Believing in a higher power to help you define what is right and what is wrong helps prevent the dissolution of society and the world.

 

So can a personal honor system, or rational sociological self-interest (using logic to discern that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few). God is not required, please leave religion out of it.

holy CRAP people. Do I need to post a huge response explaining why you're all getting way out of hand with this thread (complete with little pictures of the members in question, just in case you don't know who I'm talking about)? Here's what this thread is really about:

 

Kids grow up watching a show that they really like.

 

They want to keep liking it as adults, but find themselves unable to identify with the simplistic world view presented in it.

 

They imagine it to have more depth than it really did, in order to continue their enjoyment of it.

 

That's it. The show (and comic) were about heroic Autobots and evil Decepticons. Is that unsatisfying for an adult viewer / reader? Then grow up and stop obsessively clinging to shitty 23-year-old toy commercials.

 

(see what I mean, I get riled about this)

Believing in a higher power to help you define what is right and what is wrong helps prevent the dissolution of society and the world.

 

So can a personal honor system, or rational sociological self-interest (using logic to discern that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few). God is not required, please leave religion out of it.

 

 

As I said, a higher power. That doesn't mean religion/God necessarily (though I despise the idea of something man made being a "higher power"). BUT. I find it EXTREMELY difficult to argue what is truly right and what is truly wrong without at least touching on religion. Even if all religions are false, they are still usually at the center of morality.

 

But also, a personal honor system alone is still POV which is what I was disagreeing with.

 

And the needs of the many don't always outweigh the needs of the few. Example: 5 people need to go to the hospital due to HIV/AIDS. 2 people need to go to the hospital due to blood loss. There is one ambulance and it can only pick up one of the two groups. The 2 people have a much higher chance of survival in the long run IF they get to the hospital first, even though there are 5 with HIV/AIDS (Even though it takes a hella long time in some cases, almost everyone who has this dies from it).

 

The nature of the need must also be taken into account.

 

holy CRAP people. Do I need to post a huge response explaining why you're all getting way out of hand with this thread (complete with little pictures of the members in question, just in case you don't know who I'm talking about)? Here's what this thread is really about:

 

Kids grow up watching a show that they really like.

 

They want to keep liking it as adults, but find themselves unable to identify with the simplistic world view presented in it.

 

They imagine it to have more depth than it really did, in order to continue their enjoyment of it.

 

That's it. The show (and comic) were about heroic Autobots and evil Decepticons. Is that unsatisfying for an adult viewer / reader? Then grow up and stop obsessively clinging to Blotty 23-year-old toy commercials.

 

(see what I mean, I get riled about this)

 

But duking it out with other people over things that don't matter one way or another is FUN!

George W. Bush on the other hand (again, just my personal opinion) is an amoral President. When New Orleans got smashed by that Hurricane, he did sweet fcuk all to help those poor people. To this day people are still waiting for Hurricane assistance. Watch Farenheit 9/11 and look at the video footage of what Bush was doing when Whitehouse aids told him that the World Trade Centre had been attacked and continued to give him updates while he was reading that story book to those kids. He had to be prompted to take action by his aids! A moral leader would have dropped EVERYTHING as soon as he heard the news and left that classroom to assume his duty as US President at a time of crisis. What kind of arsehole just sits there reading a story book while your country is under attack?? His actions demonstrate that Bush simply does not care about right or wrong... it's something that crosses his mind less frequently than correct English syntax.

I'm just going to touch on this first, and then forget I ever saw it.

 

 

There was nothing to be done.

 

The President of the United States of America is not a superhero. Yes, George W. Bush has ultimate authority when situations such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina arise, but that does not mean that he is the one who must take action in every situation. In theory, at both of these instances, George W. Bush was being apprised of the developments as they occurred and what was being done about them. The Federal Government of the United States of America did not grind to a halt while George W. Bush read My Pet Goat to a classroom of small children. The United States Armed Forces were not simply standing back and waiting for the President to call them - actions were being taken by the people whose job it was to take them. Nothing could have been done by George W. Bush to save the people in the World Trade Center, the people on United Flight 93, or prevent any of the heartache sufferred by those who lost friends or relatives on that day, including myself.

