>Kill off the main protagonist of your series
What the frick were they thinking.
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 Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
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>Kill off the main protagonist of your series
>Kill off the main protagonist of your series
What the frick were they thinking.
|
Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
|
You need to buy new playsets and toys.
I think the whole narrative that they were shocked, SHOCKED, that killing off the G1 line was upsetting to little kids and really learned their lesson is a crafted narrative and actually they knew it would be controversial and bring in lots of headlines and demand for Prime to return. The toy was still on sale through the late 80s after the character was killed off, with new versions in 1988 and 1990
I'm unwilling to entertain the idea of this being a 4d chess ala "New Coke was a publicity stunt". It wasn't just Prime. So many of OG1s got killed in Transformers the movie. Prowl, Ratchet, Ironhide, and Wheeljack all got gunned down in the opening. They just didn't get the same long teary death scenes. If they knew they were going to cause a horrible negative emotion in children they risked their brand's viability, and even if someone in the chain knew this was a bad fricking idea: they weren't calling the shots about it.
It's an argument solely about Prime. The other toys were old and tired and not selling, Ratchet and Ironhide not even having fricking heads, so they were eager to replace those with the new line. Also Wheeljack was not gunned down in the opening, noob. He died in the city offscreen and only got shown briefly as an already dead body.
Prime got the big emotive scenes. Prime was coming back. Prime's toys stayed on shelves for multiple years after this death.
The decepticons were also genuinely phased out at this point for the more plasticky Scourge, Cyclonus, Galvatron etc toys
> Prime was coming back. Prime's toys stayed on shelves for multiple years after this death.
That wasn't the plan, though. He was dead for good until the fan letters poured in.
The other thing to consider is the short time between G1 premiering and the movie. G1 aired in like September 84 and the movie was August 86. The movie was being made just as the first season was still being made. They weren't even able to fit the entire first two years of the toyline in the cartoon and some like Reflector were almost extras. They figured they had enough stock to expend some characters.
Gotta give kids a reason to buy that new Rodamus Prime toy.
The documentary for this is so wild. I love it.
Link?
Has Max Landis, Elijah Wood and a few others.
Y'kno, when I first watched this years ago I had no idea this was John Landis' kid.
I had to look up a few of his other credits. Recognized more than a couple.
What was the general reaction to Optimus's death?
Kino
Kids cried about it. But it made the movie metal as frick.
>Kids cried about it. But it made the movie metal as frick.
Go to bed, Kevin Smith
>Kids cried about it. But it made the movie metal as frick.
Unironically this.
Mufasa ain't got shit on Optimus.
mufasa dying was actually important to the story and characters
so yea youre right, it aint got shit on optimus dying, because optimus dying is moronic
I was 6 years old and I didn’t cry. I thought it was badass, especially with Spike cursing.
Starscream had that coming for so long.
Funny enough, Lindsay the former Nostalgic Chick, hates the movie because she always identified with Starscream form the cartoon show.
the teens liked the movie even more than the younger kids. I was 10. Even if Prime died I did like Hot Rod, I got his toy before the movie came out. I also had Ultra Magnus who was basically the same as prime toy colored white. his trailer became the armor of white prime and that's what made his look drastically different than him.
I kinda suspect the amount of kids crying was less than it's made out to me and most kids thought it was cool, but the kids who cried had parents who made a big deal about it and wrote letters. Back in the analog days just a few letters was enough to make an impact on companies.
And retroactively a lot of people exaggerate their reactions to make a better story.
Well how much do you think it IS made out to be? Animated kids movies have been killing paternal figures for pathos with success for at least as long as Disney's been doing themeparks. But of course not eveyrone cried with the death of Mufasa, or Bambi's mom, Or Littlefoot's Mom, or Hiccup's dad, or Charlotte.
I'm sure the negative reaction of not liking his replacement: Rowdy Rodimus Piper was a factor of it "sticking" as it were.
I think it more has to do with time. You watch a movie like that and you get 20 to 30 minutes to get the character across to the kids. Meanwhile, Optimus was there every Saturday morning one year, and five days a week the next before the movie hit.
