What do TF:P, WFC,TF:U and Exile have to do with each other?

[Shockwave]

It's half assed because they're doing it wrong. Paramount is very clear about this sort of thing with Star Trek: If it's not on screen it doesn't count. Lucas similarly is very clear with Star Wars and has the same edict. Hasbro on the other hand is basically trying to tell us that "it all counts, and it's all the same story even though it's not.

[Dominic]

Lucas has gone back and forth. But, yes, point taken.

In Yomtov's defense, he was often given pages at the last minute. You will notice that there are runs of the comic where he does *very* well for the standard of the time. The man was one of the hardest working guys in the franchise.

This sort of confusion is not unprecedented. There are several "2005 and later" timelines, one explicitly cancelling out the other during "Time Wars". But, this is the first time that so many contradictions happened so quickly after Hasbro claimed that a part of the franchise would be clean. Instead of one clean Hasbro controlled setting, we have a sub-set of the larger TF multiverse.

I am really not conceptually against having a multiverse in fiction. But, too often, the concept is used as an excuse for idiotic crossovers (as in many of the FanClub comics/text stories) to retroactively justify bad editing (as is the case here).

[Shockwave]

I'm still not giving it Yomtov. Hard working or not, is one job is to... GET THE COLORS RIGHT!! I've been rereading the G1 series lately and the coloring is my biggest gripe. It seems like every damn panel has something miscolored on it. Then there's the added confusion of using blue to replace black which got really annoying. I'm sorry, but maybe growing up in England where the art was so far superior had me scratching my head as to why the UK stories had all the colors right when the US stories didn't. The art in Dinobot Hunt for example is years ahead of anything the US had by that point and again, at least there everyone was colored correctly.

[Onslaught Six]

I dunno, he got better over time. I read the entire back half in the Titan trades and rarely noticed any glaring errors, and if I did they didn't take away from my enjoyment.

Jim Shooter always had a policy that things are going to get messed up by someone somewhere along the line. It just happens. People don't communicate things effectively, or they forget stuff. Shooter's policy when he was Marvel's EIC in the 80s was that you fix the books with the most glaring errors as much as you can, and let some of the lesser errors slip. Some robots getting miscoloured probably wasn't as bad as, say, Wolverine getting coloured wrong.

This was the 80s and it was a licensed book; I think your passion for the franchise is getting in the way of realistic expectations for the time. And, the replace-black-with-blue thing was standard of the time. (It becomes a lot easier to tell guys apart when dudes like Thundy and Skywarp stop showing up.)

[Dominic]

The thing is that TF was never that many standard deviations behind other then contemporary Marvel books. Garbage Stan Lee narration as dialogue? Common at the time. Sloppy colouring? Common enough unless it was a book with a-list talent.

And, as O6 noted, replacing black with blue was a necessity at the time.


Dom

[Onslaught Six]

Like I said: Shooter's policy was that the worst books (i.e. with the biggest mistakes) had to be fixed. If someone spent an entire issue colouring The Hulk blue, then that'd be a mistake that needed to be fixed. A couple guys in the background coloured wrong? Let it slide, we have bigger things to spend time fixing.

In other words, TF was not the worst offender of this in the 80s.

[Shockwave]

I think the reason it irks me in particular is that I was in England at the time and had the UK issues to compare it to which were years ahead in terms of art and coloring. And I was ten. So I wasn't really making the distinction between Marvel US and Marvel UK and was just constantly wondering why one issue would look so good with everthing colored correctly and then the next issue would have whole groups colored blue or Shockwave is red or what have you. And bear in mind, I was only getting the UK issues, so even the US stories I read were the UK versions of those stories which is why I didn't see the distinction at the time.

[Dominic]

The UK had its share of *really* bad art.

I love "Target: 2006". And, some of the art is really good. But, the rotating art teams also led to some very bad art and monochrome colouring. I am not defending the low points in the US. But, the US comic did not have a monopoly on laziness.

[Shockwave]

And even the "bad" art was still way better than the US art at the time. I was spoiled, no doubt about it, but I often did wonder why the inconsistency.

