We interrupt your usual Fun Stuff Friday articles to bring you a special piece on the BBC’s new series. In with the Flynns. Because I saw it about six months ago.

So Saturday night I went to a live taping of ‘Meet The Doyles’, which in the time between signing up and actually arriving had metamorphosed into ‘Meet the Flynns‘, or maybe just plain ‘The Flynns.’ After spending about twenty minutes waiting outside while the actors finished their rehearsal and the crew worked out how to herd the audience in to the studio, the magic started. Not good magic, the kind made by someone like Dumbledore or Gandalf, the evil kind weaved by sorcerers throwing bats into a bubbling cauldron at the top of a tower made of obsidian.

The show stars Will Mellor and Nicky Wardley as Liam and Catherine, a couple who had kids too early and… that’s it. It’s basically ‘My Family’ but Northern, presumably to play up the fact the BBC is moving/outsourcing their offices and studios out to Manchester.

In the episode we saw, Liam faced such wacky and original situations as his son getting in a fight at school, his daughter getting a tongue piercing and his dad almost going out with a  woman who may or may not have been a nun. We would watch the show a scene at a time, then the ‘entertainer’ would take over.

At live tapings they have to fill in the gaps between takes and scene changes. Some times it’s a way for stand up comedians to start their careers by keeping the audience occupied. I don’t think our guy was a professional stand up comedian, and if he wanted to be he should think long and hard about his life choices. I can only describe him as what you’d get if Gilbert Gottfried was northern, and not funny. His idea of hilarity involved accosting anyone who got up to leave by forcing them to hug him until he would let them go. In his eyes it was probably endearingly funny, in the eyes of the law it was probably rape.

We were there to be recorded as the canned laughter, all you need to know is that aside from one or two chuckles from what I can only assume were an actor’s mum and a homeless person who’d snuck in, the audience sat in almost stony silence. occasionally laughing at the odd joke from the guy playing Liam’s brother (Can’t find the actors name just yet) who managed to actually be funny. Unfortunately, no matter how funny a joke is the first time, the second or third take tends to lose it’s lustre somewhat. That’s just how live tapings are, when you don’t really laugh the first time, you have a problem.

Meet the Doyles/Meet the Flynns/Meet the Spartans doesn’t have a release date I can find on hand, and maybe it should stay that way. It was fascinating to watch and understand the process of making TV. How people work on set, how actors toil away for hours on end to get their scenes just right, and how an entire crew of at least fifteen people in a room will somehow get this far without one of them so much as saying, “Hang on a second, this isn’t funny. This show is awful!”

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe the show will be released and go on to sell eight series and a range of tea towels with catch phrases written on them. Maybe it won’t make it to air, which feels like a tragedy to me, not that it deserves to be seen, but that our TV licence money got wasted on this steaming pile of failure.

For those of us that didn’t know, ‘Friendship is Magic’ started in October 2010 and has gained a cult following on the internet, to the point Lady Gaga referenced it in one of her costumes.

Anyway, I decided to see what all the fuss was about and watched the pilot episode so I could make fun of it for the amusement of everybody.

The problem is, it may be a cartoon for little girls, but it’s actually not half bad.

Okay, lads, hold on to your manliness, listening to this plot synopsis may cause you to lose them.

The pilot follows a Unicorn called Twilight Sparkle who wants to save the world of Equestria from the coming of the ‘Mare in the Moon’, a sort of horsey anti-christ. But her message to the Princess, presumably requesting a horse SWAT team, is turned down and she’s told to stop reading the dusty tomes and go out and make some friends instead… Dude, harsh!

So she is sent out to Ponyville to go and celebrate the Solstice festival, which is coincidentally the time the aforementioned Pony-pocalypse is coming.

It was around this point in the episode I saw she was going to Ponyville on a chariot being pulled along by two anonymous Pegasii, Pegasese? Pegasuses? I paused the video and started furiously scribbling down jokes about how Ponyville runs on slave labour, that there is an intricate caste system that means some horses are treated as people while others are treated as, well, horses…

Then I resumed the video and Twilight got off the chariot and politely thanked the two pega… horses for giving her the ride over. Well, bugger.

Not only do I get deprived of material, but it’s actually setting a good example to my future children as well… Can I at least make fun of something other than myself for watching this? I’m watching a cartoon for little girls about magic ponies and having to concede that it’s actually quite good!

Twilight finds it hard to settle in to her new life with the Equine Ragnarok looming, and her desperate preparations are disrupted when she meets five other ponies with names like Applejack, Fluttershy, Rarity, Rainbow Dash and Pinkie Pie. Each of them is nothing but welcoming and friendly towards Twilight in her own way, but she is having none of it because you know, end of the world.

It turns out Twilight was right the whole time when on the stroke of midnight the Night-Mare appears and wreaks havoc upon the land. Twilight and her friends set out to save the world, and learn a few things about friendship along their journey of epic proportions.

That’s just the first episode.

Overall, I felt kind of uncomfortable. Not just because I didn’t want anyone to catch me watching My Little Pony, that would be silly because I’m writing about watching it now, but because I have to actually admit I enjoyed it.

Don’t be mistaken, I doubt I’m going to be watching the rest of the series or anything… I’m a twenty three year old man, but the jokes are funny when they’re supposed to be funny, it’s educational without being preachy and the messages are the kind of thing I would genuinely get behind. Things like being kind and looking out for your friends.

If you have kids or you’re secure enough in yourself to check this out, then I highly recommend this show. If you’re a dude I’d recommend it for you too, but I would also suggest you listen to some Alestorm every fifteen minutes lest you forget you are a man, because this show will get under your skin.

This time, I’m going to look at a cartoon a little later than the others I’ve covered – from the early 90′s, comes the gem of hilarious eco-bludgeoning, and Ted Turner’s favoured son, Captain Planet and the Planeteers.

The show was originally imagined by Ted Turner, head of TBS and later Hanna-Barbera cartoons, to promote  the concepts of environmentalism and eco-centric ideals, which were reaching prominence for the first time in the early 1990s, when the cartoon was first made.
As such, it featured villains based on an array of pollution and ecologically-damaging ideas – such as radiation, toxic waste, trash, runaway scientific experimentation, ruthless corporate ideals, unchecked hunting, and even warfare and violence. Arrayed against these villains are the ‘planeteers’ five ‘special young people’ from around the world with five magic rings that represent the four elements – Earth, Air, Fire and Water – as well as one ‘special’ element, ‘heart’, representing emotions and ‘humanity’.

When the five powers combine, they summon ‘Earth’s greatest champion, Captain Planet’, who is a superhero avatar of the Earth itself, and possesses whatever powers are needed to solve the immediate problem at hand.

As you can imagine, this occurs pretty much every episode, in one way or another, and leads to a fairly formulaic series, which was nonetheless successful enough to spawn five series (three under the name The New Adventures of Captain Planet, and animated solely by Hanna-Barbera, with new opening titles and different animation).

The Planeteers were pretty stock characters too – each of them was a very stereotyped ethnicity – Wheeler was from Brooklyn, and had a hot-headed temper, and the power of fire. Linka was pretty, and from the Soviet Union (as it was 1990, and the Soviet Union was only disassembled the following year), and longed for a better world and had the power of wind. Gi was the water-controlling marine biologist from an undisclosed country in ‘Asia’, Kwame from ‘Africa’ and no discernable country and controlled earth, and Ma-ti from ‘somewhere in South America’ and controlled the power of heart.

But to cut a long story short, let’s have a look at a couple of episodes.

Episode One – A Hero For Earth

So, the show opens with a narration describing the show, and a pretty ear-wormy and epic-sounding theme tune and some decent animation. So far, it’s pretty much what you’d expect from an early-90′s team-show – here’s what it’s about, now sit down and watch it, and leave your parents

alone for half an hour.
Also worthy of note is that Kwame’s voice – the narration – is provided by LeVar Burton, who also played the character Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The episode proper opens with a cute bunny and other animals fleeing from a giant monster machine, apparently, according to it’s pig-faced mutant weirdo driver, ‘Hoggishly Greedy’, is for oil-drilling in a wildlife sanctuary…
um, what?
Apparently they’ll be able to ‘fill their tanks with oil, before anyone even knows they’re there!’
Huh. So, no park rangers? No tourists? they’re not going to see this GIANT ROBOTIC DRILLING PLATFORM, wandering around in a wildlife preserve? Also, given the trail of destruction it leaves, surely someone would notice? And wouldn’t he stand to make more money selling his design on the open market, if it’s that good?

Well, logic applied to cartoon villains aside, all the disturbance wakes up Gaia, the Spirit of the Earth (another Star Trek performer – Gaia is voiced by Whoopi Goldberg!), who has been slumbering for centuries. Strange that unlicensed oil drilling is the final straw to wake her up, rather than, say, the Seveso Disaster, the Bhopal Disaster, or the Chernobyl Disaster I guess it’s all about having an Ecological Terrorist involved.

Anyhow, she observes the ‘poor silly humans’ making a mess of things, and decides something needs to be done. And rather than exterminating humanity, she decides to be more moderate, instead sending the five rings to the five planeteers – who find the rings in a variety of strange places, sent by Gaia. And, as they’re ‘special’, they don’t try and pawn them off, or sell them to anyone.
When the five planeteers put on their rings, they are magially transported to Gaias’ Hope Island -
-with no reference to their parents or families?! Well, an emergencies’ and emergency…
Still, seems pretty irresponsible.

Gaia teaches the five to use their powers, after Wheeler, the dumbass American, hits on Linka – who is Soviet NOT Russian, thank you very much! – before some mild comedy and environmental anvilism on Kwames’ part, mentioning ‘planting many crops, and stopping many bulldozers’ Subtle, wow.

To make Ma-ti feel better, Gaia explains that his power of ‘heart’ allows them all to keep in contact, and Ma-ti to sense the thoughts of the others, and the planet around them – potentially making it, yes, the most powerful… but he never uses it for anything clever or smart, such as messing with the heads of his enemies, communicating with the others, using strategy or tactics, or controlling animals or even helping out people in trouble… instead, it’s usually used in the obligatory summon captain planet scenes.

Gaia goes on to tell them all about Greedlys’ activities drilling for oil in the

middle of a wildlife sanctuary, and all the animals its’ hurting. The Planeteers are already on the way – in a change of clothes – and in a eco-friendly solar-powered jet (don’t ask me how that works!), and accidentally set off their powers some more, for giggles.
Gaia hints at the existence of Captain Planet, while they argue some more, and turn up to see the poor animals of the reserve all hurt by the oil spill.

Greedly decides to put off the Planeteers by spraying their plane with oil… surely that’s a waste of his potential profits? And there are better ways, too? If he’s built this huge robotic platform, he evidently has money to waste, and doesn’t care much about the law – so why doesn’t he have a bunch of flunkies with machine guns?!
Probably because that’s not ecologically damaging enough.

Wheeler trash-talks Greedly after the Planeteers save themselves from the crash using their powers properly. Greedly threatens the animals if they interfer further. So, after deciding they basically suck, the planeteers summon Captain Planet!
GO PLANET!

Greedly runs away (wasting thousands of dollars  more oil in the process…)

before the Captain, with his mighty earth-saving green mullet hairstyle, uses his powers to create a whirlpool and suck the oil back into the ground. Greedlys’ sidekick tries to attack Captain Planet with the drilling machines’ arms, but he’s invulnerable, and through the use of puns and super-strength, he does some damage – before getting spammed with toxic waste, which knocks him out for the count. He uses a bit of exposition, before the Planeteers wash him off and recharge his batteries in sunlight.

He trashes the drilling machine thoroughly, and Greedly (of course) gets away, leaving Captain Planet to return to the five rings, and the planeteers to clean up the animals.

And of course – then there’s time for  quick moral message, advocating us all not to waste petrol, electricity, or other resources, and then the ending theme.

So, not a bad cartoon episode, but nothing special. The environmental messages and absolutely anvilicious and overly simple – but they have to be, in order to make the cartoons’ idea work, and get the message across to kids. Certainly I remember myself and my sister bugging our parents to recycle, and turning off lights when they weren’t needed, and similar things. Not to mention cutting down on littering.

