Here was a cartoon about robots, based on toy robots that almost universally looked better as jets, planes, trains, or anything anything other than robots.
TRANSFORMERS ANIMATED CHARACTERS TV
Even Optimus Prime was a bit gimpy as a toy: those tiny T-Rex arms bending only at the elbow, that tractor-trailer alter ego literally disappearing into thin air on TV only to get stashed behind the couch in real life.
![transformers animated characters transformers animated characters](https://i.etsystatic.com/21133546/r/il/0d5d49/2161968771/il_fullxfull.2161968771_mb26.jpg)
Or, I should say, he was a perfectly swell toy gun that turned into a misshapen, robotic birth defect. As iconic as the Decepticon leader has become in geek lore, he was also an awful toy. And, come on, it had toys.īy transforming Megatron into a bizarre space-jet for the first movie, Bay actually cleaned up one of pop culture's biggest blunders: a giant, bloodthirsty robot with a massive cannon mounted on his arm who, when he gets really furious, shrinks himself down into a Walther P38 pistol and orders, nay, demands that someone start shooting him. Or at least too stupidly constructed to gather the following of, say, Watchmen. Let's face it: The original Transformers cartoon, popular as it may remain today on YouTube with nostalgic hipsters, was just plain silly stupid, even. So why does this particular franchise remain, even in a movie-hungry but uncertain recession, successful against all geeky odds? How can even the Transformers sequel stay so immune to the pitfalls of all the other '80s brands getting this newfangled CGI redux for the Comic-Con set? It ain't just the robots, for Prime's sake.
TRANSFORMERS ANIMATED CHARACTERS MOVIE
Because, when you come right down to it, his first Transformers movie was a $700-million worldwide hit, and his follow-up is likely to perform even better. And if Revenge is anything like its campy predecessor, Bay might as well continue delivering the kind of numbskull gags (get this: hackers live with their moms and play Dance Dance Revolution a lot!) that I doubt would cut it on Nickelodeon, much less in a major tent-pole release.
![transformers animated characters transformers animated characters](http://www.clipartbest.com/cliparts/di6/aR5/di6aR58XT.jpeg)
In this summer's sequel, the blasphemy springs anew, as Bay re-imagines every geek's favorite bad-boy boom box, Soundwave, not as a dastardly iPod speaker but as some sort of satellite-style spacecraft. In 2007's Transformers, he insisted that hero Optimus Prime have lips and villain Megatron turn into an alien jet instead of the handgun of franchise lore (comic, cartoon, whatever). Lurking in the outer darkness of the blogosphere, these godlike man-children are the supposed tastemakers of today's effects-driven blockbuster the make-or-break nerdcore audience segment whose fundamentalist devotion to dork scripture (comics, cartoons, whatever) drives the decision to give Wolverine that special hairdo of his, or to pay a team of digital artists to painstakingly adjust the heft and swing of a luminous blue penis in Watchmen.īay, it seems, doesn't much give a damn. Most filmmakers kicking off a long-awaited Hollywood take on a treasured Gen-X franchise spend years treating its fanboys with a mixture of reverence, fear, and worship. But if Michael Bay is not one thing, it's afraid of the geeks. Unrepentant poster boy for Hollywood excess ( The Island, anyone?) so easy to parody that he's even parodied himself. Purveyor of ridiculous explosions ( Pearl Harbor) and random guitar solos ( Armageddon).
![transformers animated characters transformers animated characters](https://i.quotev.com/img/q/u/18/9/12/qx7xbzpduv.jpg)
Director of blockbusters big ( Pearl Harbor), bulletproof ( Bad Boys), and both (next month's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen). Jaimie Trueblood/Paramount and DreamWorks