When the RID toys came out, I thought to my self "now THESE are perfect - vehicle TFs with Beast Wars toys articulation". Then in Armada, it seems they completely abandoned the concept by bringing back the funky, unrealistic looking vehicles and such - it was a drastic change. Looking the movie toys now,it looks like Hasbro/Takara is returning to the Car Robots/RID concept. Then I just realized that the RID toys are the most articulated car TFs ever, and that Bay and Co. probably noticed that. I know that some of the post-RID toys are very articulated, but they're blocky, and much harder to animate than the RID brothers, for example. So they based their work in the RID designs and took a step further by eliminating the "shellformer complex" that the RID cars had. I wasn't sure about what to think about these movie designs until now. They're just what I was looking for back in 2001: the next step after RID. What do you guys think?
That's the way my best friend saw them too, he was a huge RID fan and when he saw movie Bumblebee he immediately said that he looked like a "beefed up" RID car brother.
the movie toys maybe (i see ratchet and blackout influenced by cybertron more than RID, but in the case of bumblebee you're right) but the actual movie designs have on big diference with RID... CAR KIBBLE
I had the same thought as well. The build of Optimus Prime's arms is very similar to Fire Convoy. The benefit of the movie designs is that they can break the kibble into much smaller parts and tuck those parts into convenient places, so that the robots don't have gigantic skirts and capes. Also, if you look at the faces of WildRide & Mach Alert, they look very much like the movie bots.
Well, I am a huge RID fan, and personally I think the only similarity between the movie and rid designs is that they are both cars. The toys may employ some of the RID styling as we see more, but then again, the movie toys don't really transform or look like they will in the movie (which i think is good). Basically, as TFs grow in complexity over the years, their Transformations will. RID was the first time we saw real cars since G1 (in mass, specific), and this is the second (minus alternators). So their transformations will be closer to each other than say G1 to movie or even Armada to movie (since those designs were simplified on purpose and had non-real-world alt modes). Just my 2 cents.
