Advice for Hasbro, Paramount Pictures and the film-making crew on the up-coming July

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GluteusMaximusPrime
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Advice for Hasbro, Paramount Pictures and the film-making crew on the up-coming July

Post by GluteusMaximusPrime »

Advice for Hasbro, Paramount Pictures and the film-making crew on the up-coming July 4, 2007 Transformers Live-Action film.

After seeing the proto-designs for the up-coming transformers movie, I have been rudely reminded of earlier annoyances by Hasbro’s inept decision making regarding its Transformers products. About 3-3and1/2 years ago when the alternators/binaltech line debuted I was extremely excited. I thought to myself “wow, modern car manufacturer updates of G1 transformers characters!” As the months progressed however, Hasbro started to release certain character designs that made absolutely no sense to me. I vented this frustration last year when the designs for a Dodge Ram pick-up truck as Optimus Prime were initially released. For more info, see my rant below at these two addresses at Tfarchive.com

http://www.tfarchive.com/community/show ... adid=32622

http://www.tfarchive.com/community/show ... adid=33265

Anyway, when news of a live-action Transformers movie was released by Hasbro I again went ecstatic. I was so hopeful that this movie would be a great re-creation of my childhood obsession with the 80’s cartoon. I was also hoping that the alternator/binaltech character designs would be incorporated into the up-coming movie. It just made perfect sense to me that 21st century updated transformers car designs should go into the 2007 Transformers movie. This would give Hasbro and Takara great returns on their financial investments into the alternator/binaltech designs since most people are really unaware of these toys.
However, slowly but surely, little by little, my hopes were dashed as news of the script and other aspects of the movie were leaked to the public. This latest debacle with the releasing of Transformers movie character designs including Optimus Prime, Megatron and Starscream and others, is the most disturbing development to date. Why don’t they use what would please most of the fans? There are already “movie-status” designs out there for these three characters: MP-01 Optimus Prime, the blueprints I keep seeing circulating around the web for a tank design of Megatron and finally, the MP-03 Starscream jet soon-to-be released.
Furthermore, I don’t understand what Hasbro is doing with the direction of this movie. The perfect script for this movie and its character designs is right under Hasbro’s nose in the original cartoon plot line. All you have to do is follow that story and you’ll have a great movie. This was done with the first installment of the 3 Spiderman movies and look at what a success that has been. If I were directing this movie I would take cues from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by telling an epic story of war, tragedy and redemption, using the past as reference to present circumstances.

Here’s a general outline for a Transformers movie plot. You all should be familiar with this already.

Just like Lord of the Rings in The Fellowship of the Ring, start at the beginning. The first 15-25 minutes or so of the movie will tell us how the race of Transformers came into being; how they were all created by the Quintessons as slaves on the planet of Cybertron. The Decepticons were the descendants of military hardware which protected the interests of their Quintesson masters and the Autobots were the descendents of manufacturing hardware. When the Transformers successfully rebelled against their masters, they then went to war against one another. (Picture this on the big screen folks, similar to the epic massive battle scenes in The Lord of the Rings, legions of Autobots on Cybertron against legions of Decepticons.)
The Decepticons, being designed for warfare, and thus not inclined to peaceful relations with others, sought conquest and domination, while the Autobots wanted to coexist in peace. This began a long Cybertronian civil war between the Autobots and Decepticons that raged on for millennia and continued up to the point where Cybertron was drained of its natural energy resource, the element upon which all transformers thrive: energon. The Autobots, led by the current possessor of the Autobot Matrix (Optimus Prime, formerly Orion Pax) then set out in search of replenishing Cybertron’s lost energon. The Autobots were pursued by the Decepticons, led by their leader Megatron, to a previously unknown planet that we call earth and crash landed there millions of years ago (during the age of dinosaurs), before the emergence of modern humans.
It was not until the 20th century, or 21st for our day, when the Autobots, and their uninvited guests, the Decepticons, aboard the Ark were reawakened by Teletran 1, which reformatted their alternate transformation modes to fit what it thought were the dominant species on planet earth: automobiles and other air or sea-borne vehicles, including other electrical-mechanical objects of human technology. When the Decepticons realized the abundance of the planet’s natural resources they immediately began to exploit this opportunity. When the Autobots realized that the humans were the true dominant species on the planet and that the humans were unable to protect themselves from the Decepticons’ pillaging, the Autobots allied themselves with the humans against the Decepticons. The goal of the Decepticons was to gather enough energon from earth’s natural resources and somehow return to Cybertron to end their war once and for all against the Autobots who were already teetering on the edge of defeat there.

The above was a brief summary of the original Generation 1 story and plot line of the Transformers. I don’t know about you guys, but this sounds like the makings of a great sci-fi summer blockbuster movie to me. Also, the alternator/binaltech and masterpiece Prime and Starscream characters should be used. Let me know what you guys think.
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StoneCold Skywarp
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Post by StoneCold Skywarp »

can someone read this and decide if it should be here or not.

until then, consider it closed
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Post by Denyer »

The news forum is for news, so *moves* ...or I can merge it into one of the threads discussing movie news...

