Fit For Natalie

Bear in mind that you american collectors who rely on Wal*mart (or whomever) undercutting the competition OR putting everything on clearance when it doesn't sell, you are just hurting your hobby in the long run, especially for collector-oriented products such as MP stuff. Why should Hasbro bother to make collector toys and why should stores bother to stock them if people don't actually buy any at full price or even sale price? The same goes for Star Wars, G.I. Joe or any other major toyline. If you like the product and can reasonably afford it, buy it and support your hobby, I say. You mean like Armada Thundercracker? Dark blue, silver/grey accents and limbs with a sort of bolt-shaped red stripe on each wing. Deluxe class TFs should be abit larger than most Gundam 1/144 scale figures.

Well, you know how conservative that region is.

How realistic is the depiction of the US military in the movie? The military itself say its the most realistic depiction since Black Hawk Down and lots of servicemen and women have roles as extras or speaking roles. One of the AWACS operators on the E-3 Sentry emailed TFW2005 saying Bay let them to come up with dialogue they would normally say in that sort of situation to make it more authentic. Old school? I thought Zoidfans consider it an NRJ Zoid because it was a modern tooling released during Tomy's 1999-2001 line? Yeah, I noticed that. Even in G1 some of the TFs sort of got on all fours to transform, such as Jazz - he used his hands to either lower himself to the ground or push himself off the ground.

Don Figueroa (or whomever at Hasbro/Takara) appear to have designed Grimlock based off the Zoids Genosaurer, hence the similar head sculpt, tail design, proportions and, yeah, the gun on his back.

Oh okay. Frankly, I don't see what the big fuss is about. Transformers change in style and appearance every so often that there no true set style of what makes a Transformer anymore, since everything from Diaclone mecha to a VF-1S Super Valkyrie to some weird shuttle bird lion thing to a scorpion that turns into a sort of fish are all Transformers. What makes a Transformer a Transformer is that they are alive and from the planet Cybertron. Eh, just an action movie flair. I thought it was pretty cool, and I liked the soldier characters. Remember, the back of their pants have 10 pockets, and Lennox might have had 10 wallets in there!

Nah. At least not for a long, long time.

Bumblebee is easily the best deluxe of the line (so far) and oneof the best deluxes in years. Hasbro Masterpiece Starscream in ppackage pics. Final Battle Jazz isn't in this wave. He's in the next one. Latest wave is mostly BB, some Arcee and Dreadwing with a couple of older toys.

They didn't use that song anywhere in the movie, the actual main theme music of the movie (and also the Autobots theme music) is a heroic orchestrated piece. I love it.

The 2009 Deluxe Bumblebee toy is AWESOME, you guys. The most accurate transforming BB toy, well articulated and detailed. Clear freaking windows, too. Alex Jaeger is quite a good ILM designer. He designed the Akira, Steamrunner, Norway and Saber class starships from Star Trek: First Contact, you know. I give him automatic awesome points for that because those designs are very different from the Star Trek norm (ie, not just like the Enterprise), yet familiar. Yeah, I do. Barricade is the predominantly black guy with the long ass arms with wheels near his hands and shoulders. Starscream is the guy with the wide torso and goat legged stance. Frenzy is the small, extremely thin and hollow guy who looks vaugley like General Grevious on crack. Ironhide is the guy with the slanted shoulderpads and huge cannons on his arms. Blackout is the guy with the helicopter cockpit for a torso and and rather hollow arms and legs with a big thing (rotor mechanism housing) behind and above his head. But Ironhide doesn't have wheels on his shoulders. They're under his arms. TFs can smell, so they have noses. They can also eat. TFs are usually depicted with teeth. Whether this is to facilitate in helping them eat energy sources or merely artistic license to help with human-like expressions, they've always been there. Megs and Prime do have their weapons (sorta). Meg's right hand is his physical mace on a chain, which he uses initially when he breaks free of Sector Seven, then again against Sam on the roof. Prime's sword is a representation of his axe, but more in line with his King Arthur and 'noble knight' theme that the writers wanted him to have.

