Today's edition of Penny Arcade ( webcomic juggernaut) touches on a chord that has crept up time and time again: don't fuck with our franchise.
Michael Bay's live-action feature film adaptation of 80's wallet-buster Transformers is set for release next 4th of July, and AICN talkbacks and advance photos have once again sent geekdom into a Superman looks too fruity kind of uproar, and I think some people are bitching just to get some attention.
The two robots people have seen photos of are Bumblebee and Optimus Prime. The extent of criticism has been "Bumblebee was a VW Beetle in the cartoon" and "Optimus Prime has flames painted on his Truck Form chassis". Jesus F(ucking) Christ.
I was a fan of the show and the animated movie as a kid, the latter notable for Orson Welles' posthumous appearance as the voice of Unicron the world devouring menace and the hilarious use "You've Got the Touch" in an early scene, and...well, that's it really. These robots and the huge chunk they took out of my parents' pocketbook hold an indellible place in my childhood. Giant robots and young people with big dreams. That's America, right there, according to the TV conditioning my generation got. Let's hear it for the Freedom Eagle, ya'll.
It is the right and responsibility of those who filled the Hasbro coffers to demand nostalgic justice, but at a certain point, you can't just take one form of media and transplant it to another.
When Kevin Smith made Clerks into a cartoon, he not only had to find a way around the langauage censors, but make a black and white $28k movie into a primetime, full color cartoon. There had to be some flexibility in the translation, or it wouldn't have worked creatively.
It didn't work out overall thanks to stupid programming execs, but that's the story of many underappreciated gems, for which another day will be set aside.
Thanks to the internet, it seems there has to be some big hairy deal every time someone sitting in their mom's attic decides they'd do it better than the pros. That probably makes me sound like the quintessential fanboy traitor, but my concern comes from a genuine place.
Bay is certainly not one of my favorite directors, but if there's anyone on the planet who can do giant robots and explosions right, it's him, through and through. ComiCon this week will turn out to be an indicator of what the relationship is going to be like from here on out, and I can only hope Bay is going to give the fan masses a drop of reassurance to get them to chill the hell out.