Why can't Mandy Moore Lois Lane be real, bro?
>Season 1 finale of Amphibia: Sasha nearly falls to her death.
>Season 2 finale of Amphibia: Marcy is nearly stabbed to death.
>Season 3/Series finale of Amphibia: Anne dies after sacrificing her life to save Amphibia and her loved ones.
Kino
they genuinely didnt think kids would develop strong attachments to the characters in the toy commercials
Why did they even think making storylines for their toys was so effective in the first place?
It gives kids a context they can play with.
Yes. And if they didn't care about the context in the first place, it wouldn't be doing it's job, and they might as well just release the toys without stories and save money on writing.
Pretending they didnt know kids can like things is beyond moronic. Even a toddler can have a favorite blanket.
Because it worked. Kids like stories to go along with their toys and they don’t always want to make them up themselves. Having a toy of a character you know was a great feeling as a young kid.
Then why was his death framed in such a sad way? homosexual
To motivate Rodimus to succeed.
The EXECUTIVES didn't think kids would care. The writers knew full well what they were doing.
Executives aren't the ones writing the charcters and stories. Executives at Hasbro at one point requested that every chracter be on-screen at all times before being told how stupid and expensive that was. It was the expensive part that probably made them realize how silly of a request it was.
holy shit that woulda been awesome tho
Explains all the group shots of the autobots where half of them just stand there.
Still, it's like turning the next season of He-Man into a show all about Robato or a TMNT season that removed the turtles and replaced them with the frogs. It's weird to remove main characters and totally replace them.
Now it is, yes. But in the 80s there was no precedent for it. It had never been done before, so no one knew there would be backlash.
>Still, it's like turning the next season of He-Man into a show all about Teela, except she's now a c**t and looks like a man
Does it remind you of something?
>they genuinely didnt think kids would develop strong attachments to the characters in the toy commercials
Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes and was pessured by fans to bring him back.
The idea that it's weird and unusual to want a fictional character you like to succeed and be treated with respect is totally modern, dumb and revisionist
Holmes wasn't conceived as a toy commercial for kids.
>The idea that it's weird and unusual to want a fictional character you like to succeed and be treated with respect is totally modern, dumb and revisionist
The story is that only executives felt that way back then.
Nowadays we have the opposite problem.
Comic characters, Flash Gordon, Luke Skywalker and dozens of characters from comics, pulp fiction and Disney movies were though
Only Luke out of those(at the time at least).
The writers did a great job. A cartoon created to sell toys had some of the best writing of any eighties cartoon. That’s some massive overachieving right there, and of course you can’t forget the top notch voice-acting and designs.
Kino
Look at the bright side.
It blew up in their face, badly.
For some reason it didn't occur to them they could just make an all new toy of Optimus to sell, so they saw keeping him around as promoting a specific toy that was losing luster after it's like 5th variant.
But one of those new toys was just his toy with a new trailer.
Exactly. And it was selling slower and slower.
This is completely untrue. They basically only sold the original Convoy toy until after the movie in a series of rereleases, and it was 2 and 4 years later, after killing him off, they started selling variants of him. Killing him in the show didn't stop them selling his toys
They did, they made Powermaster Optimus.
>GI JOE and Transformers movies in development around the same time
>GI JOE writers want to kill Duke off for story reasons
>Transformers writers catch wind of this
>Decide they want to kill off Optimus Prime to achieve the same effect
>Hasbro gives the go ahead since it will allow them a reason to start selling new characters
>GI Joe movie takes longer to develop than Transformers
>Transformers comes out before GI Joe
>Prime dies
>Kids in theaters cry over it because to them Optimus was a father like figure
>Hasbro gets spooked
>Force the GI Joe writers to not kill Duke off
>Can't do that since the animation is done
>So in the GI Joe movie there's additional dialogue that says duke goes into a coma and that he's alright at the end
>Optimus is eventually brought back in the tv show due to children hating rodimus
So yeah blame the writers of TF movie for all this bullshit. Even Peter Cullen didn't like the idea of Optimus dying when he read the script.
>guy who voices character doesn't want to lose his job
Shocking
Soundwave survived ether way.
