They had the balls to kill of most of the main characters in Transformers: The Movie?

Almost everyone from the cartoon died in this movie, Didn't know that executives had major balls to do that back in the 80s.

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The only reason they did that was so they could push and sell new characters.

Yeah, it was just the fastest way of clearing out old characters to put the spotlight on an entirely new lineup of toys.

Coupled with the fact that they had no idea kids/fans would get upset over the death of those 'toys'. They never counted on Transformers being anything more than a cartoon ad, not something that would generate attachment to the characters.

This is why Duke 'got better' during the GI Joe movie; they were going to use the exact same ploy but then came the backlash and they learned their fucking lesson quick.

...Not that it didn't stop them from killing Optimus Prime on a regular basis after that, though. As long as he always got better real quick.

This scene has stuck with me for a long, long time.

Furminating characters isn't ballsy, it's the sign of a hack writer.

>must...get to...a table....one last....time

It's not just that they did but how they went about it.
>A whole goddamn planet of robotic people get eaten by Unicron in the opening scene
>Brawn, Ratchet, and Prowl get shot by Megs and Starscream, with Prowl being shown going grey with fire and smoke coming out of his eyes and mouth
>Ironhide wounded and still trying to stop Megatron only for him to retort,"Such heroic nonsense", and blasting him
>Kickback got his head smashed in by KUP and Hot rod (I'm sure he survived, but damn that was brutal)
>Wheeljack's and Windcharger's bodies are shown with unlitten eyes and openings in their chests
>Optimus goes all out against Megatron, gets shot down thanks to Hot Rod's bullshittery. Later dies from his wounds and goes grey
>A bunch of Decepticons get tossed out into space then turned into new toys, basically killing who they originally were
>KUP and Ultra Magnus fall apart, but are put back together easily, somehow
>Janix and another bot are fed to the Sharkticons
>A lot of Sharkticons are killed during the fight, notably that one that had it's face scratched apart
>"Megatron, is that you?" "HERE'S A HINT"!
>A fuckton of characters once Unicron lays a literal smackdown on Cybertron

>Not that it didn't stop them from killing Optimus Prime on a regular basis after that

That was due to the episodes already being finished
youtube.com/watch?v=MVHM6ExSb2U
>nobody had the heart to tell them, we already had an episode in the pipeline where Optimus comes back as a zombie and we kill him all over again.

I know this apparently upset lots of kids, but I can't lie I thought it was awesome, it always bugged me that the bad guys always have to lose in tv shows and this felt like some major comeuppance. Yes, I know that probably makes me seem like I was a sadist/sociopath of a child.

I also loved when Starscream got obliterated.

I loved it as a kid because my dad story time me Greek stories as a kid and a lot of them dealt with death and rebirth of the old guard dying to keep the peace while a new generation rose up to overcome evil. I was sad Prime died but I already understood that's just a part of life at 7 so it wasn't the end of the world for me. That said I never could like Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime even though I wanted too.

No, I mean on a regular basis throughout the Franchise history. I think every Optimus except the one from the first Robots in Disguise cartoon (not counting Rescue bots) has died and gotten better in some form or fashion.

TF Animated's Optimus died in the pilot for about 5 seconds before Sari resurrected him, he *really* blew up during the Unicron trilogy, Beast Wars/Machines had him die twice, the Bayformers movies had him dead for most of the second and mind controlled through part 5, et. all.

Added bonus: It's Scavenger who does it
>IDW references this in a future issue
>Constructions are now yandere for Prowl

The big difference is he always come back and rather fast. And Bay had him dead for less than 1/3rd the film. They play it up as tradition but him staying dead a whole season will never be a thing again..

...

They literally did it because they were such souless retards and sociopaths they couldn't fathom anyone could ever have a connection to a fictional character. It was a shocking look into the minds of the ruling, rich elite, to be honest.

Huh, got the pages they reference it? I don't remember those.

