I will say this , if these werent Transformer movies and instead Go-Bots movies, many would say the designs were improvements.

 

Truer words have never been spoken. We've already seen our fair share of remakes that do exactly that.

I believe I speak for the rest of the Gobots fans on this site when I say "The fuck if we would".

 

I can agree with that too. Sometimes the source material was at the very best bland.

 

I have several boxes of spare computers parts.
And then an outside storage building has extra car parts. And a bunch of metal stuff that could be recycled -- but isn't because it could be (and has before) come in useful for repairs. Sometimes even for making custom TF props.

Bayformers look like all of my boxes, and the outside building, threw up into a bigger pile of crap.

 

No.

 

As opposed to G1, which just look like the boxes themselves?

 

Lets be clear here: Skids, Mudflap, Jetfire, Arcee, Chromia, Elita-1 (the last two, have they even had a movie appearance?) had nothing to do with their source material outside name sharing and should be judged on their own merits rather with a correlation that doesn't exist.
Unlike say, the attempt at Strascream. Or Devastator.

I dont disagree with you but:
I cant see how those mentioned above, fixed the blandness of their previous incarnations. If you even correlate the two (Which ImHo one shouldnt).

Right, so instead of streamlining the boxy part, we should put pieces of crap inside the box  

Why do you believe that if something looked like crap (which didnt but lets go with that as granted for the shake of the conversation) justifies that something else looks like worse crap?

 

Who mentioned G1? Pretty much any other incarnation looked better. Any toon, any comic.

The plot and story-telling of Bayformers were arguably worse than the StarTV-dubbed Japanese G1 trifecta (Headmasters, Masterforce, Victory). Hell, even if I watched the Japanese language version, being a Japanese non-speaker/reader, I could follow along visually with some degree of story. Visual cues let me know who was good, who was bad, what was going on. With Bayformer, it was a cross between an elephant and a rhino: hellifino.

To this day, I still think the masturbation "joke" was distasteful and inappropriate. Those movies had almost zero redeeming value: not for character design, script/story, effects, music, acting, or anything else.

Yes, I've watched each of them. They were a guilty pleasure, like having a 1-night-stand with an ex. But I felt dirty afterwards, and not even a shower could scrub off the depraved feeling I had from viewing it. After the movies, I was never entertained, and my feeling was usually "What the fuck did I just watch?"

Let's just be honest here: those were not Transformers movies. Those were generic robot movies, with the brand name added after the script had already been written. Some mild visual reworking, and poop, there's an Optimus Prime wanna-be. Put ol' Peter Cullen as the VA, to try and get the TF fans on board. You can call it a Bumblebee or Megatron all you want, but they don't look, act, or feel like the characters.

Let's be honest again: Nobody would be talking about Gobots because it's Gobots. Same for Xybots. Nobody would care, nobody would talk about it, and it'd have flopped at the box office like so many other robot movies have.

 

As a big GoBot fan I'd have to chime in with the chorus of "The hell I would"....

As for the movie designs being bad....I'm older, I grew up on the Shogun Warriors and other super robots long before Transformers was a thing. Because of that, there are a few things I find very visually appealing when it comes to my preferences in robots:

Clean lines
Heroic proportions
Bold colors
Shelf presence
Personality

The movie aestetic has none of this. Most characters look like a mass of scrap parts, have gorilla proportions, bland colors and if I put them on the same shelf together it tends to look like I just threw my parts boxes up on a shelf. Meanwhile, so many classic namesake characters have ZERO personality...ironically most of the ones who DO were movie original characters.

