bot who always tries but fails, Soundwave and his cassettes, the Dinobots etc. If you accept it for what it is, and try not to compare it to story heavy shows with a focus on character development like say Beast Wars, then the show is good for what it is. The animation errors exists yeah, but I say it gives the show charm, even if their unintentional.

Plus it introduced many of the lore and world building this franchise has build upon. The G1 cartoon is the foundation of this entire franchise after all.

 

Personally, I would recommend seasons three and four more than the previous two. Season two is alright and it has fun episodes, but honestly, season three had the more interesting characters. Season one I wouldn't recommend. Aside from Fire in the Sky and Ultimate Doom, it was actually the most boring season for me.

 

I think absolutely yes G1 is worth watching. It's true the animation isn't great and the writing is a bit cheesy because it was a product of its time (by which I mean that it was from a time when this was viewed as just a silly toy commercial and not something that could or should warrant serious effort in its creation) but they still crafted like 100 episodes of mostly enjoyable characters, some really fun plots, a few very visually cool spectacles and ideas, and just a fun ride for most of its run. There are some real clunkers, but those are far outnumbered by the good to great portions.

I agree with what Longitudinalwave says. Season 1 is the most tightly made, season 3 has the most consistent character growth and broad arcs, and season 2 is probably the most fun (albeit at the cost of being a lot more inconsistent than the other two seasons)

And the less said about The Rebirth/Season 4, the better.

Plus it has had more influence on the broad universe of the Transformers than anything else that's been made since. Character concepts and design cues created here have informed most of what's come in the nearly 40 years since. So if nothing else it's at least the single most important run of Transformers fiction ever crafted, even if it's not necessarily the best (though I would contend that at its best it is as good as almost anything else that has come since. It's just held down by being the most inconsistent series so far)

I've been doing something similar. Not that I'm a Bayformers-first fan since I started with G1, but I've been going through every series in order starting with G1 and all the way up until right now where myself and a loyal and growing cadre of other posters are working our way through the last 1/3rd or so of RiD 2001. Shout out to the regulars from various points along the way like @Longitudinalwave @RKStrikerJK5 @TheUltimateBum @Rojixus @WreckAndRoam @Swerve @Scoff and others I'm sure I'm forgetting about.

I didn't do it drunk, but I've had my moments. Especially during the bad parts of the franchise. Like Headmasters.

 

Bruh there’s 98 episodes, and I thought you were a TRUE fan? Every TF nerd knows there’s 98 episodes!

 

*pushes nerd glasses up* actually, they also cut up the movie into 5 episodes to air on TV so there's really 103 episodes, which is like 100 episodes. But of course, you must not be a true fan either if you didn't know that. Also there's that alternate cut of Dark Awakenings that ends differently when they repeated it later in the season

 

 

I'd recommend reading the Marvel comic as well as the cartoon, since the comic has a bit more of a "serious" tone than the cartoon. But I'd still recommend doing both since they both tell very different but equally important versions of the G1 story.

 

The G1 cartoon is pretty low-stakes TV that you can easily watch while at other tasks like the dishes, etc. So I'd say it's worth giving a roll even if you're not movie critic levels of focused on it. It's also mostly self-contained episodic, so you can totally look up your favourite characters on the wiki and watch their featured episodes. If nothing else, it's probably worth watching some of the big iconic episodes and The Movie just to have a basis for all the references they get.