wadapanさんのイラストまとめ

still, we finished strong with Heavy Metal War, which is very much a capstone to the first season. The "Megatron steals his friends' superpowers" conceit is great, as is the Autobot's hologram gambit, and I was legitimately shocked by the "will we be renewed?" are-all-dead ending

we snap straight back into toy-selling mode with A Plague of Insecticons, which has the new figures repeatedly trounce the Autobots using an absurd array of superpowers. Also, the cartoon's handling of other cultures continues to be as bad as you'd expect

considering its plot is "autobot mad scientist gets so caught up in scientific accuracy he makes his robot dinosaur killing machines too stupid", SOS Dinobots turns into a bit of a slog, with its weird effects and painfully-slow voice acting making it a pretty poor toy commercial

Divide and Conquer set the bar low with its everyone-is-stupid plot. The Autobots just... go on an errand run back to Cybertron, and get rained on until Trailbreaker remembers he can make a forcefield umbrella. It's all much less fun and interesting than it should be

figure I should carry on this thread of The Transformers thoughts, so you can mute it if you don't wanna be bombarded with screenshots on the weekly! The second batch was generally a step up from the first, both in terms of unironically-good stuff and wild things to laugh at

all that said, watching Transformers with friends was an absolute blast - its greatest value is in the things it inspires, and I think that's as true now as it was in 1984. Admittedly for our purposes I'm just talking mst3k goofs, but still, it's like reading the sacred texts!

at the same time, though, I vividly remember one critic describe the show as "abominable" - upon seeing it for myself, I kinda agree with them? The animation is poor, the writing is the very definition of "stuff happens" (I remember basically nothing that happened)

some stuff was pretty much as I expected: the voice acting was wonderful, and my monkey brain liked seeing blocky bot friends on watercolour backgrounds. And obviously those aesthetic sensibilities are what people remember, and are what have influenced later stories, fairly so!

(the story's genuinely very short, but I ended up writing a lengthy commentary explaining the process behind it, so the post's about three times bigger than it should be whoops)

you might also want to check out my relettered Transformers comics! https://t.co/44HVmZYFrQ

the one time Rung tried to operate a bar he started a millenia-long war