Apparently Megan is something of a comic book fan - IIRC, during some premiere event a comic site interviewed her and she talked about some rather non-mainstream and (to most people), fairly obscure topics such as the work of Michael Turner, the comic book Fathom and Image. On the subject of Star Trek, the writers of this movie will also be writing the new Trek film. Roberto better keep in a scene where Scotty suffers from the delusion that his engines are capable of handling the operation for which they were designed, and indeed, may explode at any moment! *shakes fist*

Probably not. I think they went with rough scale for most of the normal cars and trucks in this line

isamu = hooray for trolls. I thought Macrossworld was more mature than that. Personally, I like having the human characters. TF always had human characters to help balance the story and sell it to new audiences. Before I saw the film, I was afraid it was going to be like ID4 or Deep Impact, or Armageddon or that film with the boat where they tell the life stories of the human characters, but was pleasantly surprised that they involved Sam with Bumblebee right away, even if we don't clearly see that he's a Transformer until sometime later. I think the main reason there's so much human elements in the movie is they were introducing Transformers for the very first time to a much wider audience (of overwealmingly non-genre fans), an audience who may already be skeptical of its high-concept premise. When Jazz attacked Brawl, Ratchet used his buzzsaw to slice off the tank's left arm. Then later he's trying to fight Starscream using his repeater gun, and protect Sam, but gets his ass kicked. I tend to agree. I believe even Roberto Orci agreed to a point after seeing the finished product. The aussie chick was hot, though, and I loved Glen's donuts scene.

I've actually not read any of the prequel books, comics, the comic adaptation or the novels, or the leaked draft script. I deduced what was going on mostly, read up abit later. While I agree that due partly to writing and partly to editing, some things could have been explained or clarified for people who aren't into TFs or robots, I find it odd that people are all but asking for everything in the movie to be explained to them (in the movie). No offense, but that suggests that either people aren't paying attention or aren't very observant for a film some here are suggesting is pitifully simple. That's an example. Doesn't Robotech infuriate some people here? Either way, Robotech is hardly as well known as Transformers and Harmony Gold doesn't deserve the sucess, with their attitude.

Energon gets away with his inaccuracies because he's a Cybertronic sort-of F-22 knockoff design Alpha Quintesson gave him. Was Ironhide's combined canon actually a movie concept or just something made for the toy?

Well, being named wrong in the movie doesn't help

If you watch during that sequence, their protoform entry modes have some form of protective coating (like a cacoon) that burns off in entry. Their protoform entry modes, as I understand it are designed specifically for this task until they can find a native form to adopt, like a stasis pod protecting newborn protoform transformers from Beast Wars. He did, didn't he? I forgot when exactly he is zapped by Allspark energy, but I believe it was when he activated its compact mode, and evidently it repaired his vocal unit as he revealed at the end. Its possible he got back his voice immediately, but they saved it until the end as a 'big reveal', such as it was. I think Megatron was aware the whole time - he just wasn't in the position to free himself. I think she felt guilty for running away as Spike and Lennox told her to while everybody else was fighting and risking their lives. What series? Not in G1, and either way the movie isn't G1. In this continuity, Optimus Prime and Megatron are literally brothers, as in family. The fair Optimus Prime was the politician while the firm Megatron was Lord High Protector, supreme commander of the armies. Canon to what? Every Transformers continuity is canon to itself. Each continuity is as relevant as the next, and part of Transformers as a whole. *G1 - BW - BM are the G1 Sunbow animated/Marvel fusion continuity *G1 - Headmasters - Masterforce - Victory - Zone - BW - BW2 - BWNeo is the Japanese G1 continuity *G1 - G2 is the G1 Marvel continuity *G1 - Classics is the new G1 Marvel Classics continuity *RID is its own small continuity *G1 Dreamwave is its own continuity based (sort of) on the Sunbow G1 animated continuity *G1 IDW is its own continuity *Armada - Energon - Cybertron is the Unicron Trilogy continuity *Timelines links the Unicron Trilogy and the G1 Classics continuity. *The movie is its own new continuity, and the major new TF continuity. *And TF:Animated is also its own new continuity. And from what Hasbro said awhile back, what binds all Transformers continuities together is the same multiversal beings known as Primus and Unicron inhabited them or will inhabit them all at one time or another, though that might have changed with Simon Furman's comments about his plans for the IDW G1 universe. SWTF - they're just toys. Part of no storyline or continuity. I not a fan of them because their robot modes aren't very good for the most part.

Ahh, that's why I thought it looked abit sleeker. Incorrectly-mounted engines - Yikes. That's the hand-painted prototype from Takara, too. I hope the production toy sorts that out, then again, with all the assembly errors and QC problems lately, probably not.

