It has been announced that a 'new' TransFormers cartoon is in the works, as a collaboration between Nickelodeon and eOne. I'm currently not sure what to make of this news but, for the most part, it feels broadly positive. Hasbro aren't keeping all their eggs in one basket, and with the Netflix War for Cybertron series set to conclude with Kingdom later this year, and the next live action movie supposedly set for release in the summer of next year, they're clearly looking to maintain brand awareness in the visual media.
There's a poll up on one of the fan sites now, asking punters what they'd like to see and I was disappointed (though absolutely not surprised) to find that the majority (at almost 2:1 votes versus the two next closest) was more Generation One (with Generation Two, bafflingly, lumped into the same category). Personally, I am thoroughly exhausted as far as G1 is concerned. There's been way too much of it over the last 15 years, and one of my favourite things about TransFormers - the reason for my enduring passion for the brand - is its capacity for change. I don't always like the changes (initially, at least), there have been several toylines that I felt were not for me, but there have been very few that I've ignored entirely.
As I write, 'Something New' is marginally behind of the idea of revisiting TransFormers Animated but, given Hasbro's apparent aversion to employing Union voice actors, I'd have thought an attempt at revisiting any previous franchise, particularly one as well regarded as TFA, would be best avoided. They'd have to bring back the original cast - and the original creative team, for that matter - or it just wouldn't be the same. It'd likely just turn into one of those shows like ThunderCats Roar, a reviled parody of a show, created by a self-professed 'fan', yet which misses the mark on literally every aspect of rebooting an original show that still has a strong fanbase. Remember how goofy Bumblebee was, how clumsy Bulkhead was? What if that was their only character trait? That'd be cool, right? Make Optimus Prime petulant and arrogant, because you really don't need to respect the hero/leader, right? And then give it the same art style as BotBots, because simpler, more homogenous character models are cool, right? Then it'd just need a couple of non-Union voice actors, maybe a YouTuber or two*, to do impressions of all the original voice actors and, BAM! Instant hit with the kids, right?
So... Next...
Beast Wars is currently about 3:2 ahead of revisiting TFPrime, but I'm fairly confident that WfC: Kingdom has killed off any chance of a BW reboot in the forseeable future, and returning to either of these would encounter the same problems as TFA: if it's not the same cast and crew, it'll probably be crap, just like the Prime Wars and War for Cybertron series. I mean, Prime Wars had Ron frickin' Perlman playing Optimus Primal, and that was still terrible.
The remainder are all super-unlikely - a mixture of shows that were previously aired only in Japan, or toyline-specific shows that won't have the same enduring appeal... and the idea of a cartoon based in the Movieverse is just plain daft.
Really, I think their most viable option is to follow the example that IDW have set with their comics series: strike out in a new direction, with character-based stories. They'd need to hire a competent writer, capable of actually planning an entire story, from beginning to end. By 'story', I don't just mean the first season, I mean the whole tale, covering however many seasons it's intended to run. Television is rarely dealt with that way (certainly these days), but it's easy to discern the difference in the quality of writing if a show is written as it goes along.
Where the entire story is written in advance, a TV show often has that 'slow burn' feel, where subtle foreshadowing in the earliest episodes can only really be appreciated by watching it a second time, but the characters grow and the story progresses toward a specific conclusion which gradually becomes inevitable - something the viewer can see, even if the characters can't. Sometimes there's a last-minute save, but even that will have been hinted at in earlier episodes. Another mark of a good, well-written show is that one would want to go back and re-watch it, to fully understand how the conclusion was foreshadowed.
Where the series has a basic 'beginning, middle and end' structure, but the flow of the story between them is not fully planned, you most often get a scattering of elements thrown in seemingly at random, without context, and frequently without any payoff, inconsistent characterisation and deus ex machina... Or, in the case of Prime Wars and War for Cybertron, you get no characterisation and only half a story, amounting to very little, spread out over six episodes per season, without a true beginning, middle or end, because each season only serves to set up the next, and by the time the final season arrives, all momentum has been lost and it's just a case of trying desperately to tie up loose threads, or force a giant, climactic battle for a very artificial fate. And this is a show explicitly designed to accompany and - one would tend to assume - help sell toys.
So, yes, I'm guessing the conclusion to Netflix's take on Kingdom will be a rehash of the Beast Wars season 2 finale, 'The Agenda' - itself a 3-part story, but not without its foreshadowing in earlier episodes, not least in the form of the Golden Disc, the theft of which is what kicked off the first season of the series (though it actually happened off-screen).
The G1 cartoon at least has an excuse for being shit: most cartoons of its ilk (extended toy ads thanks to Reagan-era deregulation) were shit, and frequently featured stories cobbled together from whatever plot elements the writers hadn't been able to include in other cartoons. It knew exactly what it was, and so had no pretensions of an overarching storyline other than "the Autobots and Decepticons are at war, and both eventually want to return to their home planet of Cybertron - the former as liberators, the latter as conquerors", without ever needing to do more than pay lip service to that conclusion, because it was going to continue as long as Hasbro wanted a cartoon to advertise their new toys.
As for this new collaboration between Nickelodeon and eOne... I'll try to keep my mind open, but that generally requires keeping my expectations low. Maybe they'll surprise me.
TransFormers Animated did, after all.
(* Actually, now I think about it, I would actually be happy with Emgo voicing Waspinator. Obviously, I'd prefer either Scott McNeil or Tom Kenny, but I'd accept Emgo. Come at me.)
No comments:
Post a Comment