TRANSFORMATION 49: The Dangerous World of the Knightrider.

19/4/2013

This week Furman cheerfully gives us a variant on all those episodes of '80's action shows set on a cattle ranch as Jetfire looses his badge and Soundwave auditions for the remake of Treasure Island. All as I look at:

Dinobot Hunt! Part 3.

4 Comments

Auntie Slag

19/4/2013 11:39:17 am

I liked this issue, I thought it contained plenty of action (massively important when you're a little kid reading about his favourite toys); featured some mildly sinister undertones with the Decepticons still being a credible threat under Soundwave, and actually utilising disparate members of his forces unlike Megatron, who would invariably employ the latest toy release to attack Prime or the Ark, or Shockwave would only use himself.

Jetfire being an object of mistrust was fairly interesting, and most importantly for me this issue contained good concepts; namely Jazz's subspace pants, and a robot tough metal structure actually being pierced like a human's. This was a big deal, in the cartoons the colourful lasers didn't do anything, but here a colossal robot like Jetfire could get pierced through the chest, and it looked seriously painful. It also proved that in the heat of the moment even super advanced, super powerful robots could act dumb.

So action, drama, a bit of banter, MARBS, and I've always been a fan of Will Simpson's art even if some of the camera angles were weird and Jetfire's body size would change in relation to Slag's.

Not as good as Snarl's story, that was ace with Colonel whatsisface and putting Mirage in the desert was classic.

Stuart

19/4/2013 03:35:01 pm

I'm not sure you're allowed different opinions from me. :0

;)

Dave

29/12/2018 12:37:24 am

This issue/cover has stuck in my head enough that over the years, when I see/hear the name Jetfire I think of him grappling with Slag.

Felicity link

29/10/2019 12:45:04 am

Westerns. You’re right; they aren’t interesting to most people our age (people who grew up in the 1980s) but you just couldn’t avoid them. While the popularity of Western movies and TV shows had faded by the 1980s, the topic still showed up regularly, and every science fiction show invariably had to do at least one Western-themed episode. And even when there was no overtly Western content, a ton of those “A-Team” and “Knight Rider” episodes still took place out in the countryside or a boring desert.

(When you talked about shows like “Knight Rider” influencing “Transformers” I was sure you were going to mention Tracks, who as the toffee-nosed sportscar was clearly the KITT of the series. Then again that’s mostly in the cartoon, and you’re doing the comics.)

I live in neither the UK nor the USA but in Canada, where theoretically we did have a “Wild West” era of our own (though it tends to be portrayed more in media as the “Wild North”), with cowboys and natives and outlaws and farms and horses and lawmen (in the form of Mounties).

The province of Alberta still celebrates its cowboy heritage every year with the Calgary Stampede. Alberta is the second-farthest province to the west. I live in British Columbia, the province on the west coast. Alberta is to the right of us, in more ways than one. As BC is home to a branch of the film industry we’ve had our share of Westerns filmed here. I don’t think Canadians romanticise the Old West very much, though.

I have to hand it to Bob Budiansky. In “Showdown!”, he at least has Charlene explain the appeal of the Old West to those of us who don’t get it. Although I wouldn’t want to live in such hard conditions I can understand how the directness of the justice of that time can be fun to imagine.

Mentioning the Calgary Stampede above reminds me that you could watch “Murder, She Wrote” as a follow-up to your “Columbo” watching. There were at least 12 seasons, and being from the same creators as “Columbo,” there’s a lot of shared DNA, including a huge overlap of cast members. Two episodes take place in Canada, one at the Calgary Stampede, where Col. Decker himself, Lance le Gault, plays…a Mountie! He wears the red serge uniform on duty, which as all Canadians know is really only used for ceremonial occasions, but we don’t mind it showing up in movies and TV because it looks cool. The other episode in Canada features frequent “Columbo” murderer Patrick MacGoohan. Although it set in Quebec, the *least* English province, the courts seem to be very British, with judges and lawyers wearing powdered wigs, and two of the cast (MacGoohan and Simon “Arthur Dent” Jones) playing very British-sounding Canadians. That’s OK, though. It’s nice to have the Great White North appear in a “Murder, She Wrote”!

TRANSFORMATION 49: The Dangerous World of the Knightrider.

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