>blame the writers of TF movie for all this bullshit.
Sounds to me like all the bad things are GI JOEs fault, as usual.
>The only thing that bothered me is that all the deaths happened in the movie, when it would have made more sense to spread it out throughout the show. It always seemed to me that characters shouldn't come out unscathed in a show where they're fighting a war.
One of the few shows at that time that could justify offing characters due to them being robot aliens and not human beings and instead they get ripped apart and put back together on a regular basis for 2 seasons. Now, suddenly in the year 2005, DEATH.
Meanwhile in New Texas BraveStarrr was hauling out dead kids left and right and no one batted a single eyelash.
>Meanwhile in New Texas BraveStarrr was hauling out dead kids left and right and no one batted a single eyelash.
That was just the one kid who was a drug addict and thus, his death was inevitable.
Lots of dead cartoon drug addict kids in the 80's and 90's...
In fairness I don't think anyone cared about BraveStarr like they did about the Transformers.
Even if they did, the kid in question was a one-off character who immediately got hooked on drugs and died, not exactly the same as I dunno having Bravestarr die taking out Tex-Hex who immediately gets revived into a new toy while Brad goes on to become the new Bravestarr.
nobody cared about BraveStarr's furry bondage partner being a guy either
they didn't have the vocabulary to articulate what was wrong with it
He’s just a policeman.
Ironically I don’t think Duke’s death would have hit kids anywhere near as hard, despite him being a human and not a robot. Prime had this dad/big brother vibe to him and GI Joe was less focused on Duke than Transformers was on Prime. People liked Duke but I could see a different Joe taking the lead, like Hawk.
this was my introduction to the transformers serie so i didn't cara that much
they did the same thing with Jesus and it became the world's most popular franchise for like 700 years.
They brought him back like 2 episodes later. Brian was dead longer
>If we shock our audiences, Sales will increase!
They shouldn't have killed her
I miss her. nuKid Gert just isn't the same. Not the same as Gert from the original run, and not the same as Adult Gert becoming a kid again. I feel like this must be what people felt with Ben Reilly becoming Spider-Man.
>Technically the same character but not actually.
nice get
also probably Harrison Ford only agreed to the movie if they let that happen lol
Yeah, Ford wanted to be put out of his misery. But his wishes are irrelevant to a soulless, faceless corpo. They can puppeteer his corpse through his contract. Anyway, the point I want to make is that there's a school of thought that has been passed down from the older management to the newer management. "Han was killed because they had to replace the aging actor". "Han was killed because he is a straight white male". Probably. But first and foremost management considers the fans as hooked junkies who will buy whatever you throw at them, so they kill off the old stuff in order to put forward new stuff and create an artificial need.
>Latest issue is literally nothing but padding
Man they really had no ideas about what to do for a sequel series
>Skottie wants to make 40 revival issues
>He already ran out of Ideas a quarter of the way in
Storytime of pain when?
It's not bad enough for a storytime of pain, it's just kinda whatever.
He should have stuck to doing those anthology comics with other artists instead.
I thought this was the most interesting thing in Transformers as a kid. The only thing that bothered me is that all the deaths happened in the movie, when it would have made more sense to spread it out throughout the show. It always seemed to me that characters shouldn't come out unscathed in a show where they're fighting a war.
the thing about the movie too is all the deaths happen right away. first 20 minutes or whatever is like a Transformers snuff film with Autobots being blown away left and right. It was like showing 6 year old kids Saving Private Ryan after showing them hours of war footage where no one died
Has there ever been a case of this being successful?
Song of Ice and Fire does it twice to great effect.
>does it twice to great effect
And the third time, it caused 15 years of writer's block.
They are trying really hard with Spider-Man and Miles right now
1. You are actually not Spider-Man
2. No really, he's not you
3. Spider-Man makes more guaranteed money than any superhero, Peter Parker isn't going anywhere
4. I want to reinforce that you are NOT Peter Parker.
I hated death of Ultimate Spider-Man, because it had Iceman and Firestar at the time and I wanted that team up to carry on. Afterwards I bought the 1st issue of Mile Morales Spider-Man or whatever it was called just because of the investment potential and just moved on.
