Just something that has been bothering me a bit since the Bumbleebee trailer hit.
I’ve noticed a lot of the fandom really crapping all over the G1 designs in the film, ranging from comments that they don’t fit in with the Bay films, to looking like scenes straight from a video game. In fact the backlash seems to be a lot larger than I expected.
Back in 2007, the reaction to the Bay designs were mostly frowned upon, and people seemed to want the G1 blocky aesthetic. Now that we are getting it, people are loving the more alien look.
I get that things change, and I’m certainly not having a crack at anyone’s opinion, but it seems really hard to please some people. If it’s a continuity issue, then all I really have to say is none of the other movies seemed to care about continuity either. Almost all of them had aspects that didn’t match up or follow on from previous installments or even through to the next. So if the Bee movie wants to use G1 designs and won’t explain them, this is fine by me.
Last of all, I remember lots of comments about fans hating the human aspects of the live action films, even so far as wanting just the Transformers just to stay on Cybertron. This seems to be exactly what the scenes in the Bee movie will be... without the real world backdrops and human interaction, a whole movie like that would absolutely look ripped straight from today’s generation of video games. But people still aren’t happy.
Again, not having a dig at what people like or don’t like. I’m just a little bit surprised. I’m actually really excited for Bumblebee, and I like both Bay and G1 designs.
WANTS
G1 Vortex w/ weapons
Beast Wars Basic Rattrap head and gun
Personally, I internally squealed when I saw themthanks to the "Geewun" in me
Here's my take on it.
Back in 2007, most TF fans had were the cartoons and toys from the 80's onwards and their designs. They were, lets face it, simple, chunky robots with charm, and even with Beast Wars changing things up, for the most part there were still a lot of relatable "humanised" elements (faces, body structure, etc)
That was 11 years ago, and a whole new generation of fans have come along since then. For them, the Bayverse designs are the "simple chunky robots with charm" the rest of us thought we had. So the spiky, alien, crazy up close in your face murderbots are what drives them crazy.
Different aesthetics appeal to different age groups. I like SOME of the Bayverse designs but CHUG is where I'm firmly cemented.
And Prime can stay away from my face, thank you very much.
Looks too shiney with the cgi. On earth the metal is more realistic.
Ironically, the "designs" don't look like the games eg WFC and FOC, and neither do the upcoming "siege" toys, which lack cybertronian modes or really anything related to cybertron at all.
But BOTH fit with the more hands on hasbro more "unified" media approach they have ben hinting at in recent months.
Translation = Homogenization of TF Media aka the Death of Creativity.
Not that I don't like the various designs and stuff, but even as a hardcore G1 fan myself, it's a bit too much. Let's have something new please.
Travis Knight's Cybertronian Modes:
CON: Having Earthen alt mode kibble (e.g. truck parts) on some of the Transformers on pre-Earth contact Cybertron doesn't make sense. It also breaks visual continuity with the previous Bayformers films which showed them in their metallic Protoform forms before acquiring Earth modes.
PRO: We can tell who's who and the Transformers no longer look like generic piles of moving scrap metal!
Yeah, I'll take the Knight's Cybertronian designs over Bay's metallic Rock Lords, thanks.
Although one minor thing in one of the trailer that seems off to me... Bumblebee's HUD has text in English. Shouldn't it be in Cybertronian? Even have it in Cybertronian text that 'transforms' into English for the benefit of the audience, like the Cybertronian subtitles that we saw in the first live action film (that was pretty neat IMO). Also... makes no sense that the Cybertronians would be speaking to each other in English. Although Bayformers was inconsistent on this point so... eh.
Whether it's the same elements of the fandom kicking up a stink now as it was in 2007, we'll never know. some people are just hard to please.
I do agree that the Cybertonian scenes do look a bit 'video gamey' and perhaps it's a by product of having less of a production budget this time around. If it's a budget thing, they may have decided to make sure the Earth based footage looks realistic and to make the Cybertronian based footage, less realistic as a compromise to having the earth based robots not look like they fit in. Besides it's quite possible that Cybertron doesn't have a sun and all the available light is artificial.
perhaps they're doing it like Transformers Prime did when all the 'flashback' scenes were still image water colour paintings. I recall hearing that there is another movie in the works that is entirely animated and set completely in space and on Cybertron, perhaps this is precursor styling for that entire film.
Either way, I'm more than willing to give Travis Knight and team a chance and I'm really looking forward to figuring out how I'm going to get to see the Bumblebee film in Cinemas.
The Bumblebee movie has the smallest budget of all the live action films. In fact, here's a graph I've made comparing the budget of each film.
The average budget for a Bayformer film is US$203M, meaning that the budget for Bumblebee is pretty much half that amount.
But IMO the story matters more than the visuals, and I think that fans overall prefer movies with better stories and more modest budgets over huge spectacles with inferior stories. Take Star Wars for example. Here are the budgets for each of the main "saga" movies, and the budgets for the Original and Prequel Trilogies have been adjusted for inflation.
As you can see, the Original Trilogy by far had the smallest budget. The Prequels had a much bigger budget, and thus far the Sequels have had massive Disney budgets. I don't know about you, but I consider the cheap Original Trilogy to be the best.