Sunday, June 04, 2006

Transformers: The Movie, review

Transformers: The Moive

No other kid’s movie has had a bigger impact on young boys in the 80s than the Transformers movie. The movie was made during the second season of the cartoon show and was released sometime during the end of the season. For many children, it not only amazed us, but also shocked us too. This had to do with the fact that many of the main characters that we had grown attached to on the show were killed off fairly viciously. And, a new cast of good guys and bad guys were brought in.

The movie also departed from the show with a slightly more Japanese style of drawing and a different score. While the show reused tracks from GI Joe and other shows, the movie had a completely different mood with the music, Rock/Techno. While many of the voice actors from the TV show returned for the movie, many new voices came in to join the cast. Eric Idle, Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, Robert Stack, and Orson Welles were some of the actors to join the cast of voices. Not too surprisingly, they all fitted in nicely.

The writing was where the movie has its greatest strengths and its greatest weakness. The movie took a bold step by killing off one of the major cartoon heroes of the 80s, Optimus Prime. Plus, the movie jumped ahead in time to the year 2005, nearly twenty years after the show’s time period, and the Autobots were on the losing side of the war. The main problem with the script was that fact the main villain was totally one dimension, and the name of the main villain was Unicron. We knew nothing of the main villain, except he was a knock off of the Death Star. We would learn later about his true origins and motives in the third season. The movie moved at a faster pace than the TV show. Because the story is so tight, it left no room to really get to know the rest of the new cast either. Despite the fact that the animation was ten times better than the show, some of it was little messy with mistakes.

In the end, if you want a retro look into the 80s cartoons, look no further than Transformers: The Movie. It’s still fun to watch after all these years.

Grade B+Probably one of the coolest fights in the movie, in addition to the Prime/ Megatron battle, is the fight between this guy and the Dinobots. “Me Grimlock kick butt.”

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Someone call George Lucas’s Lawyer, please…
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Yeah, they started having a female robot on the show. Her name was Arcee, not to be confused with the soda RC.

Does her color have to be pink?
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Leonard Nimoy owned this role!

2 comments:

  1. He was so cool, that they brought him back him back to life twice on the show.

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