(from the Ep6 review thread)
And therein lies in part of the problem with this series. Making it totally kiddie-oriented isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does make its appeal far more limited as it tends to exclude older audiences.Originally Posted by Gutsman Heavy
IMO the Japanese Beast Wars and Armadaverse series were pretty ordinary, even for a kid-targetted series. Car Robot (RiD) was quite good as a kid-oriented series, but again, you'll find that most older CR/RiD fans are fans of the toys, rather than the series because it has limited appeal to older fans.
The appeal of G1 (esp. the comics) and Beast Wars was that it had different layers of appeal - to both kids and older audiences. G1 and BW had elements which appealed to both younger and older audiences - like The Simpsons they worked in layers.
Animated fails to do this. And even as a kid-oriented show, it still feels kinda mediocre at best.
As Michael McConnohie (the voice actor for Cosmos and Tracks) once said, you don't need to dumb stories down when writing for children. He attributes the success of G1 as being that they didn't dumb it down for kids. Sure, parts of it were campy/corny and there are glaring continuity issues - but overall the G1 premise wasn't dumbed down extensively for children.
And part of why Season 3 is less popular with many fans is because although in many ways G1 writers did try to smarten up the show (e.g.: putting TFs in a more scifi setting) in other ways the show dumbed itself down (e.g.: Daniel and Wheelie).
As McConnohie argued, kids really find it offensive when people talk down to them. He argued that G1 didn't talk down to kids and cites "The God Gambit" as a good example of a G1 episode which contained heavy adult themes presented in a kids' cartoon story that didn't dumb itself down for its audience. The G1 comics are full of other and better examples of this.
And Beast Wars - wow... I was a uni student when that show came out and I was totally able to relate to it as an adult audience member and G1 fan (as STL is currently discovering).
When I look at Animated I find that the show is lacklustre in its appeal to me as an older audience member. Other than some glaringly obvious G1 references, there's just nothing about it that appeals to me as an adult.
And kids these days are being more and more exposed to cartoons which engage dual audiences - I've never seen Avatar: The Last Airbender but I've heard from friends that it engages audiences on two levels like Beast Wars. I've heard the same about Digimon too, but again, have never seen the show for myself. A lot of animé series works on dual engagement (sadly none of the JP-exclusive TF animé).
The live action movie also had layers of appeal too, which helped to make it very successful. The movie had aspects of appeal for:
+ Transformer fans
+ Non-Transformer fans
+ Kids
+ Adults
Yes, I understand that Transformers is primarily targetted at kids - but one traditional strength of Transformers is that it's also targetted older audiences too - which is why Transformers has remained so endearing for such a long time for so many people.
We can't have the series appealing too much toward adults - that's what Beast Machines did to some degree and part of the reason why it failed. But at the same time, G1, G2 (comics), BW and the live action movie have already demonstrated to us that Transformers can be written to simultaneously appeal to multiple target groups.
Writing TFs solely at kids to me reeks of being slack. This attitude of "meh it's just a kids' show" to me feels like they don't really care all that much about Transformers. Despite the fact that Beast Wars was primarily targetted at kids, the producers and writers went to extensive lengths to ensure that the show could still appeal to old school fans. They communicated with the fandom online and directly enlisted the assistance of certain fans like Ben Yee. They did extensive research into G1 and G2... they read comics, watched cartoons. As a result they not only included a multitude of G1 and G2 elements into Beast Wars (in turn allowing Beast Wars to actually enrich and enhance G1/G2) but also threw in a tonne of fandom 'easter egg' references (like incorporating fans' online handles and fan site names into the script, e.g.: Wonko The Sane (also a reference to Douglas Adams), M-Sipher, Hooks, Starbase Rugby et al)! They even got widely beloved G1 writer Simon Furman to write the conclusion of Beast Wars! To me, that is dedication.
And the movie writers had plenty of dedication - on a different level from Beast Wars as the movie wasn't attempting to be in pre-establishing continuity, but there is ample evidence which showed that the writers did do some homework. And Michael Bay himself admitted being "schooled" in Transformers, a process which made him a fan of TFs.
...am I seeing this dedication in Animated? To some degree, yes. As I said, there are plenty of G1 references in the series. But where it falters is in actually making the story endear itself to an adult audience... so far the show has yet to do that for me.
Animated has the potential to do so, particularly with characters like Prowl and Lockdown - I so wish that they would develop other characters in the same vein, especially Bulkhead who still seems nothing more than a goofy cartoon caricature rather than an actual character.
Being really strong doesn't mean you have to be really stupid. Alright, you don't have to be a genius like Rhinox - but look at Brawn - his motto was "might over microchips" and was portrayed as a 'brawn over brains' kind of character - as was Grimlock - but neither was portrayed as being bumbling idiots (except for Season 3 where Grimlock was a clown, which really sucked).
One of my favourite moments in G1 with Brawn was in "The Ultimate Doom" where Brawn went, "I'll get the door," and just walked through a wall!
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