Fat Wheeljack and Tall Wheeljack!
Post Pictures of your Transformers, Let's see 40 years worth of Transformers!
- Thread starter Ave Destron
- Start date
Fat Wheeljack and Tall Wheeljack!
Thinking about getting myself a Fat ‘Jack.
I feel like Wheeljack has such a uniquely awesome head that not having a Wheeljack invoke it in some way just feels like a waste of an awesome design. And you can't just put it on someone else (Exhaust and the like notwithstanding), as that would be like putting Optimus's head on someone else.
Heck, there are probably more guys who look like Optimus who aren't him (or clones of some stripe) than there are Wheeljack!
Heck, there are probably more guys who look like Optimus who aren't him (or clones of some stripe) than there are Wheeljack!
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I’d like it better if his head or eye shape made it look like he was wearing glasses rather than wearing actual glasses.
I guess the thought I have is we're a long way from name-reuse-to-keep-registered-trademark times. It's not like Hasbro hasn't made enough Wheeljacks to keep him active. So why do the live-action movies seem so adamant about using specific names and then giving them virtually zero references to their origins? They could literally call these characters anything they wanted. They frequently don't look, act or sound like the characters previously established. Heck, Wheeljack doesn't even look like what the live-action movies have established twice (though he's at least been a tinkerer/scientist type).
On the flip-side. Just like there are more than one "Steve" in our world, there's no reason there can't be more than one "Wheeljack" from Cybertron. So yeah - it's fine.
But yes, I'm still of the opinion that the opening sequence to the Bumblebee movie is the best live-action Transformers to date. Simply put, I'll never believe a Transformers movie can't mostly be about Transformers. That's obviously the Geewunner in me!
The full-animated Transformers One is probably the only route to go for a Transformers-centered movie. As long as humans are relatively cheap to film compared to rendering photo-realistic robots interacting with the physical world, any live-action movie is going to be mostly humans with the occasional robot.
True. This is one of the areas where I think AI could actually be beneficial to the medium but obviously the slope is very slippery.
I have no problem with the glasses on ROTB Wheeljack. It's a neat little affectation and can add some charm.
What I don't like is the way the current design style does faces. Mirage is fine, Arcee less so, Wheeljack just... Bleargh. Lots of strips of metal approximating flexible skin, and slap a couple of creepy floating lips on top of that.
Like, I don't need the full Geewun (as cool as the customs with that head look), but if a face ever needed a faceplate.
What I don't like is the way the current design style does faces. Mirage is fine, Arcee less so, Wheeljack just... Bleargh. Lots of strips of metal approximating flexible skin, and slap a couple of creepy floating lips on top of that.
Like, I don't need the full Geewun (as cool as the customs with that head look), but if a face ever needed a faceplate.
Faces have always been tricky in live action. The cartoon and comics can just draw the faces as though they were flexible metallic skin, but that doesn't translate well to live action? (maybe it would? I'd be curious to see.)
So they went the route of lots of overlapping metal plates so that things can shift and move around behind other things without any part needing to visibly stretch for movement. It was a logical way to go, but I was never super fond of the execution.
So they went the route of lots of overlapping metal plates so that things can shift and move around behind other things without any part needing to visibly stretch for movement. It was a logical way to go, but I was never super fond of the execution.
Considering we already have to suspend our disbelief enough to buy the idea of giant shape-changing robots from outer space, I personally think that making them less distractingly busy is a much smaller step.
Definitely agreed. The Bay movie designs were way too busy. The BB movie did a bit better with scaling that back a bit and using larger chunks of alt mode in the robots, but kept it similar enough to the Bay movies to make them visually cohesive. I'm a big fan of keeping the designs simpler less "piles of random metal bits shuffling around."
Suspension of disbelief has nothing to do with it, for me. Not consciously, at least. I'm not really concerned about "looks like it could happen", I'm concerned about "looks good" or "fits with the rest of it".
Smooth liquid metal faces wouldn't look good, especially in conjunction with everything else about their bodies that's panel based. I'm not looking for that either. It might even be arguable that the current attempt at making the faces smooth (and/or easier to animate, idk) is what's led to this choice that doesn't work for me.
There's just something much less effective about, say, Optimus Prime's unmasked face (then and now) vs. those on Bee solo Clifffjumper or ROTB Wheeljack. The older faces were boxier and busier, but that works better than later takes that now really look like a face wrapped in foil. It's been a poorer execution that doesn't even really have any positive tradeoffs like better emoting or anything.
Smooth liquid metal faces wouldn't look good, especially in conjunction with everything else about their bodies that's panel based. I'm not looking for that either. It might even be arguable that the current attempt at making the faces smooth (and/or easier to animate, idk) is what's led to this choice that doesn't work for me.
There's just something much less effective about, say, Optimus Prime's unmasked face (then and now) vs. those on Bee solo Clifffjumper or ROTB Wheeljack. The older faces were boxier and busier, but that works better than later takes that now really look like a face wrapped in foil. It's been a poorer execution that doesn't even really have any positive tradeoffs like better emoting or anything.
They should just make the faces simpler in general. The greebly faces always translate terribly in the smaller scale of toys.
Previously painted dinobot’s sword silver but that stuck out badly in raptor mode. Adding a superheated burning effect to the tip sort of helps but not much to be done with how it’s designed.
Previously painted dinobot’s sword silver but that stuck out badly in raptor mode. Adding a superheated burning effect to the tip sort of helps but not much to be done with how it’s designed.
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I feel like people would have accepted RotB Wheeljack if we didn't get a very G1 version in Bumblebee.
Luckily, thanks to how Steve Blum portrayed that Wheeljack in Bumblebee, they can't be the same Wheeljack anyway.
Bee movie Wheeljack was voiced like a gruff old war veteran who's getting up there in his years (which actually aligns with how Que was portrayed as being even older in DOTM), while ROTB Wheeljack was voiced like a much younger character, sounding like he had just recently graduated high school. Aging doesn't work backwards.
Tell that to Benjamin Button.
I would, but he's a dead baby now. So I can't.
