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people REALLY underestimate and continue to underestimate what TF:TM FELT LIKE landing on us as 80's kids. Shit got REAL. And I personally LOVED it. I mean, not to be bloodthirsty, but for once, the thing was living up to its POTENTIAL. Was so tired of 'GI Joe' sanitized war
And since robots were always fair play for destruction in the 80s cartoon world, BRING ON THE BURNINATION.
I saw that thing in a cheap second-hand theater literally more than 20 times, riding my bike across town to go plop down 3 bucks and grin like a maniac.
Like, as an adult now, I just sit there being impressed by both the simultaneous cluelessness and BIG BRASS BALLS of guys who went "eh, kids won't care about Optimus Prime dying."
"So let's give him a really traumatic, excruciating death scene. This is fine."
many many many kids for whom Op was a literal replacement father figure: THIS IS NOT FINE
many many many kids for whom Op was a literal replacement father figure: THIS IS NOT FINE
I wasn't one of them, but I DO get the whole red-white-and-blue replacement dad to a generation of latchkey kids thing. It was like killing Superman, a heroic ur-Ideal figure. (We also offed Superman too, later, us gen-Xers. Fuck your heroes, I guess??)
I can also note that his death began the long downward spiral of Op's overall character degradation to the point where we have "GIVE ME YOUR FACE" Prime, but that's a tangent and I wrote about that years ago.
basically TF:TM BROKE the fictional universe in a way that it's still both recovering from and violently mutated by. Without it, there'd be no Unicron, no Primus, no wild shit from Simon Furman remaking the underlying mythos
I didn't like the post-movie TF season 3, but as an adult I can absolutely see what they were TRYING (and failing, mostly) to do: they were trying to take the thing big, out into space, into a broader universe. They were trying to make characters more complicated...
But cheap animation killed some of it, the unexpected resistance to the new characters after the movie REALLY hurt them, and kids just...weren't up for ambiguous, depressed, difficult characters and an unfamiliar terrain of new, weird places and crappy monsters.
And a lot of it WAS crappy and dumb: we all know the cursed episodes like Carnage in C-Minor, anything with Daniel in it, etc...
but they were TRYING.
but they were TRYING.
Also, while we were willing to forgive the initial brickformers, the post-movie toys were HONESTLY kinda.. bad in their original forms. chunky and weird and they felt cheaper, so that didn't help either. Basically G1 flew too close to the sun and got its wings burned off.
