fools to make war on our brothers in arms
every re-imagining of the transformers in an animated form since the G1 era has been a betrayal of the spirit of the series. most have foregone the characters that made the original work; some were bland and unimaginative pokemon ripoffs.
artie mentioned a while back that a new series was in development - considering he's as big a fan of the original series as i am, his optimism was encouraging. it debuted last week - and i just caught episode two this morning. so how did it fare?
so far, so good. transformers: animated got it right from the outset - with a (good) cover of the G1 theme. gabe from PA said it was like teen titans, but the animation style reminded me more of the new batman (yes, the same studio does all three). the characters aren't clones of the originals, but most of them are very close - they even got some of the G1 voice actors like corey burton and john moschitta - as well as phil lamarr (green lantern from JLA), and weird al to do wreck-gar. more importantly, the spirit of those characters seems reborn. and you can tell that real thought was put into the story and character development, while staying true to the original.
i'm not (quite) a delusional fanboy - i realize no one is ever going to perfectly remake G1; but this new series meets and far exceeds my expectations. it's not as if the bar wasn't depressingly low, though; in any case this series is worth watching and convinced me to give it a season pass.
I thought this wasn't coming out till this summer. Awesome. My girl Vickie @ Hasbro never lies.
I caught the new Transformers last week. I wasn't in love with it, but at least they took it back to it's roots...sort of.