Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.
Dismiss
Cartoon Viewing Club: Zob's Thoughts on "The Ultimate Doom" part 3
33 views
Skip to first unread message
Zobovor
May 15, 2020, 10:34:11 AM5/15/20
to
"The Ultimate Doom" part 3 is the final episode of the trilogy, and aired on November 17, 1984. As with other episodes in the three-parter, the story was a group effort (written by series story editors Dick Robbins and Bryce Malek as well as Doug Booth and Leo D. Paur; Ron Friedman made uncredited dialogue changes) but the teleplay is credited to Leo D. Paur. Despite this, no on-screen writer credits were given when this episode originally aired. The episode's full title was intended to be "The Ultimate Doom part 3: Revival," which is unusual for G1, but similar to the formatting of some Beast Machines episode titles years later.
"The Ultimate Doom" was among the episodes selected for broadcast during Transformers: Generation 2 for the 1994-95 television season, its second year on the air. On-screen titles actually were manufactured this time to try to match the format of the jumble of second- and third-season episodes that comprised this season. Unfortunately, the episode title for this episode popped up early, during the recap footage of part two, rather than during the beginning of part three proper.
We get a roughly 45-second recap of previous events up to this point, though by now they're playing fast and loose with the continuity of the episodes. The recap utilizes a fair amount of footage from the episode we haven't watched yet, though, so the contention is that at the end of the last episode, Megatron and Starscream showed up on Cybertron and blasted the crap out of Brawn. Suffice to say, this never happened. Scenes are also cut together to make it look like Bumblebee was hanging off the summit of the Autobot volcano base and plummeted into the magma. It's amazing what kind of alternate storytelling they can create just by rearranging the order of some footage!
Anyway, as our episode begins, Spike is reeling from Sparkplug's latest betrayal as Sparkplug utters a request for forgiveness. With the alarms blaring, the Autobots try to make a quick retreat, but Shockwave has arrived to block their path. Bumblebee slams straight into Shockwave, not realizing he's even standing there. Soundwave and a couple of generic Decepticon jets have arrived as well, blocking the exit.
The animation in this installment is quite exceptional. It's from the Toei studios in Japan, but it's a different team of animators than the ones who worked on either of the previous episodes. Specifically, it's the same guys who produced some really stylized, high-quality work like "Heavy Metal War." This is honestly the pinnacle of visual beauty, one that this show doesn't always consistently achieve. Watch, for example, as Brawn rushes the two generic Decepticon jets (one purple, one teal) and beautifully manages to tackle one and quickly throw him aside and immediately proceeds to gut-punch the other one and quickly throw him to the ground. It's only about three or four seconds' worth of footage, but the animation is so smooth and fluid and expertly done, and it remains one of my favorite scenes in the entire show.
Shockwave orders Sparkplug to block the door and prevent Spike's escape, and he does so obediently. It looks like Shockwave is ready to just blast them both until Brawn intercepts the shot and bravely takes the blast meant for the others. (As he flies back from the shot, you can clearly see visible teeth and a tongue inside his mouth, a rarity on this show.) Brawn grabs a fallen support beam and thinks about using it as a weapon, but Shockwave simply melts it in his hands.
By this point, Wheeljack and Trailbreaker and Skyfire come blasting through a wall to rescue the others. Skyfire promises to keep the Decepticons busy, giving the others time to flee. Now, Skyfire's G1 toy (marketed as Jetfire) was roughly the same size as the Shockwave toy, and I think they were sold at close to the same price point, so I had always considered them rivals. The toys were both much larger than most other Transformers, and they were both scientists, so it made sense for them to be rivals. This episode is about the closest we ever got to a Skyfire/Shockwave face-off, and it didn't last very long. Skyfire proceeds to lay down some cover fire, Shockwave blasts a huge hole in the wall meant for Skyfire's head, and Skyfire proceeds to rocket away. It's over much too quickly. Great animation, though.
Finally, this trilogy found its cool factor! Well, better late than never, right? The Autobot escape from the Decepticon base is really cool. I don't know why it took so long for them to find their groove. Is it just because of the animation? Could the Dinobots gnawing on trees also have been awesome and amazing if it had simply been animated better? We may never know!
Kid Rhino ended up with a lot of unfinished or rejected animation when they originally released this show to DVD, which is why you ended up with absurd things like snow falling upwards and such. The print Rhino had access to of this episode was missing some of the backlit effects, which means that Shockwave's eye wasn't flashing at all when he spoke. Rhino's solution to fix this was to try to recreate the backlighting effect digitally, adding an overlay on top of Shockwave's eye during his dialogue. They tried, but it didn't always look great. (In the Rhino version, only the front side of his eye disc was lighting up when he spoke, instead of the entire eye.) One of the reasons this bothers me so much is not because they tried to fix the episode at all, but because when I was helping them, I had suggested other fixes that they summarily rejected because they claimed that they didn't want to tamper with the episodes. It's funny how they wanted to preserve the episodes as originally presented, and yet it was okay to add new sound effects or to try to recreate animation effects in-house.
