My Review of The Transformers · 11:25pm Apr 2nd, 2023
My TV Show Rating Score:
5/5: It is an awesome show!
4.5/5: it is a great show albeit not perfect
4/5: It’s a good show with minor flaws
3/5: It’s overall okay/guilty pleasure
2/5: It’s bad but not awful
1/5: Look, up in the sky! It’s super bad!
0/5: MY EYEEEESSS!!!
Greetings, everyone! This is Mr. J back with another TV show review for today! This afternoon, I will be reviewing “The Transformers” animated series which ran from 1984-1987! Now let me just say this right off the bat: I never grew up with this series. “Transformers: Cybertron” is what introduced me to my all-time favorite franchise, but the first time I’ve heard about this show was back around 2008 or so. I’ve seen clips of the series on YouTube at that time, but I was never interested in seeing it. However, in 2017, I finally decided to watch the show all the way through with an open mind. So now, here I am! In my honest opinion…it’s okay. Yup, I said it. It’s an okay series. Why? Let me show you:
In this show, the heroic Autobots and the evil Decepticons battle each other on Earth after they crash-landed there from Cybertron, their home world. Follow Optimus Prime and the Autobots as they make friends with Spike Witwicky and his father Sparkplug and help them stop Megatron from using Earth’s resources for Energon.
Now, I do admit that the first two seasons were really enjoyable. It introduced the iconic characters us TF fans all know and love such as Optimus, Bumblebee, Jazz, Ratchet, Wheeljack, Ironhide, and even Megatron, Starscream, Soundwave, Shockwave, and so many more characters. Plus, the first two seasons had a lot of action, 80s humor, cheesy dialogue, and incredible voice acting.
For season three though, I didn’t like it. While I like the character progression they took with Rodimus Prime (formerly known as Hot Rod), it felt lackluster compared to the pre-movie seasons. The Rebirth three-parter didn’t need to exist. Enough said.
To some degree, the show has a solid start where we see these characters and get to understand their personalities, goals, and world. On the other hand, however, it is a complete mess. There are a lot of characters who barely have an episode dedicated to them whereas some have more screen time than others. Let’s look at Sideswipe as an example.
What do we know about him besides the fact that he’s a good guy? ………that he’s…a good guy with cliche one-liners? What about Sunstreaker or Ratchet? They’re just in the show as mere supporting characters. There is nothing unique or interesting about any of these Autobots.
Now, I can’t speak for all the ‘80s kids who grew up with this show and somehow connected with these characters, but I personally found them to be loud and boring. But of course, there are Autobots I found to be completely interesting—Optimus Prime, Jazz, Ultra Magnus, Hoist, Seaspray, and even Trailblazer.
The one thing I love about this original version of Optimus is that he’s a dad-like figure. He talks and acts like a kind-hearted father for both the Autobots and their human companions. This is where Peter Cullen truly shined as the character—he is strong enough to be gentle and occasionally drops inspirational quotes to live by. He even had the meekness to play basketball with his friends! That’s how humble Optimus was back then.
I’m deeply saddened he isn’t like this anymore! Because a lot of modern shows portray Prime as a stone-faced, grizzled commander with no sense of humor. Where’s the fun in Optimus’ personality? He needs to be intriguing, not boring. So that is the main thing I love about this version of Optimus. I want to see the fun, laid-back Prime again. That’s what makes a character both likable and interesting.
Megatron is…a hit and miss in this series. I love Frank Welker and his voice performance for Megs, but I’m personally not a fan of this particular voice acting. He sounds really gravelly and screechy here, and is one of the most generic cartoon villains when it comes to motivation and character.
As for Starscream, I love his treacherous, power-hungry personality, but I deeply hate his voice. No offense to the late Chris Latta (RIP) because I know he did an excellent job making his characters, including Starscream, so memorable with his vocal performance. But the high-pitched voice sounds so irritating to me. Not my cup of tea, I’m afraid.
It all comes down to the voice direction. But that’s not the only thing that stands out to me. What also stands out is the innumerable amount of animation errors. OH. MY. PRIMUS, this series is infamous for its horrendous animation. It’s actually hilarious how you would find at least more than one animation error in every episode. I can’t imagine being one of the animators who had a restricted budget and deadline to animate these episodes. If a person had a dime for all the animation errors it has, he would be a fucking billionaire.
The another thing is that this show has a poorly-executed narrative. There is barely any story occurring throughout the series, and the only time an actual “storyline” is involved is within the 1986 movie. While I can somewhat tolerate the episodic adventures within the show, it has laughable inconsistencies and continuity errors.
Lastly, I am not a big fan of half of the characters’ designs. Optimus, Megatron, Starscream, Thundercracker, Skywarp, Soundwave, his minicons, and Shockwave look fine, but the others look like cardboard boxes made into bipedal robots. I get that it was the ‘80s, but personally speaking, they just look terrible.
Those are the only issues I have with the show. But I do admire the fact that this series brought the franchise into existence; without it, we wouldn’t have any of the other shows that would come after it years later such as Beast Wars, Animated, and TF: Prime. It always had a significant impact on the TF community since its runtime, and it still does.
With all this said, I find it to be an average 80s cartoon with cheesy dialogue, cliche Saturday morning villains, and terrible animation. I’ll give it a solid 3/5: more than meets the cheese!
But I gotta say it has hilarious lines that are hard to forget.
Optimus Prime: Amazing. A booby trap that actually catches boobies.
Megatron: You’re either lying, or you’re stupid!
Starscream: I’m stupid! I’m stupid!
Peace!
Still, a moment of silence out of respect
I haven’t seen this show yet, but I’m already starting to see the Megatron of both the live-action “Transformers” movies and “Transformers: Prime” as a greater preference. Both versions of the character had much more fully-realized characterizations, and their vocal performers were stupendous in the part!