io9 took a super cut of all the actual Autobot fighting a Decepticon from the first three films then divided the length of all three films by the length of the super cut to determine what percentage of the three films is really Autobot battle the evil forces of the Decepticons.

The actual title of the article gives away a little too much if you want to guess so I changed the link title for all those who want to guess before clicking to the article.

Autobot vs Decepticon time from the first three Transformers films

 

Now how much is just general robot time with no qualifiers I wonder.

 

What a petty complaint.

These movies are about MORE than simply "this-robot-fights-that-robot."

They build a whole world around that central premise and let you get to know the Witwicky family quite well (themselves co-stars of the original G1 comic book & cartoon, btw), not to mention Epps, Lennox, Simmons, etc.

And focusing SOLELY on the robot-on-robot fight scenes leaves out a LOT of robots-against-humans stuff and simply robots-but-not-fighting-right-now footage which is likewise tremendously awesome.

And COME ON, this isn't some shitty, schlocky, PoS cartoon animated on the cheap overseas 30 years ago.

These scenes are MASSIVELY expensive.

20 minutes across an entire trilogy is PLENTY.

Plus, the ratio has increased with every single film as the success of the franchise and the budgets grow in tandem.

Ugh.

WORST FANBASE EVAR

 

Yeah, I know right! The movie's only spend so little with the robots because they put so much time into character development and plot!

... Oh wait, that's not even slightly true. I do agree that robot battle screen-time being somewhat low is one of the least of the movie's problems though.

 

Damn right, my brother!

If these films were just Autobots fighting Decepticons, then there would be complaints saying "omg too much action" "these robots are dull..they just fight!" "the story is too basic! Robot vs robot gets boring" "I want to know the humans, stop the fighting" "why are they even fighting? Good vs bad has been overused! Wow me" "too much cgi slapping each other" and other crap like that.

If they had 3 films of just Decepticons running away and returning to fight again...then run away again....people will get bored.

 

20 minutes is actually a pretty long damn time. For just fights? Damn.

I mean, why complain about that. The Transformers discuss things and are not in constant war mode, too.

 

io9 didn't make that video, some guy on Reddit did.

And it trims the fights here and there.

Not to mention it doesn't feature things like the Scorponok shootout from TF1, the Blackout attack from TF1, most of the final battle in TF1, and a bunch more action sequences from 1, 2, and 3.

So io9's article is pretty misleading.

 

It would be pretty cool if someone put all the Decepticon time together and all the Autobot time together so we'd know how long the robots where on screen in the films. Although I wonder if you could count in the time in their alt mode since sometimes they don't do much in alt mode but at other times a character like Bumblebee will do a good deal in alt mode.

Maybe the next time someone does a marathon of the films they could be nice enough to keep a stop watch handy to give us the results. Call it crazy but someone somewhere on a Transformers site must have a copy of all three films  

 

This kinda takes the steam out of the "These movies are about giant robots fighting" agrument when defending the plot and writing criticisms of the Transformers movies.

 

There has to be that one guy out there who's dedicated enough to figure out total robot screen time. (Certainly not me. Too lazy.)

By the way, what counts as robot screen time? Do their vehicle modes count?

 

I'm actually not a big fan of robot on robot combat. It's just a lot of flashy sparks and explosions, and it often gets criticized as what the movies are all about, even though it's such a small part.

 

The one useful thing I got from the article is that AoE wasn't that much longer than the other 3. Sure it's long, but it's not significantly longer than the others. Which actually what I'd like to say about this topic:

I think that it's not so much that the robots get too little time in these movies (I get the cost of CGI) it's that the movies are so long and full of (human-focused) junk. Particularly for the first and fourth movies, I feel there are sections of human-focused scenes that could be cut easily and cleanly - and would only improve the films. I'm almost tempted to make a trimmed version of AoE once it hits Blu-Ray as I've already got it mapped in my head what to cut.

Yes, the robots are underfeatured, but it's due in a large part to their being way too much junk in there, making the robot parts proportionally too small. I think in AoE we got a good amount of robot time (other than the dinobots being tacked on, but if we just count "robot time" in general, it's good), it's just that there was 1h45m of human stuff with it, making the whole thing too long, and diluting the robot time.

Sorry if I rambled or got repetitive.

 

Things the video didn't show:

1. The entire fight between sentinel and the autobots before the final battle
2. Ironhide's death
3. Skids vs. Mudflap
4. Que's death
5. Wreakers
6. Half of DOTM's fighting scenes
7. Sentinel waking up, and attacking Optimus

 

At least someone else remembers Skids vs Mudflap! I liked that scene because they're brothers and it shows even cybertronian bros fight (like humans)