So you're telling me that if Arcee had happened to be there and caught the Matrix as it fell, she would have become the leader of the Autobots? There was a great He-Man episode called the Problem with Power that I felt was a lot deeper than Rodimus's constant pity party.
I'm not telling anyone anything. This was just the way my imagination reckoned the scenario. But, by my rules then yes, I could see Arcee becoming the leader if that was the case. She was certainly brave enough. However you look at it though -Optimus intended Magnus to lead. So, it was poignant by any set of rules that he physically gave the Matrix to Rodimus at the end of Dark Awakening. Poignant until the next episode anyway. I'll have to look for that episode somewhere. I was not such a big fan of the original He-man, but I love the 2001 reinvention.
I am in the "Wish Optimus hadn't been killed" camp but I really didn't have a problem with Hot Rod in general. It is just that he was filled in for shoes that he couldn't possibly have filled. Hot Rod was a good character but I wish Optimus had just stayed on.
I have mixed feeings on this one. I hated to see Optimus go but bringing him back like that cheapened the events of TFTM. If they brought him back in a advisory role that would have been better. Rodimus should have been given the chance to grow into this position.
I kinda always assumed based on the movie toys that Prime wasn't intended to die originally. I think that it could have been just as easy for them to rebuild or evolve him into another character (like the BW characters did fairly frequently with the meshing of sparks and so on, as new toys became available) which would have been easy to do based on the fact that a white Optimus Prime formed the bulk of Ultra Magnus. If Megatron was turned into Galvatron, then why COULDN'T Prime have been transformed (no pun intended) into Ultra Magnus? Or the only way to save him was to "coat" him in something like they did in "Rebirth" and give him a new "suit." I mean look how the Powermaster Optimus Prime toy works... little Prime fits into the trailer to form BIG Prime, a lot like the Ultra Magnus toy.... they both have almost the same color scheme, although Prime's is a little darker, they're both red, white and blue. Seems just as logical as anything they've written before to me. If they hadn't made them separate characters in the show, they could have made Prime INTO Magnus in order to save him and then we never would have been sick to our stomachs at how pitiful a leader Rodimus was. Hot Rod was so much cooler before he was Rodimus. Even the Hot Rod TOY was cooler than the Rodimus toy.
I saw Dark Awakening and compared that to The Return of Optimus Prime, and I was like WTF? Prime wasen't a slight bit injured in the sequel to that episode but he was heavily screwed in the previous? That made abseloutely no sense to me... pure inconsistentcy, and yet again one HUGE plothole! And also, how the hell did Prime return from the dead anyway, when we KNEW he died in the first place? Was he a zombie in the Dark Awakening, or was the entire "NOOO PRIME'S DEAD" thing a throw in confusion?
I remember hearing the writers talk about "Dark Awakening" at BotCon 2004. It was something akin to... I lol'd.
i think the discrepancies between the 2 episodes was a bit annoying, but dark awakening was the better story
Then what ended up in the Matrix? Myabe it wasn't called Sparks. . . Anyway, if there's "no Spark" how could a Transformer, being a robot, die in the first place? Unless you're totally destroyed, e.g. vaporised, you could be fixed. Anyway, I like Kickback's answer.
Well, he had that Cosmotron thingy right? Honestly, why didn't they fix him and the other 84-85 characters? I mean... the Junkions were able to pull Ultra Magnus back together right? Of course, G1 is loaded with these kinds of discrepancies... I mean, Perceptor probably didn't have a Cosmotron on hand and the Junkions probably didn't have enough to go around to every dead Autobot. And, yeah, I like Kickback's answer too.