The show is pretty ridiculous though – again, mainly, the simplicity and camp nature of the thing prevails over any useful message, and it got much more ridiculous as it went on too – especially after the revamp, when animation and plot were handled by a different company – much like the GI Joe newer series I reviewed previously.
Like many cartoons of its’ kind, it had little in the way of consistency or continuity, and veered all over in terms of quality.
A particular episode in the final season featured Dr. Blight (an ‘eco-villain’ representing the problems of runaway technological development and scientific experimentation) traveling back in time with an older version of herself, to World War Two in order to sell Hitler an Atomic Bomb and change the course of history, as well as Captain Planet delivering an ‘anti-hate’ speech at the end of the episode.

Despite its’ flaws though, the series did try and tackle a lot of revelant issues for the time, which was unusual, and probably wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for the show being bankrolled by Ted Turner.
Some notable episodes dealt with drugs and addiction, as well as showing the related death of an addict related to one of the main characters, and an episode dealing with HIV and the paranoia and suspicion a sufferer of HIV could experience – touchy and brave stuff, for a kids TV Show.

The show also attracted a surprising amount of guest stars who either were famous, or would become famous, including Malcom McDowell, Tim Curry, Jeff Goldblum, Meg Ryan, Sting, Martin Sheen, Danny Glover, Louis Gossett Jr. and Elizabeth Taylor.

Evidently it made a mark on many young and impressionable minds, as well as sticking in the collective consciousness of a generation, since most people remember Captain Planet in one way or another – mainly for how silly it came across, and the simple moral nature of the show.
However, it does appear to have done some good, as the Captain Planet Foundation is a genuinely beneficial charity organisation that does good work in supporting education around the world.

So, Captain Planet may have been a pretty camp and silly cartoon series, but at least it has done something it set out to do – raise awareness of issues, and try and do something positive about the environment in some way.

As a popular and memorable cartoon series from the 90′s, with a large presence in the collective consciousness of the masses, it’s surprising that Captain Planet hasn’t yet received either a remake or a movie adapatation – the Wikipedia article hints at a screenplay submitted setting the action in a post-apocalyptic world ravaged by ecological catastrophe – which sounds awesome – but was never made anything of. Who knows – maybe one day, we’ll see a new Captain Planet!

Back in 2006, when the rumours started flying that the team at Family Guy were planning on doing a feature length Star Wars parody, there must have been a collection of nerds out there who couldn’t believe their luck. Blue Harvest, as the episode came to be known, was one of the most hyped DVD releases of the 2007, despite the fact that it wasn’t a ‘real’ film, but rather an hour-long television special, and ran to only 48 minutes without commercials. Still, a full endorsement from George Lucas and plenty of internet buzz meant that this release was much anticipated.

Now, I have a confession to make. The entire sum of my knowledge of Star Wars at that point came from the referential jokes on Family Guy prior to this making of this trilogy; I have never watched any of the originals.  So I wasn’t one of those anticipating it because I was a Star Wars fan. The entire appeal of this project to me was that it was yet another DVD to spend my money on – yet another Seth MacFarlane project to endorse. I pre-ordered the UK release, and waited.

I was pretty impressed with the final product. It was really funny, even to people like me who hadn’t seen the original, and from what I understand they went out of their way to make the shots etc true to the source material. I now know the basic premise of Star Wars enough to fake knowledge of them at parties. (I still haven’t seen the original movies, but my knowledge of them is much more in-depth thanks to these volumes and their commentaries. Did you know, for example, that “Blue Harvest” was the fake working title for Return of the Jedi? They didn’t want fans to mob the sets while they were filming.)

It was also great to see the Family Guy characters we all know and love transformed into people from an alternative story universe. The six key members of the Griffin family play the leading roles as you would expect (Stewie as Darth Vader, Brian as Chewie, Lois as Leia and so on), with neighbours Quagmire, Cleveland and Mort filling out the cast as C3P0, R2D2 and Lando Calrissian respectively (Meg takes her usual ribbing). The rest of the extended cast fill in the supporting roles, with very few mis-cast or doubled up (more on that later).

Overall, I quite enjoyed this offering. It seemed a great success for the creators, and judging by the commentary and what I’ve read they had great fun doing it too. It was a special project that they all got passionately involved in and devoted extra special effort to.  It was very well received by critics and fans and was even nominated for an Emmy.  Calls began to come in for a sequel…

Something, Something, Something Dark Side

… and in 2009, those calls were answered! The second instalment of the Family Guy trilogy was a straight-to-DVD parody of Empire Strikes Back (later aired as two episodes at the end of the 8^th season on American TV). The title came from a cutaway joke set up by Stewie in “Barely Legal”, an earlier episode of Family Guy, about the Emperor’s prefect formula for Star Wars dialogue.

But, something, something, something was different about this one. It lacked a certain energy, in my humble opinion, both from the production team and the final product. The jokes weren’t as clever or as snappy, and the plot seemed to drag at points, looking for something funny to say in expositional scenes and amid a much more serious story line. If I had seen it, maybe I could compare it to Empire vs A New Hope, but I all I can say is that I was slightly less than impressed with this DVD. It was okay, but not great; amusing but not side splitting. What I can offer by way of observation is that Blue Harvest was the product of the Volume 6 era, when the writing was still solid and the episodes still impressed me, while this one was being written round about the same time as Volume 9, which I didn’t think much of (see the review I wrote recently).

One thing that was impressive about this instalment – and the first one, come to that – was the animation. The graphics of Star Wars were revolutionary at the time; spaceships, believable alien Muppets, costumes, props, and foreign landscapes must have all impressed their viewers visually. And the Family Guy instalment has lived up to that with impressive use of CGI and wide screen format to make their style look as much like Lucas’ as possible. As a side note, this was the last ever episode of Family Guy to use hand-drawn anamatics, before transitioning to computer-designed ones.

Like I said, I’m not sure what Star Wars fans thought of this one in terms of accuracy or telling the story well. You’ll have to ask the sci-fi nerds about that one. All I know is that it relied a lot on the Family Guy nerds knowing their stuff – there were a lot of call-back jokes, bit characters, and inside references that people who aren’t as obsessed with Family Guy as I am might have missed out on.

Maybe it was because they churned this one out faster to please the fans, perhaps they realised that making fun of Star Wars has been done to death, or maybe it was because they’d done it before and it had lost its edge, but this offering just missed something. It’s longer than the first instalment – 52 minutes – and produced to the same high standard, but there was a certain apathy that seemed to come across on the commentary and which was obvious in the footage. They had stopped caring.

It’s a Trap!

And, by the time the third movie rolled around, everyone knew it. The episode opens as the other two did, with a power outage killing the TV, leading to Peter telling the Star Wars story to pass the time; “We have to do Jedi now, don’t we?”, asks Stewie in a defeated tone, and Peter asks him to shut up and just let him get through this. The opening scroll across space also portrays this sense of rushing to the finish line to complete the set: “Luke Skywalker has returned to his home planet of Tatooine in order to—okay, you know what, we don’t care. We were thinking of not even doing this one. Fox made us do it… Look, just do me a huge favour and lower your expectations, okay?”

With the creators even admitting to not believing in their own product anymore, there’s not really anywhere else to go but disappointment. Don’t get me wrong – this is, once again, a vaguely entertaining and funny movie. It’s still visually brilliant, and it rounds off the trilogy well. But there’s no passion any more, and it followed the slow steady slope of decline in quality that Family Guy has offered me of late. Oddly however, given that they have apparently tired of the project, it is the longest of the three episodes, and the DVD features a good six minutes of footage not seen when it was aired on TV, again as a two-parter.

This offering is the most complex and fast paced of the three. I am told that Return of the Jedi is the best out of the original movies, so perhaps the few remaining fans on the production team wanted to do it justice. Sadly, all the additional new characters posed a problem for the writers: they were out ofFamily Guy stock characters to fill the roles. So, they fell back on cameos from Roger and Klaus from American Dad (the highlight of the hour for me, which says something) and Rollo and Tim the Bear from The Cleveland Show. They also re-cast some of their lesser characters into second roles.

Which is my one big complaint about this offering: one of the most talked about things on the net was who “was going to play Jabba the Hutt?” Most people speculated Meg as the obvious choice, but she had already been cast as two different space monsters and ended up playing a third in this film. Who did they go with? Joe Swanson.

Completely mis-cast in my humble opinion – it seems the only reason he got the part was because he was the only main character who hadn’t been used (except for two bit parts) already. I’ll give them credit that they got almost all the other characters down pretty well, as far as I can tell, but this one casting decision seemed to make little sense to me. I don’t know who else I would have gone with, (perhaps Stan from American Dad, if you’re looking for the real enemy of the Family Guy universe) but Joe is one of my favourites, and casting him as the bad guy sullied the rest of this film for me.

Overall, I would recommend this box set. It’s a part of the Family Guy canon now, and it’s not bad. Maybe a Star Wars fan would love (or hate) it more than I do, but all I can offer is that it’s a quick and humorous way to educate yourself about Star Wars without actually having to sit down and watch all three full-length originals. And it does justice to the cast and style of Family Guy too. But lower your expectations if you’ve read the hype surrounding this series and are expecting something groundbreaking.

It was recently released it as a complete trilogy, and that is how it will stay. They have stated emphatically that they will not be doing the prequels. “Maybe Cleveland can do those” says Peter, as we fade to the Family Guy credits done in George Lucas style, and fans of Family Guy and Star Wars alike breathe a sigh of relief that it’s over.

I actually didn’t think it was all that good.

There. I said it. And I think Seth MacFarlane would be proud of me for doing so: after all, he was the man who famously said (via Stewie) that he wanted to hurt “The guys who watched the Simpson’s back in 1994, and won’t admit the damn thing isn’t funny anymore”. As someone who still has a huge amount of respect and admiration for the earlier canon of the series, I am just being honest and true to their own lessons by not remaining a slavishly adoring fan when they have ceased producing work which entertains and amuses me as much as it used to. I tried to be loyal and stick out the slump (in fact, Seasons 7 & 8 impressed me more with subsequent viewings than they did at first), but it’s now looking like that confidence was misplaced. It’s been, in my humble opinion, a downwards slope since about midway through Season 6, and I don’t see it being back on the way up any time soon.

I’ll still be watching to see what happens, of course. Like I said, I’m still madly in love with the earlier offerings (and their creators), and I still LIKE the show enough to keep coming back for more. It’s not bad television, per se. It just doesn’t leave me as satisfied as it used to, and that’s a disappointment. The jokes aren’t clever (insult, insult, fart, bowel movement, fart, mock the Jews…); the plots are getting more and more far fetched, and I miss the days when Stewie was evil and subtle instead of just overtly gay.

But don’t you worry, money crunchers at FOX; you can still count on my £20 for Volume 10. I just hope it’s a better collection than this last one – and that dear old Seth and his team have the courage, before there’s a volume 11 to pull them further into the pit, to put their own hands up and admit that enough is enough when it comes to the adventures of the Griffin Family. (Have you seen what’s happened with Scrubs? It’s much better to just let something die, with dignity. Think of shows like Friends, Frasier and MASH. They all stopped before they got to the point of flogging a dead horse, and they’re still respected and admired today for a good long run and a graceful exit on a high.)

Yes, I really just said that: I don’t want to see Family Guy go on forever and ever, not if it’s going to keep being more of the same that we’ve seen lately. It’s a historic, and kind of sad, day. But admitting it is the first step, and I know that I’m not the only one out there who shares that sentiment. A lot of fans feel let down. I personally think that they should write the show a fitting ending, and then leave it at that. I might even be excited about the odd Family Guy feature length release, if they did it like the older stuff. But I wasn’t overly impressed with this latest offering on the whole.

So, that’s the reason for the delay in the review, and pretty much the gist of my feelings about the new offerings. But don’t let that put you off borrowing a copy off someone or watching some episodes on TV; they’re not awful, just they’re not as good as they used to be. The plots are solid, if relying a bit heavily on the same transparent structure over and over again. The characters are all those you know and love (plus a few new B characters that are enjoyable in small doses). They’re still funny, they’re just not ‘laugh out loud, holding my sides, quote it to your friends for the next six months’ funny.

I would add one addendum to the above: the sequence where Stewie and Brian go into an alternative universe where everything is Disney-fied is pure comedy genius. (In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that the whole Road to the Multiverse episode is almost as good as any in Season 5.) Worth the price of the DVD on its own, seeing the Family Guy cast beautifully animated, bright eyed and busy-tailed, and singing about pie almost makes up for the less brilliant moments across the rest of the episodes. If only they hadn’t ruined it by ending on a Jew joke, it might have made it into my Top 20 favourite moments. I cannot even begin to describe this joyous scene, so do please find a way to view it if you’ve been feeling as jaded with the show as I have of late: it will restore your faith in the franchise.