 

Similarly, the Hurricane Katrina debacle was not directly George W. Bush's fault - nor can all of the blame be placed upon his shoulders. The city of New Orleans did not take appropriate action to move citizens out of the path of the storm - and when the city failed, the state of Louisiana failed to step in to ensure the safety of it's citizenry. Additionally, officials in neighboring communities took action to prevent, first evacuees and then refugees, from entering their municipalities based upon predjudice and unfounded fear that those individuals would be of an unseemly element.This was not helped out by a newsmedia influx which reported unsubstantiated rumor and speculation as fact, i.e. Roving Transufomah! Gangs, wholesale murder within the Superdome, and mountains of corpses - all of which later responsible journalism showed to be completely without basis in reality.

 

Any failings in these two instances can be traced to the same problem - people who we and the President should have been able to count on to adequately fulfill the duties of their assigned agencies (FBI, CIA, FEMA) were either unqualified (Bush's fault) or unable to see what the appropriate actions should be, and bungled their responsibilities completely (not Bush's fault).

 

Bush is not evil, but he is not adept at doing the most important job the President has to do; putting the most capable people in the positions of true, not ultimate, reponsibility.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to the topic at hand - LMH is absolutely right.

 

People have aged, and now want to take their childhood memories and reexamine them, as they do the whole of their lives, through the lenses of the moral relativiity we live in today - and you can't do it.

 

Well, not if you want to stay true to the intent of the creators, anyway.

People have aged, and now want to take their childhood memories and reexamine them, as they do the whole of their lives, through the lenses of the moral relativiity we live in today - and you can't do it.

Sure, we can. We can retcon whatever we want to improve our enjoyment of the show. We're the customer. Let's just not kid ourselves that it's somehow NOT a retcon.

Well, not if you want to stay true to the intent of the creators, anyway.

The only intent the creators had was to get paid, by getting as many of us to watch/buy the toys as it took.

Not all the writers were like that. Throughout the G1 run some writers did genuinely try to write Transformers at a higher order level to engage a growing audience, e.g.: Simon Furman, Flint Dille, David Wise and heck, even Bob Budiansky to some degree.

 

Some of these writers were hampered by the fact that what they were writing were fundamentally toy commercials, such as The Rebirth. If you listen to the interview with David Wise and his original idea for the Rebirth story as a 5-parter, it was a pretty decent idea. Unfortunately Hasbro compacted it and also insisted that virtually the entire 1987 toy line needed to be featured in it, which meant that Wise had to butcher his own story and turn it into the absolute piece of sh!t that The Rebirth turned out to be.

 

Flint Dille did try to mature the G1 cartoon in Season 3 by introducing a more science fiction element to the story, but as I mentioned before, it was severely undone by really poorly made characters like Galvatron, Grimlock, Wheelie etc.

 

Simon Furman is the best writer when it comes to writing seriously cool sh!t for Transformers and is notorious for taking what were - let's face it - some pretty ordinary toys, and writing them into fcuking awesome unforgettable characters. Look at Bludgeon! As a Pretender, he's pretty good - but he's still just a fcuking Pretender!! Yet he's become a bloody LEGEND thanks to Furman, who now admits that had he known how popular this character would become, he would've bought caseloads of the toy to sell them on eBay today! Classic Pretender Grimlock is a bloody awesome character, yet the toy would have to be one of the worst Grimlock toys ever made! Hell, Furman even made the Action Masters look cool, which is a real credit to him considering how god-awful those toys were. Carnivac ROCKED yet the toy is very forgettable. I recently scored a Carnivac off eBay (the Pretender Beasts were never sold in Australia) for no other reason than because I love the character in G1!

 

Speaking of this debate, Furman did also examine the different variations of evil (and good) in many of his stories. Before I mentioned the evil Autobot Scientist Flame. He (and Budiansky) also populated Cybertron with many neutral non-aligned Transformers who were neither good nor evil, such as Spanner (the architect of the Decepticon Space Bridge), Maccadam (his oil house appears on the TF Monopoly board!) etc. One interesting story Furman wrote was the 5-part "Aspects of Evil" series where an Autobot student embarks on a research into the nature of evil only to be consumed by it.

 

 

Yuyuyami: you're reading too much into what Tripredacus said. He's basically saying that Autobots are good and Decepticons are evil because that's how HasTak has marketed them - and since they own the property then it's a fact. Only a marketing fact, but a fact nonetheless.

*shrug* I liked Rebirth. It had a whole buncha toys in it. :)

You'll love Scramble City then. ;D

 

 

I spent my entire time watching Rebirth laughing at it...

Seen it, Goki. I didn't 'cause I'd already seen all those guys in regular eps (whether it came before or after).