so I’ve just rewatched prime,animated,and rid 2015
And tldr: prime and animated are tied for my favorite TF show and cartoon of all time

And now on to rid my god this show was a chore to watch it was so boring it’s basically a power rangers show it’s that bad it’s not energon and cybertron levels of bad but it’s still horrendous

I’ll number all the points so that it’s not a mess to read

1. The story: my god it had an amazing concept a corrupt cybertronian government rules cybertron bumblebee leads a ragtag team of autobots to hunt down all the remaining decepticons and no Optimus and no megatron how do you mess this up?! You might call prime repetitive but Every episode in rid is the same thing bee team has a decepticon to catch bee team struggles to fight the decepticon bee team learns a life lesson and the bee team catches the decepticon and the bee team is happy and it repeats itself again every episode

2. The characters: man they were annoying especially sideswipe and strongarm you might think prime arcee is annoying but she is kind of likable sideswipe and strongarm are some of the worst transformers characters ever they never learn their lesson sideswipe and strongarm learn to work together the next episode they go back to fighting each other Bumblebee was boring Optimus prime was extremely boring you may think prime Optimus was boring but at least he was badass Optimus in this show is an old man he can’t fight at all and is really weak he gets beaten by laserbeak the decepticons were awful and annoying with the exception of steeljaw and starscream also grimlock was awful too
and when the characters from prime appear they feel so different and bland

3.the action was bad I never saw an action cartoon fail so bad in its action scenes like god they were boring as hell they were so slow you may hate prime but you can agree that it’s action scenes were top notch rid’s action were bland and they use slow motion for the most dumbest scenes slow motion works when the thing you’re slowing is cool

4.The stakes: they were no stakes at all in this show and they are no deaths in this show besides the fallen the one other death in this show is russels tv

5.The continuity: at the end of prime after cybertron was rebuilt and life came back to cybertron how did the decepticons come most of them were dead or were working for the autobots and megatron ended the decepticons and also rid didn’t bring any of the other decepticons they explain what happened to shockwave and airachnid at the end of prime even though they had the models for them and why are the decepticons all animals ?

6. The age demographic: the weird thing about rid is they expect all the viewers to be fans of prime but they still make the show for five year olds it doesn’t make sense who not make show for older fans?

7. The humor was atrocious it’s basically justice league level of bad prime wasn’t comedic genius but the jokes were pretty funny

But for positives:
The starscream arc was amazing and the episode were soundwave wave came back was cool and the finales were decent and the voice cast was great but that’s it

But all in all 2/10 if you’re a fan of prime don’t watch it if you’re a fan of light hearted shows it might be your cup of tea

If you like this show more power to you this is my opinion so plz don’t @ me again if what I wrote was to sloppy watch diamondbolt’s review on the series

They were some points I left out for the sake of time but this video covers them

 

Personally, I found RiD 2015 a lot more tolerable than Prime.

I honestly liked the characters more than TFP's mostly bland cast of characters. Ratchet in here was much better than he was in TFP. He was charming, laidback and likeable in 2015 RiD.

Strongarm and Windblade were also a wonderful addition to the cast. Strongarm had a great 2001 RiD Prowl-esque attitude that made her quite enjoyable and charming and Windblade was the wonderful quip machine of the team. An improvement over Prime Arcee's unlikeable hypocrite personality (as I stated in other posts, I liked Prime Arcee's design, but her character and personality are just unbearable).

Sideswipe did get annoying at times, but not as much as someone like TFP Ratchet or Miko were (yeah, they really annoyed me a lot).

Drift was also a cool character. I felt this is so far the best version of Drift we've gotten so far either in movies or cartoons.

Bumblebee... I felt it was a breath of fresh air compared to TFA's irritating Bumblebee or TFP's "Boreblandbee" (as I tend to call him). I do wish they had used another character as the leader (Rodimus anyone?), but honestly, this 'Bee is really good. I still prefer G1's little adorable yellah guy, but this one is a close second.

Optimus was... superfluous at best. There is no need to have Optimus around anymore. Please, no more Optimus. One thing this show did right is having no more Megatron (especially after the complete bores and wastes of space that were TFA Megs and TFP Megs).