>>A fuckton of characters once Unicron lays a literal smackdown on Cybertron

That is the part that has really perturbed me when I was a child. I didn't watched the movie for years after that, so I never was sure if some well know G1 character was killed that way.

I'm making a joke on how Prowl and the Constructicons is a thing in IDW, while in G1 it was the meekest and woobiest of them that fucking murdered Prowl in a single shot.

Though in Scavenger's defense, Prowl did shoot first.

>tfw I was a Megatron fan and cheered while he finally got his revenge
There were too many episodes where he got Optimus on the ropes and would have killed him for good only to call a retreat over some minor annoyance for me to not get hype over this as a kid.

Oh. Wouldn't be surprised if they did reference the chest shot somehow though.

lol

>Almost everyone from the cartoon died in this movie,

Now you either have no idea how many characters were in the first couple of seasons, or you think the rate of attrition was less brutal to the kids that super identified with y'know Skids or Woodchuck or whoever the shit.

>Ratchet! Wheeljack! New Guy! What the shit have you built this week?

>Prime these are the Explodobots. They ex-
>WHOOOOM

>I see. Megatron!

>Where?!

>I just like screaming his name.

One of the scripts points out that Shockwave bites it, but so does Thundercracker and Skywarp because Galvatrons troops werent made from any specific character or the ghosts of dead Decepticon leaders.

If we assume Shockwave died the same way in the film we'd have to lump reflector with him since they were in the same place.

>This is why Duke 'got better' during the GI Joe movie; they were going to use the exact same ploy but then came the backlash and they learned their fucking lesson quick.

Both movies were in production at the same time and the team making G.I. Joe came up with the idea of killing off Duke. The Transformers team heard about it and thought it was great so they used it for Optimus. Somehow they were able to finish first though.

i think there was a storyboard shot somewhere that showed a shot of a building collapsing with shockwave and a few others in it

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>t because they were such souless retards and sociopaths they couldn't fathom anyone could ever have a connection to a fictional character.
I mean they were thinking in terms of "these are toys". If you look at it from a businessman's point of view, it kind of makes sense

ive always hated brawn, so i was thrilled when i saw this scene. wish theyd shown huffer biting it too

...

>mfw that moment in Devastation when the character you're currently playing as gets a prediction from the computer about what is to come
>Wheeljack learns he's gonna die, and real soon

...

Real talk, I always loved those backlighted elements in cartoons. Why don't cartoons do that anymore? It always looked cool to me.

And this is the less graphic version.

The script and storyboard for TFTM went through a large number of rewrites and the unfilmed ones sometimes had much more graphic death scenes. The scene where Ultra Magnus gets drawn and quartered by four sweeps went so far as to make it into the comic adaption, but was cut and replaced by a more generic explosion in the movie after they got afraid it might be too much for the rating.

In one of the even earlier drafts, the 84-85 Autobots were to charge a Decepticon fortress through miles of gun emplacements and trenches, being slowly whittled away as each one was blown up until only Optimus and the few most popular characters reached Megatron. That was the "Vietnam" version.

There were also a number of death scenes in the storyboard which were just left out for cost reasons. Gears was to be blown up by a strafing run by the seekers and Red Alert was to die by being shot in the back while retreating from the Constructicons.

it was a very very violent script because the writers were told that violence against robots was totally fine even for a kid movie, so they went whole hog on it.

>In one of the even earlier drafts, the 84-85 Autobots were to charge a Decepticon fortress through miles of gun emplacements and trenches, being slowly whittled away as each one was blown up until only Optimus and the few most popular characters reached Megatron. That was the "Vietnam" version.
That sounds metal as fuck. They should've done that.

>it was a very very violent script because the writers were told that violence against robots was totally fine even for a kid movie, so they went whole hog on it.
I guess they never really pictured kids getting attached to the cast, huh?

one of the few reasons i like the headmasters cartoon is that it ignores his death. hes just right there working like normal to resurrect prime

>I guess they never really pictured kids getting attached to the cast, huh?

