Man. I rewatched Mission Accomplished again and it really got me wondering. Just how experience and capable the Elite Gaurd really is. Optimus just out shined them all around in this ep. First he take's out Sentinal with no effort. Then UltraMagnus' plan for stopping a massive explosion is to...........Hit the engine with his Mega hammer......WTF?! Then He get's straight up blasted in the face cause he's not paying attention or prepared to go up against Starscream. He should have just gave Optimus the Matrix right then and there.

Do you guys think that by the end of the series Optimus will be Supreme Commander? Will it be because Magnus is Dead or will the Allspark choose Optimus and Magnus'll just fall into place?

This last episode had me totally thinking what you said. These Elite Guard guys are a bit out of their element when it comes to actual combat, it seems. Which would make sense, since it's been centuries since there was any actual war to be fought. Jazz seemed to come off best of the three -- Sentinel is a douche and Magnus is a bit of a bureaucrat -- though I think they're also just playing Jazz as the more likeable character anyway. Not that he was any more effective than Magnus at helping out. But he does seem to have a bit more common sense.

What I really like about these Elite Guard guys is how they come across as so sheltered. Like, you think "Elite Guard" and you think "oh they must be badasses." But the reality is that they've all had little actual combat experience, just a lot of training and polishing their weapons (so to speak).

I think Magnus would have been much more effective if he hadn't been taken totally off guard. Remember the first time Optimus went up against Starscream?

BTW, I'm surprised they didn't yank the allspark fragment out of his head. Did they not notice?

I see Optimus and Co. being elevated to the Elite Guard. UM will probably get PWND by Megs (he couldn't even deal with Starscream ), and then Optimus will get promoted to Supreme Commander, either by the AllSpark/Matrix/whatever, or Magnus will name him his successor on his death bead.

It wouldn't take that much to get Optimus to the Supreme Commander position, actually. When Ultra Magnus was down and out, Jazz turned to Sentinel, suggesting that as the "Prime" of the Elite Guard he was second in command. Which means that if Optimus and Co. are promoted to Elite Guard status Optimus would have just as valid a claim to the Supreme Commander position as Sentinel would.

Well, there is an "Elite Guard Bumblebee" repaint planned.

Somebody needs to photoshop Magnus getting blasted in the face by Starscream with his famous saying.

which is either an annoying spoiler or a ghey repaint.

although the Goldbug thing makes me chuckle a bit.

I was thinking lazy Goldbug too. I think it's a spoiler though.

Jazz does have more common sense than the rest it would seem. It's funny though that they sorta gave Prowl some of Jazz's personality save for Prowl wants to be one with nature while Jazz likes the culture of it all.

Elite Guard Sh*tpiece?

I'm seeing the "OMG awesome leader of Autobots with awesome hammer" from the Elite Guard premiere episode, and compare it to Mission Accomplished, and I think we all here could see that the soon-to-be-awesome Magnus turned back to become much like his old G1 self, Ultra "I can't deal with this now" Magnus.

I think there are different ways to fail.

G1 Ultra Magnus was supposed to be a mighty warrior and stuff; he just sucked at leadership and stuff.

Animated Ultra Magnus hasn't seen combat in centuries, if at all, and is much better at administration than heat-of-battle stuff.

And awesome lightning hammer usage.

Optimus really did outshine Sentinal, OPtimus is more of a bot of action now as he knows it's required whereas Sentinal just stood there shellshocked not knowing what to do in an actual combat situation against thelegendary enemy.

*PAGE TWO FOR LULZ*

I would officially like to stick up for Magnus at this point.... he is NOT the that G1 Ultra Magnus was. Prime got even more PWNED by Starscream in the first episode.

You basically just said what I did in my first post in this thread.



You got the line slightly wrong, Agent Zero. It's "I can't deal with that right now!"

Still, the picture is awesome.

Thing is, OP's just a lowly repair bot. So getting PWND by 'Screamer actually made sense. Ultra Magnus is the Autobot Supreme Commander who we know was active during the Great War. So it was kind of unexpected to see him get PWND by a 'Con we know is weak compared to Megatron.

Maybe Magnus is just rusty, but then again, the Decepticons were just as inactive as the Autobots were following the Great War. Maybe Megs has an awesome conditioning program?

Optimus Prime! Get me those TPS reports!