What Shout Factory eventually did, of course, was take a fan-submitted list of all the things from the first season that didn't belong on a DVD release, because it was stuff that never appeared in the broadcast versions of the episodes, and replace just those scenes. They toggled between the 35-millimeter masters and the one-inch broadcast prints which resulted in the footage switching back and forth periodically from crisp and colorful to slightly washed out and out-of-focus, but I guess both DVD releases exist now, so fans can pick-and-choose which ones they like to watch. (The Shout Factory version seems to go for a lot more on eBay, so this would seem to be the more desirable version.)
Anyway, two jets identical to Starscream and Thundercracker are standing guard when the Autobots blast open an exit to the Decepticon base and scurry away. A couple of Cybertronic-style Decepticon jets pursue them, the same forms Thundercracker and Skywarp appeared in during "More Than Meets the Eye" part 1, and the same type of jets who dropped acid rain on the Autobots in "Divide and Conquer." It's nice that they were consistent about using these Cybertronic forms, since they sometimes forgot these vehicles existed ("Fire in the Sky" being perhaps the most egregious example).
A pair of ground-based Decepticon vehicles also give chase. We've never seen them before, but back in the day it was Derik Smith's pet theory that this was really the Cybertronic mode for Reflector. His argument was that they used the same colors as Reflector, but grey-and-purple is such a generic Decepticon color scheme used for so many other robots (Shockwave's sentinels, Decepti-Traan, etc.) that I'm reluctant to agree.
The Autobots finally make it to Wheeljack's old workshop. Bumblebee offers up the computer disc that he and Brawn had acquired in the previous episode. I'm still just in love with the animation here. Even an action as simple as Wheeljack grasping the disc and taking a look at it is drawn with such talent and style. He looks so large and powerful and imposing. These animators really knew how to imbue the Transformers with a dynamic look and feel. They understood the geometry of how the characters were built, and how to make minor proportionate adjustments to make them look dynamic.
It almost makes the terrible music editing in this episode a little more forgivable. Whoever was doing the sound editing didn't make even the slightest effort to preserve musical phrases or make edits based on the timing of scenes. They just hacked the music into pieces randomly and called it good. Sometimes, two pieces of music are playing at the exact same time. It's awful.
Back on Earth, the rest of the Autobots, led by Prime, are on surfboards, heading towards a Decepticon energy-collecting installation. Surf culture wasn't really prominent in the early 1980's, but it definitely was during the 1960's when the writers of this show would have been growing up. They were writing about their own childhoods here, when beach party movies like The Endless Summer were huge and shows like Gidget ruled the airwaves, not necessarily the contemporary scene. For example, the 1960's Batman television series did at least one surfing episode, with characters preposterously wearing swim trunks over their superhero costumes, but at least it was topical on some level. As it happens, with this scene no longer capitalizing off any popular fads or trends, it just comes off as odd.
It's especially odd that the Autobots have the knowledge regarding the mechanics of how to surf, and where to procure car-sized surfboards, but they remain completely oblivious to the possibility of a tidal wave. It takes a panicked Bluestreak to start babbling at them incessantly to alert them to the potential problem. It's a really surreal moment for this show. (I also find the physics impossible of Bluestreak rushing ahead of the others on his surfboard, but at this point that's neither here nor there.)
Elsewhere, the Decepticons are working on an energy-collecting sea funnel. Rumble deliberately trips one of the human slaves and then admonishes him for being lazy. Rumble's such a delightfully evil character. He's unabashedly a bully and a punk and makes no apology for it.
When Megatron realizes that one of the energy-collecting generators hasn't been installed, he finds Starscream and Arkeville bickering about it. He throws the generator at Starscream, who is being petulant as usual. Arkeville expresses concerns that the incoming tidal wave will drown all his hypno-chip slaves. "I thought humans liked to play in the ocean!" replies a heartless Megatron. He then proceeds to forbid Arkeville from speaking to Starscream any further, but like any human, you tell Arkeville not to do something, and that's precisely what he wants to do. They're beginning to set things up here for the alliance the two eventually form in "Countdown to Extinction."
The Autobots realize much too late that maybe they weren't prepared for this whole surfing business, and they completely wipe out as they hit the energy-collection station. In the aftermath, the Autobots collect the human slaves while Starscream absconds with Dr. Arkeville. Megatron has already escaped aboard a starship with one of the Reflector robots. Megatron's completely given up on Arkeville by this point, as he's pretty much ready to abandon Earth and head for Cybertron.
Back at the laboratory, Wheeljack has analyzed the schematics of the hypno-chips and he's managed to put together an anti-hypnosis device. It's back to the Decepticon base to try to recover Sparkplug once more. (There's some odd color-correction going on with the DVD release of this episode. Shockwave shows up and is accompanied by two Decepticon jets, a purple one and a teal one. They're probably the same ones that Brawn tangled with earlier. In one scene that shows them, a wide shot, Rhino fiddled with the colors and so now the teal jet is a weird forest green. (This is like the DVD version of "Fire on the Mountain" where Thundercracker keeps toggling between a light blue and a darker blue. It's because they applied color-correction filters to certain scenes, but they were wildly inconsistent about it.)