Hasbro probably liked Brawl's design enough to do justice to it at Leader class (which should have really been renamed Super or something for the movie line now that Brawl is in it). According to Bay, they didn't like Starscream's design so I doubt they'll visit it again. I'm fine with the car guys, because most of the Deluxe cars, Voyagers Ironhide & Ratchet and Leader class Prime are in rough scale with one another (very rare in Transformers), and Barricade is reasonably accurate to his movie design (except they did his arms upsidedown). Just get the Deluxe 09 Bumblebee, its the best Deluxe class toy in the line. Overall, he's more accurate than Ultimate BB, which I personally call 'Poor (rich) man's Robosapien'. A question for you aircraft guys - how accurate is Incinerator, the Osprey Decepticon they revealed at Botcon? Hasbro said they based him off the Ospreys Lennox's unit travelled on at the start of the movie.

Its also in the IDW comics, the novelisations, kids books ect. I think they just chopped it down to that one scene in the movie so that the fanboys don't inter-threat them with bodily harm and arson. The IDW comics are considered part of the visual canon as it (mostly) closely adheres to what happens in the movie. That I can't explain - I would need to watch it again (and wait for the DVD to slow down the transformations ) before I can tell where stuff goes. ILM 'CLAIMED' that all of the parts are chained together and go somewhere during transformation. Hmm, looking at one of those rendered concepts from last year, on the 2009 Camaro body, it appears the hood is still there - merely compacted down into his chest, while the front windshielf is on his back, between the front wheels (on his shoulders) and the doors on his back. Most of the glass appears to be either on his back or sandwiched inside.

Might be a problem there - Transformers is practically it as far as american giant robots go, and any japanese anime adaptation would have to be made by an American studio, owing to the smaller film industry in Japan and their lack of movie CG technical expertise (at least compared to a firm like ILM). And american adaptations would need to be changed to make it palatable to a mainstream american audience. So I predict less 'burning heart of justice', music that can defeat aliens and those weird themes the Japanese seem to dig What is the 'basic concept of a transformer'? A living alien robot being with a soul, and taking that into consideration (and judging by the relative complexity of biological organism), I don't think its unreasonable to expect a Trasnformer to be extremely complex compared to any machine humans would make. In most modern TF continuities (including retcons back into G1), Transformere's aren't 'built', but born. By comparison, a human-made robot can be fairly simplistic due to the limitations of technology (and to lessen complications in cost and mechanical failure).

Not really - the concept of a powerful Transformer being defeated after his spark is extinguished isn't a stupid idea in Transformers, given that it has happened a few times already, and the spark has been retconned back into G1. For instance, the invincible, immortal Rampage allowed himself to be destroyed by letting Depth Charge plung a pure energon shard into his spark, killing them both. And if you have a mystical device derived from G1 that gives Transformers their sparks, what's to say directly applying it to their spark won't destroy it? Because at the time Sector Seven were messing around with the Allspark and activated its energies - hence the scene with the cell phone. That was uncalled for.

Wow, I just researched - the Ironhide edition of the GMC Topkick is officially endorsed by Hasbro, so it has the Autobot symbol on the tailgate. Only difference is the roof lights are orange (as opposed to Ironhide's blue) and it comes with stock full-size mirrors.

HAHAHA! They're both the same age, 21. Why is it stupid? I find it amusing that of the four GM Autobots in the movie, you can't actually buy three of them in the configuration seen in the movie. At least not yet.

I say its not a GREAT movie, but a good one, and at the very least it was very entertaining. That was Brawn. Brawl was a Combaticon Leopard 1 tank Starscream magically built out of the wreckage of a Sherman tank he found on the Guadalcanal. DOH, David beat me to it. Never know - fanboy RAGE might cause the next director (assuming Bay passes) to buckle and have Prime redesigned to use a cab over. I don't think Prime is supposed to be Megatron's equal in power. After all, Prime used to be a politician Though, what makes Optimus Prime (all of them) strong is their courage and their sense of compassion. Probably not - the only real reason why called the Allspark that name (and Energon Cube during production, hence its shape) was that they thought calling it 'The Matrix' was too problematic legal-wise and people might think they were ripping off the Matrix franchise. The Allspark is essentially the Marvel TF comics' Creation Matrix. According to the prequel comics, they got to Earth in 2003. Apparently Starscream got his form by shooting down an F-22 that was having a test flight. Of course, this doesn't jive with the fact .

Looks really rough - the wheels are photosopped onto his arms. But they made a toy of him anyway. He's the white M113 Stryker apc toy with flip-out clear blades, Wreckage. Megatron and Scorponok Megatron turned into a Cybertronic fighter/space ship. Brawl is the real name of the tank - Devastator is the working name they forgot to change. The little guy wasn't Soundwave, he was Frenzy. During production they called him Soundbyte (for some reason). Police car was a Saleen S281 (modified Ford Mustang), he was Barricade. Helicopter was Blackout (who was originally Soundwave, hence the relationship with his little minion Scorponok).