Transformation 300: Here's to the Future.

8/2/2018

Yes ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... after nearly six year I reach the final milestone issue of the comic. Be as keen as Getaway, including an announcement about the future, and look at my write up on ISSUE 300!

Plus, a celebratory ADDENDUM (though perhaps not the one you were expecting).

Thanks for coming this far folks!

16 Comments

Colin H

9/2/2018 05:30:30 pm

Getaway - a dick in any reality, apparently.

LKW

30/9/2018 06:53:24 am

My personal reaction to this was more along the lines of "Wow, it's kind of strange through this look back to see a Getaway I don't hate with the fire of a thousand burning suns," but, considering the results he produces.... Getaway: net sum negative.

Tetsuryu

9/2/2018 06:12:31 pm

The biggest sin of The Girl Who Loved Powerglide is that it's not even the best comedy episode of the series.

Chris Chapman

9/2/2018 06:29:09 pm

I remember picking this one up from our local Post Office - there was very deep snow that year! Nice that the comic lets me put a date to the memory.

Cosmic Horse

10/2/2018 12:11:48 pm

Hmmm, is that screen grab the final appearance of the Delbo coccyx-snapper pose? A sad day...

John D. link

11/2/2018 09:03:41 am

Ha ha! I wonder if Delbo drew that way to avoid showing exit wounds? Maybe he reckoned that looked too violent! Found this story excessively grim and excessively stupid in equal measures and my opinion hasn't changed. Seemed another sign of the gradual weird drift the title had been going on. ( Is that not a generic decepticon head on a spike, rather than Ironside?)
Think I have tried to speculate here before on the costs of creating a comic - if sales were now maybe 30,000 (an completely guessing) instead of the peak of 200,000 (have seen that quoted a few times), surely it was still a pretty profitable publication? Why then was it axed? Was there finite capacity at the Marvel UK printing facilities? Was "Ghostbusters" going to make more money?
And was there ever a Turtles comic? Seems strange there was never a tie-in, given the Turtle Mania that unfolded.

Tigerbread

11/2/2018 05:13:52 pm

There was a UK Turtles fortnightly comic, that reprinted the US Archie comics, which showed an adaption of the season 1 TV origin of the Turtles, then just branched out from there. Then in the latter half of 1990, it became a giant poster comic, with original UK content.

Stuart

11/2/2018 08:34:15 pm

I'll be disapointed if there's not a Delbo pose next week...

Charles RB

10/2/2018 01:44:25 pm

I never knew Darn 'N' Blast was from Yet Anotehr alternate future. Now we have the PERFECT answer for continuity issues! How does Blaster have a sister in the no-female continuity? It's from after Prime's Rib! How are there so many football teams that we don't see on Cybertron and can't be there? IT'S THE FUTURE! They're there then!

Tim Roll-Pickering link

12/2/2018 07:40:20 pm

Is that cover another piece of early toy promotion for the Classics re-release of Sideswip and Tracks? And was there ever a plan to rerelease Mirage?

(I never realised that was meant to be Ironhide's head. The colours suggest I'm not the only one.)

That sidebar is surprising. Although he's not named, it was probably Euan Peters who designed the "Dread Fidings" logo and to slag off a past employee's work in print feels like the sort of thing that would yield a legal complaint if done today.

I have a recollection that the Action Master backstory given here was also in use on the toy boxes and/or some catalogues at the time.

The Girl Who Loved Powerglide was on one of the early tapes I found when my TF interest renewed in the late 1990s - this was the tape with the far more interesting Call of the Primitives. There was a strange period of a few years around then when there was a growing fan demand but no new releases and so we had hunt down the old VHSes. (And it was annoying when episodes were duplicated across releases - without access to a full list it was impossible to know where else to find them.) I found the episode incredibly silly and exhibit A for the case against the cartoon (I hadn't found the release with Carnage in C Minor).

I've always interpreted Powerglide's surprise as a reference to Astoria's age, especially given what she puts the company through, but it seems the animators drew her a bit too old and thus the company seems to be in the hands of a... can we say "woman-child"?

Ryan F

14/2/2018 10:33:40 pm

Never really had a problem with Astoria’s depiction. Sure, she’s a spoilt rich kid and a bit of a klutz, but she’s also assertive, independent, and is able to defeat the Decepticons all by herself, pretty much. It’s telling that, when in Decepticon custody, she’s defiant and valiant, rather than a ‘screamer’.

With three execrable exceptions (Abdul Fakkadi, the poncho-wearing Peruvian stereotypes and that Marissa Fairborne episode where she falls for the obvious con artist), the Transformers cartoon was surprisingly inclusive. There were some notable BAME actors on the cast list (Casem, Crothers, Burghardt, Jones), and a lot of positive role models like Chip Chase, Raoul and that street-urchin-who’s-actually-an-Arabian-prince who helps the Aerialbots. There were numerous female writers on the show, a female executive (Margaret Loesch) and - despite Hasbro wanting to keep the cast to toy characters only - snuck a number of female Transformers into the mix as well (compare this with the comic’s attitude to female TFs).

If you consider all the lame stuff Spike does (bring Soundwave into the Ark, turn into Autobot Spike, get tossed around by Rumble, saved from death by an annoying kid etc.) then Astoria comes across well by comparison, I think.

Felicity

23/12/2019 09:51:37 pm

From all the comments about Astoria Carlton-Ritz, I’m guessing this is one of those comments sections that links to two different blog entries. I’ll come back and comment on “The Girl Who Loved Powerglide” after I read the blog entry.

