Should I give G1 a try...

Should I give G1 a try? I always thought it was kinda like GI Joe where characters just kinda shoot lasers and ride around cool vehicles but no one actually gets hit and it's all just hugs and educational messages, but I was listening to some friends talk about it and apparently there's a lot of cool stories and characters and they didn't have to really censor the violence since "lol robots".

It's mostly just okay, but it has one honest to god great episode.

I think it's pretty good.

Honestly no, It's pretty boring and dated.
You're better off watching something like Transformers animated.

Don't listen to this queer.

I'm watching it the first time and I think it is fun in a very stupid way.
Just be aware that this show is super cheesy and try to get a kick out of that.

I don't care if it's dated, I can still watch something like Gundam 79 and enjoy it a lot. I'm mostly concerned about the action scenes being overly censored "safe for kids" stuff like He-Man and other cartoons from the time.

if you're fine with some 80s cartoon cheese and some downright bizarre animation errors, i'd say give it a go.

Transformers G1 can get away with some more violence then their contemporaries because the characters are robots.

Yeah, that's what I was wondering. Do they actually shoot down/blow up enemy mooks or do they like miss all the shots and use the scenary to find a non-violent solution like most 80s cartoons?

I know this sounds silly, but if I'm going to watch transformers I want to see robots fucking each other up.

Don't worry 'bout that - the whole show isn't as violent as TFTM, but the fact that the main characters were robots meant they got away with more stuff than their contemporaries. They also didn't have shit like He-Man's one constantly recycled punching-towards-the-camera animation.

>TFTM

What?

Neat, I'll give it a chance. What's TFTM though?

>they didn't have to really censor the violence since "lol robots".
They might have been talking about the movie there. There's not a lot of serious robot violence in the show, I'm sure.

No doubt that silly acronym that nobody has ever used before stands for TransFormers The Movie.

That makes more sense.

There's a point where optimus gets blasted apart or some shit and they staple his arms onto a tower as a sentry. And another part was a crocodile.
And occasionally Megatron will violently beat Starscream because he needs the exercise.

>Do they actually shoot down/blow up enemy mooks or do they like miss all the shots and use the scenary to find a non-violent solution like most 80s cartoons?
I can think of a few times when they defeated the cons using "the scenery" in some clever way, but they also got shot plenty of times - the thing is, because they're robots playing with lasers, they almost always shrug off the blasts, except for in TFTM, and even there that rule still applies to new characters. Whether or not the fights looked good varied from episode to episode.

Early season 1 has stand-out moments like the battle axe vs. mace duel between Optimus and Megatron, the whole second episode's plot revolving around Optimus getting BTFO and the Autobots going behind enemy lines to find a replacement part so he doens't fucking die, the episode when the Dinobots kick the shit out of Optimus, the season finale when Megatron challenges him to a surprisingly-well-animated duel and beats the shit out of him with cheating... basically, all through season 1 the robot action has that old-school Toei flair, and Optimus Prime is not the unbeatable demigod he would become later.

By season 2 though, you really gotta come to terms with the show being more about the wackiness of the plots and the characterizations, but no, it barely ever approaches MoTU or 80s TMNT levels of twee, and those instances stand out because they're the exceptions, not the rule.

>doens't

Neat. So the movie takes place after S2. Are all the seasons worth watching or is there a point I should stop and move on to a better transformers series?

You should move on after the movie. Rodimus Prime is not as good as having Optimus Prime.

>I can still watch something like Gundam 79
That's because 0079 is a well-told, good story with solid direction and art design despite what the animation often lacked in consistency. It's an actual classic.

The '84 Transformers series isn't awful, but it's pure cheese. The 1986 movie is legitimately fun, though.

There's a fantastic episode in which they find a pool of some kind of weird metal coating that makes transformers impervious to lasers, in the middle of a natural paradise.
The final scene and moral of that story stuck with me for years and years.

I'd say they're all worth watching, but keep in mind season 3 is so different in terms of setting and characters it was actually rebranded as a sequel show in Japan, it's darker and weirder and more straight-up science fiction. And season 4 was only three episodes long, so they crammed a year's worth of product and storyline into a single three-parter. The result is so... divisive that Japan decided to branch off from there with their own series, effectively a "fourth season" from our perspective but a second spin-off to them, Headmasters, but that gets into the Japanese G1 anime which are a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

You probably won't mind QUALITY after watching '79, but the basic ratio is season 1 is 70/30 well-animated episodes, season 2 is 50/50, and season 3 is 30/70, with the numbers favoring the shitty Korean studios, but this just makes the Japanese episodes look even better by comparison.

Season 3 has some notable episodes, but when it hits bottom, it not only has a dumb plot but the worst animation on top of it.

If you do any Season 3, in no particular order: Web World (required), Call of the Primitives, Dark Awakening, Burden Hardest to Bear, Only Human, Dweller in the Depths.

Return of Optimus Prime ends the season.

You'd probably be better off with Prime if you just wanna see robots getting fucking annihilated

What about
>The Killing Jar
>Thief in the Night
>Starscream's Ghost
>Ghost in the Machine
>Chaos
>The Quintesson Journal
Really, just watch all of season 3.

>a well-told, good story with solid direction and art design
That's what the 0079 MOVIES are. Funny that both mecha franchises probably only became such fan-favorites because the cult classic movies based on them were objectively superior.

The TV series has some weak episodes, but the films cut out things that lended well to the overall arc of the story. Encounters in Space is an absolute improvement over its analogous TV material, though.

I watched the TV series first and became a huge fan immediately.

which ep

>which ep

*Which ep?

The one with the golden lagoon

ONE MORE THING... be careful which "version" of the show you end up watching.

The original video/DVD releases of G1 by Rhino have shit like added sound fx in the first season, animation & coloring errors that were fixed in the aired versions were reverted because of using unfinished animation, the whole transfer just looked generally "wrong" in terms of brightness/color contrast, and worst of all, it's the version that Netflix had available to stream for the longest time. The Shout Factory version fixes all the aforementioned issues, but nothing beats watching an FHE VHS on a CRT, DESU.

The UK G1 comics were notorious for their violence.