How dare you?! Neon green/dark purple is the bomb!

Its just our personal preferences, no offense meant.  


ETA:
In terms of robot mode though how the hell are some of them supposed to even move around? I mean one is a...head on a leg thing thing. One is an evil unicycle thingy. People who praise Bay design as more realistic in the same breath as one-legged hoppy thingy and giant unicycle thingy are full of it.

 

I think the realistic argument is a bit of a stretch, considering we are talking about giant robots here, but I do commend the designs for doing something interesting and out of the norm. Realistic or not, the Constructicon designs are very creative and unique, and I’ve always appreciated the different direction that they took when creating them.


Also, kind of weird that I have to mention this, but that appreciation has no basis in low cognitive function, but actually a little thing called preference.

 

I personally prefer the bayformers designs because I have bit a biass towards the designs but because I got into Bionicles before I saw the 2007 movie of transformers and I prefer monochromatic colors schemes a lot more

 

Have you ever seen a Japanese movie called The Great Yokai War? Bay musta stolen some of his shitty mechanical designs from that. Since it predates it by two years.

The mythological costume designs are fantastic though and its a good little adventure flic. Go check it out.

 

It looks... interesting?

Hell yeah, Bionicle was the best! My situation was the opposite, I actually got into Bionicle around 2009 because of the Transformers movies. I think it was the intricacies in the designs that made me like them.

 

That's going to be a HARD disagreement on my part. I maintain that every single Transformers product Dreamwave ever produced blows the entirety of the Bayverse clean out of the water several times over. It's not even close.

 

Always cool to see fellow Bionicle fans   Bionicle may have ended but it will always live on in my heart.

 

The Dreamwave Unicron Trilogy comics sucked - I should have written "Dreamwave Unicron Trilogy" comics.

The Dreamwave G1 comics had good ideas, but were hampered by Pat Lee's megalomania.

Even the shittiest IDW comic is far superior.

 

Honestly your right in that about that the BaYfoRmErS bAd GeEwUnN GoOd argument feels very forced, I get it that there are people who don't likes the movies and am okay with that if it's just an opinion, but there sometimes that the argument feels like they are shouting "hey give me free likes" or those who call bayformers fans mentally handicapped then that is not okay

 

And yet, I would still place them above anything connected to the Bayverse. As far as I'm concerned, the only good thing to come out of the Bayverse is Barricade and Blackout.

 

Wrong.

2007 AllSpark Power Deluxe Landmine.

To this day, that figure remains absolutely unmatched in excellence.

 

I'll tell you what the best aspect of the Bay designs is though...variety! Variety is the space of life!

The Bay Transformers have a wide variety of robot designs. The colorful variety of body types of the Constructicons. The metal shard bodies of 2007 Megatron, Frenzy, and the Decepticon Protoforms. The ancient alien Egyptian look of the Fallen and Quintessa. Autobots based on humans like samurai, paratroopers, fat bearded, cigar-smoking soldiers, and armored medieval knights. The alien barbarian designs of TLK Megatron and the Dinobots. And speaking of Dinobots, their dinosaur modes being like mythological versions of dinosaurs. Stupid Drones with cartoon-like eyes. Cyborg wolves with flesh, fur, and jaws and feet of metal. Often colorful robots with "visors," like the Wreckers, Jazz, and KSI Traxes. The Frankesnstein's monster that is Galvatron, with even the hole in his chest representing his lack of a Spark. A cyclopean, Cybertronian wildcat. The faceless minions on Lockdown's ship whose bodies resemble those of their master, Lockdown. I could go on!

So yeah, I would say the best two aspects of the Bay movies' designs were 1) the sheer variety of designs, and 2) the willingness to upgrade characters and try new things, both from the beginning of the movies in 2007, and also as the series moved along. That's not a bad thing. That's a Shrektastic thing.

We need a variety of designs and design philosophies. We need a variety of fiction. We need a variety of preferences, because how boring is it if everyone likes and dislikes the same stuff? I hope future series can also embrace the potential for variety and trying new things in their designs.

 

Hell, yeah! Landmine and Incinerator were my first two Transformers figures - I still have them. They are brilliant figures!​

The Cybertron stuff in Dreamwave - War Within et al - is great. Optimus and Megatron disappearing, the Autobots and Decepticons splintering into various feuding sub-factions and the stuff with the Chaos Trinity and the Fallen is absolutely brilliant - it's the best depiction of the war for Cybertron in any piece of Transformers media ever. It basically informed the High Moon games, among other things.

The stuff on Earth, on the other hand, is absolute wank - for the most part, it's just just neo-Sunbow, with only token attempts to do anything new, and the attempts to do anything new are utterly stupid. The idea of Shockwave uniting the factions on Cybertron, his defeat and his and Starscream's later independent scheming comes off as interesting, but they're quickly tossed away to have Megatron be the big bad again... And Pat Lee's megalomania curtailed any attempts for it to be anything more (TFWiki shows you what would have happened - it would have been great).

Another good thing came out of the Bayverse - the idea of the AllSpark as a physical object. For people who don't care much for the Matrix of Leadership, like myself, the AllSpark provides a perfect alternative - it's more like the Creation Matrix than the actual Matrix of Leadership.