However, the villains... the villains were some of the most creative characters in this show. Characters like Thunderhoof, Underbite and Fracture became instant favorites of mine. Plus, Frank Stallone as Thunderhoof? Instant win for me. "EH-OOOOOH!!!"

The story isn't anything impressive, and there are flaws, but I feel that the more simplistic approach does help the series a lot. This show isn't trying to be something big and epic (Prime tried and failed at being that), it's just about having fun. So I feel there is a lot more to like here than in TFP.

Anyway, that's just my two bucks on the stuff.

 

I agree with you about windblade she was ok strongarm was annoying her rid2001 prowl personality was ok in the first few episodes but got more and more annoying sideswipe is just god awful imo he never learns anything and I hate his design
Drift was basically sensei he was boring imo and fracture was ok and his rivalry with drift was fine I didn’t like thunderhoof or underbite to me the voices were really annoying for me bumblebee is that teacher who’s always trying to be cool but fails miserably I kind of agree with Optimus and megatron but having a show without them would be like having a Justice league show without Superman they are essential to the franchise but I would love to have a show were it’s established that both of them are dead but anyways I can understand why some people like this show but it’s really not for me as someone who loves prime it was really disappointing I expected it to be way better than prime but it ended up being really really bad but it’s not that I don’t like transformers shows being childish animated and cyberverse were childish but they were great imo each show has at least something to give prime had great action scenes animated had great characters beast wars had a great story cyberverse had a good story and a lot of references that I like but does rid give ? It doesn’t have good characters or good action scenes it does have a good story but it’s done really badly but that’s just my opinion if you like it more power to you this show is really not for me

 

Well, Sideswipe did get annoying at times, but at least there was a bit of wackiness to his whole personality that reminded me of Side Burn from the 2001 RiD cartoon. So for me, that just makes him a bit more tolerable than TFP Arcee. And personally, I felt the uptight personality made Strongarm a lot more unique.

As for Drift, I think having him as a sort of mentor-like figure was great, and in fact, it somewhat inspired me in some scripts that I've written and shared with some members.

Thunderhoof and Underbite were a lot more fun than some of the villains in TFP (I would take them over TFP Breakdown, Dreadwing and Skyquake any day of the week). Plus, I felt their voice performances brought a lot of character into them, especially Frank Stallone's Thunderhoof, which basically made him sound like a Joe Pesci-esque character.

And honestly, I felt that works for Bumblebee, because he really isn't experienced as a leader and it does frustrate him, which is much better than having Optimus being constantly in control and basically being a bland character.

Well, I have written some scripts where I've killed Optimus and Megatron off in the very first episode. I did it mainly because of my rising frustration I've had towards TF shows since the Unicron Trilogy came in and basically decided to add stuff I've liked from many continuities, even stuff I liked from shows that I'm not really fond of like TFA (mainly concepts that were badly handled like the Elite Guard and using them in a proper way) and TFP (Knock Out deserves to be in a better show), as well as the Unicron Trilogy (concepts like Velocitron and a few characters from it), but not in a fanservicey level (which is one of the reasons why TFA failed with me). However, they're not for everyone, since a lot of the characters I've used as part of the core cast are pretty rare characters (with a few of the more well-known characters added in for a bit of balance) and the first season is more light-hearted fare, but it was a way to try and write a TF show properly while also trying to make it fresh.

 

I've mentioned it before, but I think RID2015 gets too much hate. It's not as impressive as Prime, but I feel like it's actually a tighter show overall. Prime has some fantastic episodes. When it's good, it outshines RID2015. But overall Prime is sort of a mess, when I view it in hindsight. I wouldn't say RID2015 (as a whole) is fantastic in hindsight, but it feels like less of a mess to me. I legitimately really like the first season of RID2015. I thought it had a unique setup and executed it pretty well. I had no problem with the villain-of-the-week approach, because the designs were unique and they were playful with it. At the time, the vast majority of fans seemed to be onboard with season 1.It's been 5 years since I watched it, and I could probably still describe a fair portion of it.