Please understand that when the movie went into production the whole Transformers franchise was only about two years old. Not just that, but action figures and the idea that they had an enduring "character" that kids got attached to were totally new. Hasbro's earlier "action figures" like the 12" GI Joe dolls had only the barest outline of personality and no canon "story" and were instead presented as just a toy for kids to make stuff up about. But because of the collaboration between Hasbro and Disney, GI Joe ARAH and Transformers had become fully fleshed-out stories in their own right, and I don't think they were quite ready to accept the full implications of that.


Yeah, there were a lot of unused things that the writers put into the three Hasbro movie scripts just to see if they could get away with it. Sadly Hasbro put the kibosh on the Optimus Prime cameo that was suggested for the My Little Pony movie.

those were a partially caused by the backlighting when the animation cells were being photographed. most art is processed digitally now, so it would take more effort to recreate that effect

I still find the level of animation so, so beautiful. Though, rewatching the movie as an adult felt like it was too short and some things were awfully rushed in the story.

>Both movies were in production at the same time and the team making G.I. Joe came up with the idea of killing off Duke. The Transformers team heard about it and thought it was great so they used it for Optimus. Somehow they were able to finish first though.

A lot of the same people worked on both movies. Getting the Transformers movie out first may have been prioritised if it was the bigger-selling brand of the two.

It might also have something to do with the GI Joe movie plans changing a lot from the earliest plans, which had involved Cobra acquiring a nuclear weapon. That plan was dropped, possibly because number of cartoon episodes had already escalated past that threat-level, and the movie they made was something very different.

This. It was about the closest you could get to depicting graphic violence in a kid's show. Even as I kid, I knew that they were robots but seeing Prowl's eyes go out and smoke come out of his mouth pretty much meant he's dead.

This was another scene that fucked with me and even to this day it's haunting. These poor bastards didn't get the luxury of a quick death, no they were dropped into acid, slowing dissolving, and they're screaming the whole time.

>This was another scene that fucked with me and even to this day it's haunting. These poor bastards didn't get the luxury of a quick death, no they were dropped into acid, slowing dissolving, and they're screaming the whole time.
And don't forget, they've likely been sitting there awaiting this the entire time. Stuck, trapped, caged, inside of Unicron, only for him to melt them down presumeably as fuel.

This. I watched the movie 2 decades after it came out with very minimal attachment to the characters besides Optimus and this scene still made me mad as a kid. Megatron killing Ironhide pissed me off.

This guy gets it.

Frankly, the only super-popular characters who died in the Movie were Optimus Prime and Starscream. We traded up from Megatron to Galvatron. Galvatron is crazier, has a cooler crown, and is a really nice shade of Decepticon purple instead of boring basic-bitch grey.

Ratchet, Prowl. Thundercracker, Skywarp and Windcharger had maybe a combined total of 12 lines in the entire first two seasons, and no focus episodes to endear them to kids. Ironhide and Jazz got some focus, but they were functionally interchangable as Optimus right-hand bot, so Hasbro kept Jazz alive cuz let's face it, Ironhide's toy was godawful, the character model looked nothing like it for a reason, and they couldn't have known Jazz's VA would die before season 3.

Optimus' death-and-resurrection, and Starscream's return from the dead as a scheming ghost, both wound up being more interesting developments than if they'd just stayed alive. Optimus is now a full-on Christ figure, for better or worse, and as for Starscream, possessing others is a neat way to literalize his conniving-manipulator shtick, and now they're both functionally immortal.

>Tfw best boy survived

Soul of Chogokin Unicron when?

>at most appeared to the side away from the action.

is that really a win user?

That's the benefit of the ensemble cast. Everyone gets their own favourite.
My favourite is Trailbreaker!

well it was a toy commercial. They pretty much just hired the team that did the cartoon openings for sunbow and had them smack together a plot that they thought would sell more toys.

Probably why they liked killing him off so much in the comics.

>think every Optimus except the one from the first Robots in Disguise cartoon (not counting Rescue bots) has died and gotten better in some form or fashion.

