Yup. Lessons learned from the past. Kids hating the movie is understandable. Critics hating it are just plain snotty ivory tower livingknowitalls who just criticize for the heck of it.

Toy reviewers? Very few get my seal of approval. Not more than five of my fingers at most because I can smell a fraud 1 mile away. The ones I respect basically are those you know really loves the hobby and didn't sell their sould for 30 pieces of energon.

I love the 86 Movie but not to the extent that I would rain hate on Hotrod. Btw, transitioning from beloved iconic characters to the next is kind of a staple in JP animation (though this was written from an American perspective (who knows, maybe Ron Friedman got inspirations from the East too). I'm happy Optimus returned but a character dying (in anime) is not new to me back then(maybe due to early exposure to such).

Again agreed on the turn over. LIfe was much slower back then. Heck, we can wait a month or two until the next Marvel/DC comic issue would arrive (then Marvel went the bi weekly route)

 

No. It just means they have an opinion. Said opinion might be different from your very own opinion 30 years down the line, shock of all shocks. There are plenty of reasons to criticize the 1986 movie, and while I don't necessarily agree with all the reviews, some do at least have some good points.

Being a fan can and will definitely clutter one's own opinion regarding the quality of a work. As a fan, it's easy to overlook bad writing, cardboard characters and poorly defined motivations because of one's own emotional attachment to the material. Hell, look at all the debates over the Bay movies. Fans of the films will find all sorts of excuses to justify poor continuity ("it's just a film, get over it!"), terrible characters ("I think they're funny!"), obnoxious product placement ("Transformers exists to sell toys, so product placement is not a problem!") and nonsensical plots ("it's just an action film!"). A lot of it boils down to "It's better to have a bad film than no film at all" or "my nostalgia allows me to accept it, so I'm willing to settle for mediocre rather than wish for something better".

Again, I'm not saying one opinion is more "right" than the other, but some people can be very toxic when it comes to people having a negative opinion of their favorite pieces of entertainment. It's not "Let's agree to disagree", it's "How dare you criticize that wonderful thing! It's perfect and flawless and you are a mean poo-poo who should burn in hell for saying one bad thing about it!" Sure, the opposite side can be equally bad (see all the gazillion "Michael Bay raped my childhood" hyperbole), all I'm saying is, again, it's completely fine for others to have different opinions. It's okay if critics didn't like the 1986 film. Some of them had valid points. That doesn't make them snobbish elitist know-it-alls. All it means they weren't invested in the source material and especially didn't have 30 years of nostalgia to cloud their perception.

 

You have your opinions of those highbrow knowitalls I have mine. Same type haven't change 35 years ago to the present. Who died and appointed them "critics" in the first place? Is there like a licensure exams to be certified movie critic? English literature majors enough to make them experts of anything in english literature? And those snotnose experts use their "position" in popular culture to brainwash brow beat those they deem below their intellectual level. If you don't see that then either you are too nice a person or just naive to the ways of the world.

When I watch a movie, I don't think which minority group would be insulted disparage etc etc. I watch a movie to relax and escape. I leave the real world concerns at the movie house's door. I don't think if the movie is a multi national's company's cynical attempt to "Sell Toy's".........ahem, cough......... TF:The Movie 1986. I watched it to see the next riveting high octane adventure of my fave 'bots now rendered in higher quality values. Was it perfect? Heck no! (It took me 20 years to find out that the Matrix not fitting Ultra magnus was not an animation error but a clunky way of presenting that it was never meant for him (thanks to Flint Dille's commentary tracks).

But the ride was well worth it and not a "turkey" the way the so called "experts" rated it.

 

1996 beast wars.

I appreciate it is an unpopular view but there it is: crushing disappointment for myself.

 

I would say when takar gave creative control back to hasbro for the first time I think it was like 1987 ish dont quote me on that

 

Say again?

Creative control of what aspect?

Fiction?.....Takara really didn’t have that for the majority of the 80s

Toys?....Hasbro only got that fir the First time around 86 and it was limited to sone figures for that line

 

Listen to the Flint Dille commentary tracks in the 2007 DVD release of 1986 Transformers the MOvie.