What I start to take problem with are the following seasons. They started to lean into nostalgia, and it started to feel generic to me. Partially because they started reusing villain designs excessively. I remember some neat stuff here and there (I liked the idea of Optimus teaching the Autobots new knowledge about Transformers physiology that he learned in the spirit realm), but overall it was kind of forgettable. I'm struggling to remember what the finale of season 2 even was. Was it Starscream collecting Minicons? My main fond memories of season 2 are watching it at college between homework assignments, not what actually happened in the show (again, aside from a few neat things).

Season 3 was mostly forgettable to me. I remember Combiners and a conspiracy with the Cybertron council. I remember thinking it was really neat and out-of-the-box at the time, but it ultimately didn't prove memorable to me. I was kind of burnt out after season 2, so I didn't even watch it right away (I think I binged it in late 2017, after the finale aired).

At some point I want to revisit Prime and RID2015. But right now I'm still in the process of finishing Animated and G1. And over the summer I'm going to finish Cyberverse.

 

I enjoyed RID. My main misgivings were the know all kid, Grimlock and Drift who was just a stereotype. Fixit's speech pattern got annoying quickly.

Grimlock was a major disappointment and given that RID was meant to be the same continuity as Fall of Cybertron only made his goofiness worse. If they'd gotten Greg Berger to voice him in his G1 S3 style, it would have softened the blow.

Jazz was poor too. Didn't like him minus the visor and his voice was poor. It would have been great to let Troy Baker reprise his role from Fall of Cybertron as he was perfect.

I liked Sideswipe despite the hair which thankfully I got used to. I liked him and Strongarm as characters along with Bumblebee.

The high point of the show was the Decepticons. Steeljaw was a great villain. The animalistic robot modes were a bit off putting initially but the characterisations soon fixed that.

Apart from Overbite who just looked awful.

Quillfire and Springarm were more sympathetic than villainous to me. The Fallen was my favourite design of his various incarnations and suitably impressive as a main villain. Growing up on the 1980s Buck Rogers show, I liked hearing Buck Rogers himself, Gil Gerard, voicing the Fallen.

It was great seeing Starscream and Soundwave return and Starscream's design looked much better than his stick insect Prime look.

I really liked Scorponok and his Decepticon unit.

Cyclonus was a good villain though I wasn't fond of his voice. The Stunticons were fun. They've always been my favourite Combiner team and it's great seeing them resurface in various recent series apart from the awful voice Menasor got in Prime Wars.

RID, Bumblebee and Rescue Bots all showed a Transformers series with a minimum of Optimus Prime and the other usual suspects can work well.

 

Yeah, that was a surprising casting choice. However, I still felt that the effects they added to Gil's voice kinda slowed down his performance. Still, even though he isn't my ideal voice for Megatronus, I do think he is the best one we've gotten so far (James Arnold Taylor was pretty decent but I still feel Gil did a bit better, Mark Hamill sounded like he would fit Mindwipe a lot more and Tony Todd just bored me).

 

The only character I didn't care for is Drift, but I generally dislike him in most continuities that doesn't expand him outside of "hurr I'm a samurai muh honr!". I liked Bee, Strongarm and Sideswipe well enough despite his dumb looking faux-hairdo, I liked Fix-It, Grimlock is one of my favorite incarnations of the character. Didn't care much for the decepticon of the day approach though when they didn't do that it was pretty fun. Russel was a lame character(though I think that's par the course for anyone in a Hasbro cartoon named Russel to be really lame), on the flipside, I thought his dad was really fun. It's a bit of a step down from Prime in terms of storytelling, but I also enjoyed the levity given it came out around the time things like Prime, the Bay films, the High Moon video games, and the comics were in full force

 

Fun fact: knockout was going to be in cyberverse

Imo he could be an amazing starscream or galvatron

 

Whoa back the truck up there. I'll admit that the show had issues but it's absolutely nothing at all like Power Rangers. I mean the closest comparison you could make is that the Decepticons are very monster of the week but that format isn't exclusive to Power Rangers. Masked/Kamen Rider, Beetle Borgs, VR Troopers (Which was adapted from three entirely different shows in Japan), and many many others also used this format... Even the Japanese Spider-man did this. Power Rangers wasn't even the first monster of the week series.