Shockwave orders Sparkplug to kill Spike, and he produces a tiny laser gun and is visibly struggling with fighting against the orders he's been given. Wheeljack and the others show up just at this critical moment, and Wheeljack lets loose with his anti-hypnosis lunchbox (this is, incidentally, one of the accessories included with some versions of the Masterpiece Wheeljack toy by TakaraTomy). Sparkplug's days as a Decepticon agent are done forever. Thank goodness. Not because I care about Sparkplug, mind you, but because it's a plot thread that's just been so strained and unnecessary. Father and son reunite. (As a point of interest, this is also a really Corey Burton-heavy scene, as Spike and Shockwave and Brawn all have dialogue in rapid succession.)
The animation nuances are still so great in this episode. When Spike goes to hug Sparkplug and Shockwave orders, "Stay back, human!" he raises his gun-arm, and the hose attached to his arm swings through the air gracefully. It has a real sense of weight to it and its movement is captured so well.
The Autobots are now on the run. "I'll get the door," Brawn promises as he proceeds to plow through it at a full speed, smashing it to bits. It's a great moment, perhaps the funniest of the episode.
The Autobots are outside but are pinned down by automatic defense guns. Skyfire heads to the rescue (and fires some undercarriage guns that seem to be directly based on the Jetfire toy by Hasbro) scooping them up in a successful rescue. On the trip back to Earth, Spike and Sparkplug wax poetic about how you never give up on the people you love the most. Even the stoic Brawn is forced to agree with the sentiment. "Mushy, but true," he says.
On Earth, slaves are loading energon cubes onto Megatron's starship, with the Autobots ensconced in the jungle foliage as they look on. Prime is concerned about the safety of the human slaves if the Autobots were to attack, so Mirage slips away to try to take care of this problem. (There's an odd moment where, instead of turning invisible like normal, he just goes to black-and-white.)
Nearby, Starscream has slipped away to try to siphon energy out of Dr. Arkeville's own brain. He's determined to secure his own private energy source in order to wrest control of the Decepticons from Megatron, but he can't get Arkeville's brain to produce even a single energon cube's worth of power. They say humans do have a few volts of electricity running through their bodies, but evidently it's not nearly enough for Starscream's purposes.
Megatron stumbles onto this secret experiment, declares Starscream a mutineer, and threatens to destroy him. It's a rare moment before we cut to commercial when it's a Decepticon who is in jeopardy, not an Autobot, but it plays as suspenseful enough that we can pause for a moment on this cliffhanger. (Starscream is arguably the most sympathetic Decepticon to the audience, so it's kind of cool that they structured the episode this way.)
Skywarp interrupts this moment to report on a problem with the human workers, giving Starscream an opportunity to slip away with Arkeville in his clutches. "The slaves are malfunctioning!" a confused Skywarp reports. Mirage has snuck on board the ship and has herded the human workers off the ship, becoming visible again after all the slaves have cleared out. (There's a terrible, terrible moment on the Kid Rhino version of the DVD, which was made using incomplete animation. The visual effect of Mirage appearing again was missing from the early print of the episode, so somebody at Rhino decided to cut-and-paste Mirage into the scene. Suffice to say, it was done really badly. The Shout Factory version of the DVD has the completed footage, and is the same as the broadcast version of the episode.)
The Autobots are free to attack now, and the fight is on. Optimus Prime clips Thundercracker in the wing with his laser rifle; Rumble catches Mirage unaware and blasts him in the back. "I'll mow you down!" Cliffjumper promises while taking potshots at the Decepticons from behind a rock. "Easy, kid," Ironhide admonishes him. "The battle's just begun!" The relative ages of the different characters has always interested me. We don't always get a lot of information on the show about who's older and who's younger. Older characters seem to include Kup and Ironhide and Thundercracker and Blitzwing and Octane. We don't have as much information about younger characters. It's interesting that Cliffjumper is among them. It would certainly explain his impulsive nature.
Prowl is ready for a strategic withdrawal, but Prime knows that Cybertron's next orbit around the Earth will completely demolish it. So, the Autobots must not only remain and finish the fight, but they've got to win. Skyfire and his crew appear, with Wheeljack dangling over the personnel hatch with his anti-hypnosis device. (Watch the goofy guy in the striped shirt and glasses as he throws his energon cube to the ground and runs off. Looks like Where's Waldo is ready to make an appearance on The Biggest Loser.)
An incensed Megatron leaps into the air, transforms, and fires himself in gun mode at Skyfire while in mid-air. (He does this during every episode of the first season, at least in the title sequence, but he's never done this before in the series proper, and will never do it again.) Kind of makes you wonder why he even bothers to have other characters carry him in all those other episodes!
Rumble sneaks up on Bumblebee and lets loose with his piledriver arms. Bumblebee proclaims, "Not again!" and grabs on a vine to escape. He swings around, Spider-Man style (which may or may not be a meta-reference to voice actor Dan Gilvezan also portraying that character) and gives Rumble a good kick, knocking him into the chasm that he himself created. Poetic justice!
Prime gives Megatron a short speech before Megatron slips aboard his ship and escapes. Prime just stands there and watches. This is playing out like the end of "More Than Meets the Eye" part 3 again, only this time Sideswipe isn't around for Prime to scream at and steal his rocket pack. Skywarp and Thundercracker are still battling Autobots on the ground, unaware that Megatron is making his escape. They cry out in desperation and transform to jet mode to follow him to Cybertron. (I love Thundercracker's transformation sequence here. It's drawn so nicely.)
