layla | Vanished off face of planet

I realize that I haven't been around much lately. Here's the Cliff Notes of the Cliff Notes of the past couple of weeks:

Crawlspace heater died. Rigged up strange Goldbergian solution to get by until husband gets home. Weather got -30. Water froze up. Husband came home. Water thawed out. Sister came to visit. Husband got heater working again. Woke up this morning to find heater doesn't work again, boiler doesn't want to go, weather is -20, crawlspace is frigid and now I have to go to work. Sigh.

My sister brought with her the first season of Beast Wars. Like just about every child who grew up during the 80s, I had my Transformers fixation, so we watched about half of the first season last night. In spite of the overwhelming cheesiness, it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be ... not only is it nice to look at and genuinely funny in a lot of places, but it's actually surprisingly dark. I kept thinking, This was on kids' TV? One of the good guys shot out Megatron's KNEECAPS in one episode, f'r cryin out loud...

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Crappy about the Heater. I hope you manage to get it fixed. Our outer door actually froze last week. Ice all over it, due to freakweather and high winds.

Beast Wars gets a lot darker, and a lot funnier in places :) And it gains female cast members! Also, Mainframe found out the best reason to introduce new characters- killing off old ones. Won't say who and how many, let's just say being in syndication and having a cast of robots gave the writers a lot of freedom.

Our outer door actually froze last week...

Ouch. Yeah, our front door does that. It's not properly weathersealed and is therefore prone to freezing, especially around the hinges, but not so badly (so far) that we can't get in and out. (Besides, there's another door if it did get that bad.) At my old apartment in Fairbanks, the doorknob used to get ice in it and stop working; my roommate and I would have to take it apart (stuffing a dishtowel in the hole to keep the room warm) and thaw it out so it would work again.

I do like Beast Wars but I'm starting to hope the influx of new characters doesn't continue at its present rate ... we're in the middle of the first season right now and there's a new character added in practically every episode. The ant, Inferno, is hilarious, though ... I like how he's not really evil, just sort of obsessed. Actually, that is perhaps my favorite thing about the series -- how many of the characters aren't precisely good or evil, but somewhere in between. It's really unusual to see that kind of ambiguity in an American action cartoon. (Not that I dislike them ... it's just ... like with old-style superheroes, usually you get good guys and bad guys, and that's it.)

I think they can only get away with a lot of what they do because the characters ARE robots -- even though they behave just like humans, right down to feeling pain. But it must be enough to keep the parents from getting too bent out of shape.

I know about one of the ones who dies. Wish I didn't ... found out by accident.

My only complaint about BW is that we never got a Botannica toy [she appears in the sequel Beast Machines, which serves as the last 2 seasons to the show.. at first it's kind of oddly preachy for a kids show, but quickly moves into better territory]. She's a big monster plant :P
Inferno calling Megatron "My Queen" is the best. Megatron does a lot of funny things though.

Call me a purist, but I really hate that later gens of TF use old Gen 1 names, like Inferno for example, or even worse, they switch the affinity of the 'bot! I mean, Laserbeak for one of the more recent gens is now an Autobot! It's great that he's still a bird in 'bot mode, and that they cleverly made him a camcorder, which, if you recall his original specialty was spying and recording...

But the bigger problem besides changing sides for me is when the names are used and have nothing to do with who they are. Using Inferno again, what does an ant have to do with Infernos? And don't say Fire ant. A fire ant and a roaring blaze have nothing to do with each other. I mean, Hound at least was a spy, Mirage could turn invisible, and Thundercracker would disorient audio receievers with a sonic boom! The originalInferno was in fact, a fire truck.

Sorry, I'm very fond of my sentient artificial lifeforms.

Well, a lot of the name reuse is due to trademark issues--Hasbro has lost the rights to a number of character names (Hot Rod, Shockwave, Bluestreak, Jazz) because another company now owns the trademark.

So, what bothers you more: name recycling, or losing the name alltogether? The way the laws are set up, it seems to be either one or the other....

Rob

I hadn't thought of that ... about the trademark issue.

Rodimus Major... what a stupid rethinking that is.

And Jazz is now Meister? How can you trademark a type of music?

Shockblast is an okay change for 'Wave...
and Silverstreak is a good changeover.

I was thinking about writing a longer rebuttal, but I think what it comes down to is that I'm just NOT a purist ... about anything, really. I *like* seeing re-imaginings of popular stories. F'r example, a lot of XMEN fans don't like the way the movies mess with existing characters, relationships and continuity -- but, though I love XMEN, I really didn't care that they took and did something different with it. It was fun to see the story play out a different way. (Okay, I liked the tough, reformed-bad-girl Rogue a lot better than the waifish movie Rogue, but that was just a personal affinity for the character; I didn't hate movie Rogue, I just thought of her as a different character.)

It's also got something to do with my tastes changing as I change ... anymore, most of my love of Transformers is a nostalgia thing, and the few bits and pieces of the series I've seen recently didn't do more than trigger brief, warm flashes of those happy childhood days. The (for lack of a better word) grittier Beast Wars version, with its more complex characters and political situation, is more to my liking nowadays.

We are, after all, talking about cartoons that are designed to show off the capabilities of a line of toys in order to sell them. The fact that they're watchable AT ALL is kind of amazing.

Vanished off face of planet

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Okay, you're a purist ;P