Transformation 111: Rat Attack.

27/6/2014

Both the Autobots and Decepticons need new leaders, but in a twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan the obvious suspects don't get the job. Instead SPACE Alan Sugar and the world's stupidest dinosaur are on the road to victory.

All as I celebrate getting a third of the way through the series with my look at:

King of the Hill! Part 1.

8 Comments

Tim Roll-Pickering link

27/6/2014 10:37:28 am

Well done on getting this far!

The cover was even more topical than it seems as the issue came out during the local election campaign - back then it was very rare for local and general elections to take place on the same day. (In both 1983 and 1987 it was good results in the locals that was the final clincher for Thatcher calling the general election the following month. The Transformation page mentions the general election but that was probably just heavy speculaton it would come that summer rather than a mind reader.) So just imagine Grimlock running your local council! And is it me or are those his Generation 2 colours making a surprise appearance?

Oh and despite the terms and conditions of the Tell-A-Tale competition in #98 restricting entrants to "Great Britain" I can spot at least two winners from Northern Ireland. I wonder there were any readers from the province discouraged from entering due to using a term that implies the mainland only.

Ralph Burns

27/6/2014 11:15:43 am

The joke about someone like Ratbat being a Decepticon Leader completely flew over my head as a nipper yet is also a good example of good children's story writing: don't write down to the target audience. When re-reading as an Older One this was an extra layer for me to discover, which is pretty good for a kiddy comic. Just compare it to the quality of writing in the current kiddy UK comic.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

27/6/2014 05:53:25 pm

One problem with the joke here is that Ratbat's toy wasn't released in the UK and he rarely uses his cassette mode in the comics. Add in the cartoon only being available on pre-Sky/BSB satellite & some later videos and it's easy to not realise that Ratbat could be treated so lowly.

Alex Smith link

27/6/2014 11:53:59 am

It's just a shame no one's quite managed to get Ratbat right since. Stop giving him a humanoid body, ffs! And just let him do what he does best, which is be a friggin' rude boy.

Stuart

28/6/2014 07:32:06 am

@Tim, It's a shame Grimlock wasn't around when they were having those police commisioner elections, I'd have been well up for voting for him in that.

@Ralph, to be fair on the current comic, I can't think of any other toy-tie in at the time that would have done anything similar. Try imagining Skeletor being bumped off and replaced with Accountant Man. This is a very Budiansky thing.

Which is probably why, as Alex points out, all the attempts to do something with the character since have never worked as well, it's too idiosyncratic to the one author. Mind, I also think he suffers from a similar problem to Soundwave in that no two writers on the same continuity can agree if he should be his TV or comic persona's.

Simon Hall

28/6/2014 02:37:43 pm

Thought I'd chime in as I've been quiet of late (I'm still loyally reading - with my lips moving and everything) . And all the clever peeps have made more astute observations than what I usually does.

I have always really, really liked that the Marvel books established that the Transformers had jobs or 'functions' and that they were often seen doing them. It really helped cement their characters and its the one thing I miss most in current Transformers lore, with every new guy that turns up being a generic super tough awesome fighter ninja guy. The bios Hasbro give their toys these days are just garbage and whilst I don't think they're willfully shite, there's just no imagination and everyone's sold as the roughest toughest robot in the west in case - God forbid- children have no interest in them. This is part of the reason I get so much out of MTMTE - it gives these characters some depth and history and what their all about.

I liked that it showed some semblance of how Cybertronian society may have worked. And Ratbat, bless him, is a cracking example of this. Bob may very well have been taking the proverbial, what with the 'put this toy in' mandate he had, but it works. Ratbat's constant number crunching also signposted how things work in the real world - if these no benefit to the expenditure, then things come to a halt (as I learnt in 1998 when a lot comic books I'd enjoyed for a number of years came to a sudden end for similar fiscal reasons - that really felt like the bottom had dropped out of my world!)

Stuart

28/6/2014 06:13:04 pm

Though I would say again the depths of the Marvel backgrounds is more a one off exception than a sign of how things have gotten worse over the last three decades- The profiles almost instantly become terrible once Bob stops writing them. From the later half of G1 into G2 Every. Single. Character is both super amazing awesome and in possession of one huge personality flaw that makes them mentally ill. It's as if the PR people writing them by that stage thought "Well, we need to make them perfect... but not too perfect... we'll give him an irrational hated of the colour green. That'll do".

Simon Hall

29/6/2014 02:14:10 pm

Oh yeah, I don't deny that from 1986 up the profiles are half arsed and certainly by the time of the European line they were a right old hack job and everyone's some kind of warrior, but I wonder if that what makes the '84 - '85 cast so memorable.

Transformation 111: Rat Attack.

Leave a Reply.

Author

Archives

Categories