Now the Autobots are faced with a real problem. Cybertron's gravity is about to demolish Earth civilization across the globe with its next pass through the sky. In desperation, Spike grabs Prime's rifle and starts shooting into the air, uttering some nonsensical gibberish about knocking Cybertron back out of Earth orbit. Prowl is the first to explain just how impossible this is; only an explosion somewhere in the neighborhood of ten billion astro-liters of energy would do the trick. Then he proceeds to start shooting up at the sky, just like Spike.
Wait a minute, though. Megatron has quite a bit of energon on board his starship. The detonation could actually affect a planet's movement. Instead of communicating this plan to the others, though, Prowl and Spike just wait for Optimus Prime to catch up and realize what's going on. Then the rest of the Autobots let loose with all the firepower they have to offer.
Lots of footage from "The Ultimate Doom" part 1 is recycled, including the general chaos created by Cybertron's movement into Earth orbit as well as that top-down shot of Optimus waxing regretfully. His mouth plate is moving, but he's not audibly saying anything this time. Cybertron moves out of orbit, and the encroaching tidal wave just flops into non-existence, because this is how tidal waves work. Somehow, the Earth's orbit is entirely unaffected.
In the aftermath, Spike ticks off all the good things that have happened (Sparkplug is back to normal, the Earth is safe, Megatron done got blowed up), but Optimus is quick to downplay it. He always seems to know just how to put a downer on a celebration. Sure enough, though, Megatron has survived the explosion, miraculously, and is swearing vengeance. Tough to keep a guy like that down for very long, it seems.
I feel like the premise of this episode was much better than the execution. "Megatron brings Cybertron into Earth orbit" is a clever and high-concept idea that could have potentially have played out as one of the most exciting episodes, but somehow that's just not what happened. It gets too muddled down in padding and filler moments, bad dialogue, and the overly sentimental drek between Spike and Sparkplug that, I suspect, just didn't resonate with the school-aged boys who watched this show. Spike's role in the show is to give us a lens through which to view these gigantic alien robots from outer space, somebody to identify with. Not to give us family drama and heartache. The writers may have learned their lesson, because they didn't try anything like this again for the remainder of the show. (Weirdly, though, when they did it with G.I. Joe, it made for really compelling storytelling. Just goes to show you that what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander.)
While this is officially a three-part episode, "Countdown to Extinction" continues the story of Dr. Arkeville and takes place right where this episode leaves off, so in some ways it's part four of the story. I expect to see you all here next month to talk about it!
Zob (not gonna watch this trilogy again for a loooooooong time)
"The Ultimate Doom" was among the episodes selected for broadcast during Transformers: Generation 2 for the 1994-95 television season, its second year on the air. On-screen titles actually were manufactured this time to try to match the format of the jumble of second- and third-season episodes that comprised this season. Unfortunately, the episode title for this episode popped up early, during the recap footage of part two, rather than during the beginning of part three proper.
We get a roughly 45-second recap of previous events up to this point, though by now they're playing fast and loose with the continuity of the episodes. The recap utilizes a fair amount of footage from the episode we haven't watched yet, though, so the contention is that at the end of the last episode, Megatron and Starscream showed up on Cybertron and blasted the crap out of Brawn. Suffice to say, this never happened. Scenes are also cut together to make it look like Bumblebee was hanging off the summit of the Autobot volcano base and plummeted into the magma. It's amazing what kind of alternate storytelling they can create just by rearranging the order of some footage!
Anyway, as our episode begins, Spike is reeling from Sparkplug's latest betrayal as Sparkplug utters a request for forgiveness. With the alarms blaring, the Autobots try to make a quick retreat, but Shockwave has arrived to block their path. Bumblebee slams straight into Shockwave, not realizing he's even standing there. Soundwave and a couple of generic Decepticon jets have arrived as well, blocking the exit.
The animation in this installment is quite exceptional. It's from the Toei studios in Japan, but it's a different team of animators than the ones who worked on either of the previous episodes. Specifically, it's the same guys who produced some really stylized, high-quality work like "Heavy Metal War." This is honestly the pinnacle of visual beauty, one that this show doesn't always consistently achieve. Watch, for example, as Brawn rushes the two generic Decepticon jets (one purple, one teal) and beautifully manages to tackle one and quickly throw him aside and immediately proceeds to gut-punch the other one and quickly throw him to the ground. It's only about three or four seconds' worth of footage, but the animation is so smooth and fluid and expertly done, and it remains one of my favorite scenes in the entire show.
Shockwave orders Sparkplug to block the door and prevent Spike's escape, and he does so obediently. It looks like Shockwave is ready to just blast them both until Brawn intercepts the shot and bravely takes the blast meant for the others. (As he flies back from the shot, you can clearly see visible teeth and a tongue inside his mouth, a rarity on this show.) Brawn grabs a fallen support beam and thinks about using it as a weapon, but Shockwave simply melts it in his hands.
