Do you think the show was too dark and depressing?

Honestly when I first watched the Darkness Rising episodes, it depressed the fuck out of me with what happened to Cliffjumper and some other stuff. But I still like the dark tone.

 

Define dark

It was a bit colorless and boring.

 

Not at all. I found it to be just right. It's exactly the way that I like my Transformers presented.

 

Prime was really well-made, and in my opinion one of the best Transformers incarnations to date.

 

I think it certainly showed some grisly shit, but the lack of stakes and really isolated world kept it from ever being super dark to me, since I rarely if ever feared for the main characters, especially after Bulkhead's fakeout. Maybe I'm thinking of stakes instead of dark tone. It certainly wasn't an upbeat series, but I think "Code of Hero" and "Thrill of the Hunt" are more heavy and dark than the vast majority of Prime put together.

I know these days everyone wants to be dark, because dark equals better in a post-Dark Knight world. It's why pretty much every single sequel these days is hyped up with "it's darker", as if it's a guarantee of quality. I feel like Prime was overly grim dark at times. Melodramatic. So it got kinda cheesy.

A dark tone does not equal good quality. Maturity certainly can, however. What I love about Code of Hero and Thrill of the Hunt is their maturity in dealing with some rough subjects. The most mature moment I can think of in Prime was when Ratchet went off on Optimus and vented the stuff he'd been holding back for years, and its far and away the best scene in the entire series.

 

Not at all. I was not in the fandom for 20 plus years and in one week I stumbled onto TFP and TFW2005. Now I will say TFW2005 is to dark. LOL I joke

 

It was dark, but that wasn't the problem. If you look at its immediate predecessor Transformers Animated (god I miss that show), you will find that dark themes present in Prime were also incorporated into that, but Animated offset the dark ideas by making sure the show is fun.

Prime on the other hand took itself a bit too seriously to offset what happened a lot throughout the series.

 

They canceled Animated S4 for absolutely no reason, outside of DoTM possibly. HasTak Why??

 

It certainly tried too hard to be dark, but no, it wasn't too dark. It was too colourless, lifeless, and banked too much on flashy imagery and hitting certain beats without much regard for how they connected.

But it wasn't too dark.

And nothing came of it. >_<

TFA was cancelled for a multitude of reasons, including CN being a shitshow to work with, and Hasbro wanting to make the HUB.

Frustratingly, the HUB failed and Transformers is back on CN, so it really feels like TFA died for no reason in the end. :/

 

Idk, but I seen a lot of shit in anime that makes Prime look like pokemon. For a Transformers series it was dark, but not more or less than Beast Machines.

 

It could have stood to turn on the lights a bit more often.  

This is how you know we live in the worst timeline.

 

We do live in Quadwal -3760.925 Theta, a negative-polarity universe in Axiom Nexus terms. So in some positive version, Animated was never canceled. Now, if only we could figure out some way to travel there.

 

Didn't Jim Sorenson and some other guy of Quadwal negative actually visited the Animated universe? this would mean Quadwal -3760.925 Theta is not the real world because technically the real Jim Sorenson of the real world never visited any alternate universe.

 

You may be right with that. Damn!

 

Nah, to me, it wasn't even that dark for kids with the possible exception of the episodes Predatory and Crossfire. (Oh my god I loved it when Megatron ripped that Insecticon's pinchers off and then straight up beheaded him) It may have it's surprisingly dark moments like Megatron killing Dreadwing like it was nothing, but then we have the moments like Bulkhead being seriously injured, or Prime stuck in a cave dying slowly for 4 episodes. Neither of those moments were dark, they were just a drag for me personally. Prime did start off dark at first when Cliffjumper died, and that was made all the more impactful when the producers said this: "When a character dies in this show, they will stay dead." That's what I was looking forward to, some real dark consequences for the characters, no Quintesson or Shia LaBeouf would save Prime this time when he meets his inevitable death. But no, Bulkhead survived somehow despite Ratchet saying "He may never be fully functional again.", Prime came back immediately after dying, so did Bumblebee, so did Megatron, only the minor characters or the expensive voice actors were murdered permanently.

