Transformation 90: Living the High Life.

31/1/2014

It's a good week for Jetfire as he gets his first decent bit of buisness in an American story since his introduction.

It's also a bad week for Jetfire as Budiansky has completely forgotten how to write him.

Also: Some stuff with Aerialbots and a dam. But does anyone care?

All in:

Aerialbots Over America Part 2!

7 Comments

snowkatt

31/1/2014 09:35:23 am

anything with the spotlight on circuit breaker behaving like a stupid fucking twat can never be good

anyway i always found this story to not be spectaculairly bad or good though it shows the early sigsn fo megatrons soon to be mental breakdown ( megatron gets a far superior sign off compared to optimus at any rate )

but other then that all i can say about this one is that its better then the issue that follows ( doesnt say much )

any chanche of uploading a bigger version of the spot the difference pictures ?
its a bit hard to spot the differences at this size

Simon Hall

31/1/2014 01:31:02 pm

I feel sorry for Donny Finkleberg. There he is trying to help and all he gets for his efforts is the Autobots acting like total dicks to him. No wonder he ends up selling Skids out....

Is Circuit Breaker really that bad? I never found her as offensive (tin foil outfit aside) as a lot of folk do. What I do find odd is that she develops this pathological hatred of Transformers (usually hapless Autobots at that) for no real reason. When she was paralysed and developing the technology to artificially replicate her nervous system it seemed to me to be an effort to get back to work and gave her hope. Josie seemed quite optimistic and then Blackrock shuns her and suddenly she goes all mental. What's that all about?

As for AAOA, yeah, not having seen the cartoon episodes that this borrows from until afterwards means the similarities are a bit easier for me to forgive and it simply becomes a forgettable 'toy advert' story. I wonder why Bob had such dislike for the Special Teams..?

As one of your regular posters mentioned, the gestalt technology offers a lot of fascinating avenues for storytelling (and some of their profiles hint at this), but it never came, sadly.

I like that the competition Transformers is running is for something that you could go out and buy at the time...I'd be further amused is t prize actually turned out to be the post magazine..!

And S.T.A.R.S.

Sigh.

What a load of rubbish. I hated robot points over here in England. They were pointless. You couldn't get anything good with them. Just the 'Time Warrior' watch (which was just a rather naff digital watch with an Autobot logo tat split down the middle to reveal the watch) or the tremendous Blue Peter cardboard base.

I'm sure there's some terribly interesting blah about why Hasbro's global markets got stiffed on mailaway items, but why even bother at all?

At least Weetabix got it right with the Drag Strip / Fireflight mailaway offer (although you had to eat a lot of Weetabix and pay P&P which cost almost as much as buying the toy at retail!)

snowkatt

31/1/2014 08:28:21 pm

the idea of combiners is fascinating but it has never in any media so far been much fo a focus on how exactly the metal structure of a combiner is

if they are five minds smashed in to one or five minds that have to co operate as one
nor ha sit ever been explained how much the minds interact and what they know about each other

the only times we actually saw what makes the combiners tick is in perchance to dream part 5 with silverbolt where the aerial bots merged in to superion and they found out he is afraid of heights ( thought they already knew )

and war with in the dark ages issue 3 where sandstorm says " you really were the first of the production line werent you ? six of the sharpest minds on cybertron mushed together in to devatsator smash "
which is one of our few other clues just how combiners work

thats not much to go on beyond the bio's

circuti breker together with raat have a rather myopic view of transformers and they always seem to target autobots and autobots only which makes them so annoying

the only time corcuibreaker targets a decepticon is in monstercon from mars and by then she has well and truly past the point of no return and became an anoyance
( monstercon from mars is a slush story anyway )

budiansky's apathy towards the combiners migth be the first signs of burn out or mayeb he just wasnt too thrilled with these new characters thrust up on him messing up his ongoing narrative

by the time afterdeath rolls by ( brrr ) budiansky isnt even trying to explain the combiners anymore he just puts up with them and is apparantly glad to be rid off them

he is more enthusiastic about the headmasters

Tim Roll-Pickering link

1/2/2014 10:55:57 am

"Secret Transformer Autobot Rescue Squad" - so we need to be told that Autobots are Transformers. And STARS consists of humans... Yet another entry in the long list of organisations where the acronym was picked first and random words applied afterwards. At least R.A.A.T. seems to have been constructed the right way round.

And yeah a dull main piece. Clearly Bob was interested in telling an ongoing story but kept getting the new toys dumped on his desk and here just didn't bother to work them into the long term plot.

Stuart

2/2/2014 01:36:01 pm

Some excellent thoughts here on what might have been done with the Special Teams had anyone cared.

@Tim: RAAT may work more as an acronym but I'm not sure any government agency would go for a name with negative untrustworthy connotations.

@Snowkatt: Right click over the image and it should give you the option to see it full size (I think).

Felicity

27/10/2019 04:59:19 am

Re: government agencies with untrustworthy acronyms: there was Richard Nixon’s Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CREEP).

Rapid Anti-Robot Assault Squad should really be RARAT! Harder to say but fewer negative connotations!

Felicity

25/9/2016 09:17:30 pm

Harsh! Budiansky wasn’t a bad writer. I didn’t get the feeling he mentally checked out whenever he had tow rite combiners. He had his favourite characters, just like Furman did. Valid point though about the error with Jetfire remembering Cybertron, and the unprogrammed Aerialbots not seeming much different.

Transformation 90: Living the High Life.

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