Said it before and I'll say it again: a book about Transformers Animated character models is the last place magic retcons about the G1 cartoon should ever be placed.
Transformers: Age of the Primes toyline discussion || update: Wave 1 Box Art
- Thread starter TriBlurr
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Arguably, in Japan, it should be the 4th Prime.
Even nowadays I still consider him annoying to transform, for pretty much the same reason a lot of Movie toys aren't always a lot of fun to transform. very fiddly, very precise, and has trouble gettign out of its way.
Man, movie toys took so much of the fun out of the toys.
Cybertron Soundwave was, as other said, fiddly, but once you had it all lined up, everything was pretty damn solid. I recall several movie toys that were just as fiddly, but not nearly as secure when everything was in the right place.
I'd have to dig mine out, but I seem to recall that it was tricky to get all the parts to line up to form the nose of the jet, particularly the cockpit, as it was on a little strut that didn't like to cooperate.
More frustrating was Laserbeak, as he had all these tiny bits to reposition. As far as I know, he's still intact, but his Blockrock redeco died a horrible death when something snapped during a transformation.
On a related note, I would be all for any updates that got us modern Armada and Cybertron Laserbeaks.
Armada Laserbeak with a 5mm handle has been on my wish list for a long time. It seems so obvious but somehow it hasn't happened yet.
In theory, no. Nothing he does is super complicated.
In practice the legs, which formed the bomber's sides, never pegged in right. The bomber canopy never pegged into the legs/sides right. And his gun and shoulder cannon, which formed bombs that could slot into the wings, never actually stayed securely slotted in.
Despite that, I love the design. And would love the current design team to take another crack at it.
While I totally get that and maybe there's a way to reconcile the two, I'd rather just get one that's straight up Cybertron Soundwave. Maybe with Earthspark Soundwave's head and/or chest panel detailing. Maybe even a way for the wings to fold down lower akin to the Earthspark one-step's cape thing. But that's it.
I'd like something that's more Legacy United Hot Shot than Legacy United Side Burn.
I'd like something that's more Legacy United Hot Shot than Legacy United Side Burn.
Which is part of the problem with Jim Sorenson IMO. He knew that. He knew Hasbro wouldn't care too much. So he put it in because he knew could game the system.
Jim worked with FP and would have known when Hasbro gave them the ok to name the FFoD guys. If he was working on The Allspark Almanac II when that permission was given he could have easily worked it in to beat FP to the punch.
I wanna be clear that I don't know that for sure, but I do know a few people involved in FP who had insider knowledge, and they all seem to be pretty annoyed at Jim in general for how it went down.
Granted I haven't heard Jim's side of the story but my admittedly brief interactions with him haven't exactly been... positive?
AFAIK they never got that far. At least not far enough to have any concrete plan. Hasbro passed permission down and then Jim worked his version into the Almanac and Hasbro just said "that's what it is, tough" and any plans FP had got scuttled.
I'm sure someone had some ideas but noting got that far along. I can try to ask around.
All that I'm aware of is the fact that the ninth installment of Recordicons, which was published in the Dec 2011/Jan 2012 issue of the TCC magazine, featured some "Ancient Autobot" text that translated to read "-LTIVERSAL TRAVELER VECTOR PRIME ALWAYS LIES ABOUT FIVE FACES OF DARKNE-", in vain attempt to counter what Jim did with the names in the book. Recordicons was written and drawn by David "ItsWalky" Willis, so this tells us that he, at least, was one of the ones miffed about Jim naming them what he did and the way he did it.Funnily enough naming the FFoD Primes isn't the worst use of Jim's "canonization" efforts IMO. They're important characters, or should be at least, and probably should have been named back in the 80s.
And while I'm sympathetic to some of the FP peeps who may be annoyed at how they got those names, well they were going to be named anyway and FP likely would have been drawing from the same name pool anyway so....
Oh, have I got a thread for you to read.
Here's the archive of all the AVP entries from the Almanacs:
Source:Ask Vector Prime - Transformers Wiki
Source:Ask Vector Prime - Transformers Wiki
Source:Ask Vector Prime - Transformers Wiki
We did get one of those guys back in Legacy (with the wrong head and colors, but still).
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Willis isn't one of the folks I know, but "slips text into something official that's unrelated" to deal with Jim is a real "fight fire with fire" situation
I'd put good money on some other folks at FP knowing Willis was doing it though, and probably encouraging it.