By this point, Wheeljack and Trailbreaker and Skyfire come blasting through a wall to rescue the others. Skyfire promises to keep the Decepticons busy, giving the others time to flee. Now, Skyfire's G1 toy (marketed as Jetfire) was roughly the same size as the Shockwave toy, and I think they were sold at close to the same price point, so I had always considered them rivals. The toys were both much larger than most other Transformers, and they were both scientists, so it made sense for them to be rivals. This episode is about the closest we ever got to a Skyfire/Shockwave face-off, and it didn't last very long. Skyfire proceeds to lay down some cover fire, Shockwave blasts a huge hole in the wall meant for Skyfire's head, and Skyfire proceeds to rocket away. It's over much too quickly. Great animation, though.
Finally, this trilogy found its cool factor! Well, better late than never, right? The Autobot escape from the Decepticon base is really cool. I don't know why it took so long for them to find their groove. Is it just because of the animation? Could the Dinobots gnawing on trees also have been awesome and amazing if it had simply been animated better? We may never know!
Kid Rhino ended up with a lot of unfinished or rejected animation when they originally released this show to DVD, which is why you ended up with absurd things like snow falling upwards and such. The print Rhino had access to of this episode was missing some of the backlit effects, which means that Shockwave's eye wasn't flashing at all when he spoke. Rhino's solution to fix this was to try to recreate the backlighting effect digitally, adding an overlay on top of Shockwave's eye during his dialogue. They tried, but it didn't always look great. (In the Rhino version, only the front side of his eye disc was lighting up when he spoke, instead of the entire eye.) One of the reasons this bothers me so much is not because they tried to fix the episode at all, but because when I was helping them, I had suggested other fixes that they summarily rejected because they claimed that they didn't want to tamper with the episodes. It's funny how they wanted to preserve the episodes as originally presented, and yet it was okay to add new sound effects or to try to recreate animation effects in-house.
What Shout Factory eventually did, of course, was take a fan-submitted list of all the things from the first season that didn't belong on a DVD release, because it was stuff that never appeared in the broadcast versions of the episodes, and replace just those scenes. They toggled between the 35-millimeter masters and the one-inch broadcast prints which resulted in the footage switching back and forth periodically from crisp and colorful to slightly washed out and out-of-focus, but I guess both DVD releases exist now, so fans can pick-and-choose which ones they like to watch. (The Shout Factory version seems to go for a lot more on eBay, so this would seem to be the more desirable version.)
Anyway, two jets identical to Starscream and Thundercracker are standing guard when the Autobots blast open an exit to the Decepticon base and scurry away. A couple of Cybertronic-style Decepticon jets pursue them, the same forms Thundercracker and Skywarp appeared in during "More Than Meets the Eye" part 1, and the same type of jets who dropped acid rain on the Autobots in "Divide and Conquer." It's nice that they were consistent about using these Cybertronic forms, since they sometimes forgot these vehicles existed ("Fire in the Sky" being perhaps the most egregious example).
A pair of ground-based Decepticon vehicles also give chase. We've never seen them before, but back in the day it was Derik Smith's pet theory that this was really the Cybertronic mode for Reflector. His argument was that they used the same colors as Reflector, but grey-and-purple is such a generic Decepticon color scheme used for so many other robots (Shockwave's sentinels, Decepti-Traan, etc.) that I'm reluctant to agree.
The Autobots finally make it to Wheeljack's old workshop. Bumblebee offers up the computer disc that he and Brawn had acquired in the previous episode. I'm still just in love with the animation here. Even an action as simple as Wheeljack grasping the disc and taking a look at it is drawn with such talent and style. He looks so large and powerful and imposing. These animators really knew how to imbue the Transformers with a dynamic look and feel. They understood the geometry of how the characters were built, and how to make minor proportionate adjustments to make them look dynamic.
It almost makes the terrible music editing in this episode a little more forgivable. Whoever was doing the sound editing didn't make even the slightest effort to preserve musical phrases or make edits based on the timing of scenes. They just hacked the music into pieces randomly and called it good. Sometimes, two pieces of music are playing at the exact same time. It's awful.
Back on Earth, the rest of the Autobots, led by Prime, are on surfboards, heading towards a Decepticon energy-collecting installation. Surf culture wasn't really prominent in the early 1980's, but it definitely was during the 1960's when the writers of this show would have been growing up. They were writing about their own childhoods here, when beach party movies like The Endless Summer were huge and shows like Gidget ruled the airwaves, not necessarily the contemporary scene. For example, the 1960's Batman television series did at least one surfing episode, with characters preposterously wearing swim trunks over their superhero costumes, but at least it was topical on some level. As it happens, with this scene no longer capitalizing off any popular fads or trends, it just comes off as odd.
It's especially odd that the Autobots have the knowledge regarding the mechanics of how to surf, and where to procure car-sized surfboards, but they remain completely oblivious to the possibility of a tidal wave. It takes a panicked Bluestreak to start babbling at them incessantly to alert them to the potential problem. It's a really surreal moment for this show. (I also find the physics impossible of Bluestreak rushing ahead of the others on his surfboard, but at this point that's neither here nor there.)
Elsewhere, the Decepticons are working on an energy-collecting sea funnel. Rumble deliberately trips one of the human slaves and then admonishes him for being lazy. Rumble's such a delightfully evil character. He's unabashedly a bully and a punk and makes no apology for it.
