Unless I've been misinformed, today marks the 20th year since Transformers Armada first aired. A toast, to the series that got me hooked onto the Transformers Franchise.
Cheers indeed! Armada is a great series, and it kicked off the first honest-to-goodness reboot of the franchise (RiD01 wasn't intended to be a reboot). Love Armada Optimus, Jetfire, Hot Shot, Red Alert, Megatron, Thrust, Starscream, Demolishor, Sideways, and Unicron.
To reiterate, Transformers Beast Wars was my introduction to the series, but I thought it was just "Beast Wars" since that was the only thing they said in the opening, and I was in elementary school. XP Then I encountered Robots in Disguise, but I dropped it after the first episode because that Optimus VA was terrible. So Transformers Armada is what made me a fan of the franchise.
Cheers to a fairly underrated series that took quite the unique approach to Transformers. And it had Best Starscream in the franchise.
...20 years. FFS. It's G1 all over again, for a lot of people. Not too long after that, we started getting Masterpiece and Binaltech/Alternators, and G1 was being celebrated for its 20th. (Followed by the movie's 20th.) Good grief. HTF have we all gotten this old this quickly? I remember 2002 like it was yesterday. I remember thinking these toys looked like ass and I wasn't going to buy them, but then lost my mind over the gimmicks and bought every friggin' one I could find. ...TWENTY YEARS AGO?! I WAS 22! I. Am. So. Friggin'. Old. ;_;
Man, this really puts it into perspective how long I've been around since Armada was my initial entry into the franchise - sure, I'd seen various G1 episodes from the times mom took me to Hollywood Video and get an episode (The first episode of the Dinobots was always a favorite of mine, which is ironic because I actually don't really have any special affinity for the Dinobots so I dunno why I loved that episode so much). But Armada was the first one I could really catch on TV and follow along with. That was Neil Kaplan lol. I know, right? Time just seems so weird - never feels like it's going fast enough sometimes but then you blink and suddenly it's years later and so much has happened in what feels like such a short time.