Transformation 180: Wreck-Gar is a Little Tied Up

23/10/2015

It's technically the begnining of the latest UK epic, but you wouldn't tell as desperate filler from the American comic gets used in a very strange way.

Plus the return of Peter Pez Clown Policeman IN SPACE and the answer to the question: "How will I cope without the Classics UK books to steal from?"

All in my look at The Big Broadcast of 2006 Part 1!

23 Comments

Ryan F

23/10/2015 05:44:06 pm

As a kid, I always assumed that the comic came first, and then the episode was based on it. This misapprehension was fuelled by the fact that Big Broadcast later got a VHS release in the UK, so I was already familiar with the story when I got it on tape!

The main issue here is that, even though the toon episode is ropey as hell, Frank Welker's loony Galvatron could make anything fun. "To care is to share!!!" Whilst a bad TV script can often be salvaged if the production and cast are on form, The same can't often be said for a bad comic script.

Simon Hall

24/10/2015 08:56:21 am

um, 'latter' has two 't's, other wise its 'later', as in 'later on today, I shall be going to the pub and shall be partaking of some fine beverages to forget that The Big Broadcast of 2006 was so badly adapted'.

Also: Pez is disgusting. Novelty sweet dispenser or not. Peter Pez can f**k off.

Nathan webb

24/10/2015 09:13:04 am

I haven't read this story in a long time but I remember enjoying it as a lad. I thought the interrogator was cool. Better go dig it up and have another read.

Alex Smith link

24/10/2015 05:29:23 pm

References to the Sweeney and the Prisoner abound, which make me smile, but you're right; the behind-the-scenes stuff would be really interesting here. Why not pop Simon Furman an email and scoop James?

John D. link

26/10/2015 01:59:33 pm

That's Mr Furman's pension plan, there's no way he will cough it up. Unless we all pretend most of regeneration one wasn't a pile of poo.

In regard to this story I think I was happy to accept it was some daft US Cartoon related thing and could be ignored. Are any of the cartoons (past the initial series that was on TV AM) worth watching? They didn't seem to get shown on normal uk free to air TV. I'm led to believe he Movie is unrepresentative (ie much more money was spent on it than an average cartoon episode).

snowkatt

28/10/2015 06:28:35 am

Season 3 has a few episodes worth watching.
Dark Awakening ( Best episode bar none )
Forever Is A Long Time Coming.
The Ultimate Weapon. (First Aid, is willing to die for his convictions.)
Fight or Flee( I have never seen anything this beautiful in the entire galaxy ...alright give me the bomb. )
Webworld.
The Killing Jar. ( The title alone would never get through nowadays.)
The Return of Optimus Prime. ( If you don't mind how it retcons dark awakening. )
And Five Faces Of Darkness, even if its a bit poor it sets up the post movie status quo.

season 2 is slim picking

Felicity

10/11/2019 07:47:11 pm

Whether the cartoon is worth watching or not depends on your priorities and what you’re looking for. Since I judge things first and foremost by the artwork, for me almost any episode of the cartoon beats almost any issue of the comic hands-down. Similarly, my recommendations for cartoon episodes would be based on which ones had the best animation. Story-wise I would recommend avoiding the ones that are too kiddified like “Nightmare Planet” (or anything heavily based around Daniel).

Simon Hall

26/10/2015 10:11:58 pm

Are any of the cartoons past season one worth watching, not really. Much of season 2 is cops and robbers nonsense, with Megatron having no end of daft schemes. Dinobot Island with its time travel hijinks is daft hokum and worth a watch. Outside of that, there's what, 'Starscream's Brigade' and 'The Revenge Of Bruticus' that are tolerable.

The post-movie Season 3 is ..interesting, as its a kind of insane space opera, with the Quintessons cuasing much of the bother. The Decepticons are pretty much hobled by having Galvatron as leader, whom seems to be more interested in blasting his own troops for percieved slights rather than dealing with his enemies. There's a fair bit of characterisation for Rodimus throughout (although everyone and his dog will tell you this is why he seems such a wet blanket). Best episodes? Hmm... 'Madman's Paradise', 'Fight Or Flee', 'Dark Awakening', 'Call Of The Primitives' , 'The Return Of Optimus Prime' (if only for the endlessly quotable dialogue) and 'The Rebirth' (technically Season 4, but its only three apologetic episodes of fast paced guff that introduces the Headmasters and Tagretmasters).