[JediTricks]

It's "aligned" in the sense that, at least according to Hasbro, they're "supposed" to take place all in the same continuity. Just like all those disparate 2007 film prequels are supposed to all take place together, but don't really.

I like to think of it like this: Each individual publication (video game, show, novel, whatever) is a "window" into the overall "Aligned" universe, during which certain elements like character models, style, or history details might be changed or altered because of the window's dressing. Everything's the same hot dog, they just have different condiments--Prime's ketchup and mustard will taste different than WFC's chili cheese, but at the end of the day it's still a hot dog.

It's kind of similar to IDW's stance on character models as of the ongoing series two years ago--different artists draw the same Transformers in different ways. Don Fig's Optimus Prime is the exact same character as Guido Guidi, but Don Fig draws him different from Guido Guidi because That's How Don Fig Draws. Just because there's differences between them doesn't mean they don't represent the same character, or that there needs to be a specific explanation from how Prime got "from this body to that body." Similarly, if you handed me and you both pieces of paper and a pencil, and said, "Draw Optimus Prime," we'd both probably come up with things that had disparate details--for example, I might draw his oil tanks and wheels on his legs and big gaping holes in his forearms (as per the toy) while you might draw him more like his animation model. But they would both be drawings of Optimus Prime, each representing the "real" Optimus Prime. Does the "real" Optimus Prime have wheels on his legs? It doesn't matter! I draw him the way I do, you draw him the way you do.

Visuals are one thing, though how War for Cybertron and TF:P can exist in the same universe is baffling, especially Soundwave; but I'm talking about stuff like Dark Energon having different behaviors and meanings, having more understanding in WFC and then less understanding in TF:P, and being entirely opposite actions when Cybertron is infected by it; or Sentinel Prime and Zeta Prime being different characters yet both being Optimus' direct predecessor (and Hasbro's "Sentinel Zeta Prime" thing doesn't really address how WFC attends to the character, IIRC); and WFC and Exodus tell stories of the same war yet with at times entirely different situations.

But no, I don't have to count UT, nor RID, nor the commercials made by Sunbow in G1 style, nor Machine Wars, nor Pack-In comics, nor Headmasters, nor BWII or Neo. They aren't viable precedent here, they are cobbled together, promo materials, or not originally intended for this audience.

How are you lumping entire cartoon series in with ads?

I think that's where "not originally intended for this audience" comes in, being that all of the series he mentions began as anime. I think that's a bullshit call, myself, considering UT was very much made in conjuction with Hasbro, but hey.

It's that they're all made without any intended intention to tie into the greater TF story, they are produced to stand-alone with less restrictions as to their storylines.

Also, Hasbro is only a helper monkey on the UT, there are enough storylines and elements from those 3 shows to prove they were produced as much for a non-US audience, if not moreso.

I would also like to point out that, while this is my interpretation of how Hasbro is doing this, it doesn't mean I *like* it or support it. I don't like that a bunch of TF media is coming out that is supposed to apparently work together but has major problems with it. Thankfully, I give a pitiful zero fucks about Prime as a show, removing pretty much the driving reason for me to care that it doesn't match up with it. It's like someone complaining that the Energon comics don't match up with the show--Energon sucked ass! Who cares?! (Besides Prowl.)

I like WFC though, Exodus and TF:U sounded interesting, so it is a curiosity to me to have Hasbro claim all these clearly different entertainment vessels are related and telling the same story. If you told the Aligned canon as a single narrative, you'd have characters appearing and disappearing in the same paragraph, and contradictory sentences leading into each other. I find that odd considering Hasbro is trying to build a larger new Transformers ethos and yet it doesn't seem to fit together all that well from the outset.

I mean, Transformers have had errors since some poor Sunbow colourist accidentally mixed up the model sheets for Rumble and Frenzy. I don't see you declaring that there have to be three micro-continuities inside the G1 cartoon because the Constructicons have three origins, even though it doesn't make sense for them to have three origins. So things don't match up between Prime and WFC and the books! This is what happens when Hasbro is more concerned with having a book and a video game and a cartoon and a live action movie than with their other shit. Frankly, I kind of wish Hasbro would just stand back and go back to what we know they do well--make good toys. Hell, I'm sure even if Hasbro assigned one or two guys *specifically* to watch the development of all these separate things and make sure not one single thing contradicted each other, there'd be things they would miss.