I sincerely hope that either things improve/revert to their original state, or that the team accept that it’s past its peak, and end it on their own terms while the fans are still willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I don’t mean to say that this latest poorer offering sullies any of the genius of the previous ones, or that there’s nothing redeeming about the entire volume, but just rather that the whole thing left me with a taste of “Oh, was that it?” on this occasion. I expected more. This is also why I don’t want Seth MacFarlane to stop altogether. American Dad is still consistently strong, and his other projects are admirable. And Family Guy will always be my favourite of his offerings, and I do feel he’s made his mark on history with it. But perhaps it’s time to try something new folks.

If I hadn’t been in such a fragile state that I was terrified at the sight of alcohol I would have played the “Mecha Anime drinking game.” Try playing it next time you watch one of these, I’ll make the full list of rules some time.

Anyway, this series first episode begins on a space station in space that is hosting a massive ceremony over everyone collectively forgetting what year this is and just deciding to start again from zero rather than try to look it up or something. The space station suddenly explodes in a massive ball of fire, hurling the thousands of guests on board into the vacuum of space… Horrifying violence in a cartoon about giant robots, take a drink.

This scene cuts to the rest of the film which takes place ninety six years later and is never mentioned again. Having seen the original series Mobile Suit Gundam I understood the scene… but a series about giant robots should not require you first do research on a thirty year old cartoon in order to understand what the hell is going on.

This episode is the first of six and it lasts a full hour… of which we get to know our protagonist Banagher Links for all of ten minutes during which he meets a mysterious girl called Audrey Burne when he sees her plummeting to her death, he catches her using a little flying robot bubble machine thing. Demonstrating the protagonist can drive a robot in a civilian setting, take a drink.

It turns out there is more to Audrey than the ability to manage to nearly die of falling in a zero gravity environment. She tells Banagher to take her to some old bloke for them to talk politics about a macguffin called the Laplace Box and how they have to prevent a war. As soon as Banagher opens his mouth both Audrey and the old bloke tell him to piss off and stop trying to play soldiers… and Banagher says something that I personally hope was a case of really bad translation… This is taken verbatim from the subtitles.

“…For the first time I saw where I needed to be. I don’t care who you are! Just tell me you need me!”

Whoa… Slow down there boy! You’ve known this girl for all of five minutes! The protagonist creepily latching on to the first girl he sees. Take a drink.

Thankfully this plays out as it should and they tell him to fuck right off. But a minute or two later the politics of this made up world goes pear shaped and war breaks out between two or three factions that we haven’t seen before and haven’t had adequately explained to us. Innocent civilians being mercilessly slaughtered by giant robots to poignant music, take a drink.

During the chaos and backstabbing between characters we don’t know against other characters we don’t know either, Banagher somehow manages to find he’s accidentally wandered in to a hanger containing a prototype giant robot. ‘Prototype’ robot that is magically better than all the others, take a drink. You’d think that if you were building and testing a superweapon you’d put a lock on the door or something. Banagher finds the old man from before, who explains that he is ‘DUN DUN DUUUUUN’, his father. Estranged father who built a giant robot, take two drinks. The old man puts Banagher’s hand against a fingerprint scanner in the cockpit and tells him that it will only obey his orders now. Giant robot can only be driven by one person for a contrived reason, take a drink. And Banagher finds himself thrown into the cockpit. Main character “accidentally” falls into the cockpit of a machine he’s never driven before and is able to drive it because he’s special, finish the bottle. And then there’s some unimpressive fighting and the episode ends a minute later.

The animation is good and the music is beautiful at times, but for a series that has space travel and giant robots it manages to be massively clichéd, the action scenes lack any emotion because we have no idea who any of the characters are and the characters we do know are only in it for a short period of time that is spent on fantasy politics.

This new series adds absolutely nothing to the Gundam franchise that hasn’t already been done. Hell, rather than pay scriptwriters to make up anything new, the villain of the next episode is just a cut and paste of the villain from the first series!

The only reason you could possibly enjoy Gundam Unicorn is if you enjoy something purely on the basis that it’s Gundam. In which case, shame on you! Grow some bloody standards! They’ll never learn if you let them get away with this kind of shite!

Drinks taken in this episode: Seven, and the rest of your bottle. Good luck.

.

What I got was one of the most interesting shows this year. Think Muppets, but filthy and with an anarchic Family Guy twang thrown in for good measure and you’re half way there.

The show follows the misadventures of animals like the metrosexal fox Nelson having a forbidden romance with a chicken, Marion the Persian cat facing surgical castration at the vets or the dippy Afghan Hound Destiny trying to get sent to a dog obedience class to try and get with the bad dogs. And there’s a musical number where a cockney fox sings a song called “F**k the chickens.” Where he compares them to illegal immigrants…

Yeah, it’s not exactly got a cogent, linear plot. But that never stopped people watching Family Guy. It’s the jokes that matter. So the question is, is it funny?

Oh… Hell… Yes!

I knew I was going to have at least a few laughs when I saw one of the trailer clips about poor Marion’s plight which left me laughing helplessly for a good minute.

Just see for yourself.

This show has some serious teeth, and it doesn’t mind laying into its guest stars like Toby Anstis or anyone they don’t particularly like, like Michael Buble.

The puppetry and effects aren’t particularly groundbreaking, but they do a perfect job of making the jokes funny and the characters likeable. I don’t know why, but I always find myself more impressed by the simpler effects where you can see how it’s done. I played both Final Fantasy 13 and Final Fantasy 6 at around the same time, and I found FF6’s opening more impressive when it cracked out the Mario Kart style faux 3D than any of the shiny CGI shite that FF13 offered. It’s not the size of the budget that counts, it’s how you use it, and The Mongrels uses it to crack a few utterly filthy jokes, who could ask for anything more? Someone like James Cameron or Michael Bay probably would, but they’re twats.

I’ll be watching to see how the rest of this series pans out; if you’re British you can check out the episodes Here on BBC iPlayer. I’m afraid my lovely non-British readers will have to wait for the DVD release in August or see if they have a Hulu release or something.

It’s good to see a series that tries to do something a little different considering the BBC is usually as tight as a ducks arse with the TV Licence money. It’s not the second coming of Firefly or anything, but it’s a good way to spend a Tuesday night if you can get the TV free from Big Brother for five fucking minutes.

In what might well be the last thirteen weeks of her career, Davina is back in full force. Grinning, gurning and downright leering her way through the show, at one point during her antics I wondered if she’d just upped and had a stroke on camera. Thankfully she hadn’t, and they went through the process of picking out the housemates live on TV.

Yes, this time Big Brother brought eighty hopefuls down to watch as thirteen were picked out of the crowd. It shows just how much Big Brother’s playing to its strengths when the first contestant to go in was Josie, a Bristolian farmer who went up to the front door and just started crotch-thrusting at the already booing audience, makes you proud to be British doesn’t it?

This also had the added bonus that quite a few of them already knew each other when they went in. The look on professional Beyonce lookalike Rachel’s face was priceless, especially when cockney tosser Nathan walked in and hugged everyone but her. I’d like to say it’d be interesting to see what that’s all about, but I’m sure it’ll be bitchy and nauseating.

The house itself is carnival themed this time around, with various Circus paraphernalia and wherewithal scattered around the rooms that seem to conform to non-euclidean geometry and with even less privacy than before, so the contestants will have even more opportunity to piss each other off. The highlight of the house itself is the evil tree from the last series making a comeback as a chest of drawers, I’ll happily put up with this show if he’s still fucking with the housemates heads with his foul language and even fouler sense of humour, and he has more than enough material with the fourteenth housemate Mario.

Poor, poor Mario. He was picked out of the hopefuls at random by tombola and given an impossible task where he will have to act as a mole amongst the housemates sabotaging tasks and generally annoying the others, if he is discovered, he gets evicted… Oh and they weren’t finished… they gave him a special costume to enter in, he went into the house dressed as a mole… with a placard hanging from his neck with the words “I AM A MOLE” in big red letters. Well, at least they’re making me laugh. And I personally hope Mario stays in and escapes from this horror, he seems like a better person than any of the others.

I can’t say I won’t be glad to see it go. But I can’t say I won’t be able to escape it for the next four months either… Maybe if I buy and review more videogames I’ll be too occupied. Win win for both of us, You get more stuff on the site and I get to pretend there is actually a shred of decency in humanity!

This week it’s the turn of another well-known franchise in the spotlight, famous for it’s toys, comics, and also one that has had a live-action movie made.
It’s the Real American Hero, GI Joe.

GI Joe started out in the USA  as a series of 12-inch articulated action figures, thought up by someone during the 1960′s as a counterpart for boys to girls’ dress-up-and-play dolls. The figures came with removable clothing and varieties of weapons, and as time passed, the line grew more diverse, and the figures became smaller following the great success of Star Wars toys, which were in a similar size.
For their size, the figures were extremely well articulated (although had ugly joints), and there was a bewildering array of vehicles available for both the good guys – the Joes – and their enemies – Cobra, a snake-themed terrorist organisation.

Over time, the original aim of GI Joe as a military force became less and less realistic, as the character ideas grew steadily more outlandish. However, this didn’t seem to dampen kids’ interest at all, and comics and cartoons of the toys were soon spilling into the spotlight during the 80′s, on the wave of merchandise-based cartoons that were so popular.

GI Joe at one time was as popular as Transformers, with it’s own cartoon, comics, figures, and so on – but I always come up with one curious anomaly when remembering this. Despite most people knowing of GI Joe, and even knowing most of the theme tune, or some things related to it – Nobody I knew ever remembers watching it!
I found this a curious anomaly, but then I also don’t remember seeing it myself until I was much older, so perhaps it wasn’t just me, and it never did have much of an airing in the UK.
One other curiosity about the GI Joe in the UK is that it wasn’t GI Joe at all!

When the series was localised to Europe, and especially the UK, it was re-branded as ‘Action Force’, and was pitched as a spinoff of the Action Man toyline that had always been popular, and filled the same niche as GI Joe toys did in the USA and elsewhere.
Action Man had always had comics and suchlike, usually telling tales of military adventure and derring-do (Oh how the mighty have fallen…), and Palitoy, the company who produced the Action Man figures, also took the step of producing smaller figures following Star Wars toys’ popularity. The line took off well, and many figures, vehicles, and such were released, in several yearly waves, with a few molds borrowing from GI Joe ones initially, but the majority being brand-new.
However, things changed when one of the toy companys’ owners died, and Palitoy allowed Hasbro to take over. They began rebranding GI Joe as Action Force, and tied the storyline into one whole.
Over time, the distinctions disappeared, and the two became one and the same thing, with Action Force, INTERNATIONAL HEROES sadly disappearing, and the REAL AMERICAN HERO taking over.

Oh, and just for the record? The Action Force theme tune sounds way way less crap than the GI Joe one.

Anyway, looking at that should give you the hint that it wasn’t really especially a ‘conventional’ military unit, being as how it contained a variety of people – soldiers, sailors, wrestlers, models, and American Football players, and Cobra was equally ‘varied’ with their army of soldiers, robots, and biker gangs.
Similarly, the cartoon dealt with Cobra’s plots being less actual military or terrorist plots (Kidnapping, extortion, suicide bombing, car bombs, insurrection, etc) and more Saturday morning cartoon friendly, such as taking over the world by stealing things like solar energy converters or other such MacGuffins of the week, or some other fantastically outlandish and rediculous plan – despite having a huge army of fighter planes, tanks, and robots, and never resorting to all-out warfare.

The GI Joe cartoon was all the same solid material for Saturday Morning cartoons, and continued for two syndicated seasons totalling 95 aired episodes, as well as three mini-series of four episodes each under the Sunbow company, who also made the Transformers cartoon. A further series was aired in 1999 under a new animation and production company, DiC, and lasted for two seasons for a total of 44 episodes, and several other incarnations as mini-series or one-offs have appeared since then.
An animated movie was also produced, and was originally planned for a theatrical release, like the Transformers  and My Little Pony movies. But the  GI Joe movie was instead released direct to video instead, as the other movies performed poorly at the box-office.

Which is a blessing in the case of the GI Joe movie, as it was fucking terrible, involving some idiotic plot about an ancient society of snake-worshipping mutants who lived in the Himalayas, and of whom Cobra Commander was secretly a member. Various other idiotic things were also mentioned, all of which contradicted established facts (such as they were) in the cartoon, and ultimately the film is regarded poorly on the whole, and disliked by fans and non-fans alike, and the movie has become a curio on DVD and the internet.