When Megatron realizes that one of the energy-collecting generators hasn't been installed, he finds Starscream and Arkeville bickering about it. He throws the generator at Starscream, who is being petulant as usual. Arkeville expresses concerns that the incoming tidal wave will drown all his hypno-chip slaves. "I thought humans liked to play in the ocean!" replies a heartless Megatron. He then proceeds to forbid Arkeville from speaking to Starscream any further, but like any human, you tell Arkeville not to do something, and that's precisely what he wants to do. They're beginning to set things up here for the alliance the two eventually form in "Countdown to Extinction."
The Autobots realize much too late that maybe they weren't prepared for this whole surfing business, and they completely wipe out as they hit the energy-collection station. In the aftermath, the Autobots collect the human slaves while Starscream absconds with Dr. Arkeville. Megatron has already escaped aboard a starship with one of the Reflector robots. Megatron's completely given up on Arkeville by this point, as he's pretty much ready to abandon Earth and head for Cybertron.
Back at the laboratory, Wheeljack has analyzed the schematics of the hypno-chips and he's managed to put together an anti-hypnosis device. It's back to the Decepticon base to try to recover Sparkplug once more. (There's some odd color-correction going on with the DVD release of this episode. Shockwave shows up and is accompanied by two Decepticon jets, a purple one and a teal one. They're probably the same ones that Brawn tangled with earlier. In one scene that shows them, a wide shot, Rhino fiddled with the colors and so now the teal jet is a weird forest green. (This is like the DVD version of "Fire on the Mountain" where Thundercracker keeps toggling between a light blue and a darker blue. It's because they applied color-correction filters to certain scenes, but they were wildly inconsistent about it.)
Shockwave orders Sparkplug to kill Spike, and he produces a tiny laser gun and is visibly struggling with fighting against the orders he's been given. Wheeljack and the others show up just at this critical moment, and Wheeljack lets loose with his anti-hypnosis lunchbox (this is, incidentally, one of the accessories included with some versions of the Masterpiece Wheeljack toy by TakaraTomy). Sparkplug's days as a Decepticon agent are done forever. Thank goodness. Not because I care about Sparkplug, mind you, but because it's a plot thread that's just been so strained and unnecessary. Father and son reunite. (As a point of interest, this is also a really Corey Burton-heavy scene, as Spike and Shockwave and Brawn all have dialogue in rapid succession.)
The animation nuances are still so great in this episode. When Spike goes to hug Sparkplug and Shockwave orders, "Stay back, human!" he raises his gun-arm, and the hose attached to his arm swings through the air gracefully. It has a real sense of weight to it and its movement is captured so well.
The Autobots are now on the run. "I'll get the door," Brawn promises as he proceeds to plow through it at a full speed, smashing it to bits. It's a great moment, perhaps the funniest of the episode.
The Autobots are outside but are pinned down by automatic defense guns. Skyfire heads to the rescue (and fires some undercarriage guns that seem to be directly based on the Jetfire toy by Hasbro) scooping them up in a successful rescue. On the trip back to Earth, Spike and Sparkplug wax poetic about how you never give up on the people you love the most. Even the stoic Brawn is forced to agree with the sentiment. "Mushy, but true," he says.
On Earth, slaves are loading energon cubes onto Megatron's starship, with the Autobots ensconced in the jungle foliage as they look on. Prime is concerned about the safety of the human slaves if the Autobots were to attack, so Mirage slips away to try to take care of this problem. (There's an odd moment where, instead of turning invisible like normal, he just goes to black-and-white.)
Nearby, Starscream has slipped away to try to siphon energy out of Dr. Arkeville's own brain. He's determined to secure his own private energy source in order to wrest control of the Decepticons from Megatron, but he can't get Arkeville's brain to produce even a single energon cube's worth of power. They say humans do have a few volts of electricity running through their bodies, but evidently it's not nearly enough for Starscream's purposes.
Megatron stumbles onto this secret experiment, declares Starscream a mutineer, and threatens to destroy him. It's a rare moment before we cut to commercial when it's a Decepticon who is in jeopardy, not an Autobot, but it plays as suspenseful enough that we can pause for a moment on this cliffhanger. (Starscream is arguably the most sympathetic Decepticon to the audience, so it's kind of cool that they structured the episode this way.)
Skywarp interrupts this moment to report on a problem with the human workers, giving Starscream an opportunity to slip away with Arkeville in his clutches. "The slaves are malfunctioning!" a confused Skywarp reports. Mirage has snuck on board the ship and has herded the human workers off the ship, becoming visible again after all the slaves have cleared out. (There's a terrible, terrible moment on the Kid Rhino version of the DVD, which was made using incomplete animation. The visual effect of Mirage appearing again was missing from the early print of the episode, so somebody at Rhino decided to cut-and-paste Mirage into the scene. Suffice to say, it was done really badly. The Shout Factory version of the DVD has the completed footage, and is the same as the broadcast version of the episode.)
The Autobots are free to attack now, and the fight is on. Optimus Prime clips Thundercracker in the wing with his laser rifle; Rumble catches Mirage unaware and blasts him in the back. "I'll mow you down!" Cliffjumper promises while taking potshots at the Decepticons from behind a rock. "Easy, kid," Ironhide admonishes him. "The battle's just begun!" The relative ages of the different characters has always interested me. We don't always get a lot of information on the show about who's older and who's younger. Older characters seem to include Kup and Ironhide and Thundercracker and Blitzwing and Octane. We don't have as much information about younger characters. It's interesting that Cliffjumper is among them. It would certainly explain his impulsive nature.