I had to look up “Dread Fidings”—but yes, I can see why people thought it said that.

There was a George Adamski who was a UFO contactee and, from what I understand, the inspiration for Cosmos’s Japanese name, Adams. But I suspect Blaster is asking about the DJ Adamski, who had an excellent song and video in 1992 with “Get Your Body” featuring Nina Hagen on vocals.

I love the scene with FRED VII and the Baroness having a little party and watching spy camera footage in their quarters. Having a camera installed in the BAT was a nice touch that recalls that FRED is a mechanical genius.

Check out Powerglide’s tiny Donald Trump hand in that screenshot!

Felicity link

24/12/2019 02:07:25 am

VHS releases of the original “Transformers” series in the 1980s were a little better over here, from the sound of things. Family Home Entertainment (FHE) released the entire first season, one episode per tape (though multi-parters were collected as one long episode, so you didn’t have to buy, say, “More Than Meets the Eye” as three separate tapes, the way you did with the multi-part “X-Men” episodes released to VHS in 1992). Those FHE tapes, if you have them (which I do, or at least first-generation copies of them) might be the only authentic versions left (as opposed to the DVDs with their miscoloured characters and wrong sound effects).

After season one, though, the pickings got slimmer. During the 1980s proper, you only had “Transformers: The Movie,” “Five Faces of Darkness,” and “The Rebirth” from FHE. In the early 1990s there were some second-season episodes, like “Megatron’s Master Plan,” on VHS from Rhino. The selection was still very random. And you had to visit all the video stores in your city just to get that much; it wasn’t like they were all kept in one place, or every store had a complete set.

And until the arrival of the DVDs, that was it. If you didn’t tape the show in the 1980s when you had the chance, you were out of luck. It’s no wonder I gratefully recorded all those episodes of the “Generation 2” TV series despite the egregious amounts of unnecessary CGI slapped on them in the apparent belief that a child of 1993 would not be able to pay attention to a show from 1984 unless computer animation was spammed in every few seconds.

“Better and worse than we remember it” is a good call, and I agree that the David Wise scripting is one of the better aspects. It’s still a silly premise and a very uneven episode. I’m not as forgiving as you of the more whimsical parts, like the merry-go-round, the LED heart, the bickering, and Astoria’s ditziness.

I think part of the problem is that she made a bad first impression on me by tyrannizing her employees at her mandatory birthday party, then getting angry that they were only there because she forced them to be (which is true, but is not their fault), and the episode wasn’t long enough for me to be won over.

I can relate to machines breaking down around her, though, as I mentioned in a previous comment with the GI Joe Wildcard. Imagine if Wildcard and Astoria had a baby and it was twice as powerful, a la Franklin Richards. They could destroy civilisation.

Another problem is that Powerglide, while a fun character as written and voice-acted, is not that great visually. Being one of the second-season characters, he’s got that awkward, toyetic physique and face. (His vehicle form is good though.)

Also I’m not that wild about the Coneheads getting humiliated so easily. “What force fields?!” is a great scene though.

As for the LED heart ending, I guess I’m inconsistent, because I don’t have the same objection to the cuteness of Bumblebee being introduced to Lisa’s brother’s convertible “Juanita” in “Fire on the Mountain.” The only problem I have with that part is the inappropriate squash and stretch animation on Bumblebee’s car mode when he laughs.

But even the G1 episodes I skip when I’m rewatching the series (and this is one of them) are still great works of art in the larger scheme of things.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

24/12/2019 09:23:59 am

One episode per tape sounds bizarre given some of the prices for VHS in the mid 1980s. The list on Tfwiki has some releases over here with only one episode title but I think at least some (such as "Only Human") actually had several episodes are were using whichever title was deemed the most marketable. A few, such as Dark Awakening, definitely had single episode releases but these feel like the cheapo tapes aimed at the pocket money/stocking filler market (usually distinguished by crappy cardboard covers as opposed to the plastic cases with glossy paper sleeves).

Rereading the post, I slightly disagree that the tapes were aimed primarily at the rental market. The earliest ones even have Robot Points on the sleeves and seem to have coincided with the growth of sell-through video; the prices on the early adverts reinforce this as do the existance of Marks & Spencers exclusive tapes. In those days the idea of collecting a whole series on video was a bit pie in the sky, so I guess it was a case of sticking out whichever episodes were to hand.

Felicity

24/12/2019 10:08:32 am

One episode per tape was not too bad if you were only renting the tape, but the $12–$25 sell price was indeed a huge mark-up. Especially starting in the 1990s, when just to add insult to injury many of them were recorded in lower-quality EP (AKA SLP) mode just to cut corners even more.

About all I can say in fairness to these tapes is that at least this was the era of physical media you could buy once and own forever. No streaming, no DRM, no “subscription model”; just pay once and that’s it.

I prefer the plain cardboard boxes to the “puffy packs”; they look nicer and take up less room on a shelf. However there’s also something satisfying about having a tape rescued from a video store going out of business, still in the clear plastic box with the name of the store on a sticker on the box. ☺

Tim Roll-Pickering link

24/12/2019 10:49:20 am

Ouch. Over here EP/SLP as standard arrived later on VCRs and when you add in how long many machines lasted (particularly as hand me downs to children and students) it just wouldn't have been commercially viable to release tapes at the speed without either drawing endless complaints from retailers frustrated with opened incompatible returns (the same thing seems to have played a role in limiting NTSC DVDs over here) or a mess of multiple format releases that looked identical.

Transformation 300: Here's to the Future.

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