but BW followed G1 continuity in theory, so also in theory they have to fit in somewhere.

Basically, BW followed an alternate G1 cartoon in which Unicron was a god and his rival, Primus, created the TF's, thus endowing them with sparks. Aside from that, everything pretty much proceeded the same way but with some adjustments to work in Primus and Unicron's divinity. Also, in this alternate continuity, G2 got an original cartoon that was a sequel to G1 and while it borrowed some elements from the G2 comic, it was pretty much separate from it. So technically, BW followed the fictional G2 cartoon, which in turn followed the modified G1 cartoon.

that made absolutely no sense.

hornet?

Anyway... BW got shoe horned into G1 continuity...or that's how it seemed to me. I would assume that this takes place in between G1 and BW. But to be honest someone Like Goki would better be able to put together the pieces on this one.

I'm just saying that most of the G1 references from BW seem to indicate that it is connected to a G1 continuity that is fairly similar to the original cartoon but with the exception that in this alternate continuity, Unicron is a god and the TF's were created by his godly rival, Primus.

No, this is a brand new continuity. They just used G1 footage at the beginning as an Easter egg/fanwank.

And yeah, I really doubt Sari's a robot.

Yeah, at the youngest Sumdac would have been 60 when she was born, but like all the official press info states, she's adopted.

Here's what I think went down.
When thinking up the "human sidekick" character they decided to make her the daughter of the scientist who reverse engineered Megs.
Then they noticed that according to the show's timeline Sumdac would have been pretty old (60, at least) when his daughter was born, so about a week or so before the series premiered, when they released all the official bios, they inserted the bit about Sari being adopted. Problem solved.
IIRC there was no indication that she was adopted until that official bio was released, which leads me to believe the age of her father and herself was simply a mistake that they caught at the last second. The "adopted" bit was added as a quick fix.

I just don't see her as a robot. As Pete said, she would be much more advanced then anything Sumdac had created so far. In fact I think we saw the result of his first venture into the techno-organic realm in the mini movie premier (the giant roach thing).

Or, to put it more simply - a combination of the G1 show and comics.

Just to add to the discussion....

"Uh...am I going to be able to breathe down there?"
"Oh, sure! What's 'breathe'?"

Way to trust the creative team. This attitude is why fans hate everything before they've seen it.


Why would you expect there to be any?


We got confirmation Season 2 was already in production a couple months ago - do you have any idea how far along in the show they were before that press release even got written, much less went out? Sari robot or no, I think they know they're doing enough to not have to rely on last minute press release fixes.

It's been thrown around here a lot that she might not even know she's a robot... IF she is one. I personally don't care; I'm focused on the TFs. All this Allspark nonsense is just a plot device around which the bots can fight, which is what we really tune in for - and then scramble out like mad to find the toys like good little boys age 6-12.

No, it's not a combination. To call it a combination is like saying that they some how combined both sources into into a single continuity, when all they did was transplant Unicron and Primus from the comics to the cartoon.

Way to jump to conclusions, there. I thought you were above that.
Read any of my posts on the subject. I've been very supportive of this series. The writing is easily the best the franchise has had since Beast Wars (in the animated sense at least), and I love the voice acting. My personal feelings on the animation style aside, I actually like this series.

Besides, I don't really see how the scenario I presented is in any way a slap to the face of the writing team. It's simply providing a realistic explanation to a "gap" in the story. Even the most thought out plot lines have their holes, they just caught this one in time to make a fix.


Yes, it does seem like they've thought out the story at least through season 2, and the writing is progressing along nicely. Still, no writing process catches all of a story's flaws, and the fact that Sumdac would have had to have been at least 60 when his daughter was born probably just slipped through the cracks until the last minute. I'm not implying that the writing is substandard in any way, or that the writing team is lazy. I'm simply being realistic. It's a Saturday morning cartoon show, and small details like the age of the human sidekick and her father probably passed unnoticed.
It's very possible that they caught this "plot hole" and, seeing as the bios hadn't been released, made a last second change, adding the "adopted" bit into Sari's profile.

The genius is that the creative team adding in the "adoptive" bit into Sari's bio really doesn't change the story the writing team set out to tell.
She can still refer to Sumdac as "Dad," she can still view him as her father. It's very possible she was a baby when she was adopted; that would leave the original father/daughter relationship unaffected.


I remember hearing and reading the basic premise of this series long before the official bios were released, long before I even saw the character models, as I'm sure we all did. We knew well before the bios came out that Animated Prime was young and inexperienced. We knew well before the bios came out that Sari and her father would be the two primary human characters.
Up until those bios came out we heard that the two human "sidekicks" would be Isaac Sumdac, the man responsible for building the robotics industry on Earth, and his daughter. We never heard the term "adopted" until the bios. Given the age difference between Sari and her father, it just seems like the "adopted" thing was thrown on to fix a mistake caught at the last minute.