I think Beast Wars handled a dark tone better while still some how managing to balance the comedic tone which was more dominant in that show. And yet it still managed to get away with the overuse of "Slag". But nothing can beat the bleakness of Beast Machines, I mean, shit.  

 

Well, not that we know of.

 

Well put. To put things in context, Animated managed to make the best sounding outcome - Autobots winning the war against the Decepticons - into something that was anything but truly optimal. Because despite being the side the protaganists are from, the Autobots as a whole really are not that much better than the Decepticons - they litterally made sentient superweapons and didn't give a damn who got hurt or the horrifying moral rammifications of this (as Ratchet, who was admittedly forced into the whole process to keep his mouth shut on the matter). They made the jet twins more out of dumb luck by grabbing two disfigured smelting pool victims who literally couldn't say no to being forced into what was essentially a completely unethical experiment. And then when Sentinel goes so power mad to the point Megatron is horrified at how batshit irrational things have gotten, every single Autobot can protest Sentinel ordering an attack that would kill everything on the planet, including the planet, but the power structure is so broken they can't override his guaranteed mass-suicide manuver because he's the leader. That is the setting of Animated, which also featured a 5 year old with a PhD that flew around on a toy horse and Optimus vs. Soundwave in a rock-off. It can get away with that, because just how dark the setting actually was didn't get shoved front and center. It was built up over time, gradually (Thrill of the Hunt is when Animated takes the gloves off, because the plot centers around the most crucial character of the show - Lockdown - and how he traumatized two of the main cast by stealing their body parts), so when the big reveals came later, they felt natural because the foreshadowing was so subtle.

With Prime, after Darkness Rising killed Cliffjumper, it never got that dark again. They literally had to make up robots just to kill offscreen to avoid killing a single Autobot other than Optimus (who got the upgrade right after as is the norm these days), or be as subtle with a sledgehammer about how fucked they would be if the Decepticons or whoever did something with some arbitrary plot device. They had to hype up Bulkhead's supposed permanent injury to make people actually worry he'd die or be forever crippled...until like two or three episodes where he's absolutely back to full form. The show is only 'dark' really because they kept trying to make it seem like that, but it was far more telling than showing across the board. Hell, the ending of S3 exists literally to do nothing but nullify the fact Prime actually had to sacrifice something permanently to make the morally superior choice at the end of S2. And it should be noted that while TF Prime has the dubious honor of being the first TV series to have a human die on screen, everybody had thought Silas had been dragged to his death the last time he was seen and so all the show did was kill a character already assumed dead to begin with. Inside another character already assumed dead to begin with. By a bitch who should have been dead already to begin with, for that matter, for the exact same reasons.

 

It depends on what a "dark" show means to you. Dark for a kids show? Yes, considering in the first 5 minutes of the show, an Autobot is impaled by Starscream. Dark in general? Average, most "adult" shows are like prime, just not animated.

 

I would seriously disagree with this claim.

Adult shows these days feature copious death and violence, and I mean every episode someone's dead. Graphic violence and gore are common in medical and cop shows. In Chicago Fire the other week, two guys died horrifically in acid.

Prime is absolutely a more child-friendly tone, even at it's darkest, than any "adult" program.

 

Heck, I'd say Rescue Bots is more borderline adult at times than Prime ever was. They freakin' did a whole parody episode of The Birds with the telephone booth sequence, the woman in the underwater lab legit has a psychological condition where she can never return to normal life with other humans because she's been isolated for so long, the casual bit in the first season ending where it's literally a copy-paste of the book 1984 and Morocco is running around with an army of robots trying to outright murder children, and then the much more subtle detail on how Chief Burns outright told Doc Brown that the rescue vehicles were sentient off-screen and in effect breaking his promise to keep it a secret - but because that way Doc Brown would know his daughter was in safe hands as no doubt he'd be fucking terrified as her father with literally no other way to know if she's even still alive.