Universe 25th aniv. Optimus Prime

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Animated Leader Megatron

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My Custom Transformers Toys

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Transformers 2: Revenge Of The Fallen – Official FINAL Trailer [HD]

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Transformers Animated Leader Megatron Review

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Movie reviews: The Transformers (2007) – Part 37

Darkness. Optimus Prime’s voice (that of the immortal Peter Cullen) echoes through space as stars fade into view. For a second, for just a second, I think things are going to be ok.

Then I start listening to the words. “Autobots… Decepticons.” Good. “Devastating war that destroyed our whole civilisation.” Great. “Allspark Cube”. Grea… Hang on.

I’m looking at a huge cube, rather remeniscent of the Borg, floating through the void. Apparently, it has the power to create mechanical life. And guess – no – just GUESS, where it’s landed. As Prime melodramatically announces, “a tiny planet, called… EARTH.”

But I’m willing to accept all this. It’s ok for blockbuster adaptations to mess with the canon a bit. But only if it’s done well. And in this movie, it really isn’t.

Now we’re in Qatar. Patriotic, heroic American soldiers are on duty in the Middle Eastern desert, clearly not unnecessarily referencing in any way any current affairs. But fine, I say, I’ll let them off, because suddenly the first Decepticon arrives in the form of an unmanned helicopter. Cue brilliant CG battle between giant stompy robot with energy weapons and the desperate soldiers.

But that’s what’s always so painful about these movie adaptations: they’re so damn pretty. Industrial Light and Magic have outdone themselves with the animation in Transformers, but it’s the WAY it’s done that bothers me.

Optimus Prime doesn’t NEED fiery decals to make him cool. Yes, he transforms into a truck cab. But he’s still cool: he’s Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots. In the original, Bumblebee is a VW Bug, not a souped-up Camaro. And their FACES. They look like freaking robot gorillas. And where’s Prime’s face mask? He wears it about three times in the whole film. To console myself I took to putting my hands in front of my face, pretending to wear it myself.

But let’s get back to the story. Basically the whole plot is formed around a tenuous link to eBay, with Megatron having crashed into the Arctic hundreds of years ago and been frozen, except for a brief moment of accidentally shooting a map to the Allspark Cube onto old explorer Witwicky’s glasses (does he often do this, we are forced to wonder?), which are later being sold on the Internet by Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky. You can almost imagine the moment in the scriptwriting session when they thought up this idea:

“Hey, we could reference eBay!”

“Cool! Because, you know, people use that in real life!”

“Yeah, but this would be in

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Remembering the 80s cartoons

This is a great topic to write about. I believe that cartoons of the ’80s were the greatest ever. I was born in 1980 so my earliest memories are actually of watching cartoons during the middle and late ’80s. Today’s cartoons, which are mostly replaced now by computer animation, seem inferior to those of the ’80s. There was something special about a cartoon drawn by hand that computer animation is missing.

Transformers (now a blockbuster motion picture) really set the standard for action heroes with the battle between the Autobots and Decepticons. Every little boy (and maybe even some girls) owned Transformer toys. I had several Autobot toys that actually transformed back and forth between the car and the Autobot. I can remember the commercials that used to air for the action figures: always had that slogan, “Transformers…More than meets the eye.” It was an awesome cartoon.

Thundercats was yet another adventurous cartoon of the battle between good and evil. Once again, I owned the action figures for this cartoon as well. What boy wouldn’t run around the house pretending to be a character? Today’s cartoons lack the thrill and I rarely ever see a kid pretending to be an action hero. This is because there are no good action heroes for a kid to idolize anymore!

The ’80s were a great time to be a kid because we had some awesome cartoons to excite our imaginations. I often think back to these cartoons and I wish kids today had similar experiences to look back on when they grow up.

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Transformers: The Score – Optimus Vs. Megatron

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G1 Transformers Toys – Astrotrain – Triple Changer

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Movie reviews: The Transformers (2007) – Part 31

I visited my hometown, Charleston, WV, for the Fourth of July holiday this week. While I love West Virginia dearly, there is not a whole lot going on for young people. I blame this lack of social activities and the bad weather on the holiday for weakening my defenses such that I was easily convinced to go see Transformers. Even as I was buying my ticket, I couldn’t believe I was spending money on what was sure to be a monstrosity.*

Let’s just say I had the lowest of expectations for this film. While I don’t mind the occasional thinly plotted summer blockbuster, I couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm for a movie based on a line of action figures.

The movie stars Shia Lebeouf as nerdy high school student Sam Witwicky, who, of course, just can’t seem to get ahead in life. The girl, the popular friends, and normalcy are just out of reach for Sam, but he hopes his new car will change that.

That is until Sam discovers that his car is actually a transforming alien robot. Through a series of events that is still a bit unclear to me, several more of these transformers come to Earth, and good guys and bad guys are established. The good guys Autobots have to beat the bad gusy Decepticons to something that belonged to Sam’s grandfather, an Arctic explorer. They then have to find and destroy the mysterious “Allspark,” an energy source which was the cause of a tremendous war on the Transformers’ home planet, but is now located somewhere on Earth.

The U.S. government is involved in a massive cover-up in ways that are never really clear. It turns out that Sam’s great-grandfather had discovered the leader of the Decepticons Megatron frozen in the Arctic ice. The government retrieved the massive robot and kept him cryogenically frozen in the Hoover Dam. As you can imagine, this didn’t end well.

In an end battle scene I can only describe as epic, destruction reigns. Sam and “the girl” (Megan Fox in the role of Mikaela Banes) work with a U.S. military special ops group to protect the Allspark from the Decepticons, destroying an entire city in the process. You can’t tell the different transformers apart, but there are lots of really fabulous explosions.

The heroic Autobots are led by the completely badass Optimus Prime. While I was never into Transformers as a kid, I can only assume this guy was a big deal, based on the audience’s reaction.

Jon Voight delivers a supremely dramatic performance as the Secretary of Defense, who has been kept in the dark about the discovery of Megatron. Josh Duhamel plays a homesick soldier, just trying to do the right thing and get home to his family. His whole subplot seems a little unnecessary, so I think he was just thrown in to up the hotness factor.

When the film was over, I turned to my friend and said, “Well, that was dumb.” But then something strange happened I realized I was smiling. Never had I been so consistently entertained by a movie. Two and a half hours had flown by, and I had enjoyed every minute. I couldn’t really say exactly what had happened in the movie, besides of a lot of explosions and dramatic music, but I had a good time. I wouldn’t avoid this summer blockbuster just don’t expect to understand why you like it.

Rating: 8.5/10

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