Easy. The corrupt Cybertronian Government was thrown in for the last couple of episodes so Cyclonus and Cyberwarp were the only members of the team who ever got any real character development. It would of been so much better if they had been built up from the start of the series because at you say it's an amazing concept.

You already answered the Bee team problem yourself but I'll add most of the remaining Deceptions were poorly designed and/or poorly developed.

As to the last part while they did claim that Optimus and Megatron wouldn't be in the series they kind of fudged that a bit and included them anyway. Optimus had a smaller role appearing as a "ghost" for most of the first season. Then he clashed with Bee for part of season 2 because they were both trying to lead the Autobots. He was absent for most of the series but they did keep bringing him back for the bigger baddies that were too powerful for the Bee team to handle on their own.

Megatron was kinda cheated as well... twice. Megatronus Prime/the Fallen appears at the end of the first season and while this is a totally different character it is where Megatron got his name from in the first place so he's still technically a Megatron just not the same Megatron from Prime. In other series Galvatron is normally depicted as the same character upgraded from Megatron and in RID Galvatronus is another totally different character. There's clearly some inspiration taken from the original Galvatron but Galvatronus is now a combiner formed from the previously mentioned Cyclonus, Cyberwarp, and three other characters who never speak and I think we only know their names because of the toy line. And this is the first time on film that Galvatron has been depicted as a totally different character from Megatron. He's appeared in comics that way before but never outside the comics. So again the concept is kinda ruined here.

How can Sideswipe and Strongarm be ONE of the worst characters? There's TWO of them! I never thought Prime Arcee was annoying... that's Miko. Now I will agree those two TOGETHER are indicative of the annoyance with Miko having to learn the same lesson over and over again every damn episode. Strongarm on her own however was kind of OK. Sideswipe on his own is still annoying.

Wait... you did 3 twice... Anyway... I wouldn't agree that there were no stakes. You don't need deaths to have stakes.

I would actually argue that Prime had no stakes because the only Autobot deaths were either done off screen or to characters we barely knew. It would of meant more if say Bulkhead had died, and I truly thought he was dead until the next episode showed nope, he's badly wounded but still very much alive. Miko and Wheeljack also kind of over react to his injury as if he was meant to have died but someone at Hasbro said no and then they just never changed the revenge plot line that would of made more sense if he was dead.

Anyway... there are other stakes you can introduce besides the loss of life of a main character... like the destruction of an entire planet for example. Even if the heroes prevent the evil plan from succeeding that's still a stake. If there were really no stakes at all there wouldn't be any motivation for the heroes to do anything... basically Teen Titans Go!

So no stakes requires either the heroes literally having no motivation to do anything or the writing to be so bad that whatever stakes they do TRY to include are immediately obvious would never actually happen. Like with Prime killing off Cliffjumper in the pilot and then never actually killing off any main Autobot. They sent up stakes that would never actually matter beyond that pilot and it was immediately obvious that's what they were doing.

Now it's kinda hard to make the stakes actually matter because most people know the good guys are going to win anyway. But some signs of this being done well and selling the illusion that the good guys could loose even though you know they won't is making the enemy noticeably more powerful and showing the heroes struggle to come out on top. This is one of the reasons why Batman is so much more interesting to people than Superman because Batman more often struggles to fight villains more powerful than himself while Superman is an over powered hero who most often easy beats a villain less powerful than himself. In fact Superman has some pretty lame weaknesses that get over used just to artificially create stakes.

In this regard I would actually say that RID2015 does a BETTER job of raising the stakes than Prime did because the Decepticons are noticeably more powerful than the Autobots, they do noticeably struggle to come out on top, two things that never occurred in Prime.

Some of those questions were answered in the series. I'll go through each of them one at a time.

Q: How did the Decepticons come most of them were dead or were working for the Autobots?
A: That's kind of odd phrasing. I'm not sure what "How did the Decepticons come" is even suppose to mean. But the Decepticons we see in Prime are obviously not the only Decepticons so it really doesn't matter that most of them were dead or in Knockout's case, working for the Autobots. RID2015 introduces mostly brand new Decepticons so none of that even matters.