Thats cause he was Fire Convoy and Not Optimus Prime.

In the Japanese continuity Prowl in Headmasters and Wheeljack in Victory are explained by them being duplicates from an alternate universe stuck in the main universe.

Nothing wrong with that user, it just reminded everyone that they were still "The Badguys" and not Didastardly trying to shoot at the autobots

I think the first time he ever died in any media was the IDW comic. The marvel one just liked putting them out of commission for a while, but brought most of them back.

You might be thinking of Sunstreaker who got majorly fucked over in the Marvel comics.

Every Optimus before movie Optimus was a different Convoy.
After that they said fuck it and dropped Convoy.

>Please understand that when the movie went into production the whole Transformers franchise was only about two years old

Not even, it went into it durring he first year. Its infamously why none of the combiners besides Devastator show up.

at least best autobot lived

Takara and Bandai are bitter enemies, so never.

And in context of the show even worse:

-Where the fuck was Skylynx, Omega Supreme, the rest of the combiners, etc...
-There's a fuckton of minibots and most are missing (I assume all were guarding the ARK, but holy shit, Autobot City takes priority here!).

The IDW comic adaptation shows Omega and the othe combiners fighting.

Theres only one thing in the comic that it shows that I'd like to fight.

Arcees ass. With my dick.

imagine if theyd used metroplex as autobot city like theyd planned. i would think they could have used the shuttle prime and crew arrived in could have been omega.

The ting is, retroactively EVERY 84/85 character in the cartoon is now a major character, as the oriignal fanbase has grown up and have more of a voice and a lot of the creative figures are fans themselves. there's a lot of people that grew attached to certain characters because they owned the toy, and made them out to be bigger than they were and tried to give them more spotlight. The original writers understood their needed to be A-tier characters and B/C tier ones, especially with such a big cast.

But you know, you have people who insist Skywarp HAS to be Cyclonous because they owned Skywarps toy as a 5 year old and thus make him out to be more important than he is, or people who's dead grandma bought them Windcharger and thus made him super special and want him to be featured more.

Yeah, that was one of the better things about that adaptation (even if it was kind of ridiculous 2 combiners and Omega Supreme were held up by 2 Decepticon Combiners).

That nigga Megatron just yelled "DIE AUTOBOTS" and the actually went and slaughtered them. Fucking hell that was crazy.

Not like they were nobodies either. Fucking Ironhide was one the more prominent autbots.

Didn't the movie pretty much portray the Autobots as being on the verge of a collapse anyway? Like, it was do this final push or they'd probably lose, and then Megatron found out and came to raid them?

>But you know, you have people who insist Skywarp HAS to be Cyclonous because they owned Skywarps toy as a 5 year old and thus make him out to be more important than he is

Funny you should say that, Skywarp is Cyclonus in Japan, and Thundercracker is Soucrge.

Oh please, This film has nothing on the ending of Space Runaway Ideon!

Instruments of destruction
Tools of foul play
It's a violent eruption
Existence drips away

It's not elaborated in the script, but the reason that attack was so crucial was due to Autobot City being a major energy plant, and the last one the Autobots held. It going down meant the Autobots were fucked.

In this context, you could assume the Deceptions did so well in the film since they had way more energy compared to the Autobots.

I have no idea how Jazz made it out of that. I spent the whole thing thinking he was next

Japanese canon is basically fanwank bullshit, and no matter what, in the actual animation the Bombshell scrapheap is turned into Cyclonous, and the Seeker scrapheap is in the background during the reformatting.

>some Mecha anime made by the guy who did the original Gundam, a pretty mature war series

I don't think it's that fair to compare Space Runaway Ideon to a Hasbro property aimed at 8 year old boys

Scatman crother's death ironically saved him; considering he was going through lung cancer in 85 and was probably in no condition to record for very long.

Because he was safe and sound on Moonbase one. Completely out of harm's way.