Of course, it’s the series that everyone remembers most, and that I’m here to review. To do it some justice, I’ve decided to review one episode from the original Sunbow run of episodes, and one from the DiC run of episodes too, and see what the difference (if any) is.
So, without further ado, let’s get into things!

Lights, Camera, Cobra!

So, the episode opens with the theme tune, as above (still not as good as the Action Force one), and then Cobra and the Joes (Yo Joe! – though makes me wonder what they said in Action Force?) are engaged in a fight – and here’s one of the things I remember the most.
The Joes and Cobra never used real guns that fire bullets, despite, or perhaps because of, being an elite military force and the world’s most powerful terrorist organisation, oh no – they had LAZORS! PEW PEW PEW!

The Joes arrive in 1950′s vintage helicopters, and the Cobras are using curiosly realistic looking vehicles too. Duke (leader of the Joes) jumps Cobra Commander (Leader of the… well his name gives it away), and they both tears through a wall… and it turns out it’s all a movie set!
Gosh! What a surprise!

Anyhow, the producer, or whoever he is – it’s not made clear – storms off, declaring he won’t film unless he’s got authentic equipment and some advisors from GI Joe.
At Cobra HQ, Destro, the Cobras’ arms dealer (Yes, apparaently they have one specifically), arrives in Cobra Commanders’ office to tell him that they’ve tracked down a captured Cobra fighter jet at the film lot, and he’s worried about it giving away their location. Cobra Commander hires a bunch of his allied Mercenaries, the Dreadnoks and their leader Zartan (a master of disguise) to recapture the vehicles, and put a stop to the shenanigans. What a party pooper!

Also worth noting is the fact he hires the Dreadnoks for 4 million dollars in gold ingots.
If the man has that kind of money to throw away at his disposal, the question begs, why the shit is he a terrorist?
It’s never made exactly clear what Cobra’s ideals and goals are. Terrorists are usually defined by having some set goal and ideal to achieve – the IRA wanted Northern Ireland to be part of Ireland again, Hezbollah want Israel to be gone, the Basque seperatists want the Basque lands of France and Spain to be a seperately governed area – but there’s no clear indication of what exactly it is that Cobra wants. But whatever it is, it apparently allows them to have masses of money, resources, and manpower at their disposal, as well as the ingenuity to hide all of this somewhere where no-one has bombed the living fuck out of all of it so far to stop them.

Anyway, logical reasons for violence aside, the Joes also send an unlikely bunch of  ‘advisors’  for the movie, who look not unlike the village people, especially as one of them is a sailor, with most unexpected voice ever – i.e. – he looks like the stereotypical sailor, with a little hat and everything – but does not sound like a salty sea-dog at all. One of them is also ‘Cover Girl’, who is a Fashion model turned special forces soldier, which is the weirdest career change I’ve ever heard of.
They go along to the movie set, where the nefarious Cobras have set up a nefarious trap… or they’re going to, anyway.

Shipwreck (the sailor) makes up an excuse to go and get some movie equipment, instead going to a bar and getting in a bar fight (you actually see it!) and Cover Girl follows him to keep him out of trouble – which she fails at.

Meanwhile, Zartan, who is using his mastery of diguise to appear as… himself, but being played by an actor (STUNNING), antagonises one of the Joes so much that they have a motorcycle race using their respective sides vehicles.

Oh, that reminds me – according to the movie director, the authentic Cobra vehicles were turned over to the move by the US Government.
Yes, that’s right – after capturing advanced military hardware from the world’s most dangerous terrorist organisation, the US Government gave it to a movie producer.
Imagine if that happened in real life.

Anyway, the two Joes are injured after the Dreadnoks attack and cause their bike to crash, leaving Zartan and the others to topple a wooden water tower onto the Director and the other film crew, and Shipwreck about to be in trouble with the police!

OH NOES!

The Dreadnoks attack, and cause utter chaos on the film set, destroying the filming equipment, but Junkyard sets his dog (imaginatively named ‘Mutt’) on them, and the remaining Joes drive them off, stopping Zartan from destroying the Firebat jet.
The others return, and Shipwreck is bailed out. They take the Cobra jets to look for the missing Joes from the race, while Cobra Commander scolds Zartan for the failiure to destroy the jet.

Around this scene, I suddenly realised something about the incidental music – it sounds awfully familiar, almost as if… Sunbow used the same music from the transformers!
In an awfully cheaptastic move, the incidental music is actually the same music reused from the animated transformers series, creating a weird sense of deja-vu in my case, being familiar with both series!

So, Dusty and Rocondo (if that’s how you spell it?) are being stalked by Coyotes, where they’re both still stuck in the desert. Shipwreck rescues them in one of the Cobra flying pod vehicles, but then leaves them behind (which is reasonable, as there’s no passenger space), but is ambushed by the Dreadnoks as he gets back, and through a series of unlikely events, ends up getting stuck in the plane as it returns to Cobra HQ under remote control.

Anyways, Shipwreck ends up at Cobra HQ, and proceeds to put up a reasonable accounting of himself, slugging Cobra Commander and Destro in the face, before getting a rifle butt to the back of the head. And then Cobra Commander announces to have him taken inside for their ‘amusement’…

….Snigger. Maybe that’s Cobra’s goal – recognising Man-love throughout the world. Although that would suggest Shipwreck in his little sailor’s hat is on the wrong side.

So, the Joes come up with a plan to get Shipwreck back by using the Hollywood studio magic, while Cobra Commander uses elaborate torture methods – Shipwreck standing on a steel beam over molten metal, while Cobra soldiers shoot at him – and miss, though I’m willing to believe it’s deliberate to try and make him fall in – and a James Bond pastiche quote to ‘Amuse’ himself with Shipwreck.

I also noticed that Cobra Commanders’ voice is very familiar too…

So, Cover Girl’s plan is to use their captured Dreadnok to bring Cobra running, by showing him being tortured, which is an elaborate deception using camera trickery.

The message is sent on Cobra’s Ultra-Secret Frequency – By one of the Joes. Which means it can’t be very secret at ALL – and even if it was, the cobra soldier reporting it, does so in front of Shipwreck.
This does indeed bring Cobra running, as Cobra Commander is worried about their location being revealed – despite having a Joe on the base – and then the Joes also come running, and there’s a big ‘ol fight.
The movie crew also finally get their battle footage, as the Joes Conduct an airstrike on a civilian target to get rid of the Cobra, and we see the other thing besides Lazors that GI Joe is famous for – guys coming down on parachutes after their planes are shot down, which is laughably going to lengths to avoid showing anyone being killed in the show.

The huge battle is captured on film, and Cobra Commander escapes thanks to Destro, and the Joes are annoyed he escaped, but get to see the movie all the same – but the Director doesn’t credit the Joes, much to Shipwreck’s annoyance, as he threatens, in an almost perfect imitation of Scrappy-Doo, to ‘murdilise ‘em’, while the othes hold him back.

So, all in all, a none-too-special episode. A lot happens in it, but as a result it feels kind of jumbled, and the plot is a bit lackluster and dull, compared to some of the more exciting and wider-scoped ones found in comic books or other Joe episodes. It also focused on some of the less interesting cast, and I was disappointed I didn’t see Flint, Lady Jaye, or any of the Joe characters I remember from my young days – and had as figures – although I did have one of Shipwreck, now I recall.

So, let’s move onto the next episode and see if it’s any better.

‘Chunnel’

Well, this is going to be hilarious already – it’s about the Eurotunnel.

The episode opens with a hilariously inaccurate depiction of London, with GREEN London buses going back and forth, and a badly-realised Tower Bridge shown. The Chunnel is also shown in London, rather than being anywhere near the Channel, while a voice supposedly belonging to the Queen conducts a speech opening the tunnel.

One interesting piece of difference that comes up right away between this series by DiC and the previous Sunbow series is obvious immediately – the animation is far more primitive in the DiC series, and looks completely different. The colours are all far brighter, and the designs less technical or detailed than the Sunbow show.

So, the hilariously inaccurate Chunnel visuals continue, with there apparently being a station underground, and a character who is presumably supposed to be Queen Elizabeth II (there’s a Corgi shown at her feet) reading the dedication. A rumbling occurs, and for some reason, rather than being accompanied by Armed Police, MI5 or any other security forces that would accompany the Queen, instead five soldiers of the Coldstream Guards, for some reason equipped also with bolt-action rifles, instead of assault rifles, react to the sudden, and completely expected appearance of Cobra Commander through a wall. Cobra Commander abducts – oh, sorry, Cobra Commander – Queen-naps, the Queen – and then escapes into the opening credits – which are Awful.

After the horrendous noise, the terribly English -what-what-what-cup-of-tea-shine-your-shoes-guvnor- (ARRRRRGGGHHHH) ‘Big Ben’ (ARRRRRRRRGGGHHHHH) calls some other Joes in to help rescue the Queen. Duke and Scarlet are shopping in London in their full combat gear, and are stampeded to death by shoppers, leaving only a russian guy, and some other dude as well as Big Ben to rescue the Queen. Despite the odds, Big Ben announces in his painfully bad accent

“Come on Lads, let’s save the Queen!”

So, off the merry band of fuckwits go.
I already hate this much more than the previous episode. What did they do for research? Read the word ‘England’?

The horrible parody of the Queen wonders if Cobra Commander is a circus performer, and then a snake charmer. BECAUSE IT’S FUNNY. HE WEARS A MASK. SHE IS THE QUEEN, AND KNOWS NOTHING, AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Sorry, let me find my medication.

…

Yes, despite Cobra being the world’s most dangerous terrorist organisation, and having threatened the security of the free world on several dozen separate occasions, apparaently the state leader of the United Kingdom, one of America’s staunch allies, has never heard of them. GO FIGURE.
Starscream Cobra Commander is less than pleased, of course, and follows the Queen as she walks off. Meanwhile, the rest of the Cobra play with the dog, for no good reason.

The Joes show up, and a small and stupid gunfight happens, with the Joes doing some fancy and improbable driving to get past.
Ugh, I so don’t care anymore – this episode is dire, and the DiC series is so much worse. Everything is more comedic, and the colours are so BRIGHT, it hurts.

Anyway, the tunnel is breached, and water starts to fill the tunnel, causing trouble for everyone, as Cobra Commander escapes with the ‘Queen’, leaving the Joes in a tunnel filling rapidly with water. Hopefully they’ll drown.

Sadly, the return after the ads does not start with a funeral service for the lost Joes, so on we go.
The SCUBA equipped Joe manages to close the tunnel safety door, and use the abandoned Cobra vehicle to get them out of the tunnel. Meanwhile, Cobra Commander and the other idiots are being attacked by the Corgi, while Cobra Commander scrapes and grovels to the Queen, for some reason. She berates him, and he finally reveals his plan to steal the Crown Jewels… for some reason.

Duke and Scarlet are apparently at the Tower of London (still wearing full combat gear..) and end up meeting the bad guys who are armed, yet do not instantly decide to fight armed terrorists in the heart of London, and are somehow defeated by the bumbling and incompetent Cobra lackeys. Cobra Commander and his goons escape, with Cobra Commander deciding he wants to be King of England.
Duke and Scarlet escape from the Tower, while Big Ben (AAAARRRRGGGHHHH) escape from the Chunnel, and are attacked by a Cobra jet, piloted by the most incompetent of all Cobra Commanders’ minions, and the Corgi.
The diver guy shoots down the plane with a rifle, but not before it damages the train and shoots out the brakes (very precise shooting…), leaving the Joes ‘Special’ team on a crazy train.

Duke and Scarlett use one of the Joes vehicles to ram the train to a stop in a fairly reasonable representation of Waterloo station. The Joes go after Cobra Commander, who is idiotically not realising that the people in the palace are bowing to the Queen not him… not that everyone bows to the Queen anyway…

The Joes storm the palace, while the Queen tells the Cobra that they’re basically useless and smell bad. Cobra Commander reveals he has bombs planted everywhere across London, which ought to stop them. Cobra Commander goes crazy and starts appointing the idiots with him into royal positions.