FIX'D

AWESOMENESS

"I can't deal with that now" is the line n00Bs

FIX'D AGAIN


Thanks. Here's one for ( . Y . )....

Know what's surprised me? The complete lack of acknowledgement of Ratchet by the Elite Guard. He's a Great War Vet, and served directly under Magnus (direct enough to be in direct communication in battle), yet doesn't get so much as a "How ya been?" from Magnus.

How about a reverse TF:TM scene where Ultra Magnus hands off the Matrix to Optimus? Wait... didn't they say Rodimus might come into the picture around Season 3?

Oh blot...

'Cause UM appears to be an uptight, pompous a$$. Or maybe Ratchet had robo secks with his wife.


RECANT! If you don't believe in Rodimus he can't hurt you!
*LALALALALALALA*

Anyhow, yeah, UM will probably end up getting PWND by Megs, and Optimus, one way or an other will assume the leadership role. That seems to be the easiest way to go about things, provided they allow Optimus time before hand to climb the carer latter a bit.

Rachet has been quiet in period in the past few eps.

LALALALALALALA

as long as we don't get any of these lines roddy will be allright.

Rodimus-" are you trying to tell me I'm not the leader you were? I know that optimus"

Ratchet was just a medic... one of many, I'm sure. He was only important to Magnus in that moment because he had located Arcee. Also keep in mind that the war in Animated was a bit larger in scale than the traditional Transformers "war" with like ten guys per side. Not to mention that the war ended hundreds of years ago. Anyway, the fact that Ratchet is working on some lousy space bridge repair crew tells me that his postwar career path hasn't been stellar.

That an Magnus seems to be a real official dude...he never addresses anyone of the crew but Optimus.

Thanks for making "Prime" a rank, Animated guys- now I automatically refer to Optimus as "Prime" less and less.

Looks like Ultra Magnus borrows a lot from Thor. Ultamate hammer of power indeed.

Sentinal Prime's an a**hole.

Jazz is all about the nunchucks.

Watched this ep last though it looks to have come before Mission Impossible and Return of Headmaster.

Am really surprised at how everything's playing out after Megatron rising. Sumdac imprisoned by Megatron and OMG it looks like Sari really is a robot. WTF?

The topic is about Mission: Accomplished, namely how much the Elite Guard sucks. >.>

Exactly. The Elite Guard seems as weak as the 'repair bots'

You guys forget that it's been millenia since there's been a war between the Autobots and Decepticons - the Decepticons have become like Boogeymen. Very few Autobots have ever really seen a Decepticon before, let alone come across one. So we're really seeing the Cybertron Elite Guard being caught off-guard by the sudden emergence of Decepticons.

if you go back through the thread, you'll see that I, along with other people, have already said that.

Yeah, it's been a while since the Elite Guard saw some real action, but one Decepticon against 3 Elite
guard members should have went better than that, even being caught off guard. Starscream pwned all of them, luckily they had a repair bot there to saw their as*es. We'll see how they handle their next encounter.

Most of the Elite Guard has NEVER seen action.

Ratchet and Ultra Magnus are the only ones who had seen a live Decepticon before the pilot episode. (Well, Optimus had seen Black Arachnia but he didn't know it and one of the Autobots on Cybertron is an imposter.)

But Jazz and Sentinel Prime had never even seen a Decepticon before "Mission Accomplished".

Most of the Elite Guard, presumably, has never seen real combat.

Optimus Prime was the first Autobot to face a Decepticon in his lifetime. Only the really old guys had even seen one and even back in the day, Autobots were NOTHING compared to the Decepticons and hid behind the Allspark.

There has to more than a couple of Autobots that have dealt with Decepticons

Yeah, but most actual veterans would no longer be in active service within the Cybertronian military. The vast majority of Autobots would have never encountered a Decepticon before.

*trying to think of a real world military example that is really well equipped and thinks they're badass, but has never really seen any action.*

The big difference is that in the real world, we tend to have regular wars.

But imagine if we didn't for 50 years or so.

We'd still have Westpoint Graduates (Elite Guards) but the only living combat vets would be a bunch of 70-90 year old Gulf War/Iraq War vets.

The American Civil War was close to that though. The Generals had fought in the Mexican American War but the vast majority of soldiers had never fought before (and expected the war to over much more quickly, on both sides).