I'm also going to add, cause I think this is what you meant to ask... Most of the Decepticons who appear in this series either didn't know Megatron disbanded the Decepticons or were totally unrelated criminals the Autobots had branded as Decepticons like Grimlock. These characters were never really loyal to Megatron in the first place.

Q: rid didn’t bring any of the other decepticons they explain what happened to shockwave and airachnid at the end of prime even though they had the models for them
A: Again the phrasing here doesn't make a lot of sense. It reads like you started one thought and then started a completely different thought mid sentence. So first of all they did bring other Decepticons from Prime... which is what I'm going to assume you meant there... we see Starscream and Soundwave from Prime.

Second of all the DIDN'T explain what happened to Shockwave or Airachnid, you said that like they did explain them. And Airachnid's model was reused as a totally different random background character here but I never saw Shockwave's character model in this series.

Q: why are the decepticons all animals?
A: Well they're aren't ALL animals... most of them are but not ALL of them. The exceptions include Fracture, Megatronus, Overload, the Stunticons, and Cyclonus' team. That doesn't really answer why most of them are animals though. I'd like an answer to that myself.  

What doesn't make sense about that? It seems to be that you're misunderstanding what the target age demographic actually is. Both Prime and RID2015 were made for audiences 5 AND UP. Neither of them were made specifically just for five year olds.

That said there is a huge difference in tone between the two shows with Prime being a lot darker but this doesn't mean it's made for older audiences. It means it's made by people who understand their audience can handle darker themes... They did this back in the 90's too with a lot of kids programming having darker themes. Despite how popular those shows were there are still some how people who think kids show have to be bright and colorful and happy all the time. So the difference in tone is more about entirely different creators with different opinions on how kids programming should be done than a change in the age demographic.

Prime had jokes?

To be fair I kinda felt this way about Transformers Animated and the original Teen Titans as well. The finales were great but the rest of the series was really kind of boring. Though I don't really like the season 2 finale of RID2015 that seemed like just another regular episode. The Starscream arc felt more like the proper season finale to me.

I wouldn't say don't watch it at all... There were some good episodes in there. But I would recommend skipping most of the monster of the week crap and going straight to the good parts. Normally in shows with an over arching plot skipping episodes would not be recommended but this series does such a bad job of developing those plot lines that you could skip most of the episodes and not miss anything important as they're never seen or referenced ever again.

So lets just list the episodes you should watch.

Pilot (2 parts)
Hunting Season
Sideways
Lockout
Battlegrounds (2 parts)
Knock, Knock! (Short)
Back and Forth (Short)
Two Plus Two Equals More (Short)
Overloaded (2 parts)
Metal Meltdown
Misdirection
Portals
Decepticon Island (2 parts)*
History Lessons
Strongarm's Big Score
Pretzel Logic
Mighty Big Trouble
Mini-con Madness*
Worthy
King of the Hill (2 parts)
Bee Cool
The Great Divide
Disordered Personalities
Guilty as Charged
The Golden Knight
Railroad Rage
Combine and Conquer
Moon Breaker
Collateral Damage
Enemy of My Enemy
Freedom Fighters

*These episodes aren't really the best. The Decepticon Island 2 parter as I previously mentioned is the worst finale of the entire series... but it's still pretty good as a normal episode, I just don't think it was grand enough to end a season on. Mini-Con Madness includes the back store for what happen to the Predacons and how Starscream is still alive which is FREAKING STUPID. It's an otherwise good story arc except for that one flash back but for plot reasons can't really skip that episode.

While these are the worst episodes on this list, if this is the stuff I recommend watching just imagine how bad the rest of the series is that you can completely skip over it. And yeah I put some shorts on here too, and they're placed on the list exactly where they would of taken place in the story. I didn't even include all the shorts because most of them are a pointless waist of time as well. The 3 I recommended include Fracture who is one of the best Decepticons in the series so I wanted to make sure I included all of his appearances.