There's the Japanese stuff after that, it you're feeling hardcore and don't mind subtitles.

snowkatt

28/10/2015 06:09:14 am

Season 2 has a few worthwhile episodes, but they are mostly variations on the same theme. ( The Search For Alpha Trion parts 1 and 2, Masquerade, The Golden Lagoon, probably one of the few season 2 episodes with a bitter downbeat ending, and a few others. )

I'd add The Ultimate Weapon, ( First Aid is willing to die for his convictions ) and Webworld, ( Galvatron's insanity is so great, it infects a whole planet. ) to your list Season 3 is mostly hit and miss.

As far as the Japanese series go.
Headmasters is overlong and boring and runs out of steam, half way through.
It's sadly also the best of the Japanese series sadly

Masterforce is a mech show with Transformers. The only real Transformers are the pretenders, and those are superceded by the mecha squad.
It's also, again overlong.

Victory is ...urgh.
It's aimed at a younger demograph and it shows.
The Decepticons are ineffectual morons and as such no threat what so ever.
The stories inane.
The humor insipid.
The series as a whole is a disaster, how its viewed as being the best of the three, I'll never know.

Zone is ...mercifully short.

I'd rather watch Beast Wars, Beast Machines and TFA, if I am going to watch a Tf cartoon series.

Cradok

27/10/2015 10:24:07 am

They picked a pretty awful episode to adapt. Still, could have been worse, could have been anything with Daniel or Grimlock. Or that Japanese one with Perceptor. I've no real nostalgia for most of the cartoon anyway, just bits of the first two seasons, the movie and Rebirth. I'm pretty sure I saw some of season 3 - in Ireland if you wanted more than just national channels, you paid for Cablelink's basic which included Sky One - but it didn't make much of an impression on me.

It always annoyed me that the Titan reprints didn't include this. Man of Iron was at least UK originated and I expected that to be collected in a UK collection, but this was at least US originated. And it also meant that the last Titan trade was only five issues long, and consisted of a large swathe of Bob's poorest work.

snowkatt

28/10/2015 06:19:28 am

Got no love for the craptoon either..err cartoon.
But I tend to cherry pick the best from the seasons,
season 3 being my favorite.

This episode wasn't exactly stellar to begin with and this adaption does it no favors.
Other then Wreck Gar's spin pages, there isn't much to like or recommend in this comic.

Still better then Monstercon From Mars though.

Alex link

27/10/2015 07:47:10 pm

An adaptation of Dark Awakening would have been interesting. Or painful, I'm not sure...

snowkatt

28/10/2015 06:20:06 am

Would have been better then this trainwreck regardless.

Cradok

28/10/2015 11:37:55 am

Dark Awakening would have been a pretty awful choice, especially for when the fill-in actually got used. We've just had Prime come back, a story of 'Prime's sill dead, and a zombie, and evil, and the Quintessons built the Transformers' is about the worst thing you can do.

Alex link

28/10/2015 12:56:44 pm

Considering the final quality of the issue in question, I think saying it's the 'worst' thing that could be done is open to debate!

snowkatt

28/10/2015 02:11:00 pm

Considering the quality of the story they did use, I'm not so sure about that claim.

Ralph Burns

30/10/2015 11:11:23 am

Peter Pez must die.

SPECIAL TEAMS!

Tim Roll-Pickering link

30/10/2015 12:43:31 pm

Call of the Primitives or Grimlock's New Brain would have at least allowed Grimlock to resign as letterspage answererin style and disgust at his portrayal.

I've mellowed on the cartoon - sure it has its problems but there are also some pretty good episodes if you ignore portrayals and continuity. The Key to Vector Sigma is probably my favourite but there's good stuff in all four seasons.

And if I ever want to torture someone, Carnage in C-Minor will be very useful.

snowkatt

30/10/2015 12:57:10 pm

Mellowing is a big word .
But after gazing upon the horror of the Japanese G1 series, Kiss Players, Rid 2001\Car Robots and Energon. The G1 cartoon suddenly comes off a lot better.

Cradok

30/10/2015 01:16:59 pm

Woah, hey now, let's not say things we can't take back, you're doing an awful lot of disservice to a lot of stuff to even compare to that monstrosity. The worst examples of all Japanese excesses, it makes even Revenge of the Fallen look mature next to it. At least you can safely ignore it without impacting anything else, which is good, because Armada and Cybertron are actually worth a watch.

