Len Wein Dies at 69

[New and Improved Zobovor]

Len Wein recently passed away. He is most notable in the field for helping to create popular comic book characters like Wolverine and Swamp Thing, but he has also written numerous scripts for Transformers, including co-writing "Webworld" for G1 with Duane Duane, "Tangled Web" for Beast Wars, and "Savage Noble" for Beast Machines.


Zob (he was also a four-time champion on Jeopardy!)

[Rodimus_2316]

On Wednesday, September 13, 2017 at 10:39:01 AM UTC-7, New and Improved Zobovor wrote:
> Len Wein recently passed away. He is most notable in the field for helping to create popular comic book characters like Wolverine and Swamp Thing, but he has also written numerous scripts for Transformers, including co-writing "Webworld" for G1 with Duane Duane, "Tangled Web" for Beast Wars, and "Savage Noble" for Beast Machines.
>
>
> Zob (he was also a four-time champion on Jeopardy!)

I remember him. He was a great writer, and I loved his work. He did some legendary Marvel Comics work too, which I loved, especially Spider-Man.

R.I.P., sir.



- Rodimus_2316

[banzait...@gmail.com]

I loved webworld. Great episode, very dark. "Do you want something to scream about? I'll give you something to scream about!!!"

-Banzaitron

[New and Improved Zobovor]

On Wednesday, September 13, 2017 at 11:39:01 AM UTC-6, New and Improved Zobovor wrote:

> including co-writing "Webworld" for G1 with Duane Duane

Well, now I guess I need to call her Diane Diane at least once, so both mistakes can cancel each other out.


Zob (sigh)

[Travoltron]

My mom would record those shows for me during Season 3, because KSTW
idiotically decided to air the cartoons an hour earlier that year. When
the kids were all still at school.

I remember mom telling me that it was a really good episode. I can
imagine watching all these cartoons was probably tedious for her, but
there were hidden gems like that episode.

The old way of making episodic television may have been chaotic, but you
would often get some brilliant (and awful) stuff that way. There would
always be those one or two amazing, iconic episodes of a show.

Current serialized TV is very "samey". All the episodes feel alike.

[New and Improved Zobovor]

On Wednesday, September 13, 2017 at 10:45:30 PM UTC-6, Travoltron wrote:

> My mom would record those shows for me during Season 3, because KSTW
> idiotically decided to air the cartoons an hour earlier that year. When
> the kids were all still at school.

I lived in Maryland in 1986, and I watched season three in the mornings before school. The show came on in syndication in the afternoons, too, but I believe it was just reruns of seasons one and two.

Prior to that time, I caught season two in the afternoons after school. I remember Challenge of the GoBots came on at 3:30 and Transformers was on right after that at 4:00. (Thundercats aired at 4:00 on another station. Which is probably why I've never sat through a single episode of Thundercats in my life.)

> I remember mom telling me that it was a really good episode. I can
> imagine watching all these cartoons was probably tedious for her, but
> there were hidden gems like that episode.

It's funny what we remember, isn't it?

When the show was on the Sci-Fi Channel, I would tape it in the morning and then watch it after I got home. I remember my little sister telling me about how she was home sick one morning with my grandmother and "Five Faces of Darkness" was on. It was the scene where the Quintessons are trying to trick Galvatron into joining forces. My grandmother finally turns to her and goes, "Do you have any idea what's going on here? Because I sure don't!"

> The old way of making episodic television may have been chaotic, but you
> would often get some brilliant (and awful) stuff that way. There would
> always be those one or two amazing, iconic episodes of a show.

I'm currently watching The Real Ghostbusters on Netflix, just hopping around to random episodes, and I really get a sense of that from the show. There have been some really bad episodes but also some really amazing ones. My memory of the show is pretty spotty (and I really only watched the first couple of seasons; it just isn't the same without Lorenzo Music and Arsenio Hall) so I'm just now rediscovering how clever and sharp and smartly funny a lot of the episodes were.

Slimer is one annoying little fuck, though.

> Current serialized TV is very "samey". All the episodes feel alike.

My suspicion is that there's more planning now than there used to be. The showrunners come up with a concept for each season and then all the scripts are created around that idea. So, a season of television isn't so much a series of episodes strung together, but rather a long, over-reaching story that spans the course of 13 episodes (or however many). You usually end up with a really high-concept starting episode, a bunch of mediocre episodes in the middle, and then a really strong finish.

A result of this is that I rarely remember individual episodes from current TV shows. I will remember moments, or season-wide plots, but I couldn't possibly point to my favorite Breaking Bad or Walking Dead episode because they're all a big blur. It makes for better and more coherent seasons (especially in this day and age of binge-watching) but there's very little chance for individual episodes to really shine.

It's very different from the way they produced the Transformers cartoon, where individual writers (who had no idea what the other writers were doing) would just pitch random ideas, and whatever Sunbow liked, those ideas got turned into episodes (and whatever Sunbow REALLY liked got turned into two-parters).


Zob (cannot believe I deliberately subjected myself to "Adventures in Slime and Space")

[Steve L.K. Macrocranios]

New and Improved Zobovor wrote:

> Len Wein recently passed away. He is most notable in the field for

What most excited me about him was he wrote what I believe to be the very first toy robot tie-in comic book-Microbots-in 1971 or thereabouts. Even though it only lasted one issue it qualifies as a milestone in toy robot marketing history (to me anyways). I think the Zeroids in '68 had single page comic style illustrated ads but nothing before Microbots was ever an actual comic book tie in to a toy robot line.

I was really excited to get him to sign my copy of issue 1 a couple years ago. To his credit although he didn't remember much about it he was still as proud of that work as any X-Men book he ever did. Unfortunately the artist of the book died years ago so Wein's autograph is the only one I'll ever have on that one.