A random battle takes place outside, as the Joes decide that assaulting the Palace isn’t a priority, and instead engage in a physics-defying dogfight with Cobra, including slowing a jet down enough to open the canopy and pick someone up, before they decide to stop Cobra Commander again. They get into the palace, and corner Cobra Commander, who holds the Queen hostage. However, she fights her way out by stamping on Cobra Commanders’ foot, and setting a Corgi on him – which is evidently enough to cause him to retreat…
Wow. He’s a pretty shitty terrorist.

Anyway, the Queen congratulates the Joes, and they accept an offer for tea, as well as letting Scarlett spend the states’ money on shopping, before the end credits roll.

So. The DiC cartoon was a big pile of DiCs, and far more silly and comedic than the Sunbow one, which was hardly a rigid and gritty depiction of Cold War counter-terrorism and hi-tech warfare itself. All in all, I’d say that GI Joe deserves to be remembered with a sense of humour and as a campy item of ridicule way more than the other things I’ve reviewed so far.
The reincarnations of GI Joe in comics for the fans who’ve grown up some more and now have better ideas of what makes a good story and good action are apparently a lot more mature and well thought out, as are the original comic books, which also have more deep and involved plots, as well as more realistic action and combat, as well as simply better characters.

There is also the GI Joe: Resolute series which came out in 2009 as a short series of episodes available only online, which are aimed at a PG-13 audience, and forgo the lazors and parachutes for more realistic and dramatic action, with real danger and a better storyline by Warren Ellis, which I would recommend checking out.

While GI Joe might be remembered in the same breath as Transformers, I wouldn’t say it holds up as well in it’s animated form, and while it’s fun to remember, it’s nothing special, after all.

Besides, Action Force was a much better name.

]]> http://unbored.co.uk/reviews/2010/05/22/retro-reviews-gi-joe/feed/ 3 http://wp.me/p1B5QK-io http://unbored.co.uk/reviews/2010/04/16/retro-reviews-the-transformers/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 23:00:54 +0000 Steve Doyle http://unbored.co.uk/?p=1140 Continue reading →]]> In the first of my ongoing series of reviews focussing on all the cartoons you remember from your childhood, and from mine, I’m going to tie up my transformers articles by looking at the original transformers cartoon.

Well known and (mostly) remembered by a many a geek, the original transformers cartoon aired for three seasons and a mini-series in most parts of the world. Everyone remembers the theme tune and many of the characters, and it has spawned many sequels and spinoffs since it’s debut in the 80′s.

Of course, everyone remembers it fondly – but was it really that good?

Sure, there were some episodes that were pretty exciting – like the first 3-parter, Arrival From Cybertron, which established the setup for the show, and featured a lot of action. There was also The Key to Vector Sigma, which introduced the combining teams of the Autobot Aerialbot planes, and the Decepticon Stunticon cars who were powerhouses in their own right, and the episode War Dawn, which shows the origins of Optimus Prime, and the beginnings of the war on Cybertron, amongst other good episodes.

Of course – there were also a whole bunch of fucking terrible episodes, full of shoddy and awful animation, dumb-as-hell plots with stupid half-assed ideas in them, and mind-breaking problems in continunity between character design, plot, and abilities and more, often within the same episode. Many of these came in the third season when there was less money and more of the work was being farmed out to other companies, and the writing was of a much lower standard.

Of course, reviewing one of the good episodes would be easy, and I’d

thoroughly enjoy watching it.
But that wouldn’t be nearly as funny, so instead here’s a review of two of the worst episodes known to fans everywhere – City of Steel, the third episode of Season two, and Surprise Party, the 12th Episode from Season three, and featuring everyone’s two least favourite characters, Wheelie and Daniel. Why these two episodes? Well, why not.

City of Steel

So, the episode begins with Lazerbeak flying past the Statue of Liberty, and entering New York City. Nobody notices or comments on the giant mechanical eagle, and the sound of his rumbling jet engines, and likewise nobody notices him using his laser cannons to levitate a manhole into the air. Well, I guess it’s New York. Those guys have seen everything.
Presumably it’s one fucking big manhole, as he then flies down it and into the sewer, where the Decepticons have established a secret base.

Now, let’s just take a moment here. The Autobots and Decepticons are stranded billions of miles, and 4 million years from their home planet and their civilisation. The Autobots are known and in contact with the US Government, but the Decepticons are hated and feared. However, the Autobots never establish any bases – but the badguys are constantly building shiny metal bases everywhere! where the do they get all their shit from?

Anyway, somehow, the Decepticons have built a massive base under New York, and no one has noticed. Presumably they also didn’t file a building permit, the Fiends!
The Constructicons actually do some constructing, and sink the Empire State Building beneath the streets and into their secret base, which is apparently part of some Master Plan of Megatrons’.

Meanwhile, the Autobots see this on TV, and Optimus Prime blames Megatron instantly, with no evidence (although, y’know who else was it going to be? Cobra?). They rush to NYC to put a stop to his shenanigans.

Some of the Autobots arrive, inexplicably using hydrofoils to skate over the water. They see Lazerbeak and… well, nothing really comes of it, and they

rendezvous in Central Park and have a bit of a comical slap-fight, before Megatron shows up, abducts Optimus Prime, and renders him a cripple in his secret lair, before raising a phallic-looking Cybertronian building in the Empire States’ place, declaring the city to be ‘New Cybertron City!’
Oh Noes! What will the Autobots do now?

Well, after the commerical break, it turns out that the city has been evacuated – it’s apparently much easier than movies, tv, and the real-world have otherwise made out – and the Autobots sneak into the sewers, where

they encounter a robot alligator, made from bits of Optimus Prime, on Megatrons’ orders.

No, really.
Spike, Bumblebee, Ratchet and Hound manage to drive the robot alligator into a subway train, and send it on it’s way, before discovering the location of Optimus’ dismembered head. They repair him so he can talk, and then set about recovering his body parts, but are missing his right arm, which Megatron had mounted, with it’s gun, on the top of a tower as a freakish gun turret. Soundwave repeatedly clicks the fire button, and the gun-arm inaccurately strafes the Autobots, while Megatron cackles incessantly.
Our heroes are dooooooooomed

Fortunately, the Autobots survive the commerical break, and escape the badly-aimed barrage by transforming into the vehicle modes and driving around hapharzardly. After not paying attention to driving or where they

were going in any way, Bluestreak and Hound fall into a hole that appeared from nowhere that leads into the subway.  They fight Rumble, who turns into Frenzy, who turns into Rumble again in a subway train, which is surprisingly resilient to laser cannon fire, before it explodes, while Sideswipe, Sunstreaker, Bumblebee and Optimus are attacked by…

KILLER TAXIS!

They somehow find them hard to beat, but eventually discover the secret of levitation long enough to jump over them with no ramp whatsoever in their car modes, before Optimus rams them all and destroys them. They then begin to scale the side of the decepticon-state-building. Sideswipe learns to fly long enough to take out Starscream, but then forgets how to again, while the others climb up the building.
Spike and Bumblebee infiltrate the control room, and trick Megatron into shooting the base controls.
Well that’s fucking dumb of him. No wonder the war on Cybertron went so badly – he probably blew up half of his own bases and equipment because he was startled by a spider on his chair.

Anyhow, he then sends Devastator, the combined robot form of the Constructicons, after the Autobots, who, rather predictably, proceeds to climb up the building like King Kong, while speaking in the third person. Wheeljack, who has been conspicuously absent since the start of the episode, attacks him with remote control helicopters that fire rockets (maybe he was building them?), which do little, and then gives up completely, despite them not being destroyed.

Optimus takes control of his arm again, despite being grabbed by Devastator, who is waving him around like a kid with an actual Optimus Prime figure, and then blasts him with his gun, which for some reason is insanely powerful, and topples Devastator with one shot.

The Decepticons all fly away, Optimus pulls himself together (they use that pun in the show, too), and everyone lives happily ever after – until the next episode.

So, that was insane, dumb, yet somehow I’m left grinning at how stupid it was. I don’t hate it, I just think it’s incredibly silly. I’m sure my four-or-five year old mind would have enjoyed that episode at the time, but as an adult, I can see how idiotic it is.
Speaking of which, onto the next one!

Surprise Party

The Episode starts with the Season 3 opening, complete with it’s hilariously mis-coloured Springer-as-Kup (there’s a toy in there somewhere, Hasbro! Limited edition repaint!), which was never, ever corrected. For thirty-three fucking episodes! Then onto the real fun!

So, the episode opens with Daniel being surprised by his dad, Spike, and the majority of the Autobot army, who have little to do, apparently, except celebrate the birthdays of small human boys.

This seems surprising, since Galvatron, leader of the Decepticons, is watching on a monitor. Considering he can spy on his enemies’ HQ with such impunity, I would’ve thought the Autobots would have their work cut out, and Galvatron would’ve kicked their asses by now – but hey, whatever. All the same, he gets pissed he’s not invited to the party, and attacks Cybertron. The combaticons (decepticons who turn into military vehicles) attack and destroy two of the Autobot shuttles, one of which looks remarkably like the Aerialbot Fireflight, who’s jet mode is an F-4 Phantom jet fighter. One of the combaticons also looks a lot like Hound.

Wheelie suicide charges the Decepticons for no apparent reason, and for some reason the others decide not to let him die and free themselves of his rhyming bullshit, and instead Ultra Magnus shields him with his body, taking a shot to the robo-kidneys.

Amazed by this display of heroics for a comedy relief character, the Combaticons, including the robot they combine into, along with their seperate forms. Yes, that’s right – the robot they combine into, Bruticus, is present in the same shot as their uncombined forms, in a tiny form, escape into a GIANT version of their space-shuttle comrade, Blast-off, and flee.

Daniel decides that Ultra Magnus should have a surprise party too, which I’m sure he’ll feel in the mood for after getting shot in the robot-kidneys, and set off to find out when he was built, while Spike and the others wangst about the shuttle and the upcoming ‘peace conference’.

Wheelie and Daniel, the worlds most annoying partnership, scour the archives and find only an archive bot who is also annoyed by them, and tells them that Ultra Magnus’ birthday isn’t on record, except for on some archive asteroid that is apparently lost.
They need a ship to get there, and Wheelie takes Daniel to a hangar full of immaculate shuttles.
Now, correct me if I’m wrong – but didn’t the Combaticons attack the hangar at the start of the episode? And didn’t they trash all the shuttles? Furthermore, didn’t Spike and the others head off to find out if the shuttles could be repaired? They’ve got a hangar full of perfectly good ones here!

Anyway, the Dullard Duo head off to the asteroids’ last known location. Meanwhile, using his omnipotent viewscreen, Cyclonus, Galvatrons’ right-hand man, notices… and does nothing about it.

Wheelie and Daniel fly into an asteroid field, which turns into a meteor shower, and crash-land on the asteroid, where they’re attacked by flying scaly eel things. Wheelie, despite being part of the Autobot army, is apparently unarmed, and transforms and drives away to head them off.

This doesn’t really work, probably because Wheelie sucks, and Daniel is an idiot. They somehow manage to disgust the eel-things into going away, and then instead get shot at by the guard robots of the archive base that they’d fortunately happened upon.
Just as they’re about to finally bite the bullet (or laser, or whatever), Cyclonus and his henchmen the Sweeps – who are not a cadre of evil chimmney sweeps, alas – turn up, and prove that they are sincerely evil, and save Daniel and Wheelie from certain doom.

Dumb and dumber reveal all within seconds, and Cyclonus sets the asteroid, that looks suspiciously like a moon, onto a collision course with Cybertron. The Autobots receive a signal from the base, and Cyclonus, in true villain style, reveals his evil plan.
The autobots rush to save their home world and everyone on it, and respond in full force…

…by sending only Sky Lynx and Ultra Magnus (who was injured earlier!) to stop the planetoid on a collision course. Somehow, Wheelie and Daniel also escape. Magnus and Sky Lynx make short work of the flying eel-things, because they bought fucking guns with them, and then kick the Sweeps’ asses too.
Cyclonus and Magnus get in a punch-up, while Wheelie saves the day.

Cyclonus and Magnus get in a punch-up, while Wheelie saves the day.

Wheelie saves the day!

by pressing the button marked ‘self destruct’, which requires no authorisation, and has no covers or other systems to prevent it being pressed accidentally or anything.
Man, the Autobots build some crappy bases – malfunctioning guard androids, doors a human child and an unarmed robot could break into, and easily labelled and accesible self-destructs? No wonder their planet is fucked up.