Prowl is ready for a strategic withdrawal, but Prime knows that Cybertron's next orbit around the Earth will completely demolish it. So, the Autobots must not only remain and finish the fight, but they've got to win. Skyfire and his crew appear, with Wheeljack dangling over the personnel hatch with his anti-hypnosis device. (Watch the goofy guy in the striped shirt and glasses as he throws his energon cube to the ground and runs off. Looks like Where's Waldo is ready to make an appearance on The Biggest Loser.)
An incensed Megatron leaps into the air, transforms, and fires himself in gun mode at Skyfire while in mid-air. (He does this during every episode of the first season, at least in the title sequence, but he's never done this before in the series proper, and will never do it again.) Kind of makes you wonder why he even bothers to have other characters carry him in all those other episodes!
Rumble sneaks up on Bumblebee and lets loose with his piledriver arms. Bumblebee proclaims, "Not again!" and grabs on a vine to escape. He swings around, Spider-Man style (which may or may not be a meta-reference to voice actor Dan Gilvezan also portraying that character) and gives Rumble a good kick, knocking him into the chasm that he himself created. Poetic justice!
Prime gives Megatron a short speech before Megatron slips aboard his ship and escapes. Prime just stands there and watches. This is playing out like the end of "More Than Meets the Eye" part 3 again, only this time Sideswipe isn't around for Prime to scream at and steal his rocket pack. Skywarp and Thundercracker are still battling Autobots on the ground, unaware that Megatron is making his escape. They cry out in desperation and transform to jet mode to follow him to Cybertron. (I love Thundercracker's transformation sequence here. It's drawn so nicely.)
Now the Autobots are faced with a real problem. Cybertron's gravity is about to demolish Earth civilization across the globe with its next pass through the sky. In desperation, Spike grabs Prime's rifle and starts shooting into the air, uttering some nonsensical gibberish about knocking Cybertron back out of Earth orbit. Prowl is the first to explain just how impossible this is; only an explosion somewhere in the neighborhood of ten billion astro-liters of energy would do the trick. Then he proceeds to start shooting up at the sky, just like Spike.
Wait a minute, though. Megatron has quite a bit of energon on board his starship. The detonation could actually affect a planet's movement. Instead of communicating this plan to the others, though, Prowl and Spike just wait for Optimus Prime to catch up and realize what's going on. Then the rest of the Autobots let loose with all the firepower they have to offer.
Lots of footage from "The Ultimate Doom" part 1 is recycled, including the general chaos created by Cybertron's movement into Earth orbit as well as that top-down shot of Optimus waxing regretfully. His mouth plate is moving, but he's not audibly saying anything this time. Cybertron moves out of orbit, and the encroaching tidal wave just flops into non-existence, because this is how tidal waves work. Somehow, the Earth's orbit is entirely unaffected.
In the aftermath, Spike ticks off all the good things that have happened (Sparkplug is back to normal, the Earth is safe, Megatron done got blowed up), but Optimus is quick to downplay it. He always seems to know just how to put a downer on a celebration. Sure enough, though, Megatron has survived the explosion, miraculously, and is swearing vengeance. Tough to keep a guy like that down for very long, it seems.
I feel like the premise of this episode was much better than the execution. "Megatron brings Cybertron into Earth orbit" is a clever and high-concept idea that could have potentially have played out as one of the most exciting episodes, but somehow that's just not what happened. It gets too muddled down in padding and filler moments, bad dialogue, and the overly sentimental drek between Spike and Sparkplug that, I suspect, just didn't resonate with the school-aged boys who watched this show. Spike's role in the show is to give us a lens through which to view these gigantic alien robots from outer space, somebody to identify with. Not to give us family drama and heartache. The writers may have learned their lesson, because they didn't try anything like this again for the remainder of the show. (Weirdly, though, when they did it with G.I. Joe, it made for really compelling storytelling. Just goes to show you that what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander.)
While this is officially a three-part episode, "Countdown to Extinction" continues the story of Dr. Arkeville and takes place right where this episode leaves off, so in some ways it's part four of the story. I expect to see you all here next month to talk about it!
Zob (not gonna watch this trilogy again for a loooooooong time)
Sky Raider
May 17, 2020, 5:48:13 PM5/17/20
to
On Friday, May 15, 2020 at 10:34:11 AM UTC-4, Zobovor wrote:
> We get a roughly 45-second recap of previous events up to this point, though by now they're playing fast and loose with the continuity of the episodes. The recap utilizes a fair amount of footage from the episode we haven't watched yet, though, so the contention is that at the end of the last episode, Megatron and Starscream showed up on Cybertron and blasted the crap out of Brawn. Suffice to say, this never happened. Scenes are also cut together to make it look like Bumblebee was hanging off the summit of the Autobot volcano base and plummeted into the magma. It's amazing what kind of alternate storytelling they can create just by rearranging the order of some footage!
