TF Prime episodes

No noses? No problem! Zombiebots? Sure, why not. A confusing new canon that allows loose and contradictory material? And now a new sequel show with an entirely different art style that takes place way in the future!
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Shockwave
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Re: TF Prime episodes

Post by Shockwave »

Why does everyone hate Unicron so much?
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138 Scourge
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Re: TF Prime episodes

Post by 138 Scourge »

Shockwave wrote:Why does everyone hate Unicron so much?
Well, I can only speak for myself (and I really don't hate on Unicron THAT much), but... Dude's kind of overused, though that comes more from the comics and the Unicron trilogy. Still, you throw the giant planet eating thing on screen the one time, and it's "HOLY CRAP, GIANT PLANET EATING THING!", keep bringing him around and it's "Oh, this guy again. Sigh." Especially if he's the big bad of every story he gets involved in. Like, if I read O6 right, then he's figuring that the entire series is gonna be a buildup to Unicron showing up.

Then the other thing is that usually Unicron winds up bringing with him a bunch of nonsense about Lords of Darkness and Light, being a Chaos bringer and a multiversal singularity and all that nonsense. All of that just sucks the fun right out of the character. I honestly like the Primacron thing better at this point. The Marvel G1 origin was okay the one time, it borrowed a bit from Galactus' origin, but it wasn't all that bad. But, maybe I'm letting fan fiction get to me, but by now that whole thing seems played, and the whole "it's only the one Unicron in every universe!" thing is just retarded. Takes the whole franchise in an wanky cosmic direction. And I mean, I'm okay with cosmic, but as done in the TF franchise, well, it don't work.

I mean, I liked Unicron being a kind of god at one point. A god as in: If you ran into a human that was the size of a damn planet, you'd figure he was a god, right? Certainly, he's be enough above you in power level that he might as well be. That's how I liked my "Dark God": Bigass piece of technology sufficiently advanced so as to seem like magic. Given the chance, I'd explain Unicron and Primus both as ancient weapons from incredibly powerful civilizations that have long ago died out, but their old machines keep running on. It's not that original, probably, but man, it's better than the thing they've got now.

Anyhoo, TF: Prime! Saw, it, thought it was okay. Nothing that great, I'm not excited enough to go buy the toys (heh), but I was reasonably entertained by it. I don't know if I was entertained enough to keep hunting down further episodes, though.
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Re: TF Prime episodes

Post by Sparky Prime »

Just saw the new episode that aired today. Interesting to find out Earth has energon deposits because Transformers were trying to hide their stores of energon on various planets near the end of the war. So it seems Transformers have been on Earth a long time. Or at least visited it a long time ago.
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andersonh1
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Re: TF Prime episodes

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Shockwave wrote:Why does everyone hate Unicron so much?
I don't hate Unicron, but I agree that the character suffers from overuse. It was great when they brought him back for Armada, and finally gave us a transformable figure. But he doesn't need to be in every series.
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Re: TF Prime episodes

Post by Shockwave »

I can see the Unihate stemming from over use in the printed material especially since in comics he's been used as a sort of catch all for anything not readily explainable. "Oh, we need a bunch of random characters from everywhere in the same spot working together. Umm... Unicron? BRILLIANT!!" But on screen I think he got the Darth Maul treatment. He showed up looking all bad ass and shit and then... very promtly died. WTF? I haven't seen Armada, but I do intend to so maybe that will change my mind, but I definately think there's more they could do with the concept and the character. At the very least I would say that he's no more redundant than Prime, Megatron or Bumblebee and yet people don't have the same knee jerk WTF?! reactions to them that they do about Unicron. So I just figured I'd ask.
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Re: TF Prime episodes

Post by Onslaught Six »

Here's the thing: In Armada, he was the Big Threat at the end, but if you actually watch the show, NOTHING is leading up to it. There's this very big thread about Megatron trying to become equal to a God in power, Sideways being MYSTERIOUS! the entire show, and Starscream switching sides and legitimately trying to take out Megatron--not so he can lead the Decepticons, just because Megatron is that much of a dick. (I would actually love to see ArScream revisited properly.) And then Unicron basically shows up kind of out of nowhere at the end and everybody fights him.

Then Energon is almost literally ENTIRELY about Unicron. Seriously. 52 episodes of that crap. The Decepticons work for Unicron. The entire show. (Okay, maybe not, it gets blurry, but that doesn't change the fact that Unicron is omnipresent throughout the show--even though he's dead, there's all this talk of reviving him and I guess he does get revived at the end.)

THEN! Remember that supermassive black hole at the beginning of Cybertron? The one they're working to fight against the entire show, that they need to awaken Primus for and stuff? Guess what caused it? Unicron dying at the end of Energon! So that's ANOTHER series that is basically derived from the threat of Unicron.

That's basically the entire half-decade of Unicron Shit. Not to mention he also showed up in the DW Armada comics, was a focal point in the Energon ones, and was probably going to show up in G1 also. (Oh, and those UK Movie comics Furman's been writing? Guess what? Motherfucker showed up in those too. That's right, Furman put Unicron in the Movieverse already.)
Shockwave wrote:At the very least I would say that he's no more redundant than Prime, Megatron or Bumblebee and yet people don't have the same knee jerk WTF?! reactions to them that they do about Unicron. So I just figured I'd ask.
Here's the thing, though. For one thing, Unicron is a cosmic threat and any story he's in inevitably centers around defeating him. Unicron is also a "multiversal singularity" and that means that every Unicron is just G1 Unicron again--and inevitably he's going to be characterized the same way. On the other hand, different Primes and Megatrons and Bumblebees all have different character traits and things to set them apart from their past incarnations. Animated Prime was a rookie college dropout leader, certainly different from ArmEnerTron's "LET'S GO, MEN!" Prime. (I hated that he called them 'men.')