As well as, of course, being a massive popularity boost to the brand, making it a household name for the first time in years. That's a positive thing no matter which way you look at it.

 

I'd still take that over the Bayverse. The Bayverse tried to reinvent the wheel and became a trainwreck as a result.

The Allspark is just another meaningless mcguffin in an endless sea of mcguffins, you could have replaced it with a toaster and it wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference.

I'm becoming more and more skeptical these days that the popularity boost the movies gave Transformers was even a good thing to begin with. What profit a brand to gain the movie market but lose its soul? Transformers was doing just fine before it went Hollywood. It may not have been the most popular brand at the time, but so what? Not everything has to be a multi-billion dollar mega-blockbuster spectacular. As far as I'm concerned, live action Transformers was a mistake.

 

It became a trainwreck, yes, but it didn't start out as one - it wasn't bad from beginning to end. Paramount's mismanagement and the guy who understood the franchise the least being the guy with the most powerful position led to something that could have been great falling apart.

However, it's the closest to THE original Transformers McGuffin - the Creation Matrix - of all the McGuffins. In its cuboid shape, it also resembles the Underbase.

Not to be rude, but what do you mean by "lose its soul"? Yes, the Bayverse changed the brand quite significantly - but was that necessarily a bad thing?

Transformers has been around for 35 years (almost 25 at the time of the first movie) - that's a long time as franchises go. And be they Marvel, DC, James Bond, Godzilla or Transformers, franchises don't span multiple decades without changing significantly. The Batman of today is a very different character to the one Bob Kane and Bill Finger created 80 years ago, just as the Daniel Craig Bond is very different to the Sean Connery Bond.

But, you know what? Change is good; we shouldn't go round acting like "all change is bad", because what would we be left with if we didn't?

We'd be left with shit like the 2019 Lion King - bland, repetitive, paint-by-numbers content, with no willingness to take risks or do anything new.

And, besides, the changes might be well-received by other people.

My cousin is eight years old and absolutely loves all things Transformers, Marvel and Star Wars. To her, Bumblebee is mute, turns into a muscle car and talks through the radio - just as Carol Danvers is Captain Marvel.

She's not "wrong" because of that and she is just as much a fan as you - those are the versions of the characters she knows. She cherishes them just as much as some people do G1 Bee and Mar-Vell.

 

And I'm saying Mcguffins are boring.

What I mean is that the Michael Bay films are just generic Hollywood blockbuster pap, completely identical to every alien invasion movie ever.

And I'm beginning to question what, if any, benefit was actually gained from it. Transformers was relevant enough before it went Hollywood, it was in no danger of dying out if it wasn't this bloated billion-dollar CGI extravaganza.

 

I absolutely agree - one of the things I don't like about the Bayverse sequels is that they're just "Find the McGuffin" scavenger hunts. One "find the McGuffin" film is alright - five films in that vein generally turn out shit.

Eh, let's make the point that, on paper, that's exactly what Transformers is at its core - a story about two extraterrestrial armies coming to Earth and continuing their war, one side wanting to conquer the universe and the other side trying to save us. To me, that's the whole appeal.

The fact is, if there are popular IPs out there (or IPs that were popular at some point in time), Hollywood will snap them up - it's not a matter of if, it's simply a matter of when. From 1980 onwards, they spent almost twenty years trying to make a Planet of the Apes remake, which culminated in the terrible Tim Burton film.

Same with an American Godzilla film - Toho and Henry G. Saperstein had been attempting to make one since the 80s... and when the one they made failed, they spent another ten years trying to make it. Fact remained, there'd been serious talk about making a live-action film since the start of the millennium, we were going to get a Hollywood Transformers film at some point - and the 2007 film was not the worst one we could have got.

However, @AutobotAvalanche, in his infinite wisdom, is right - we must get back to discussing the Bayverse designs.

 

When it comes to this thread, I think one of the problems as to why we keep straying off topic is that people seem to not make the distinction between the design of a character and the actual character themselves.

Someone will start talking about how they liked “this design” and thought “that design” was cool. Then someone else will respond along the lines of “They didn't do anything in the movie, therefore they suck.” Then the thread strays away from talking about designs, devolves and goes wildly off topic, and then ends up talking about shit like Pregnant Scorponok and Greek mythology.

This is a thread debating the designs of the movie characters, not the quality of the films.

 

I don't think that's quite it, I think this is just the inevitability of arguing for something with no good arguments in favor of ____. I think it can be easily surmised no one's been convinced who weren't already hardcore fans of the Bayverse in general.

The thread is titled "In defence of the Bayverse designs", what someone 'likes' or 'finds cool' shouldn't factor in as those aren't arguments and are super subjective. Inevitably, the character (or often lack thereof) will have to come up, because what's the point in just talking about the designs as if they were nothing but mindless automatons? Because there's no really good arguments in favor of these things many other topics will be infinitly more interesting.

The designs of the characters are an extension of the overall quality of the movies, so I'm not sure what to tell you. The thread may as well close at this point since I think the discussion is more or less done, I doubt someone is gonna roll up with a smoking gun that suddenly makes the designs (both in terms of direction and the designs themselves) suddenly not poor from an objective standpoint.