The Elite Guard seem almost like the Zouave of the American Civil War, which were often rich people with no combat experience and VERY fancy uniforms which they paid for out of pocket. The Zouave really got massacred pretty heavily for a good part of the war but, I think, eventually became noted fighters.

The Opium Wars is another example - at one stage, China considered themselves to be the greatest civilisation and initially rejected attempts from Europeans to establish relations, considering them to be uncivilised barbarians. Then Confucianism set in and Chinese progress stagnated allowing the Europeans to surpass them and eventually majorly pwn them.

The Mongolians also surprised many other civilisations when they created an empire that made the Greek and Roman Empires look pale by comparison.

Genghis KHAAAAAN!

Elite Guard:

- Sentinel and Optimus were peers, equals, and Optimus never fought in the Great War, because it was before his time. Obviously, therefore, nether has Sentinel.

- Jazz refers back to Sentinel for info on procedures, and contact with organics. In other words, Jazz is of the opinion that Sentinel is the more experienced one. If he's less experienced than Sentinel, Jazz wouldn't have fought in the Great War either.

- Magnus was involved in the Great War. But, even then, he clearly had a supervisory role, not a frontline position. In other words: head-to-head combat is not Magnus' forte.


The Great War was years ago. The Autobots did not eradicate the Decepticons, they merely exiled them to the fringes of this galaxy. There they wait, ready to strike again when Megatron beckons them once more.

The way that the Decepticons are striking at the Autobots is similar to how the Sith toppled the Jedi Order and converted the Republic to an Empire in Star Wars.

(Rantage Engine: ON)

approx. 1000 years before the Star Wars movies, the Jedi thought that the Sith had become extinct. But for a millennium the Sith waited patiently for an opportune moment to strike - which began in the events of Episode I: The Phantom Menace. The Jedi, having never encountered Sith for over 1000 years had become lax and arrogant - so much so that a mighty Sith Lord like Darth Sidious (Palpatine) was able to infiltrate the very core of the Republic right under the nose of the Jedi Order without the Jedi Order being able to detect him, even diminishing the Jedi's ability to use the Force.

Many Jedi were ill-suited as warriors, focusing much of their training into becoming diplomats. This is why we saw so many Jedi fall relatively easily during the early stages of the Clone Wars.


Even though Coleman Trebor was a Jedi Master, because he focused so much on being a diplomat and negotiator that his diminished skill with a light sabre made him an all too easy prey for Jango Fett

IMO Episode II had the worst light sabre choreography of all the movies - and a retconned explanation that has been provided is that many of the Jedi during that time suffered from diminished lightsabre prowess because they had fallen into the role of being diplomatic negotiators, rather than fighters. A lot of Jedi who fell at Geonosis, like Master Trebor, had probably hardly ever wielded a light sabre in an actual fight (if at all).

When Emperor Palpatine executed Order 66, the Jedi were embarrassingly caught by complete surprise. We saw how easily Palpatine used the Clones to massacre the Jedi, topple the Jedi Order and bring the Jedi to the brink of extinction.

In Episode I when Qui-Gon Jinn reported his encounter with Darth Maul on Tattooine to the Jedi Council, informing them that he suspected Maul to be a Sith the Council was somewhat skeptical. It wasn't until after Qui-Gon Jinn was slain by Maul that the Council started taking the thought of the Sith returning a bit more seriously - but really, nothing much was done about it. The Jedi were taken by surprise when Dooku revealed himself to be a Sith convert then again, the Jedi became more concerned - especially as they continued to encounter more Dark Jedi such as Komari Vosa, Asajj Ventress, General Grievous (technically not a Dark Jedi nor Sith) etc.

The relationship between the Autobots and Decepticons in Animated is similar to Jedi and Sith for the majority of the prequel trilogy in Star Wars - like the Sith, the Decepticons were presumed eradicated long ago and they have now secretly returned and striking via a series of perimeter insurgent uprisings (something which Sidious/Palpatine did by manipulating the Separatists). The Autobots are like the Republic/Jedi - believing the Decepticons to be virtually extinct and incapable of presenting a serious threat... until now.

...full of good intentions but ultimately ineffectual
...like some religions

(Rantage Engine: OFF)

A Goki rant I enjoyed reading? NO!!!!!!!!!!!!


Actually, you make a great point.