[Blaster86]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

Pat Lee's style and the subsequent dreamwave house style and even the style that still permeates a lot of the current comics is really more of "what a North American thinks anime style should look like". Ultimately, for me, Transformers for me has to be the Studio Toei versions derived from Floro Dery's original character sheets (which I personally don't like until they got the Japanese studio treatment).

I can't remember which Animation house Toei was, I'll need to talk to the guy that knew all that stuff. There were three that worked on the original series. One was amazing (Call of the Primitives was their work), one was average, and one was horrible (They drew Optimus with the white back, responsible for most of season three and the abomination that was City of Steel).

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

Figueroa and Guido Guidi, etc. are okay but they still do it waay too chuky. It's just the American style I guess. It's this way even in other cartoons. I actually hated Andy Wildman's art when I was a kid (that was more due to his use of real faces and hands for robots). He drew a mean Action Master Grimlock though.

I want my robots to be boxy. They're robots that transform into boxy vehicles. It doesn't make sense if they're bubbly and streamlined. That is just a difference in opinion of style, so I can't fault you for that.

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

My favorite art is actually the Studio OX art which sadly was only really used in promotional material and Call of the Primatives (or it may have been Tokyo Movie Shinsha). My favorite art book is Transformers Visual Works which I picked up in Toronto last summer.

One of the saddest things about the cartoon was that the best animated episodes had terrible stories (Unicron was made by an angry monkey in a lab!) While some of the best stories the cartoon managed to produce were so terribly animated that they became hard to watch (Galvatron amongst the cheering Decepticons when Cyclonus says they're going to rescue Galvatron in Five Faces of Darkness comes to mind, the Insecticons being used as stock Decepticons etc.)

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

Also, dude, you have me pegged. I spent most of 1994 just getting terribly angry at computer animated vomit that was on TV called Beasties. I hate Beast Wars 1000x more than the Vancouver Canucks. There's no possible way to put into words how much I hated that series. I also hate the current movies. Okay, fine I hate pretty much everything (including the Masterpiece/Alternator toys!) aside from some comics that do a very faithful job of translating the original 1984-85 characters to modern day versions. I also loved the Henkei! / Classics line and I have to get around to buying all of those one day. That was the only line of toys in the past 20 years that has put any effort into faithfully getting the feeling of the original characters right.

Yeah, I know this about you. I was like that once, but then I just got over it. I realized that storywise, Beast Wars was just so much better, consistant and linear with far better animation. Beastwars did something it didn't have to do, and reached out to older fans in season two. They called up Simon Furman, said come consult for us and write an episode or two. There was no mandate for them to connect G1 and Beastwars but they did.

The new movies couldn't be the 1980s cartoon or even comics. The designs just wouldn't translate aswell and people unfamiliar with the mithos would be confused by the mass-shifting and subspace ideas. I wouldn't, you wouldn't, but someone new to the series? They had to make it as believable as possible, and they did a great job in the first movie and stretched it a bit in the second movie. Part of my problem with the second movie was how they pushed the limit too much (still liked it more than the first one).

As for R.i.D, Armada, Energon, and Cybertron they were all miserable. Transformers: Animated was quite good though, and a lot of that has to do with a lot of G1 influence in design, and voice acting.

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

BTW, while we are talking Trypticon - here's some random trivia. In the original cartoon, he was voiced by the guy who plays Raymond's brother Robert in Everybody Loves Raymond!

Old news is old. It was one of his first voice acting gigs.