Psycho.
Wally as the Flash. Barry came back but Wally succeeded better than any other character. I like Barry but no one can deny they pulled it off with Wally.
"Eh, kids won't care. They'll be too busy buying the new Rodimus toy."
The kids in question:
>WHO THE HELL IS RODIMUS
>I HATE HIM
As well they should. He was a jerk.
True, but I do like his design
Third season was basically a totally different show with the same concept. Robots that turn into shit. But with all new characters, situations, most of it was in space, it was just a totally different animal.
they did not even transform into actual recognizable vehicles it was all weird looking future cars and space ships.
And then they, more or less, made the same mistake with Beast Machines. And did it even worse.
You VILL move on from past things
>You VILL move on from past things
>let the past die. Kill it, if you have to.
I've always wondered if this was ironic given the context of it being said in a THIRD star wars trilogy or if it was part of Disney's board room meetings bleeding into the script.
What the frick were they thinking.
Harrison Ford has been wanting Han killed off since Empire Strikes Back
He wasn't the main character, there was already a trilogy of movies that had nothing to do with him, and everyone expected the sequels to have a new cast.
I posted before refreshing.
Getting rid of Luke was dumber
Luke, Han AND Leia. Clear out that old growth forest, we need to plant an avacado grove here!
You know what, I think it was more the way they got rid of Luke. It was just a... and now he's dead. They wanted Leia but Fisher died in real life.
>"forget the past, kill it if you have to"
I'm not sure if the Emperor didn't end up winning in the end
It seems he did, according to what the movies told us.
>"destroy me and I will inhabit your body!"
>kills him
>declares herself a Skywalker when that bloodline is now dead and buried
Even if he lays dormant a decade or more he'll still end up corrupting her and becoming fem-Emperor Palpatine.
Good thing none of it counts since all post-buyout material is noncanon trash
>"destroy me and I will inhabit your body!"
>kills him
technically he destroyed himself with the force lightning
Leia was supposed to stick around because "the force is female"
Much like Carrie Fisher the force is now dead
>Gets killed off at the start of his new series.
>It's not even the end of his story, just the start to one wild ride.
How does he do it?
>Written by Ewing
There's your answer
>gay israelite kills off an aryan gigachad
Imagine my shock
It was awesome as frick!
it was pretty sweet that he gave Megatron the ole' James T. Kirk double axehandle. I don't think I've seen anybody in media pull the double axe handle on anybody anymore
I want to have sex with optimus prime
Sometimes you gotta
>DARE TO BE STUPID :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMhwddNQSWQ
What a stupid ass new coke tier move.
I think even my mom was bothered by this when it happened.
>What the frick were they thinking.
Toy company, out with the old, in with the new.
>show ending
>everyone fricking dies
Spike was the protagonist of the first two seasons, and the show was better post-movie anyway.
At the time, there was a severe disconect between marketing/executives and the consumer, and they assumed the Children watching the show had no appreciation of the characters and were just mindlesly watching the colours on screen to tell them to buy toys.
They failed to realize that one of the reasons Children wanted the Toys in the first place was because of their attachment to the characters from the show.
The folley of Transformers The Movie was a neccesary and essential part of media history as it taught companies the lesson that consumers, especially Children, are attached to the characters, not just the hunks of plastic and metal.
Totally contrived and false narrative IMO. They had plenty of data from Star Wars, Flash Gordon, Batman, Superman etc on this
If every company had all data and acted accordingly no company would make a mistake ever. But that isn't how reality works. You are operating on hind-sight. You technically have access to all Human knowledge right now but that does not mean that you are able to utilize it.
History states you are wrong. What is your stake in this?
"History" lol, the what is this absurd appeal to authority in the abstract?
I'm just someone who consumed the media and does not see this angle tallying with the facts - what toys were still in development, how the writers choose to present the events, how outside the US the movie aired with the added narration that Optimus Prime would return, how Mattel would like people to think they stumbled into huge unexpected demand instead of straight up manipulation children into loving a character more through a taste of grief
> At the time, there was a severe disconect between marketing/executives and the consumer
>At the time
Being disconnected from the consumer (and sometimes even reality) has always been a job requirement for executives and marketing, anon.