I didn't grow up with the TV show and only had the movie and loved the fuck out of it. I mean, it felt like a damn war. The autobots were getting fucked up. Where else do named characters with dialogue get killed in a kids movie? It's either faceless nobodies or the uncle at the end of act 2 or some shit. Not a team of good guys getting BTFO early on. The bad guys ditch a lot of people too. Galvatron killing starscream was amazing.

You'll never get something like this again in a cartoon. It was unintentionally good story telling though. When Ultra Magnus died I thought he died, the junkions fixing him was a surprise. I thought anyone could get killed through out the movie.

Gundam was made to sell toys, and so was Ideon.

youtube.com/watch?v=4lo7JPLJUUU
How did a glorified ad meant to sell toys to children get to have such a kino intro?
>that opening shot of Unicron against the binary stars

You're right, I just wanted to mention Space Runaway Ideon.

Even his death looked fabulous.

Ah well, he got better.

>Gundam was made to sell toys, and so was Ideon.

I always have been under the impression that Gundam was made as a series, and naturally just had toys made, not literally a toyline that fiction was made for after the fact....so if that's true I didn't know that. I'm not really an anime expert and I only have a fleeting interest in mecha so I could easily be wrong.

Because Transformers is metal as hell, and the 80's was the decade where cheesey metal reigned supreme.

not completely true Beast Wars Convey was G1

Pat Lee legit though he died in the movie.

Star convoy and Battle convoy was G1 OP

Just to add to the info Convoy Grand Prime (CW Prime) was the G1 convoy as well.

never understood why they bothered to "kill" magnus if it was only temporary. it really took the piss out of everyone else they just murdered

Windcharger has never done anything though, closest was in IDW as part the Outlaws.

He basically got his one moment in the last S2 episode by being super fucking cool, but yeah, I agree.

Anyway, it alwasy bothered me how some characters have really cool abilities but do nothing with them. WIndcharger, by all means, should be a fucking monster but he's always just the magnets dude.

For young me it was the moment Megatron finally was as evil and threatening as he made out to be. The only moment topped this was Beast Wars.

Gundam wasn't initially a toy-tie-in, but basically every aspect of its final design was dictated for the sake of making a more marketable product, and by the midpoint there was a toy deal and thus there was a focus on advertising things for the toys. Gundam, Ideon, and all those late 70's/80's shows are the beginning of a shift towards more mature themes, but it still began from the need to advertise to kids.

originally he was going to be pulled apart four horses(Sweeps) style and wasn't planned on getting killed so much as torn apart. They were running low on budget so they changed it to him getting blown up and the plan was to show cab Maguns climb out of the wreckage later but they couldn't get the VAs together/pay for the scene so they had to scrap that too and in the end it was just UM having the most absolute death on screen to be just thrown together 10 minutes later.

Fun trivia these budget issues lead to them being very tight with spending for the GiJoe film which left them with a good sum of the budget left to spend on completion so they spent that remaining cash on that kick ass opening on the statue of liberty.

the junkions were effectively immortal, they're robots. The idea they can die by being in pieces is pretty stupid. Starscream disintegrated, he was dead-dead. Magnus was blown up and the junkions had a way.

But you can still sell a $50 figure of windcharger, which is the main point. When eery Season1/2 character can get an MP figure, from takara or 3P, and they'e all $50-300, no one is a minor character anymore

It was also still that way in the comic at the time because they didn't get the memo about the change.

The actual animation and dialogue give us "Cyclonus and his Armada" for all of a few seconds, then just the one Cyclonus afterwards. As one of the more glaring errors in the movie, it's hard to use it to "prove" anything.

The Insecticons appearing early in Season 3 of the cartoon makes it even more confusing.

yeah but after seeing 7 bots before this die from puncher holes to random spots on their bodies it seemed rather stupid that a guy we see blown to pieces could be revived.

>They were running low on budget so they changed it to him getting blown up and the plan was to show cab Maguns climb out of the wreckage later but they couldn't get the VAs together/pay for the scene so they had to scrap that too
That's the first time I've heard that bit. Are you sure you're not tricking me?