Transformers Cyberverse Trailer
Looks to be very similar in tone and style to at least one or two recent TF series I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for.
Transformers amazes me in how many different ways it has been approached. Even Marvel’s monthly G1 US comic had a UK counterpart set in the same time and universe as its counterpart, but with a darker tone and distinctive art style. Michael Bay approached the franchise appreciating its potential for spectacle and grandiosity, but his films ultimately relied too much on the human characters, featured too much tonally inappropriate humor, and never established a canon future films would stick to.
The frustrating thing from a fan’s point of view is that the franchise constantly forgets what initially made it so captivating. There was a time when the characters alt modes were camouflage, not merely handy ways to get around quicker or “job skills”. The toys looked like cars and planes, only the insignia (and strange seams, hinges, etc.) giving them away. Many fans lost interest when the G1 continuity moved 20 years into the future and replaced the contemporary alt mode car and plane designs with futuristic vehicles and fantastical monsters. Any time they set the story on Cybertron or in the future, the characters lose the element of real-world camouflage.
I also do not understand the fascination with “teen Optimus Prime” or why you would use that character as anything other than the honorable-to-a-flaw leader even Michael Bay understand was where his greatest character potential originated. This looks more like a kid friendly “The Transformers meet The Lawnmower Man” than it does the kind of good-vs-evil battle for earth/Cybertron/the Universe that gave weight to the original series’ events.
And while this may not matter today, a large part of the original toys’ appeal was that they were very Japanese. The entire giant robot craze was a minor Japanese cultural invasion. Although the majority of episodes were written in the US, they were animated in a comparatively Japanese style. Transformers was once on the periphery of the mecha anime, but each successive show now seems to move further away from this and more toward traditional Western superhero cartoon.
I suppose what really surprises me is how minimal the visual style is, how devoid of weight or complexity the designs seem to be. The Transformers games developed with the Unreal engine captured more of the toys’ appeal than possibly even the CG Beast Wars/Machine Wars series. Perhaps the current visual style is appropriate for simplified stylized toys (which no doubt won’t be mistakable for anything other than a transformer) but to me it just looks lazy and cheap. It could be that the games have already shown the property as G1 fans imagined it (or at least the Cybertron-set events) and this show simply isn’t trying to “wow” its audience the same way previous shows’ creators felt was paramount. It just looks too self-consciously “safe”, I’m expecting the Cyberverse to be a form of VR or holodeck there to provide another layer of insulation between any violence/destruction and the show’s target audience.
Ironically, it reminds me more of the '80s “Challenge of the GoBots” cartoon than of any of the G1 Transformers series.