 

I grew up with, and watched, all of the movies. Both as a child (1986) and as an adult (1986-Knightverse) and I can honestly say they're awful movies. Cheesy fun, considered classics because they're so silly and ridiculous, and they're Transformers, but as films go? They're awful. The only things they have going for them are visuals and scale, both of which are important, but cannot carry a film. (Though, some would argue that's what saved Avatar from the landfill, and they're right, but again... Not a great film in hindsight.)

You can absolutely enjoy these movies, regardless of other people's opinions, and that's fine. The same is true for critics of the films, and it's only fair that we respect both sides, even if we don't agree with what's being said.

I don't think either of them are truly darkest moments for the franchise, I think behind the scenes planning started it and Action Masters ended it.

 

Aside from the Unicron toy that was never released back in 1986, Metroplex (not sure with Trypticon), most of the characters in the 1986 Movie was designed by Floro Dery who was a Marvel Producttions employee. Though some aspects of Unicron's planet eating activities was designed by him. UM was a carry over from Diaclone aka Powered Convoy sohe doesn't count though the UM name was initially meant for the robot we now know as Orion Pax.

I might be mistaken but it was around the henkei/classics years that Takara employed non JP toy designers. Is that what you mean?

 

1990 through 1997.
1990 through 1992, nothing at all. Awful.
There was just nothing there. I see a thread like this but I don't feel like people truly understand how bad it was. NOTHING. No comic, show or toys. Edit to add: you couldn't find somone to talk about transformers. You were lucky if you could find a single friend who gave a crap about his old transformers toys.
They didn't even have Halloween costumes.

Then 1993 through 1997.
All episodes were actually reruns of g1, treated as time fillers.
The toys were small, didn't match the characters you saw on tv, and were hard to find, like most of them would legendary size today.
Look at this one. 4.5 inches tall. I owned him. He felt like a dollar store quality. This was normal.
Cyberjets Hooligan (Transformers, G2, Decepticon) | Transformerland.com - Collector's Guide Toy Info
Megatron was a 3" gobot for fucks sake.
(this is why I don't complain about current size)
Internet was not what it is today, there was nothing to look up.
Comics, there was only a 12 part series.
Transformers was considered an old cartoon most kids didn't care about.

Transformers was about dead in the water. Beast wars is what woke it up. After that, hasbro hit the stride of having a transformer cartoon every year, one way or another. Maybe I hated the series, but I was so glad they were there again, year after year.

If not for beast wars, Japan may have ended up the only place that still has transformers.

So. 1991 was the worst year.

 

Beast Wars opened us up to a lot of interesting and fun characters who have branched out on their own from their counterparts. A cold, calculating and charismatic Megatron, a down to earth Optimus, each of them distinct from their predecessors, along with other characters such as Dinobot, who had an amazing character arc. You can say "TRUKK NOT MUNKY" all you want, but Beast Wars sent Transformers into an interesting new direction and still managed to keep it connected to G1. Sorry this reply came so late.

 

It's quiet.
Did I win or make everyone depressed?

 

Probably the Machine Wars Era between G2 and Beast Wars those were rough times from what I remember. So that would be about 94-95

 

Umm
Machine Wars came after Beast Wars

 

And it was in 1997. Lasting one year

 

Oh wow my bad I thought it was before BW

 

No bad at all

Can’t be expected to remember everything

 

I forget; what year did RotF come out again?

 

2009

 

I can see why you'd think that, the whole line comes off as G2 Part 2.

I can't really comment on the state of Transformers in the early 90s since that's the exact point I jumped in (also, I was 4). I used to say it was 2001 when they imported RID and rebooted the franchise, but looking back, I've come around on RID and its hodgepodge toyline. Nowadays, I say that period of time between 2013-2017 when it looked like the decline of Prime started some kind of horrific chain reaction that culminated in the shitshow that was TLK and did actual damage to Hasbro.