And again, that's criticizing the writing team. Mistakes are missed all the time, in this case they were able to basically solve it with an "adopted" bit that has no impact on the story at all.

In the end kids, the show's primary audience, probably won't care that Sari's dad was 60, at least, when she was born. For those older fans who do care, there's the official bio they can look up with an "adopted" bit that solves everything. Everyone wins, the story remains unchanged.

Hobbes, if I may....
I was rather surprised by your response here. It seemed overly defencive/aggressive. I've been one of this show's supporters, which is what made your reaction surprising to me. I was just offering an alternate, and IMO a much simpler, explanation for the age gap between Sari and her father.

We all know your view of this series, and I think it's safe to say most of us agree with that general view. Still, this series has introduced may "new" elements to the TF universe that many fans have had trouble accepting (you even admitted that it's not everyone's cup of tea).
So, mostly due to trolls like SUPREMEQUEEN and eternal pessimists like Hornet, you've become very passionate in your defence of this series. Maybe even a little too personal a defence.

Yes, Animated is good. Very good, in fact (IMO). Still, it's not perfect, no series is, no series can be. Simply pointing out minor imperfections, like the fact that maybe the writing team overlooked a minor detail until the last second, doesn't mean people are condemning the series. They're simply looking at it through realistic eyes.


How many times do kids hold their breath, for one reason or an other? It's safe to say that if Sari is a robot she would have discovered that she doesn't need to breath to survive by now.

Icecap,

Sorry if I offended more than I intended, but this is how I interpreted what you said, correct me if I'm wrong on this:

You're saying is that "oops we screwed the pooch and can't do math" is how the mention of adoption ended up in the press release...what's more is you're implying they were well into season 2 before they noticed and thought a random press release was the solution to the issue...that's a slap in the face to the writers, IMO.

These people are professionals, dude. Adoption may impact the plot or it could just be backstory they used to "find" the characters that will never be mentioned in a single episode, but let's not make negative assumptions about the attention paid to the show by the creative team over it without a reason to.

Friends?

-Hobbes

Fun thought.What if Sari IS Arcee? That solves one of the female TFs and provides a way to give her an action figure that isn't TOO dorky. Doesn't match the episode descriptions, mind you.And while it wouldn't cover Black Arachnia directly... It'd work a lot better for me to suggest that female TFs were once humanoids whose consciousness was somehow converted into a spark than this creepy transgendered psychotic stuff Simon Furman is pedlling with female TFs.I didn't notice that anybody else had this idea.However, did you watch any of the 90s Batman cartoons? Sari is voiced by Tara Strong, the second Voice of Batgirl.

If Sari could change between forms at will, it would make her a cross between the comic book Captain Marvel (kid who could become an adult) and Batgirl (Comm. Gordon's daughter who patterned her costumed identity on Batman). AND it could be an "Autobot Spike" reference at the same time.

(sorry, catching up)

The thing is, Sumdac's technology came from studying a Cybertronian. And with them, it's the spark that provides sentience. That's what he had to work with. So he's able to create things that are basically on the level of sparkless drones. Which is Megatron's plan, after all. Surely Megatron would prefer more intelligent soldiers if he were capable of constructing them? But both he and Sumdac are limited by the fact that neither possesses the Allspark, which is the only way that a Cybertronian (or anything built based on Cybertronian design specs) is going to achieve sentience. (Keep in mind that these advances in robot technology in future Detroit are not explained as the mere forward march of progress, but in Sumdac's revolutionary technology.)

Ergo, concordantly, vis-a-vis, Sari as a robot is a really tough sell. Also because she would never age.

I see where you're coming from, but that supposes that Sumdac is limited to work only from the Cybertronian tech and can't incorporate any Earth technological advances into it. They said in the Dinobot episode that they were bringing the park "into the 22nd century", so it's fair to assume the show is taking place one hundred or so years from now, and that human technology had made advances in things such as A.I. before Sumdac found Megs's head. Now, Sumdac clearly used the Cybertronian tech to advance human technology leaps and bounds beyond what it had been before, but they don't exactly describe in what ways, so he isn't limited by what defines Cybertronian technology in any concrete way within the story.

Which is just a long winded way of saying that reverse engineering from Megatron is not an obstacle to Sari being a robot theory if the writers don't want it to be.

If the cybertronians have true sentience then what was up with all the talk about them being programmed in the Animated movie? I still think it makes more sense if the Allspark energy is more like some kind of special fuel source that brings machines to life but the mechanical lifeforms are otherwise mindless unless they have something that can function as a brain.