To ME and my own personal taste (which is all that really matters to ME) the movie designs are BAD. There is no visual appeal for ME. Then there's the whole argument of feeling that, beyond the visual these characters are NOTHING like their classic namesakes...The Autobots have many instances where they hardly seem remotely heroic: pretending to leave the planet and letting untold numbers of humans die just to see if the humans 'learned their lesson' which for any hero is BAD character design pretty much tops that list. Can you imagine any other version of Optimus Prime in the last 30+ years letting ANY humans die by his choice? He is supposed to be a hero archetype, like Superman, Spider-Man, etc...can you imagine the Avengers or the Justice League saying 'hey, lets let a bunch of people die so they remember how much they like and need us"? You can try to say "but that was just the script" but at the end of the day a character is nothing more than the visual design matched with the script to give it a semblance of life and purpose.

From top to bottom, personality to visuals these choices make the movie character designs BAD to me.

 

I think there is a distinct difference between changing things up and flipping the bird to the source material.

Changing things up is how I would describe the designs for the characters. Sometimes it works, as Bumblebee is now more recognizable as a muscle car with black racing stripes and the doors hanging off the back in robot mode. For others, such as the vulture-like Starscream and the ape-like, multi-colored Devastator did not stick, though despite my preference for the classic look of both Decepticons, I would argue that the fault was more on the movies for not giving them personality like they did with 'Bee.

Flipping the bird to the source material is shoving all the Transformers barring mostly Optimus Prime and Bumblebee into the role of secondary characters in their own film, and instead focusing on uninteresting human characters with boring subplots that go nowhere.

Personally, I like the majority of Movie designs. I've mentioned before that I prefer Bumblebee as a Camaro to Bumblebee as a Beetle (though the streamlined design in the Bumblebee: The Movie trailer looks amazing), and I think some of the other designs, such as Optimus Prime in the first three movies, Jazz, Sideswipe (if only he'd had more color), Megatron in The Last Knight, Ravage, Shockwave, and Brawl also make for great translations of the characters to the big screen, changing things up while not abandoning the source material. Some of the more out-there designs like the Constructicons also look visually interesting.

However, I do think the cost of most being devoid of character and most of the Decepticons having monstrous faces is too great, and would prefer the characters be more recognizable for the fans. Casual movie-goers might not care if the Transformers look different or not, but that's all the more reason to keep the recognizable for the people who do care.

 

Two words.

Visual. Noise.

Too many moving parts makes his robots hard to focus on. There's no stable point for your eyes to land on, no stable surface. It's why I had issues trying to watch his movies because my eyes had issues with where to focus.

 

I agree, some of the battle scenes were unpleasant because there were so many moving parts on screen that much of it looked like a giant blur- I couldn't make everything out.

At least we got some good toys out of Bay's rollercoaster.

 

I think the recent cybertronian designs shown in the bumblebee trailer are a good mix of what both sides were looking for. instantly recognisable characters that look like aliens

 

Throw some electronics in a woodchipper, and you have the effects for a Bayverse fight.

 

This is pretty much how I feel.

 

My personal opinion.....

They aren't "bad". I just think the designs are very busy and unnecessarily complicated. If the transformation is going to have so many moving parts, I just feel they could have been much cleaner. I also thought the bulky panels to allow for facial movement made little sense for an alien robot species. They could have been cleaner too.​

 

The have more in common with anything else than Transformers. Closer to live action rocklords.

 

I'll never understand how people can say that Bayverse TF designs are good. No offence.

 

Some Bayverse designs are good .... others are pretty terrible .

My favourites are ...
Ironhide
Bumblebee ( movie 1 and 2 )
Barricade
Megatron ( DotM )
Wheelie
Optimus Prime ( start of Age Of Extinction )
Soundwave ( RotF )
... dare I say it ..... Mudflap and Skips  

My least favourites are ...
Hound ( bulkhead with a filthy beard )
Knight Optimus ( where are the truck parts ? )
2007 Megatron
Drift
Crosshairs
Bumblebee ( age of extinction )

Based on those lists , it looks like I started to dislike them from AOE onwards

 

I think they have great designs! The problem is I feel their to overly complex. While that is what I'd imagined transformers to look like in real life. I do like it to be in between. 25% complex, 75% simple. Problem solved, and the budget wasn't wasted on animating a bunch of metal objects with no character.