 

Oh crap I meant some of the worst and for the arcee part basically everyone on the site thinks that she’s one of the worst TF characters ever strongarm by herself wasn’t that bad but sideswipe was god awful with or without strongarm

yes everything with knockout and starscream was hilarious

Oh whoops I meant most of them

In short watch this video it answers all your questions and perfectly explains why I don’t like this show

 

I like RID 2015 enough, but it's got its issues.

Sideswipe was a total jackwagon. He was just unbearably an asshole. He got a bit better by season three with his insecurity arc, but he needed that in season one, I hated him so much by S3 it didn't even matter. If it happened earlier and he changed from it, he could've been alright.

Fixit's okay as the support character, but they really could've done more with the "handicapped doesn't mean broken, you shouldn't try to fix them" idea, and his speech impediment "joke" was just painful.

Drift didn't really fit in or have a purpose. He's the mentor archetype, but only to his two Mini-Cons who are scarcely relevant as actual characters, and otherwise didn't have any dynamic relationship with anyone. He should've been a sort of foil to Bumblebee's laissez faire approach at leadership, where they both learn their own lessons from each other regarding how to lead their subordinates.

Allegedly, Strongarm was an annoying hardass, but I dunno, I liked her. Bumblebee and Grimlock were pleasant too. Bumblebee growing as a man but still being a bit of a dork in a leadership role was fun. I did love his disco rave battle with Bisk in particular. I think it would've been funny if Bumblebee in S3 had a running joke of trying to come up with a good name for the team's combined mode like his catchphrase joke in S1, but that would require a good name for them to finally make. "UltraBee" is just garbage.

Optimus should've taken even more of a backseat than he already did. Rather than being resurrected, he should've been limited to only temporarily physically manifesting himself from the afterlife, and always disappearing before he can save the day so Bumblebee as a leader isn't in his shadow and needing to rely on him, to prove that he and his team can make it on their own. The guest Autobots (namely Blurr, Ratchet, and Jazz, maybe even bring in Heatwave) should've appeared a little more frequently too.

The kid was useless and barely even a character. His father, Denny, was much more entertaining and memorable. If they actually did something with Hank, the kid (I seriously don't even remember his name) might've gotten to have some character. Hank was cool, she deserved a bigger role.

They really needed to pick a few Decepticons to develop more than they did. They wouldn't need to be super complex, but most of them were single-note bit characters. Maybe even have a few peaceful Decepticons who they'd allow to be free to justify Steeljaw's motive. We definitely needed more Saberhorn.

They totally pulled their punches with the "corrupt" Cybertron Council secretly being Decepticons. They could've done something meaningful like having the council shunning/banishing the major Autobot players of the war to establish a truly neutral, unbiased reformed government that doesn't align with any faction with no desire for conflict, or even a corrupt council taking away free will to prevent a war from ever happening again like in BM, something morally gray - a valid motive but maybe undesirable means to the end. But instead they're just Decepticons taking over the world again.

But overall it was a pleasant, laid-back show that knew how to have fun, I enjoyed it more than TFP which had its head up its ass trying to be mature and edgy but never had the cojones to do anything with permanent or even lasting consequences and threw all of its potentially good character/plot threads in the dumpster at the drop of a hat. So in my opinion RID 2015 surpasses its predecessor, at least.

 

The Episodic formula of defeating random decepticons and also maybe the fact that the ending was too quick.

 

Windblade being a Mary sue, again.

From what I gathered the episode where she was introduced was originally quite different, even the Decepticon they fought was not gonna be the Queen Bee. Originally the episode was gonna have Ironhide show up, and Sideswipe was going to have a similar relationship to him that Strongarm had with WB in the final show. My memory of those details are a bit fuzzy since they weren't recorded on TFwiki or anything due to one of the brain trusts in charge of the site actively went out of his way to not archive info about RID from various convention panels because he didn't like how the Autobots were cops.   So that detail is just gonna be lost to time eventually. Apparently they didn't even change much of the dialogue from when she was Ironhide, they just added a stupid line about cityspeaking.

Honestly if RID just ignored Prime, maybe had more legacy characters show up and have roles in the show (they did design a bunch on all those cards...) it probably would've been even better, but only by a little.

They probably should've made their Grimlock a new Dinobot character altogether and just had the actual Grimlock be a seperate guy. I feel like there's more steps they could've taken to take RID from an alright show to a really good one.

