Dreamwave Armada - retro reviews

Acronyms and abbreviations are fun. That, or these lines don't deserve quite enough respect for full names.
Robots In Disguise, Armada, Energon, Cybertron - there, that's their names, happy now???
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Gomess
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Re: Dreamwave Armada - retro reviews

Post by Gomess »

andersonh1 wrote:There might have been some mileage in exploring this version of segregated Cybertronian society
More than combiners, the Matrix, gods and gender, Minicons were a new factorI really wanted to see become normalised within the franchise. SO much potential with a neutral third franchise of tiny power-boosting bots.
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Dominic
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Re: Dreamwave Armada - retro reviews

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Gomess, check this out.
The small brethren of the Autobots and the Decepticons fled Cybertron long ago, in search of refuge from the never-ending war. The Mini-Con robots are living power batteries that larger robots use to enhance their already formidable weapons and abilities. Many Mini-Con teams were broken apart or destroyed utterly by the greed of the Decepticons, or the desperation of the Autobots. Now, only a few intact teams are left to roam the universe, living in peace and isolation from other Transformers.
That is a shared profile used on a boxed set released in 2010(?). The set consisted of maybe 10 Minicons....and (faction sigils aside) they were all refugees.

There might have been some mileage in exploring this version of segregated Cybertronian society, and it’s a pity we never got that.
Hasbro picked it up with the Minicon two-packs during "Cybertron". And, then Fun Publications made it *really* stupid in their comics.

It’s not bad per se, though I’m not a big fan of Lee’s style.
Nah, Lee sucks.

The creation of the saber sequence is one of the worst damned things I have seen in a TF comic, even counting some of the low points in the old Marvel US run.

In the cartoon, the mini-cons already had this ability, but in the Dreamwave series, it’s always the Decepticons who weaponize the mini-cons, at least up to this point. I can’t remember if that changes later on or not.
Barring the sourcebook, the Saber Jets are the only recognized combiner in the comics.

Sparkplug is perfectly justified in doing so, and yet Prime’s fears about the Mini-cons being captured and turned against the Autobots are also perfectly valid, as Sparkplug finds out when he and his group are almost captured by Starscream.
That sequence was well handled. It is one of the few times that I can think of that a TF story acknowedged that certain forms may not lend themselves to working/fighting in enclosed spaces.


Dom
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Gomess
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Re: Dreamwave Armada - retro reviews

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Dominic wrote:Gomess, check this out.
The small brethren of the Autobots and the Decepticons fled Cybertron long ago, in search of refuge from the never-ending war. The Mini-Con robots are living power batteries that larger robots use to enhance their already formidable weapons and abilities. Many Mini-Con teams were broken apart or destroyed utterly by the greed of the Decepticons, or the desperation of the Autobots. Now, only a few intact teams are left to roam the universe, living in peace and isolation from other Transformers.
That is a shared profile used on a boxed set released in 2010(?). The set consisted of maybe 10 Minicons....and (faction sigils aside) they were all refugees.
See, that's what I'm talking about! This is actually a *new* story idea in the Transformers universe. I can remember Armada feeling really revolutionary when it started, but I made the mistake of reading a synopsis of the first episode of the cartoon before I'd even seen what it looked like, and imagined it waaay better animated in my head.

But yeah, ideas like... oh, I dunno... TFs not naturally predisposed to warfare, the ethics of weaponisation... all brought up in even G1, but never with the potential AEC had, and this 2010 mention is hardly the norm, is it? I dunno, I'm out of the loop. I know Minicons are still around as a toy concept, but storywise...
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Re: Dreamwave Armada - retro reviews

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Dominic wrote:
In the cartoon, the mini-cons already had this ability, but in the Dreamwave series, it’s always the Decepticons who weaponize the mini-cons, at least up to this point. I can’t remember if that changes later on or not.
Barring the sourcebook, the Saber Jets are the only recognized combiner in the comics.
What about Optimus and Jetfire? They combine pretty much at the end of the Armada run.
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Re: Dreamwave Armada - retro reviews

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Sparky Prime wrote:
Dominic wrote:
In the cartoon, the mini-cons already had this ability, but in the Dreamwave series, it’s always the Decepticons who weaponize the mini-cons, at least up to this point. I can’t remember if that changes later on or not.
Barring the sourcebook, the Saber Jets are the only recognized combiner in the comics.
What about Optimus and Jetfire? They combine pretty much at the end of the Armada run.
And didn't Megatron combine with Tidal Wave at some point?
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Dominic
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Re: Dreamwave Armada - retro reviews

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I should have said "Minicon Combiner".

That said, Megatron and Tidalwave never combined in the comics.
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Re: Dreamwave Armada - retro reviews

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I'm pretty sure they combined somewhere and I don't recall it being the cartoon. Although I quit watching the show after about the 6th episode so I could be wrong. But the fact that I remember seeing it would still put it in those episodes...
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Re: Dreamwave Armada - retro reviews

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Shockwave wrote:I'm pretty sure they combined somewhere and I don't recall it being the cartoon. Although I quit watching the show after about the 6th episode so I could be wrong. But the fact that I remember seeing it would still put it in those episodes...
Tidal Wave doesn't show up until much later in the series, so you must have seen one of those at some point. I don't think they ever combine in the comic.

My daughter asked if I had Armada, and I still have my off-air VHS tapes. Haven't bought the DVDs yet, so we've been watching the fuzzy 10 year old tapes. Man, it's pretty slow and badly animated at first. Takes about a dozen episodes for things to start to improve. I'm surprised I stuck with it, but it starts to get good once they find the Star Saber and both Scavenger and Sideways turn up. Still no sign of Tidal Wave though. I seem to remember him flying mysteriously through space and showing up about the same time as Jetfire.
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Re: Dreamwave Armada - retro reviews

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Yeah I didn't stick with it past like, 5 episodes. They were so bad that I dropped it when Optimus called his minicon Leader-1 and literally the next line of dialogue is megatron calling his minicon Leader-1. How many levels of writing and editing should have caught that? Seriously, after seeing that, I was done. It was unwatchable at that point. The disappointing thing about that is that was also the same week that Star Trek: Enterprise had the Borg on and that was enough for me to be done with that. Both Star Trek and Transformers became totally unwatchable for me in the same week.
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Re: Dreamwave Armada - retro reviews

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A bad week indeed!

I'll be honest, I struggled just with the *first* episode of Armada. Massively disappointing post-RiD animation, voice acting and QC aside, the world they present us with is so *barren*. Are there even other human beings? Inhabited cities? Do the three main kids have *families*? I never really got far enough to notice; think I made it as far as Scavenger's debut, and all I could think was, "Why is he called Scavenger". So, it was unsurprising I had no interest in the comics or other spinoffs.

But yeah, barren. Very poor worldbuilding, and just a general atmosphere of not-caring.
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