Yes I've noticed there's an awful lot of "fake news" in the recaps. My favorite example is in the Teletraan 2 file on the Decepticons in Season 3, they splice together footage of Autobot Spike with War Dawn. They make it look like Prime is providing cover fire for fleeing humans while Megatron, Starscream, Skywarp and Thundercracker attack from the air. If it wasn't for that pesky background from War Dawn (the shattered dome shaped building) it would be pretty seamless. Still makes for a dynamic scene!
> We get a roughly 45-second recap of previous events up to this point, though by now they're playing fast and loose with the continuity of the episodes. The recap utilizes a fair amount of footage from the episode we haven't watched yet, though, so the contention is that at the end of the last episode, Megatron and Starscream showed up on Cybertron and blasted the crap out of Brawn. Suffice to say, this never happened. Scenes are also cut together to make it look like Bumblebee was hanging off the summit of the Autobot volcano base and plummeted into the magma. It's amazing what kind of alternate storytelling they can create just by rearranging the order of some footage!
>It's only about three or four seconds' worth of footage, but the animation is so smooth and fluid and expertly done, and it remains one of my favorite scenes in the entire show.
> Shockwave orders Sparkplug to block the door and prevent Spike's escape, and he does so obediently. It looks like Shockwave is ready to just blast them both
>Now, Skyfire's G1 toy (marketed as Jetfire) was roughly the same size as the Shockwave toy, and I think they were sold at close to the same price point, so I had always considered them rivals.
> Finally, this trilogy found its cool factor! Well, better late than never, right? The Autobot escape from the Decepticon base is really cool. I don't know why it took so long for them to find their groove.
> Anyway, two jets identical to Starscream and Thundercracker are standing guard when the Autobots blast open an exit to the Decepticon base and scurry away. A couple of Cybertronic-style Decepticon jets pursue them, the same forms Thundercracker and Skywarp appeared in during "More Than Meets the Eye" part 1, and the same type of jets who dropped acid rain on the Autobots in "Divide and Conquer." It's nice that they were consistent about using these Cybertronic forms, since they sometimes forgot these vehicles existed ("Fire in the Sky" being perhaps the most egregious example).
>It takes a panicked Bluestreak to start babbling at them incessantly to alert them to the potential problem. It's a really surreal moment for this show. (I also find the physics impossible of Bluestreak rushing ahead of the others on his surfboard, but at this point that's neither here nor there.)
> Elsewhere, the Decepticons are working on an energy-collecting sea funnel. Rumble deliberately trips one of the human slaves and then admonishes him for being lazy. Rumble's such a delightfully evil character. He's unabashedly a bully and a punk and makes no apology for it.
> The Autobots are now on the run. "I'll get the door," Brawn promises as he proceeds to plow through it at a full speed, smashing it to bits. It's a great moment, perhaps the funniest of the episode.
>Even the stoic Brawn is forced to agree with the sentiment. "Mushy, but true," he says.
> Megatron stumbles onto this secret experiment, declares Starscream a mutineer, and threatens to destroy him. It's a rare moment before we cut to commercial when it's a Decepticon who is in jeopardy, not an Autobot, but it plays as suspenseful enough that we can pause for a moment on this cliffhanger. (Starscream is arguably the most sympathetic Decepticon to the audience, so it's kind of cool that they structured the episode this way.)
But to your larger point, yes I do think it's cool that they structured this as a suspenseful enough moment to warrant cutting to commercial. Lots of "Decepticon in peril" moments in Webworld too, if only be default.
>"I'll mow you down!" Cliffjumper promises while taking potshots at the Decepticons from behind a rock. "Easy, kid," Ironhide admonishes him. "The battle's just begun!" The relative ages of the different characters has always interested me. We don't always get a lot of information on the show about who's older and who's younger. Older characters seem to include Kup and Ironhide and Thundercracker and Blitzwing and Octane. We don't have as much information about younger characters. It's interesting that Cliffjumper is among them. It would certainly explain his impulsive nature.
>(Watch the goofy guy in the striped shirt and glasses as he throws his energon cube to the ground and runs off. Looks like Where's Waldo is ready to make an appearance on The Biggest Loser.)
> An incensed Megatron leaps into the air, transforms, and fires himself in gun mode at Skyfire while in mid-air. (He does this during every episode of the first season, at least in the title sequence, but he's never done this before in the series proper, and will never do it again.) Kind of makes you wonder why he even bothers to have other characters carry him in all those other episodes!
In my headcanon his original alt mode was a mounted tripodal canon not too different from Galvatron's, and if anything Unicron restored his alt mode to be closer to what it originally was.
>Instead of communicating this plan to the others, though, Prowl and Spike just wait for Optimus Prime to catch up and realize what's going on.
?Cybertron moves out of orbit, and the encroaching tidal wave just flops into non-existence, because this is how tidal waves work.
The wave was sent into sub-space. There was a quantam surge. Or something.
>(Weirdly, though, when they did it with G.I. Joe, it made for really compelling storytelling. Just goes to show you that what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander.)
> While this is officially a three-part episode, "Countdown to Extinction" continues the story of Dr. Arkeville and takes place right where this episode leaves off, so in some ways it's part four of the story. I expect to see you all here next month to talk about it!
> Zob (not gonna watch this trilogy again for a loooooooong time)
0 new messages