Some official people do read the forums occasionally, but they'll get feedback from the existing threads -- any of the site staff could stick what they thought about the movie designs on the front page like Ryan's currently done with Seibertron, but I don't think it'd have a positive effect.
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Post by LKW »

Well, I do agree that many of the changes and redesigns being done for this new movie range from unnecessary to stupid. But, I do have to say that I have at least two problems with the outline above:

1) The age of dinosaurs ended sixty five million years ago. (Dinos appeared in Marvel's TF thanks to their Savage Land, which time forgot.)

2) The Quintesson origin is kind of bleh/two thumbs down/no.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

As I said in the main news thread this also popped up in, it's a bit late to be giving script ideas after they've started filming. If it doesn't have a locked down script now it's in real trouble...
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Very thoughtful of him/her/It - The Terror From Beyond Space to type out a great big block of text, basically covering the origin and arrival on Earth as shown in the cartoon when they just could have gone "maybe have the origin and arrival on Earth as shown in the cartoon". But then we wouldn't have the self-aggrandaising as seen in those other two topics linked to...

"**** people in the indsutry who make films, let's listen to some kid* ranting quasi-regularly on a message board"

I'm 99% the movie's never been pitched as a G1 movie, just as a Transformers movie, and character names and use of a present-day Earth setting saw a lot of people jumping guns.

I still fail to see how this is a less valid reinvention of Transformers than the bajillion others seen over the years. Yeh, some of the models are good, some of the models are bad, but then they've always been like that - the Marvel team did a good job of making some characters look better, but failed miserably on others, and they did little more than some minor tweaks on an existing set of toys.

Good characterisation (not necessarily a resurrection of old character archetypes) and a decent plot could yet save the movie. As I've mentioned elsewhere, Megatron's never really looked that good. What made the G2 comics version or the BW version so damn great was how the character was used, not how they looked. I'm not expecting the characterisation to be that good, but it could still be respectable. It's what makes Transformers fiction better than Gobots fiction or anything else in the sub-genre.

I still can't believe people are writing stuff off based on character models. Prime Directive or Enemy Within, guys? Which is best?

* = I'm assuming you're young because you don't seem to know a lot about reality...
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Post by inflatable dalek »

What I'm hoping for from the Movie is a good silly but ultimately throwaway Summer Blockbuster, not The Greatest Film Ever Made!!! as some seem to think it has to be...
REVIISITATION: THE HOLE TRUTH
STARSCREAM GOES TO PIECES IN MY LOOK AT INFILTRATION #6!
PLUS: BUY THE BOOKS!
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Originally posted by inflatable dalek
What I'm hoping for from the Movie is a good silly but ultimately throwaway Summer Blockbuster, not The Greatest Film Ever Made!!! as some seem to think it has to be...


Same here... I wasn't really expecting much more than Independance Day, hopefully with a few sharp lines and some nice characterisation thrown in.

With a bit of luck, they can do an X-Men, do a hugely successful but pretty average opener, and get a couple of fannish sequels out of it. With the hoped-for change of said sequels being good.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

And unlike the X-MEn films most of the actors being voices should mean that they won't have to kill half of them off in the third one because they've gotten to expensive.

I'd also agree Independence Day is exactly the sort of thing they should be aiming for- A film that's tremendous fun as long as you switch the brain off first.
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Re: Advice for Hasbro, Paramount Pictures and the film-making crew on the up-coming July

Post by Mabus »

Originally posted by GluteusMaximusPrime
I was also hoping that the alternator/binaltech character designs would be incorporated into the up-coming movie. It just made perfect sense to me that 21st century updated transformers car designs should go into the 2007 Transformers movie. This would give Hasbro and Takara great returns on their financial investments into the alternator/binaltech designs since most people are really unaware of these toys.


Sigh. So did i, so did i.

The Alternators are super-cool and lethal, they'd be the perfect templates for the movie characters.
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Post by Tetsuro »

Originally posted by inflatable dalek
I'd also agree Independence Day is exactly the sort of thing they should be aiming for- A film that's tremendous fun as long as you switch the brain off first.

And without the heavy-handed patriotism.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Originally posted by Tetsuro
And without the heavy-handed patriotism.


Which isn't nearly as bad as people make out- It's really just confined to the Presidents speech. Which as a moral boosting "Lets go kick their arses!" thing to a bunch of scared people is probably the sort of speech a President would make in that unlikely stituation.
REVIISITATION: THE HOLE TRUTH
STARSCREAM GOES TO PIECES IN MY LOOK AT INFILTRATION #6!
PLUS: BUY THE BOOKS!
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Post by Lambda prime »

Just have to accept some will not like the film regardless if it oozes class. And this board should be ready for such punks. Fans need to be ready for a blockbuster that will more likely be a fan thing rather then a Titanic or Jurassic Park craze.
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