Maybe she's like Protoform X who was able to function without his spark inside of him, he was even pretty intelligent, even for sociopath.

When did Rampage ever have his spark removed?

Which could also explain the functioning of Megatron's decapitated head (Animated, by the way, is not the first use of the still functioning head without a body in the franchise).

Let's face it, trying to find consistent uses of Cybertronian tech in the franchise is a pretty impossible task. It works how it needs to work to tell the story, whether that involves sparkless bodies, little girl robots, or alligators made out of Optimus Prime parts.


Megs cut it out of his body with an energon blade and put it into that squeeze box to torture/control him, remember? It was kind of the whole point of his character.

heh, Prime Gator was great.

It's convenient to cry "inconsistency" when it supports your own theory, isn't it.

All indications from the show are that Sumdac alone is responsible for the tech boom in Detroit, and that because of his big Cybertronian secret. All indications are also that Sumdac has done everything within his means in order to achieve what he has done. Now all of a sudden he's capable of building a replicant (which is really what we're talking about here). My question is "how?" and it hasn't been answered plausibly yet.

And fun, too.

I've got a new look on life. I'm gonna wait and see.

just want to say as some one who started off the sari robot thing I'm starting to think other wise. mostly since i don't think it would benefit the story in anyway and as the the Sari=Arcee thing maybe the doc makes arcee as a guardian for sari while she's with the autobots?

This man is sure he saw Sari eating Broccoli


Yeah, that's like a multi-level reference.

I wonder if Sari dreams about unicorns

It's been pretty much confirmed that Arcee appears in flashback - she appeared with Ratchet's pre-earth animation model in the clip from SDCC, so she's likely not Sari, nor is she built by Sumdac at any point.

theirs always the chance she could return. after all what's the point of a flash back with out it being linked to the future of the story

Well, I think she's Blackarachnia before the Allspark accident that made her techno-organic. Has any Transformers series debut been the result of so many conspiracy theories? I think it's a testament to the show, personally.

Actually what I meant was that the G1 of the Beast Wars universe combined MTMTE, TFTM and elements of the G1 comics - since the cartoon never even mentioned Primus, and that according to the cartoon Unicron was built by some little monkey-guy.

Although let's not forget that some of the G1 references in BW came from "oops we didn't really know about that."

"That spark has the Matrix with it!"

YES

well obviously Prime's Spark was in a container that just happened to look just like the matrix.

BOTCON'D

Speculation, speculation....it's useless, and it never turns out the way you expect. Plus, in the off chance that it does, you lose the emperical sensation of surprise. I prefer to just enjoy the show, without thinking about it. Seems to me a far better strategy than whatever most of you are doing.

I think it's called discussion, lol

I think "discussion" ends when you cover the same points for several pages.

I could start discussing it in all caps, would that be better?

It would probably make more sense to a number of posters.

so now we're pointlessly discussing pointless discussion? BRILLIANT

Well, if everybody just read the 640 posts in this thread carefully, we wouldn't have to cover the same topics again.

I was waiting for it

META'D

Look, that just doesn't make any sense. Even if Arcee is Black Arachnia, Hasbro will still have to make a separate toy for each of her forms so what do they gain by making them the same character? The only half-reasonable explanation is that the writers don't want to have too many female characters in a cartoon aimed at boys. Then again, maybe BA never changes back and they decided to make her previous form into Arcee as a simple fan-wank.

I just find that so amusing of you to say.

Do we have any confirmation Arcee is even getting a toy? And why would that be an issue?


This is what I'm betting on, BTW. I can see her changing sides and embracing her inner Autobot, but not being "cured" of her t.o. form and becoming "Arcee" again.

Because I can understand Hasbro wanting less female characters since their toys aren't as popular as their male counterparts, but making two different fembots into the same character really doesn't solve that problem because they would still have to make separate toys for each form. The only way it would work is if Arcee is just a one-time fanwank and BA is never changing back.

That would be a lame idea because that would make the character even less original than she already is. Bad enough that she's practically 3H Black Arachnia in form and personality, but to recycle the same old plot point from BW would be even more uncreative. Black Arachnia has been done to death and practically all of her toys are fairly show accurate. I really wish they had brought in an original female Decepticon or at least a previous female who never got a show accurate toy. Nightbird, anyone?

But if they do go that route then they'll need to do something to distinguish how she's an Autobot now to the target audience. At the very least, they'll probably repaint her into BotCon Arcee colors, but toned down to be less girly.

I don't think the target demographic was alive when Beast Wars aired.

FYI all I know is that Blackarachnia says "watch out, Optimus" in the promo for the show

lol

Yup.


Right? And how would she know the name of the captain of a small repair crew, unless...eh? Eh? You know I'm right.