Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

[kirk55555]

That's fair. It's easy to forget sometimes that the cartoon ain't the real bible.

Now I'm just imaging the various Transformers incarnations as different religions. Would G1 and Beast Wars be the same one, or would they schism (and what about Beast Machines)? I imagine fans of the Bay films would end up being more of a cult/militia then a religion, with weird thoughts about things like explosives and age of consent laws

 

[Unicron]

You should probably avoid KISS Players, that fairly obscure branch of the Japanese series that most sane fans don't discuss. It's considered somewhat weird even in Japan.

With the caveat that all I know about Hot Rod comes from the 86 movie, how was Mirage in RotB literally anything like Hotrod? Hotrod in G1 was the "youngster" and a bit of a hot head, but his personality was nothing like Mirage in RotB, who seemed like he was more of a "young cool guy" archetype, with a bit of a streetwise style personality and a lot of wisecracking, which I don't associate with Hot Rod. Not that TLK's Hotrod was particularly like Hotrod either, but at no point watching RotB did I ever think of Hotrod when watching Mirage. Of course there is a whole season of the first cartoon after the movie with Hot Rod, and other continuities so maybe he is more like that in later incarnations, but I just really don't get the connection between RotB Mirage and Hot Rod, outside of both being treated like the younger/less experienced guys by the other Autobots.

RotB Mirage reminds me in ways of both Jazz and Hot Rod, and I admit I still kind of wish he'd been an incarnation of Jazz due to his car mode. Even though Jazz is technically dead in the Bayverse.

According to the wiki, G1's Mirage's original bio had him making "mirages" of himself, aka something like holographic duplicates, they only changed that to invisibility for the cartoon, so they have some justification to do what they did in the movie. As someone who is unfamiliar with Mirage in general it makes much more sense to me for him to make duplicates then for him to turn invisible just based on his name.

Yeah, IIRC that had to do with a degree of confusion over Mirage's abilities and Hound's abilities, as Hound has the power to make holographic maps as part of his scouting role. They kind of got swapped for purposes of the cartoon, with Mirage mainly gaining the invisibility instead. Apparently it was intended for cartoon Reflector to be able to clone himself instead of being a composite of several robots like his toy, but this was only ever seen briefly in one episode (several extra Reflectors merge into the one representing Spyglass). It was scripted for several other episodes but then scrapped from the final versions.

 

[Saul]

Watched it today. I regret going to the theater to see this. I thought we were going to get our Unicron movie finally but this is more of a long tease and set up for future films. If this wasn't the 7th Transformer movie I might be able to forgive this. At the end I hoped Prime might pull out the Matrix to destroy Unicron but nope.
I also find it weird that they don't go into any more backstory with the Maximals. Optimus Primal tells Optimus Prime he was named in honor of him but Prime doesn't ask how that's possible or where/when they are from. I don't get the reasoning behind keeping their story so vague. I'm sure it's confusing for those who didn't know anything about the Beast Wars series.

 

[JD]

I watched this last week and I really enjoyed it. My only experience with Transformers before this was the first Michael Bay movie and Bumblee, so I didn't really have a lot of baggage going into it.
The story was fun, and I liked both the human characters and the Transformer characters.
It had some pretty cool action scenes, and oustanding CGI.
One thing I was a little confused on was how the Maximals already looked like Earth animals before they came to Earth. Primal did make a reference to going around to other planets, so does that mean they came to Earth before, and that was how they knew what all the animals looked like?
The set up at the end was pretty fun. Do we know yet if what they were setting up will actually be happening? Or was it ore of just a little Easter Egg?

 

[Mr. Adventure]

The set up at the end was pretty fun. Do we know yet if what they were setting up will actually be happening? Or was it ore of just a little Easter Egg?

Supposedly the studio was pushing for it and had to convince Bay to include it so it sounds like they want it to be more than just a Easter Egg.