electric relaxation

I watched the new Transformers live-action film today. It was almost uniformly terrible, with precious few mitigating factors. One thing I did like were some of the foreshadowing, and references to the cartoon and the original 1986 feature film, including:

• The bumble bee “bee-otch” air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror of the Bumble Bee Camaro.
• Sprinkling out “more than meets the eye” and other catchphrases throughout the movie.
• The Volkswagen Beetle sitting next to the Camaro Bumble Bee in Bernie Mac’s car dealership.
• The voices of major characters, including Optimus and Megatron.
• Megatron’s head/helmet.
• Nearly all of the dialogue in the final battle between Optimus and Megatron.

The only truly worthwhile thing to come of it was the motivation to find and watch the original 1986 film again. I just did, and was struck by how truly awesome it really is – it’s even better with age.

I found this section of the Wikipedia article on the film particularly interesting. Fortunately, I don’t feel that the intrusion of real-life politics and business really dampens the value of the film itself.

An intention of the movie was to rid the Transformers cartoon universe of the majority of characters from seasons 1 and 2. Story consultant Flint Dille elaborated:
“ In the next season (3), we were going to have all these new characters, and people are going to be wondering what happened to the old characters that they liked so much. What we knew, in a business sense, is that they had been discontinued, because they were the 1984/1985 (toy)line – but, we needed to tie them off. So, we had this one scene where the Autobots basically had to run through a gauntlet of Decepticons. Which basically wiped out the entire ’84 product line in one massive “charge of the light brigade”. So, whoever wasn’t discontinued, stumbled to the end. That scene didn’t make it into the finished movie. But if you think kids were locking themselves in the bedroom over Optimus Prime, basically in that scene they would’ve seen their entire toy collection wiped out.[1] ”

The movie was produced by Sunbow/Marvel simultaneous to G.I. Joe: The Movie. The writers of the G.I. Joe film asked for permission from Hasbro to kill a character, Duke. Hasbro not only approved the request but “insisted” that the writers of Transformers: The Movie adopt the same fate for Optimus Prime.[2] However, Optimus Prime’s death sparked some controversy which later caused the writers to make changes so that Duke simply ended up in a coma.[3]