I feel the same way about Cybertron Soundwave that I do about HftD Mindwipe. Love the figures, love the altmodes, but their transformations are the just that bit more frustrating than I’d like. Sad thing is, i’m not sure if I even stil Have Cybertron Soundwave. Gonna have to go hunting through my boxes sometime.
Also, the fanmode combination between the Mindwipe and Skystalker molds to create a cool battle armour mode for robot mode is cool. It actually kinda looks cooler with the Strafe and Sunspot redecos of said molds too.
Anyway. Imo Universal Streams were cool in the beginning as a fun way to build the multiverse of TF incarnations. Until they just kept adding more and more universes with seemingly smaller and smaller changes.
I mean, by the end of it we had at least two (possibly more) Magazaraks (the Armada Megatron repaint who was technically Chaos Megatron) who conquered and nearly obliterated all(ish) Autobots. Then went multiverse hopping.
Also, the fanmode combination between the Mindwipe and Skystalker molds to create a cool battle armour mode for robot mode is cool. It actually kinda looks cooler with the Strafe and Sunspot redecos of said molds too.
Anyway. Imo Universal Streams were cool in the beginning as a fun way to build the multiverse of TF incarnations. Until they just kept adding more and more universes with seemingly smaller and smaller changes.
I mean, by the end of it we had at least two (possibly more) Magazaraks (the Armada Megatron repaint who was technically Chaos Megatron) who conquered and nearly obliterated all(ish) Autobots. Then went multiverse hopping.
He is, and I love it. Tapedeck Soundwave will always have a special place in my heart but I love the idea of stealth bomber Soundwave with the cassettes as bombs. Cybertron Soundwave was so cool conceptually but flawed, and I thought it was great that ES Soundwave pulled from him.
I'd love some kind of hybrid of both.
The system was willing to be gamed.
TFWiki was actually under no obligation to treat an Animated book as an authority on anything but Animated. They chose to do that.
Yep. The people in charge of the Wiki could have gone "yeah no" because there were people in that group who saw what Jim was doing. Their rules and regs weren't dictated by Hasbro, they could have said no.
But they were too wrapped up in their own nonsense to do that.
That's the thing. Lucasfilm has strict standards for what is and isn't canon for Star Wars and even has a hierarchy of what trumps what. Star Trek has a very simple rule of "if it shows up on screen on a tv show or movie it's canon, everything else isn't."
Transformers, though, doesn't have anything like that. Hasbro doesn't really lay down groundwork on what is and isn't canon so that role fell to the volunteer administrators of a fan-run wiki. Their own standards were very broad, but more importantly, they were internally decided on. And could be changed fairly easily, but fans gonna fan and once a broad standard was accepted by the group think there was no changing it even though it could have easily enough
Jim saw a regulator that frankly didn't care, and a fan-sourced "standard" that could be easily exploited, and ran with it.
That was done in an attempt to clear up some confusion.
In the 3H short comic story "Shell Game", Megazarak was depicted as willfully seeking out the Matrix, wanting to take it for himself and willing to kill anyone he could in order to take it, as the Matrix-bearing Prime he previously defeated was not in possession of it and had hidden it away somewhere to keep it safe from Megazarak:
"The Prime was among the first to fall, the figurehead of the Autobot resistance now a symbol of hopeless dispair. But even in abject defeat, the Matrix-bearer spat one last defiant barb. The Matrix itself... the true heart of the Autobot ideal... was not there."
But later, in a Fun Pub profile for Universe Nemesis Prime, it was said that Megazarak defeated the Optimus Prime whose body Nemesis was later cloned from... and chose to leave the Matrix to rot inside that dying Optimus's body, not caring about the Matrix in the slightest:
"The last thing Prime remembered was Megazarak telling him the Matrix would be left to slowly corrode in his ruined chassis on the shores of the Rust Sea. Then his core processor was torn out, and there was only darkness."
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oh ok. That kinda makes more sense. So they were actively trying to fix things that time?
Yes. This Matrix in that dying Prime's body was then turned into the Dead Matrix by Unicron, so it was definitely there when Megazarak killed that Prime and chose to leave it behind.
Yet, "Shell Game" said that it wasn't there, and that Megazarak was infuriated because he so badly really wanted the Matrix, hence the confusion of these two opposing scenarios.
One was written by 3H, one was written by FP. It makes sense that stuff wouldn't line up.