Anyway, they all escape, and Daniel and Wheelie reveal they wanted to have a surprise party for Magnus, who doesn’t seem to give a shit, or know when his own birthday is. Spike comes up with the idea that that day should be his birthday, forever marked by the near-death of his son, and the destruction of a small planetoid, and everyone cheers hip-hip-hooray!

So two episodes of the cartoon that are far from the worst, but typical of some of the sub-par or run of the mill episodes. And certainly of the far, far weaker third season of the TV show that followed the movie.

They both also show the low production values by the amount of lazy animating or animation errors, as well as the stupid plots – but they still entertained me, and it was still somewhat enjoyable, if in an intensely dumb way.

The series still has some appeal, and some of the better episodes are still pretty good, and it’s hard to resist the warm enveloping bosom of nostalgia as she nestles me with her sweet, sweet familiarity.

Transformers

Other than the well-remembered cartoon of that time, there have been many, many more incarnations of the ‘robots in disguise’ that have contributed to the franchise and pop-culture,  stretching from the original series, right up until the current day, and varying wildly in their storylines, continuity, quality, and style.
All of them are regarded differently by the legions of Transformers fans that exist, both casual and hardcore. But to the more relaxed and less transformers-orientated geek, I’ve decided to undertake a voyage into the realms of transforming robot animation to give the rest of you a guide to the galaxy and generation spanning adventures of the warriors from Cybertron, and hope that you can find some fun, adventure and appreciation for them.

The long, confusing, and twisty legacy of Transformers in animation began way back when, years ago, when I was young, and you were even younger. When business suits with shoulder pads, perms for men and women, and leg-warmers ruled the world of high fashion, when the synth was the only instrument pop needed, and when Mobile phones were big enough to bludgeon sea mammals to death with.

The year was 1984, and the original transformers cartoon had arrived.

This is the animated series that most transformers fans, and non-fans be they around when it first aired or after, are familiar with, and will think of when someone says ‘transformers’ to them. This has the classic line up of recognized characters – the Autobots, lead by Optimus Prime (“the truck guy”), and Decepticons, lead by Megatron (“that dude who turned into a gun”), and their friends and underlings, such as Starscream (“wasn’t he, like, red?”), Soundwave (“what use is a tape deck?”), Jazz (“Wasn’t there one who was like, a sports car?”), Bumblebee (“I always thought Bumblebee was awesome!”) and the rest.

The original transformers cartoon established a lot of precedents in the shows that follow it – the Autobots mostly turn into cars, the Decepticons into flying craft and weapons (although later episodes changed those things). There was a war between both factions that had raged for millions of years, and that the robots were from outer space. And both sides were in competition for energy and resources.
These ideas have been repeated over and over again in later incarnations, and these versions of the characters returned to many, many times to continue their adventures. Most fans remember this series strongly, and many of them have grown up to work on later incarnations of transformers. The characters, continuity, and familiar aspects of this show later came be to be known, unofficially, and later officially, as Generation 1, a term that has become widely-known by both fans, and even some-non fans and non-geeks to represent these stories and characters, and their associated works.

However, watching it again nowadays, it’s very much fair to say that it hasn’t aged well.
The show is rife with terrible animation errors, with limbs, heads, and even whole characters disappearing from frame to frame, characters being the wrong colour entirely, inconsistencies in plot, animation, character, and abilities for the tranformers shown, and all sorts of other terrible problems.

Much of this is due to animation being ‘farmed out’ for production to other houses and studios than the main one, for lower costs and quicker working times, which meant mistakes in the finished episodes were inevitable.
The plots of the individual episodes are often rediculous and silly – none more so than the infamously bad episode ‘B.O.T.’ – but there are some that are entertaining, and even excitingwhen viewed now, and as an older fan.
And if you can place yourself back in a child’s mind-set, it’s easy to see why you were entertained, and enthralled at the time.

The characters are kind of simple too, but nonetheless – this is a children’s cartoon, that was designed to sell toys – and it did so very well, as well as capturing the imaginations of a generation of kids so much that the show went on to have three seasons.
Likely the best of which was the second, which introduced new characters alongside the originals, and also had more adventurous plots involving the background of the transformers and Cybertron.

The series also spawned a movie, which was of much higher quality in both story and animation that the series it came from

The movie was a big thing for transformers, and another that all fans remember well. Not least for the fact it killed off almost eighty percent of the characters from the first two seasons of the cartoon!
A daring departure… in which many small children could observe the contents of their toy shelf being systematically elminated. However, it was poorly received at the box office, but went on to become a cult classic.

The third season of the cartoon followed the movie, and took place after it’s events, with the same cast of characters. However, by this point, toy sales were falling, as was the budget for the series, and many of the stories were outright rediculous comedies and many characters – such as the loved by fans, and previously powerhouse Dinobots – were changed into comedy caricatures of themselves.
Eventually, with a final, and pretty awful, 5-part story named ‘Rebirth’, and acting as the most toy-commerical-like episodes yet, the original Transformers Generation 1 series came to an end.

In the USA and UK, that is.
In Japan, things continued…

The transformers toyline had continued after the end of  ”Season 4′ with many new toys and new gimmicks to go with them. Japanese audiences were thus treated to a new storyline to go with their shiny new toys that featured many, if not all, of these new characters and the continuing adventures of the classic characters alongside them in ‘Headmasters’ the new series of transformers.
Uniquely Japanese, it featured many traits of anime aimed at younger audiences, with simplified motivations and plots for the good and bad guys and their personalities, as well as plots involving characters romping all around the galaxy to fight the Decepticons.

This series was not available to western audiences for a very, very long time, but was finally released in a terrifyingly bad, bad, bad, bad! dub by a company named Omni Productions, and most fans wish they hadn’t bothered.
While the dub is widely available, and easy to get hold of on DVD, it is best enjoyed after having consumed most of your body weight in strong alcohol, or possibly window cleaner. There are a multitude of reasons for it’s sheer awfulness, not least of which is the fact that the voice actors all sound like they’re not interested in what they’re doing or saying, having no expressive qualities in their voices at all, even when their friends are dying.
Part of this is probably due to the fact that they’re faced with a terribly translated script that has no relation to what’s really going on onscreen, or any idea what came before it in terms of the previous series and it’s events, who the characters are, or even their names! Several of the characters names are in fact hilariously changed – such as Blaster becoming ‘Billy’ and Blurr choosing the more conventional name of ‘Wally’…
Fortunately, you can find the subtitled (by fans) versions elsewhere. While occasionally a bit silly and simple, they are nonetheless fun, and most often of a decent quality of animation.

Things didn’t stop there for Japan – Headmasters was a big success, and so it was followed up by another series, following the toyline along with new changes, and introducing a new cast of characters.

Masterforce took on a whole new angle, with new characters and a new background than the previous series, and standing away from them to make it’s own story.
Humans were the central focus of the plot, and the theme of ‘personal transformation’ was paramount, as the characters could ‘become’ transformers by donning special suits to ‘combine’ with transformer bodies.

More light-hearted and comical in tone than the previous series, Masterforce was a Big Damn Adventure, though set almost entirely on Earth, as humans were central to the plot and it’s events. While a radical departure, it was well-received and remembered, and had many spin-offs and nods in later fiction.
Unlike Headmasters, Masterforce was available in the UK (because the world loves us), subtitled instead of being awfully dubbed, and continues to be available.
Japan wasn’t done with transformers yet either, and they had one more Generation 1 show in their arsenal to be deployed.

Victory was a return to the roots of the franchise, and followed two small groups of Autobots and Decepticons (or, rather, in Japanese, Cybertrons and Destrons) as they fought across the Galaxy, defending peaceful civilizations from attacks by the Destrons.

New characters, such as the heroic Cybertron commander ‘Star Saber’ and the evil Destron leader ‘Deathsaurus’ (yes, really) were introduced, alongside returning cameos and appearances from Masterforce characters.
The show spanned a short run only, which is surprising due to it’s high quality of story and especially high-quality animation – but perhaps that’s why, as the budget must have been a lot higher.

Victory continued to introduce new characters based on new toys, such as the micromasters, based on the smaller pocket-sized toys (which were a trend at the time), and other combining-type robots, most of which were Japanese exclusives – especially the unintentionally hilariously named ‘breastforce’, with their combining breastplates.

As with Masterforce, Victory was thankfully made available in a subtitled format many years after it’s original release, rather than the crackhead dub by Omni, and is still available.
But this was the last series based on Generation 1 (or G1) concepts produced in Japan, and it was many years before anything new came along.

Back in the west, things had been extremely quiet too. The remainder of the 1980′s had been devoid of any new animated, televised or otherwise tranformers content, despite the toylines continuing strength and presence, and the only blip had occurred from 1993-95 when a cartoon named ‘Generation 2′ had aired.
Consisting simply of the original 1980′s Generation 1 cartoon, and even select episodes at that, with added grating and annoying primitive CGI borders, opening and closing credits, and scene changes all in badly-done, noisy and intrusive effects. The series was a flop as much as the ‘Generation 2′ toyline was, and the only impact it had was allowing the original fans to see many of the original episodes over again – something that, at the time, was unique, as the internet was a nascent idea, DVDs were a few years off, and the only other copies of the show were on very rare VHS releases, that had often been passed around by many hands, and were aging quickly.

A few years later however, things changed as a wholly-new (at least to begin with) show came to the airwaves in 1996, with a new style of animation, and a brand-new setting and cast of characters.
Reviled by original fans upon it’s beginning, Beast Wars soon and very quickly, with the slick plotting and characterisation, became a superb example of Transformers-related storytelling, and amassed a legion of fans.

Most of this was due to the fact it had excellent characters and ideas behind it, and moved swiftly, with individual episodes that contributed to overall arc-plots (something never seen in a transformers show before!) and while aimed at kids, also had many elements that appealed to older viewers.
While the first season stood on it’s own, and made only very passing and casual references to the ‘Great War’ between Autobots and Decepticons, and a few casual name-drops that were mostly for the sake of humour, by the second season, the writers and show staff had realised that the majority of their viewers were transformers fans – and many of those writers were also fans. Synchronicity was achieved, and the references began to gather pace and the show was now explicitly tied to the original G1 series – and no more so than in the third and final series, where the original characters were featured (after a fashion), along with a slew of other elements.
Beast Wars was an unexpected success of it’s time, and is still well-loved and celebrated today by transformers fans. And it was followed up by it’s own sequel show – another first, at the time.

Beast Machines continued the adventures of the Beast Wars cast after the end of their original storyline, transplanting the action back to the Transformers home planet of Cybertron.
However, in the voyage home, their enemy Megatron had escaped, and has taken over – resulting in a much darker, dystopian and bleaker story than the earlier show. the CGI was much more refined, and the theme tune much more rockin’, leading to a smoother and more slick show.

Characters motivations changed from their roles in Beast Wars, many of them growing in different ways and becoming different to what they were, as the world around them is a dangerous, dark, and scary place. Often battles are a result of simply having to survive or flee, and getting caught, and the Maximals (the good guys) are often on the back foot against superior numbers, and more ruthless and warlike foes.

Beast Machines was mature in it’s approach and story-telling style, and didn’t talk down to it’s audience. It wasn’t without moments of levity and humour, or even hope, but was certainly on a different level than earlier shows – but in the end, that may have been part of it’s downfall, as it lasted only two seasons, and came to a somewhat abrupt and non-triumphant ending. It’s still a hotly contested and debated show in the transformers fandom, but for my opinion, makes a perfect cap on the Beast Wars storylines.

Things hadn’t been quiet in the land of the rising sun however. Japan had loved Beast Wars too, despite their dubbing and rewrites turning it into a bizarre and madcap comedy with almost no relation to the original show. However, it had been popular, and as a result, two sequels followed

Like the re-dubbed Beast Wars, Beast Wars II was a comical and zany take on the battle between Maximal and Predacon, though it followed it’s own story and direction than the American series – and, noticably, made a transition to 2D cell animation instead of CGI.
The series received, and has received so far, no release outside of Japan, but is notable because it included many characters who appeared in the toys, but did not appear in the CGI TV series – Likely due to the cost and time involved in creating new models for the characters.

Beast Wars: Neo followed up Beast Wars: II in Japan, and was as equally goofy and odd as it’s predecessor, carrying on the same storyline with the majority of the same cast.