*ahem*

Stuart

30/10/2015 03:41:07 pm

The cartoon is basically solid by pre-Batman: The Animated Series standards, if you didn't grown up with it it'll likely leave you cold, but as ironing TV for those who did it works fine.

I'd say Visionaries is actually the best Hasbro/Sunbow show.

Felicity link

10/11/2019 07:42:44 pm

Oh my.

OK, here we go.

Over here, the cartoon was the “real” version of “Transformers” and the comic was the consolation prize, and it’s a shame that Furman couldn’t (a) treat this one issue of the comic as a separate universe where it doesn’t have to fit into the normal continuity and (b) stop disrespecting the cartoon. At least he had the good sense to keep his mouth shut when he took over as writer on the American “Transformers” comic. North American “Transformers” fandom would not have appreciated him insulting the cartoon.

“The Big Broadcast of 2006,” the comic book, is not the best example of “Transformers” comics. The writing is a bad adaptation of the cartoon episode, the artwork is sub-standard, and the whole thing just feels clumsy and unreal. It also feels like nobody was really trying very hard or cared very much (though that’s just a guess).

Kurt Hathaway’s lettering is one of the better aspects of it. It’s a shame that he started using fonts when he moved to Image Comics because the fonts of his lettering were bad, whereas his hand lettering was good.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

10/11/2019 09:36:23 pm

I wrote an essay on just why British fandom never took to the cartoon some years back on Usenet. It's actually something that's often surprised American fans because quite a lot about not only both the cartoon and comic but also the basic infrastructures were so different.

Cutting out the more detailed explanation of how UK television was structured in the 1980s (in summary we just don't have the network/affiliate with syndication model the US is used to) the basics are that the Transformers cartoon had very limited exposure in the UK. The first season was broadcast on terrestrial television in the 1985-1986 school year, as part of the children's segment of TV-am, a television franchise that only broadcast in the breakfast slot 0600-0925 each day. Whether Transformers was part of WideAwake Club - the weekend children's show - or WACaday - the school holidays weekday spin-off - varies according to memory, not helped by common sets and presenters. There was also a brief repeat run on WACaday in the summer of 1987. Not everyone watched breakfast television (it only began in the UK in early 1983) and both WideAwake Club and WACaday would solve the problem of limited time by cutting up cartoon episodes into 2 or 5 segments respectively and stripping them across a weekend or week.

And that was it for the cartoon on most people's televisions. TV-AM had extremely limited space for boys' toys cartoons and others such as Gobots and Mask took over. It was extremely rare for a television series to migrate between television companies (there was even a gentlemen's agreement between the companies to not try and snatch later seasons of popular imports) and there's nothing to suggest another company would have picked it up later.

Otherwise the third season (at least) was picked up by one of the early satellite channels in 1988 (was it Sky or Super) but this was in an era when very few had satellite. There were also a number of videos released, either to buy or to rent, but these were effectively special offerings. (Also VCRs didn't reach 50% of households here until 1987.)

(Contrast this with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Thundercats and Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, all of which were picked up by other companies and had the luxury of complete episodes shown in a single screening, after school screenings, weekend morning screenings and at times achieved the ultimate Holy Grail of runs of episodes each weekday morning during school holidays. Those shows were all the rage because they were much easier to see and stayed around a good while. [Rereading the post, I was reminded that because of the one new episode a week thing and various repeats, CITV were still screening new episodes of He-Man and the MOTU into 1988, years after the cartoon had ended in the States. And I think Gobots was still doing the rounds on TV-AM this late as well, so the Sun article mentioned wasn't as out of date as it first seems.])

By contrast the comic had very wide distribution, not least because the UK domestic comics industry was still focused on the high street and corner shop ("convenience shops"?) newsagents rather than drifting into specialist stores. The UK comic was also a popular hand-me down fare to younger brothers or in school rainy day boxes. Additionally it began publication a year before the first transmission of the cartoonand lasted four and a half years beyond the last terrestrial transmission. So for at least most of its run the comic was quite simply everywhere (and is fondly remembered by many outside TF fandom, pointing to its widespread reach) whilst the cartoon was a rarely seen curiosity.

It's actually quite common for many comics professionals to dismiss adaptations as some distorted inaccurate version of the true story, and here in the UK not only was the comic around beforehand but so too were Furman and Rimmer. Add in the in-character approach to the letters page and it's easy to see how the "comic right, cartoon wrong" mantra took hold.

Transformation 180: Wreck-Gar is a Little Tied Up

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