At least it's better than Cyberverse, but that's not really saying much.

 

The animation for RID2015 was just too off-putting for me. It was just too clunky and choppy.

I'm glad they at least maintained continuity with Prime, and basically established it was a continuation of that series. Characters and voices from Prime returned later on. Like that's nice for fans of Prime who stayed tuned into that show.

 

Clunky and choppy? I was a big fan of the animation either but for totally different reasons.

My issues with the animation is that the lack of detail in their faces kinda makes everyone look boring in comparison to other Transformers designs. They're just eyes and a slit for a mouth and that's it, there's no other details that would distinguish them from each other. It's very basic and minimalist and doesn't fit at all with the rest of the designs that are highly detailed. It's like why did you cheap out and give them all the same face?

And then there's the world detail which is also very basic and minimalist. Almost every episode is either an empty desert, the Antarctic which is empty, a forest that looks like they only modeled ONE tree and copied it over and over again. Even an episode that's suppose to take place in New York, one of the most populated cities in the world, with the nick name the city that never sleeps because there are ALWAYS people around at all hours of the day and night... is COMPLETALY EMPTY except for ONE PERSON!

It's like the animation budget went to hiring celebrity voice actors like Dwayne Johnson just to voice characters that would be in the show for 1 episode and then die. And considering all of these characters were completely pointless because of their limited screen time I would rather have seen whatever money went to paying for these pointless cameos go into improving the animation.

The deserts could of at least had a few cactuses and tumble weeds to make them interesting but no, it's literally just empty. And a lot of movies and shows take short cuts with forests but they usually model a few different individual trees of various sizes and shapes so that most casual viewers won't even notice the same models being reused. But when there is literally only ONE model of the same exact tree being copied it's super obvious and looks artificial... And there NEEDS to be people...

Beast Wars is what I would call clunky. But despite the clunky nature of early developing CGI they still put more thought and care into making every background look interesting. They even managed to make Cheetor and Tigatron look different from each other despite both literally having the same face.

Choppy by the way... would be like some of the Animation in G1... like the most prominent example I can think of is from the movie. When Ultra Magnus first gets the Matrix of Leadership, as he's putting it into his chest it jumps out of his hands into his chest before his arms actually move to put it there. Choppy animation usually refers to when frames of the animation happen out of sequence or are missing which is literally impossible when we're talking about CGI as that type of animation isn't even made in a way that would ever allow that to happen in the first place. Only traditional methods of animation ever have this problem.

 

Oh yeah, didn't RID deliberately have a low framerate to try to "look like" hand-drawn animation? The animation really suffered for that.

 

Here's what I mean. This particular cel-shaded style. It doesn't look smooth and clean. It looks jerky.

Now, Prime didn't opt for that cel-shaded/2D hand-drawn but CG style, but it's a lot smoother and fluid.

Yeah exactly. It just doesn't look good onscreen.

 

I barely made it through the two pilot episodes. I can't quite put my finger on why it turned me off. It wasn't the art/animation/voice acting for sure. Perhaps the level of 'it's so silly it's stupid' written into it (it was this that made me walk out of the theater for 'George of the Jungle', first and only time I've walked out!)? Such as when the Con of the ep kissed his biceps (I think he named them too?)...I was like...yeeeaaaah...no.

 

You said that about Prime though which is why I was confused.

Someone else pointed out that RID2015 intentionally had a low frame rate to try to mimic a hand drawn style even though it was actually CGI... and I can kinda see that... the thing is it's weirdly choppy and smooth at the same time. Cause hand drawn animation wouldn't be perfectly choppy. The choppiness of it is due to human error and just lowering the frame rate on smooth animation doesn't really replicate a human element from a traditional style.

Like imagine these lines as representations of frames.

Traditional

llllllll llllllllllllllllll lllllll lllllllll llllllllllllllllllllll ll llllllllllll llllllll lllllllllllllllllll

CGI

lllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

CGI with a lower frame rate

l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l

See how the spaces in the traditional are kind of random and choppy but the low frame rate is more deliberately spaced out to look choppy when it's really not.