Things were happening in the USA though – the planned follow up toyline and series to Beast Machines, named Transtech, for which only a few designs were produced, never appeared, and instead, a new series was imported from Japan – a first for the franchise, and later to become a common practice – and was renamed, and the story rewritten. This was called Robots in Disguise

This new show was a complete reboot of the franchise, as it featured no connections to the timeline established by the original cartoon, and expanded on by Beast Wars and Beast Machines. It also featured a much more humour-orientated and kid-friendly approach than the other shows had taken, including comedy characters and dubs as standard, and new voice-acting talents (essentially, the entire cast of Digimon) and was broadcast only on cable-exclusive channels.
Robots in Disguise was not well-known even at the time, and has remained something of an obscure curio. It was the first time though that many of the anime ‘stock’ traditions were presented to familiar Transformers audiences, including things like the ‘anime sweatdrop’ to indicate confusion or embarassment, the ‘speedlines’ of a background in a character moving fast, and other notable stock-in-trades, such as stock footage and shouting the names of attacks in battle.
RiD survived for only one season from 2001 to 2002, and has never received much in the way of followups or popularity, but was the first to pave the way for imports of Japanese shows.

Transformers: Armada followed hot on the heels of RiD, and was heavily promoted, with a new toyline to accompany it. Featuring a new host of voice talent (who were not from Digimon), it follows the adventures of the Autobots and Decepticons of another new continuity as they struggle against each other to find missing smaller robots called ‘minicons’ who can unlock special abilities in all of their larger brethren to allow them to battle their enemies and achieve victory in the ongoing war, as the fleshbag annoyance human sidekick ‘Rad’ explains in the clip above.

With the theme of collecting smaller robots with special abilities that don’t speak and instead spout nonsensical sounds, and having to travel around the world to do so, Armada received many less-than-complimentary comparisons to Pokemon, which was also very popular at the time of it’s release.
Pokeformers was however, fairly well animated, and had a good-length run. However, it was boring, repetitive, and had a tedious plotline that managed to encompass several shifting allegiances throughout it’s run.
Somehow, it included several references to G1 characters in name, but was not well-received by many fans of the original shows, though it gained an audience of new and younger fans during it’s time.
Armada became the first part of a trilogy.

Energon was the second part of the so-called Unicron Trilogy, and was a direct sequel to Armada, taking place 10 years after the end of the previous series.

It featured a returning cast of characters embarking on a new plot, and used a brand-new cel-shaded CGI style that seemed to have been deliberately designed to make the transformer characters look as absolutely awful as possible.
All of the characters lacked in any range of movement and expression, and were covered in overly thick details and panel lines, often resulting from the models being bad-scaled in far-off shots or closeups.
They lacked any weight of movement, and had embarassingly bad body language, walk and run cycles, and sheer depth or range of movement in any way, and had faces that could not even move to perform expressions. It’s especially sad and depressing when one remembers that Beast Wars and Beast Machines were made made literally years earlier, and in those two shows the characters – even the ones with nonhuman faces – made facial expressions and displayed body language perfectly!

Combined with bad writing and even worse voice acting, the show was a dismal failure with fans, yet somehow managed to run for a brain-tumour inducing 51 episodes.

Most of the problem comes with the fact that the series ignored any and all character development and sub-plots, ignoring any ideas about personalities and motivations simply to include more scenes of stock-footage – which given the animation quality, have little-to-no visual impact or grand feeling to them.

The plot itself ends up being repetitive and pointless, as the characters constantly attempt to perform the same goals over and over again, ending up in a show padded out with – yet again – more stock footage, and far too many scenes of exposition and characters telling the audience what they know already, or dubbed in non-sequitors, caused by the lack of a proper translation, or sheer confusion in what is an already confusing and badly-drafted script, resulting in the voice acting being stilted and jarring, and often not matching what is happening on screen, or the characters speaking nonsense!

Supplemental comics and spin-offs were produced for some reason, and the series had a small following of fans, most of whom were presumably too young to care about the horrible visual design, or were lobotomised.
Even more sad to realise, was that Energon marked the 20th anniversary of Transformers on TV, which is quite a sad state of affairs.
Worse still, was that this abortion had a sequel.

Cybertron carried on the story of Armada and Energon, as the Autobots raced into space to find the ‘cyber-planet keys’ to stop their homeworld and many others, from being destroyed – at least in the west. In Japan, it was a stand-alone series, with a new continuity and premise, and didn’t feature the same characters.

Fortunately, considering it’s predecessor, Cybertron actually had some work put into it (someone must have told the producers about the reaction to Energon), and as a result the dub ended up with a much better script and much better performances, along with much more work being done to explain things that were otherwise lost in the translation from Japanese to English, and the rewriting performed to make the show part of the Unicron Trilogy.

Nonetheless, the show does suffer from the horrible flaw of endless stock animation sequences for transformation, and the plot often feels laboured in some places, and compressed in others, lacking any real balance. However, it is overall a much better effort than previous attempts.

Following the debut of the Live-Action transformers movie in 2006, a new all-american produced animated Transformers series was produced. It iddn’t tie into the movie itself, but featured a lot of common elements – and it also didn’t tie into G1, but was heaped with references to the series – many of them tongue in cheek, and for fans only.
The new series was called, quite simply, Transformers: Animated

With an animation style that was more reminiscent of Cartoon Networks’ home-grown shows, such as Teen Titans, and Ben 10, the initial reaction to Animated (as in, the few in-production pictures that surfaced before the show even aired) was extremely negative – although that was nothing new, as Transformers fans are routinely extremely hard to please, and considering that the franchise revolves around changing from one form to another, remarkably opposed to change.

Nonetheless, many of their opinions transformed when they finally viewed the new show. It was witty, intelligent, and smart, and had a very clever and well-paced arc story that linked the individual episodes.
The continuity also received a fresh reboot, placing the characters on an Earth in a near-future, in which the Autobots and Decpticons are unknown, and the war is long over.  Similar to Beast Wars, they are also not warriors, unlike the Decepticons, and must learn to fight their enemies as they go, often needing to team up to take out even a single Decepticon.

The series went from strength to strength, and featured masses of cameos and nods to G1 characters, or Animated versions of those characters or movie characters, to draw in more fans. There were many things featured that would draw in older fans – for example, Wreck-Gar being voiced by Weird Al Yankovic, who had written and performed a song on the Transformers: The Movie soundtrack. Or the cameo appearances of Daniel, Spike and Carly from the original G1 series, or the mention of Metroplex and Fortress Maximus, characters from the earlier shows.

The series was massively popular with Transformers fans everywhere, and news of any new episodes was widely awaited. The production staff also apparently widely enjoyed working on the show, and interacting with the fans, as well as producing and writing the show itself.

As such, it was a resounding shame that Cartoon Network confirmed that Season 3 was the last season of the show, and there would be no more episodes forthcoming, for some unspeakably stupid reason.

So far, Animated marks the last series to be um, animated, for the screen, but 2010 will mark the debut of a new series, Transformers: Prime, which has, as yet, little information released about it.

So, transformers continues to go from strength to strength on-screen, and has many, many different incarnations that offer something to everyone.
But the story doesn’t end with the cartoons, as there are other avenues down which the background and universe of the robot warriors from another world have been explored – that of the printed page, and it’s in the next part of my article that I’ll discuss the transformers comics, and their storylines and histories – and how they altered the transformers as they were portrayed on screen.

Until all are one!

Of course, being anime, there are a shit-ton of different series, all of which seem to have names designed to deliberately confuse you. So here are some quick pointers to seeing what all the fuss is about.

Mobile Suit Gundam:

This is where it all started back in the seventies. As a series, this one is incredibly simple compared to the others because the franchise became an arms race to top each previous one with more and more ornate and powerful robots. If you were generous you would say that the artwork hasn’t aged gracefully… But I’m not generous, and the graphics are terrible. And the less said about the writing and voice acting the better. Characters seem to be awkwardly narrating the action as it unfolds, explaining the plot every step of the way… it’s hideous… but I’m still watching it fifteen episodes in! Why? I don’t know. Is it because the plot manages to be simple but interesting, is it because it actually shows the horrors of war even when giant robots are flying around? Is it because the story unfolds as an intelligent battle of wits between the protagonist and the heroic antagonist, resorting to increasingly dirty military tactics rather than being the one that screams loudest in their cockpit.

Whatever it is, there are better ways to try the series on for size, both in quality and in the amount of time required. But if you like Gundam, you may well enjoy this.

Gundam Zeta:

This is the first direct sequel to the series. Avoid this one if you haven’t watched the first because you’ll just be confused. And the first episode is nowhere near as interesting as the original series.

Gundam 00:

The first episode starts so promisingly with child soldiers running for their lives from giant robots in a war-torn city during a holy war. But suddenly everything is made magically better by four stupidly overpowered robots. As soon as the leader of the four robots declared that they were a mercenary group devoted to stopping war, I literally shouted at my monitor and closed the video. This is pointless saccharine fantasy and it is not worth your time when there are better shows available.

Gundam Seed:

An interesting start to the series, with extremely good visuals and a few nice touches here and there. But it took way too long to get started, the protagonist doesn’t set foot in a giant robot until the end of the first episode, and I can’t even remember his name. It may pick up later, but for some reason I’m actually choosing the first series over this.

War In the Pocket and The 8^th MS Team:

I was told that these would be available as well. But I haven’t been able to find them yet, which is a damn shame because they’re the two best things to ever emerge from the franchise. The 8^th MS Team follows a group of soldiers fighting in a jungle environment similar to Vietnam, where the hero, Shiro Amada meets the love of his life… Problem is she’s on the other side. What follows is a very nicely told Romeo and Juliet story with interesting characters on both sides and excellently animated action sequences in only twelve episodes.

But that’s nothing compared to War in the Pocket. Which follows the 11 year old Alfred Izuhara. He lives on a neutrally aligned colony in the middle of war and is desperate to see some of the soldiers he’s heard of and idolises, he gets his wish when he catches a team of spies who were sent to steal information on the secret weapons being built there. The youngest of the spies is ordered to humour Alf in order to avoid having to kill him, because when a child disappears, people come looking. While they bond and learn from one another, things get progressively worse. The series is only six episodes long and it’s one of the most heart rending, poignant pieces of cinema I have ever had the privilege of seeing. If there is anything with Gundam in the title you should watch, it’s this!

I am about to do something I thought I would never do – bash the genius of Seth MacFarlane! (I justify this in my head by arguing that technically The Cleveland Show is actually very little to do with Seth, and is more the brainchild of Mike Henry; Seth is only implicated by involvement and association, rather than being the creator of the show.) But I am indeed about to do it, so brace yourselves folks!

The much talked about Cleveland Show finally comes to the UK on E4 this week. I have to confess that I cheated and watched the first five episodes of Season 1 on the internet a while ago, so I know what’s coming. And I have to say that I wasn’t much impressed.

Aside from the first five minutes of the Pilot (which was television gold, and included the cast of Family Guy and Cleveland’s farewell to them all), The Cleveland Show just didn’t do anything for me. Sure, it has a catchy theme tune which gets stuck in your head for days, but the characters are stock cliches, and the jokes are utterly forgettable. Even Seth’s character, Tim the Bear, didn’t bring enough to the show to make it worth going back for more. And when I don’t want more of Seth, something somewhere has gone horribly wrong!

Don’t misunderstand me; The Cleveland Show is a decent way to kill half an hour. It’s not bad, it makes you smile at times and it’s solid in terms of animation and writing quality. But I expected more. It’s not groundbreaking. Without the association with the Family Guy crew, and the curious fanbase like myself that that could promise, it probably wouldn’t have been picked up by the networks; and it probably won’t hold its own that long. It’s just not Frasier. It is, in fact, effectively, Family Guy again.

Which is what some people have said about American Dad – but they’re wrong. American Dad is much more political, it has a different tone; it has a set of truly unique and individual characters and stories to tell. It doesn’t reference pop culture as much, and it has done away with all the cutaways, segways and flashbacks that are Family Guy’s signature. It is it’s own show, and it stands alone without leaning on Family Guy at all.

But The Cleveland Show is the same format and style as Family Guy; cutaways, celebrity insults, rude jokes. (Ruder jokes, even, if possible – the town where Cleveland and co live is called ‘Stoolbend’ and all that that implies.) But while Family Guy makes this work by having an awesome collection of characters and story lines interwoven around these, Cleveland lacks those elements. The characters are American cardboard cut outs – the spunky grown up before her time teenager, the ‘redneck’ judgmental hick, the slow talking neighbour next door – and the plots are sitcom staples that are so over worn that there are holes in the elbows and knees.

