Chuck's review is both hilarious for ripping on the cheese that the series was rife in while also showing how much damn fun it was for that.
Not being a morning person I largely missed it and many other cartoons on Saturday to sleep in, but caught up with it a few years back on Teletoon Retro up here in Canada before the channel got shutdown.
If there is one thing most of the episodes make clear it's that they really struggled to find plots to base the premise of two warring robotic races around and so randomly threw things together as they went along. Instead of it being cringeworthy (actually it is, but in a good way) and uninspired it offered the producers and writers a chance to really get creative and add things that wouldn't otherwise make it into a show like this. While not making sense given the shows setting, it at least made the show damn fun to watch in a light hearted fashion and it perfect for kids.
It really reminds me of a bunch of adults getting together to play with some toys like kids and struggling to think of stuff to do with them that comes off as a weird hybrid of kiddie fun combined with an adult take on childhood imagination. The way even the animation is sometimes handled with the size of many Transformers changing as the scenes require them echoes the frenetic, randomness of the way Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes would play.
I first realized this watching Webworld, the episode where Galvatron gets committed by his fellow Decepticons to an alien psych-ward and proceeds to make a mockery of their treatments in a not so subtle wink at real mental health practices. The episode ends with the Decepticons breaking him out admitting that despite being a raving, insane and violently abusive leader they'd rather have him like that than not have him at all.
Others are great too in that same spirit, like Triple Takeover and Carnage in C Minor while it also allowed for more serious things like War Dawn.
Edit: One thing I do like about this fun mentality is how is seemingly inadvertently put a neat spin on the impact of the Transformers i-world on Earth. It literally was an invasion of two immensely powerful and violent alien robot races that continued their war where it left off millions of years ago as Mankind stood by powerlessly watching on as they went at it. It's an idea I find very intrigue, especially given that it came from a kids TV show to hawk toys. That sense of other-worldliness seems to have been in mind though, the later seasons strange intro music nicely captures that alien aspect of the Transformers despite how anthropomorphized they may be.
It makes me wish that had been front and center in any modern film series about them that dialed back the benevolence of the Autobots while maintaining it, making the setting more like something out of WWII's Pacific Theater with two advanced, industrial powers fighting across a vast ocean with islands inhabited by tribal people's that were effectively ants among giants with one faction's ethics allowing for some passing concern about them while they remained focused on fighting the war.
Ghilz wrote:If you want a laugh, go to TFWiki and read the episode's
page
After Swindle sells the components of his fellow Combaticons, three kids get their hands on Brawl's brain, using it to make a robot.
Or...
Worst. Episode. Ever.
TFwiki is the best fan wiki for a good reason.
It's awesome just for all the hilarious picture captions alone.
aceina wrote:uh why are the transformers able to walk inside a school
I liked the entire side of the Protectobots hideout building tilting up to allow them out after they'd transformed inside of it.
CrypticMirror wrote:With that ending, it is more like a prologue to a Law and Order:SVU episode.
Oh this episode sucked. The only thing that stops it being the absolute worst is that it isn't the one that drove Casey Kasem to quit the show in disgust. That is it.
While I get why he'd have quit over it, my impression of Thief in the Night after seeing it a few years back was it was a satire far, far more about tinpot dictators, revolutionary republics and authoritarianism than it was about Middle Easterners. The setting was Arab, the countries name was Communist, the dictator was a Latin American dictatorship stereotype with a bit of Qadaffi mixed in.