Also, you'll take note that half the reason I'm pissed with Prime as a show is I don't feel like watching yet another reinterpretation of Prime and Megs and Bumblebee and Ratchet and Starscream.
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Re: TF Prime episodes

Post by JediTricks »

Unicron was a fantastic villain for TFTM because he took the Transformers cartoon medium to a much larger level, he was an ultimate threat and battling him was cinematic. It's like Star Wars, having the Death Star being this big scary ultimate weapon is important, but if they had to blow up a Death Star every week on the Clone Wars cartoon, it'd get lame fast - the Star Wars Expanded Universe suffered from that a lot in the '90s, big superweapons in every book made those stories lame. Each time they use Unicron in later media, it waters the character down, and it undermines who the character is meant to be in the guise of deconstructing him.


Anyway, as for last night's episode, it was really hard to stomach, except Jeffery Combs again stole the show. But the stuff with Fowler was a mess, the kids are some of the worst ever (which is saying A LOT). I just cannot express how bad this is, everybody abandoning their posts until there was nobody left at the base was painfully dumb, and why does OP need Ratchet to go check up on a battlefield graveyard? And these changes to why Energon is on Earth and these other planets is cheap as hell. Basically, the writing thinks kids are REALLY stupid and tries to talk down to them.
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Re: TF Prime episodes

Post by BWprowl »

I'm starting to think that the main reason Cliffjumper was offed at the beginning was to infuse some tension into this show. Throughout the last two episodes, I was honestly unsure at times if Ratchet, Bulkhead, Fowler, and even Miko were going to make it out of situations alive (although for the record, I was hoping that Miko *wouldn't* survive). So there's that to be said for this series, at least. On the other hand: Zombies. Yeah, I almost quit watching right there. Prime and Ratchet got a pretty kickass fight scene out of it, though. The fights in general in these episodes were pretty good, with stuff like Bulkhead's drone shield maneuver, or Prime stabbing his arm through a zombie and then converting it to a gun to blast him. We're avoiding the ol' laser trench warfare, at least. But other than some nice fights and decent voice acting, I still feel like there's not enough going on in this show to make it stand out. Almost all of its elements are borrowed from other iterations of TF, whether it's three human sidekicks at an underground base with a teleporter (a scenario ripped wholesale from Armada), a government liaison (the movies, and a little bit of Cybertron) or a legitimately crazy Megatron (Galvatron in G1, BW, others). So far, the most original element is actually Jack, since I think he's the first human sidekick who opts out because he realizes how likely he is to get killed hanging around with the Autobots. Too bad that bout of sanity is doomed to not last.

I'm not really sure who this show is aimed at. I'll agree with JT that there's a fair bit of downtalking (the Transformers sure like spelling out every little detail to the audience!), and then there's the presence of the kid sidekicks, so you'd think this Transformers cartoon on a kids' channel is geared towards children. But then there's stuff like Cliffjumper's brutal death, and Starscream torturing Fowler, and Bulkhead telling Miko to look away while he eviscerates a drone that seem to be just a little too much for that sort of thing. Maybe if this show gets over its apparent age identity crisis, it'll settle into a groove of some sort, and I can enjoy it better.
JediTricks wrote:And these changes to why Energon is on Earth and these other planets is cheap as hell.
This is the only point I feel like debating. I don't feel it's cheap, I think it makes perfect sense that the TF war would spread to other planets and result in energon stores on them. Especially if, like they said, Cybertron is pretty much toast now. It's like Combative Colonization, or something.
OnslaughtSix wrote:I dunno, I haven't been on the major sites, just here and ATT. From that, opinions range from "It's okay," to "This is awesome."
Eh, I only saw it discussed on /co/, and they *hated* it over there.
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Re: TF Prime episodes

Post by Sparky Prime »

BWprowl wrote:(although for the record, I was hoping that Miko *wouldn't* survive)
Yeah, I'm finding her to be a really annoying character. In a way she reminds me of Sari, and that's not a good thing. She causes more trouble to the Autobots, and doesn't seem to learn or think about the consequences. The way she kept stowing away with Bulkhead... And how could she think Josh meant for her to take a picture of the Decepticon who was about to shoot them instead of the computer while they didn't have the Autobots protecting them? That's just a little too over the top. Speaking of over the top, they did that with Raf again to. I liked how they kinda explain he's learned some of the things he does from TV but then when it came to looking at the Decepticon computer and figuring out it was an important equation... How? I don't think he's seen enough Cybertronian to be able to understand any of it, let alone figure out it's an equation.

But humans aside, I think they're doing a great job with the Transformers side of the story. Zombie Transformers is a bit much, but they didn't play that out as much in this episode as I expected they would have.
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Re: TF Prime episodes

Post by Shockwave »

Sadly, I think the zombie thing is gonna get way worse before it gets better. And Miko needs to get stepped on in the worst way. Raf is the most kitchen sink deus ex machina character EVAR! and I think the most annoying thing about this show to me (and this is gonna sound silly) is the complete lack of theme song. I also don't like the lack of noses. Dark Energon sounded like fanfic even when it was first mentioned in WFC. The only thing I can hope at this point is the "Unicron the Destroyer" is a tiny little minicon. That like, has an instant kill touch power or something. I dunno, I'm gonna keep watching it because it's "Transformers" and for some reason I have a need to support the brand even in it's down times.
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