There is even a bar in Stoolbend where the four male characters on the show go to hang out and shoot the breeze. ‘Ext. establishing shot of bar, with amusing neon sign and pub name; cut to booth inside where Cleveland, a fat bear, a skinny White Guy and a short, well-built White guy are sitting, drinking beer from glass mugs.’ Sound familiar? I thought so. But while I don’t really miss Cleveland too much when I watch such scenes in Family Guy now, I do miss Peter, Joe and Quagmire when I watch The Cleveland Show.

And that’s the rub I guess; it’s Family Guy, but without the elements and people of Family Guy that we know and love. Of all the characters they could have given a spin off too, I don’t see why Cleveland was the one to get it – aside from obvious career aspirations on the part of Mike Henry, who created the character and happens to be one of Seth’s best friends as well.. I don’t really see why a spin off was necessary at all. Fox did pick it up for a second season before the first one had even aired though, so they must see a financial potential for it. But I personally don’t see this one lasting long. I certainly won’t be watching, and if you can’t even get a hard core fan like me to tune in to your ‘other show’, you’re probably better off directing your efforts into the original.

2/5

When Doctor Who was reduced to four specials last year, leaving all Doctor Who fans forced to subside on a diet of reruns on BBC3 between the BBC’s carefully rationed (by which I mean, dartboard scheduling) of the specials, the reason behind such planning was David Tennant’s unavailability for filming, as he had been asked to play Hamlet in a production of Hamlet by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Who if you haven’t heard of them (you philistine), are quite a big and impressive outfit in the UK and worldwide for their productions.

While I wasn’t fortunate enough to go up to the glamour and urban decay of our nations’ glorious capital to see the show in person, I was lucky enough to tune into it with a multitude (or a couple anyway, given the viewing habits of the British Public) of other people on BBC2 and see a lavishly produced screen adaptation of the show.
Was it worth the time away from being Doctor Who? Was David’s acting up to it, or would this be the Doctor in Denmark?

I was glad to see this was not the case!

The RSC have given things an update in setting, and as a result the characters are wearing modern-day clothes – Hamlet spends most of the play in jeans and a T-shirt, or a sharp-looking tuxedo, and likewise the other cast members are dressed in modern clothing. Luckily, they haven’t done the same with the dialogue, which results in some kind of stilted, horrifying, and dumbed-down version…

The production is great too. The sets are all very atmospheric and moody. Of course, as it’s a play and not a film, it’s not quite as finished and detailed, but the effect is there. There’s even some parts of it filmed outside, such as the graveyard scenes, and in an authentic castle corridor, for the ghost scenes.

The use of CCTV cameras for some scenes is an interesting idea too, giving things a big-brother, claustrophobic feel, and adding a unique perspective on certain scenes, especially those of Hamlet alone and indulging in talking to himself and toppling over the precipice of madness – something David Tennant plays well.

Tennant brings a great amount of his playing the Doctor to the role… but not too much. He has the same mental energy of an electrocuted ferret, but also brings the gravitas and drama he has too, and shows his training off well. He plays batshit mad very well, and uses his great range of facial expressions to great effect to show it, and everything else. His changes in voice and tone for the script also come in great use, and he shows the meaning of the unfamiliar language well by using his voice.
Putting him up against Patrick Stewart is of course a fantastic idea too. Long before he was Captain Picard or Professor Xavier, he was of course trained and studied as a classical Shakespearean Ac-tor (ahem-hem-hem!), and is as such, a fantastic one.

The strength of the production comes really from the cast, and the pedigree it has. It’s not without it’s faults, however. It’s a tad too slow and wandering in places, and on TV, it probably isn’t as grand as it would be on the stage, as it was meant to be seen. The contemporary updating of the setting is good, but seems strange alongside the use of swords and knives by the soldiers and other characters (except for the duel at the end, which is changed to a fencing duel).

All in all, I’d have no problems saying it was good – but I’d love to see it on the stage, to get the real effect. As for whether it was worth the absence from Doctor Who – well, that’s a matter of personal opinion. Personally, I’d still liked to have had a full season of Doctor Who – but I also liked what I saw of this, so it’s hard to say. The Specials haven’t been excellent… but this was something kinda special, so I’d say that Hamlet was worth the while to take a look.

Last year we had a giant steam powered Cyberman stomping around Victorian London… This year we had the John Simm with a serious case of the munchies.

For those of you that don’t know, this two-part special will be Russel T Davis’ last time writing for the series, and David Tennant’s last time acting as our favourite Time Lord. So as with all end of the series extravaganzas, it has to be balls to the wall awesome! Christopher Eccleston’s last moments involved a full scale galactic slaughter with the newly resurrected Daleks on a space ship threatening to destroy Earth as well as everyone on board, Billie Piper looked into the heart of the TARDIS and got a severe case of the Deus Ex Machina, Effectively turning her into God. This forced Eccleston to put a stop to all that before she solved all the series problems for him and ended up killing himself in the process.

Of course, back then the Daleks had been given a whole veneer of novelty by the fact the series hadn’t been running for sixteen years by that point and they were genuinely terrifying… Unfortunately that doesn’t apply any more, so thankfully, this new special episode didn’t even bother with the Daleks so as not to cheapen them any further, and decided to cheapen the Master instead!

It’s almost a clever idea, bring back someone from before the series became shit from the presence of Catherine Tate, John Simm had been a brilliantly charismatic and utterly batshit crazy villain with a wonderful anarchic glee at the evil he performed. Imagine the spine tingling horror you felt at watching Heath Ledger’s Joker at work and you’ll be about half way there.

Last time we saw him, he stole the TARDIS and made himself Prime Minister of England for a whole year before the series had even started. Hypnotising the whole world, killing the president on live television, stealing a flying aircraft carrier and sending earth into a dystopian horror… all with a smile on his face.

This time, he’s been brought back with a plot point we weren’t told about before, and he wants to eat stuff… and he won’t stop bloody talking about it. It’s supposed to be scary, but when he morphed into a blue skeleton I couldn’t stop laughing! And then he jumps away into the sky, propelled by lightning and the power of wasted TV licence money!

David Tennant himself is as great as ever, and it will be a real pity to see him go. You never realise how good an actor he is until you see him go all out to salvage something as awful as this. You can see that the only thing that’s been keeping this last series together has been Tennant’s acting and Steven Moffat’s occasional forays into writing for the series. Fighting against the corrosive influence of Catherine Tate.

So of course, Tate’s back for this episode as well after being given an utterly stupid sendoff that sounded more like a terrible fanfiction than something written by actual writers who actually get paid to write stuff where she turned out to be half Time Lord but had to have her memory wiped because then she would die because she’s too awesome for this world… Thankfully she spends the whole episode on the phone not understanding what’s going on. Instead, the episode focuses on her granddad, Wilf. The ‘Wacky’ comic relief that runs around in the Doctor’s wake like a sick puppy looking for more screentime.

Wilf’s ultimate moment comes in interrupting the Doctor on his hunt for the carnivorous Master with a gaggle of perverted pensioners who grope him, make gay jokes and demand a photo while Simm’s off eating people… I don’t know who I’m more angry at, the Doctor for not saying ‘I’m sorry, but people are dying and you’ve got your hand on my arse’ or Russel for being too stupid to write that line in for him to say!

Ultimately, the master manages to sabotage a machine to make everyone in the world including Barrack Obama shake their heads so fast they turn into copies of John Simm, and the screen pulls out to reveal Timothy Dalton telling people the Time Lords are coming back…

This series has been scraping the bottom of the barrel so hard I’m pretty sure it’s sprung a leak.

There is hope though. Though we lose Tennant, we also lose Russel T. Davis, who after re-invigorating the franchise in 2005 seems to have peaked a full series ago, to be replaced by Steven Moffat, the mastermind behind the more brilliant episodes like ‘Blink’ and ‘Silence in the Library’. And who knows, maybe the new kid will do a good job at being the Doctor, so what if he’s young, so was Tennant in comparison to the others.

It’s an end of an Era. Even if it goes out with not a bang or a whimper, but a soft farting sound it’ll be worth watching as it can only get better from here!

Unless they bring Catherine Tate back for the new series, then it can really die in a fire!

Discuss the show on our forums.

The show itself is not that bad. The part that’s bad is the fact most of its target audience are treated as if they are mentally challenged!

My proof, Marcus Akin and Charlie Drummond, two housemates on either side of the interesting/stupid debate.

Marcus described himself as “The Irrepressible Darkhorse”, and he lived up to the first part at least. Frequently swearing at Big Brother, delivering verbal smackdowns to any housemate that got in his way and performing acts of mutiny against Big Brother itself, up to and including breaking everyone out of the house and running amuck in the camera rooms. He gave the whole concept of big brother the big “Fuck you” that it’s deserved for so many years.

Charlie Drummond on the other hand… Where to begin? Stupid, bitchy, conceited, self absorbed and as boring as a… really boring thing! And everybody fucking loved him! Or at least the show did its absolute level best convince you they did and that you should as well. Deliberately editing out his nastier moments and having Davina and George Lamb practically worship the ground he walked on in what I can only assume was an attempt to deliberately manipulate the public into making him win.

Thankfully, Charlie ended up coming fourth, but only because if the show edited out all his nastiness there wouldn’t be anything left. But they still tried to justify his actions by claiming he had “gone on a journey from boy to man.” finally finishing Big Brothers degredation of duplicitous manipulation to outright lying. And the worst part is, if they had had picked someone easier to sell than this scumbag, the public would have fallen for it!

If there is any reason you should have seen it, it’s because you got to watch something die. Big Brother has gone as low as it possibly can, visibly scraping the barrel with its extreme personalities that they can’t possibly have a hope of containing. Pretentious, visibly smug presenters like Davina and Lamb who seem to think they are the show, to their overt clutching at straws trying to nab ratings from the gormless public. It’s atrocious, and yet I couldn’t look away, it’s like watching a car crash.

If we’re lucky, they won’t even bother with next years series. But if it manages to be even worse than this one I’ll be seriously surprised!

Studio Gainax

2007

For many years since the rise of Gundam, Mecha anime has been all about the realism. With the mecha being treated like walking tanks that have motors, servos and actuators and stuff, teams of engineers maintaining them in between battles and pilots relying on skill and training rather than sheer force of will.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann decided that those ideas can all go die in a fire! Who wants to watch some military type do his job when you can have a kid jump into a machine and start kicking faces!

The story follows Simon (Pronounced See-mon because it’s more weird that way.), a young orphan who lives in an underground town digging tunnels for a living. Soon enough, he finds a weird glowing object that looks a little like a drill bit. Action piles upon action and soon enough Simon has found a small robot to go with his key-thingy, and has destroyed a giant robot menacing the town and escaped to the surface with his friend and thinly-veiled father figure Kamina and a scantily clad, pneumatically bosomed lady called Yoko to embark on adventures on the deserted surface of the Earth where the only other souls are the Beast-Men, who have it in for all humans, killing them almost indiscriminately.

And that’s just the first episode!

It may sound jumbled and incoherent when being vomited onto the page by your humble yet sexy narrator. But the fact of the matter is, none of it comes out of nowhere, there is a reasonable sequence of events involved in this story… it just moves really bloody fast, and it uses that speed to kick you in the balls as many times as it possibly can!

This is the cartoon equivalent of the Powerthirst ads! Watching this anime is akin to surfing on the back of a fighter jet made of Biceps! Everything is so over the top the series actually takes it on as its personal mantra. “Go beyond the impossible and kick reason to the curb!” and by god it does! Everything from Kamina’s way of picking up a sword by kicking it upwards, letting it spin round his neck and catching it in a dramatic pose complete with lens flare. To the deliberate yet consistent breaking of the laws of physics in everything from the mech fights to the way Yoko’s breasts bounce around like a couple of puppies. This show is over the top, it’s outrageous, and it knows it!

Not only that, but it’s really funny as well! Kamina’s presence is both hilarious and inspiring at the same time. Not many characters do that mix quite so well. That is where this show truly excels. It’s not serious, and yet when it wants drama, it does it. It’s not depressing or didactic, yet when it is over you walk away feeling that you have learned something. The world may run on a fictional form of energy derived purely from hot blooded fury, but you will feel genuine questions about the human condition being subtly whispered into your ear so surreptitiously you’ll think you must have come up with it yourself.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has it’s cake and eats it. And then it turns it into a big-ass drill and puts it in someone’s face purely because it can!