>At the time, there was a severe disconect between marketing/executives and the consumer,
unfortunately thats still the case.
>Kill Optimus off
>They kill Ironhide too and Peter voiced both characters
Really activates the almonds.
This and the soundtrack is the only reason people talk about this film still. It is funny that it's the ending to a breakneck pace film where shit just happens and before you can go you liked or disliked that scene it's on to the next one.
Bull. People also talk about
>Fricking planet transformer
>Incredible and bizarre voice cast - fricking Orson Wells, Scatnan Crothers and Eric Idle in the same film wtf
>Starscream being hilarious and highly quotable
>Why is there one sexy pink female robot?
>Did Brawn make it?
Okay maybe that last one is a bit esoteric
I saw this movie in the theater and that is basically my takeaway from it as well
>the only character anyone cares about is fridged 20 minutes in
>rest of the movie is a slog
>everything else happens in the last 2 minutes
but people still act like its some classic or hidden gem
Why didn't the movie just have him upgrade to Ultra Magnus? Why make the other character that is just a recolor Optimus riding in a mech suit a totally different character?
That was the original plan. I suspect they figured having him go from the faceplate to the mouthed face when upgraded was kind of weird. The early TFTM trailers even have Magnus colored like Diaclone Powered Convoy
Funny enough the original Ultra Magnus was a separate character concept that got reused as Orion Pax’s design
I know, once the Bible pulled that shit I was out of Christianity like that.
"The most interesting thing a bad writer can do with a character is to kill them."
unpopular opinion
you know what movie did the death of optimus better?
revenge of the fallen
he takes on 5 enemies at once, alone
kills 2
protects a tiny squishy human instead of the future leader of his people getting himself into a headlock like an abject fricknut
comes back to life in the same movie because the matrix of leadership willed it
combines with an sr71 blackbird to do battle with the final villains
cap: MAKYS
I do not like the live action movies but I'd be a liar to say the forest fight wasn't well done.
the only bayformers movie I can come close to defending is the first one
thats how bad the animated movie was tho
I liked Bumblebee but I don't think that even counts as Bayformers at this point.
>grindor
>Grindr
>suddenly I remember the doujin series where the autobots and decepticons are portrayed as shemales
Okay, I know what I'm fapping to tonight
uuuh, name?
I got you my dude
>[Koshi no Itami (Koshii Tai)] Omankoformer : All Hail Megadick (Transformers) [Digital]
>g/350690/
Author has other ones too make sure to get em
>main protagonist
the thing about how Transformers was marketed before the 2000's, Optimus was one of the more important characters but the merchandise rarely prioritized a single character over others. It wasn't like a superhero toyline where it's BATMAN the toyline
The more expensive releases of a year got some more featuring and push on the license, like Optimus on the first G1 mural, but in year 2 that was changed to make The TF cartoons and comics cycled through characters they featured. If you look at a wall of TF toys in the 80's, none of it spells out who's the main character. Maybe the biggest toy, but even by 85 Jetfire and Shockwave took the spots as biggest toys.
Gradually Hasbro experimented with making particular characters more important(like making new figures of Optimus, Bumblebee, Grimlock, etc, and again as Action Masters and G2), but until Beast Machines and having Cheetor on the front of every box, TF was at least more fairhanded with the spotlight.
It works as long as the protagonist eventually comes back.
I wasn't too shocked as a kid because I also watched Robotech where Roy Foker dies mid-way thru the series. This forced Rick Hunter to toughen up as an officer.
The funniest part to me is that this clued Hasbro into realizing these CHARACTERS meant something to the kids, but they couldn't figure out WHAT it was so you'd just have two decades of "eh just reuse a name Prowl's a cop car that's all he is right?" for two decades until it was finally post Bay Film success that and Animated that someone finally showed the importance of a character being that character.
Prime was the leader of the Autobots, but the show didn't focus on him all the time. A lot of the other characters took the spot light.
The creators figured kids didn't care about the characters and just wanted more toys
And now Optimus gets to die all the time. Poor bastard.