These aren't errors though, they're entirely under Hasbro's watch and they're allowing them for artistic license... on purpose. That'd be fine, but why they have to shove the idea that they make up a grand new unified canon is odd.

One way I heard this explained a while ago was to compare it to the G1 cartoon and comic. Those were two things that were supposed to be the same, but were different. In the same way that the Sunbow cartoon and the Marvel comic had the same core ideas and were supposed to be mostly telling the same thing but ended up being really different, the ‘Aligned’ novels, games, and cartoon were all built to kinda work from the same stuff, but have ended up doing their own things. Like Six mentioned, you could compare it to the schism between the UT comics and cartoons, or the differences between toy-continuity Beast Wars, and the cartoon, and the manga, which all had the same basic ideas, but vastly different interpretations.

Ok, I sorta see what you mean comparing the G1 comic and cartoon, though I'll point out that the comic, the cartoon, and at times the UK comic, have to be handled as essentially separate canons on every merit. But then again, those were telling stories from the same period, while this new aligned continuity is telling an even broader story across its half-dozen different elements, and rarely where they overlap do they match up.

That said, I think I’m with everyone else in that I greatly preferred Hasbro’s old “Everything counts, even if it’s not in continuity with everything else that counts” approach. It was surprisingly elegant, in that you didn’t have to work overtime to track down what was or wasn’t canon if you were into that sort of thing. This new thing they’re trying just seems so…half-assed.

And yet it now takes 2 full-time executives who have NO OTHER JOB to do it. Don't get me wrong, I totally understand why Hasbro's trying to pull Transformers into a new unified expression, they're seeing global expansion into a new generations of consumers and the old materials were done on the fly with no intention to be part of the greater ethos. That said, this all seems entirely confusing the way they're going about it now - if you like a character in one format, you may not even recognize them in another (I'm looking at WFC Arcee to Prime Arcee as a good example).

In this case, by the way, it’s at least nice to talk to people who aren’t somehow hopelessly convinced that War for Cybertron is supposed to be in-continuity with the G1 cartoon. *sigh*

Well, that's clearly what the game designers were going for, but it's only a similar feel, it bases itself off several touchstones from G1's pre-Earth days but it's obviously not canon with them.

It's half assed because they're doing it wrong. Paramount is very clear about this sort of thing with Star Trek: If it's not on screen it doesn't count. Lucas similarly is very clear with Star Wars and has the same edict. Hasbro on the other hand is basically trying to tell us that "it all counts, and it's all the same story even though it's not.

Lucas has so much "expanded universe" materials that the Star Wars universe is now broken up into levels of canon, that's how fractured it can be. Movies are one level of canon, Marvel comics are a lower level, Ewoks & Droids cartoons still a different level, the new cartoon a TV level while the previous cartoon a lower level, and so forth.

Trek at least used to absorb some of the better ideas from its books and comics into the show when it came across them - Data's cat in The Next Generation came from a book, for example - so they could enjoy a clear line that could take things up without dropping them back below that line.

Jim Shooter always had a policy that things are going to get messed up by someone somewhere along the line. It just happens. People don't communicate things effectively, or they forget stuff. Shooter's policy when he was Marvel's EIC in the 80s was that you fix the books with the most glaring errors as much as you can, and let some of the lesser errors slip. Some robots getting miscoloured probably wasn't as bad as, say, Wolverine getting coloured wrong.

This was the 80s and it was a licensed book; I think your passion for the franchise is getting in the way of realistic expectations for the time. And, the replace-black-with-blue thing was standard of the time. (It becomes a lot easier to tell guys apart when dudes like Thundy and Skywarp stop showing up.)

I think the key here was that mistakes which confuse the story were less acceptable, but in TF sometimes color is the only clear element to differentiate a character in a shot, a lot of the TFs are drawn somewhat similar to others.