Animated Series discussion thread (spoilers allowed)

Some cartoon with big chins and a little girl that got beloved by fans and taken off TV to make way for a different show on another network. Yeah, that's fair.
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Re: Animated Series discussion thread (spoilers allowed)

Post by onslaught86 »

Which is why HD is really kinda lame, since we've been getting great resolutions on monitors for years anyway. Heh.
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Re: Animated Series discussion thread (spoilers allowed)

Post by Onslaught Six »

So. Predacons Rising. It looks like all the hype was for naught. Bob 'n' Larry might've wrote it, but you'd never be able to tell except for the teeny tiny BW reference at the end, which I chuckled at. (Interestingly, there's no Dinobot among them.) The plot thread with Waspinator is *finally* resolved, and Sentinel's crew have left--but what this means for the prisoners onboard is still unknown. (I hope it doesn't last--I still want more Swindle.)

It's not a *bad* episode, but with such a controversial name like Predacons Rising and with who was writing it, I get the feeling a lot of people will be disappointed. Some of us were even holding out for the likes of Sky-Byte or the Predastooges. (Wyatt did say that G2 and MW were the only serieses he couldn't manage a homage to in the series.)

What I would give for a guy named Gigatron in Animated.
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Re: Animated Series discussion thread (spoilers allowed)

Post by donosaur »

Man... I... I liked this one a lot. Got me where the last two didn't, but I'm a sucker for Black Arachnia storylines and I've been waiting for Sentinel's character to have some deepening/redemption for a while now. Also, Waspinator being a giant "the Fly" style monster? Pretty awesome. And I now I need that Waspinator toy. Seeing BA without her helmet was a nice touch, really nailed home the whole "Elita-1 is offline" sentiment.

Also, I am going to assume that beast Wars gag at the end is just that, and try not to think about it too hard. I kind of doubt it'll come to bear on the rest of the series. In my own, half-formed, fuzzy recollection of BW, I can just pretend that somehow this all makes sense.
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Re: Animated Series discussion thread (spoilers allowed)

Post by BWprowl »

I'll disagree with O6 and say that, to me, it really did feel like Bob 'n' Larry wrote this one. The dialogue had that same sort of...dryness to it, very down to earth. Another way to put it would be to say that it seemed less 'cartoony' than the dialogue normally is in Animated. That they snuck in a little of their trademark technobabble helped drive the impression home.

Of course, it did help that this episode was absolutely awesome. Blackarachnia and Waspinator were both great here (this is particularly impressive in the case of Blackarachnia, a character who hadn't resonated with me at all until this ep), but the real star was Sentinel. He shined in this one, and though he continued along the jerky pattern we've all come to know and love, but brought new depth to it. His reaction to Blackarachnia/Elita-1 was not what I was expecting, but still totally in-character for him and honestly, kinda understandable. Seeing Optimus take his own advice regarding apologies, leading to him and Sentinel finally patching things up (somewhat) at the end was nice too.

So when's the supposed Furman-written ep come out? Maximum Dinobots has me actually interested in that one now.
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Re: Animated Series discussion thread (spoilers allowed)

Post by donosaur »

Also, looks like Prowl will be hanging onto that armor after all. Coo
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Re: Animated Series discussion thread (spoilers allowed)

Post by Sparky Prime »

Good to see Sentinel and Blackarachnia finally meet and how that kinda changes things. Although I believe the next time we see Sentinel he'll be back to his old self. Great nod to the Maximals by having a gorilla, rat, rhino and cheetah looking at Blackarachnia when she woke up at the end. Likewise with Waspinator in pieces putting himself back together saying he can't go offline because he "has plans". That pretty much was my favorite part of the episode.

I believe Earth is now Decepticon free with the Elite Guard headed back to Cybertron with the captured Decepticons in their brig... Makes me wonder what the next couple episodes will hold.
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Re: Animated Series discussion thread (spoilers allowed)

Post by onslaught86 »

I liked that, as Prowl noted, mainly for Sentinel getting some depth at long last. It was a focused development episode, and it honestly hadn't occurred to me that Sentinel hadn't encountered Blackarachnia before. Nice touch having Bob 'n' Larry write it, and the injokes were great fun. It wasn't ten flavours of hot buttery awesome rah rah rah, but for an episode that wasn't crucial to the main plot, it was very good. Certainly of a higher calibre than most of the last season, to be sure. Were this the quality of the average Animated episode, I'd like the series a lot more.

That's a point, actually. Now that Animated nears its end, I'm somewhat iffy on the fiction as a whole. It tried hard, and threw a lot of great tidbits our way. Gave us some outstanding individual episodes, and some fun multi-parters. Yet it also gave us a lot of filler, and was restrained by the budget from being all it could've been. Many of the toys have engineering or QC issues, which is especially painful in a line so squarely aimed at kids as the primary audience. Die-hard TF collectors who catch the injokes make up the secondary audience rather than the casual fan who's into Transformers again thanks to the movie series.

There's good, there's bad, but it's almost over and I'm honestly kinda bored with Animated now.
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Re: Animated Series discussion thread (spoilers allowed)

Post by donosaur »

It does feel as if Animated has been pulling some punches, right? Maybe it's because they were hoping for a longer run or something, I don't know. It laid out a terrific coherent mythology though, and I really wish we could just spend more time exploring this universe. I guess it's silly to mourn lost potential though
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Re: Animated Series discussion thread (spoilers allowed)

Post by onslaught86 »

donosaur wrote:It does feel as if Animated has been pulling some punches, right? Maybe it's because they were hoping for a longer run or something, I don't know. It laid out a terrific coherent mythology though, and I really wish we could just spend more time exploring this universe. I guess it's silly to mourn lost potential though
Naw, I agree completely with that. There've been some truly great moments to the series, and the solid, structured mythology is definitely a huge selling point. If Animated could do it across three seasons, a game, comics, and toy bios, why can't the movie?
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Re: Animated Series discussion thread (spoilers allowed)

Post by donosaur »

So, Human Error Part I is up. Anyone else got any thoughts?
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