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What is so good about G1?


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Thank you all for contributing to this. I did not think so many people would post. Please encourge more to do so, as I would like a wider opinon.

 

Just to let you know i own and have watched all the american G1 series on DVD (thank you metrodom) and thought it was great! (exept some of series 3 :tfpuke ) I also own all the Japanies G1 series have seen headmaster and am working through super god master force. Thought headmaster was prity good.

 

I do understand the whole see it as a child think, as i watched a few of the old Transformers videos when i was quite young and that drew me more to Transformers. This exposure to G1 is partly why i am still a fan today.

 

Just to end, i started this purly to find the answer to the question writen, from the fandom. As i can see many flaws (e.g. toys were bricks) but also great points (charaters that you either loved or loved to hate) but i guess i am comparing G1 to other series that have gone before, when it should be looked at in contest of when it was first released. Yet I will never be able to fully understand that as i never have or will experience G1 in that way :tfsad O well you "more experienced" fans will have to enlighten me :tflaugh

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No kids running around causing trouble, no lesser cutsie characters to an extreme, no majorly dumb jokes and very un like the usual anime style series.

 

Are we talkin about the same G1 here?

 

... I dunno, in my opinion it was good for it's time.. but it's a show that doesn't age really well.. if you didn't grow up with it, I wouldn't suggest watching it as it's kind of a kin to a B Movie experience. As in.. if you don't like movies with cheesey monsters with zippers showing and UFOs on strings.. G1 is pretty much like that except as a cartoon.. love it, hate it.. it's the truth folks. I still watch it, I admit.. because it's fun for us old farts to relive that kind of stuff. But even I get all rolley eyes sometimes with all that "Deceptijerks" talk.. just call em Decepticons! .. its like, ya know, what they are and stuff. Oh.. and there's some episodes you should NEVER watch.. NEVER.. Autobot Spike.. City of Steel.. they are painful.

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No kids running around causing trouble, no lesser cutsie characters to an extreme, no majorly dumb jokes and very un like the usual anime style series.

 

Are we talkin about the same G1 here?

 

... I dunno, in my opinion it was good for it's time.. but it's a show that doesn't age really well.. if you didn't grow up with it, I wouldn't suggest watching it as it's kind of a kin to a B Movie experience. As in.. if you don't like movies with cheesey monsters with zippers showing and UFOs on strings.. G1 is pretty much like that except as a cartoon.. love it, hate it.. it's the truth folks. I still watch it, I admit.. because it's fun for us old farts to relive that kind of stuff. But even I get all rolley eyes sometimes with all that "Deceptijerks" talk.. just call em Decepticons! .. its like, ya know, what they are and stuff. Oh.. and there's some episodes you should NEVER watch.. NEVER.. Autobot Spike.. City of Steel.. they are painful.

 

Carnage in C minor

Atlantis Arise

Attack of the Autobots

Galvatron's cannontrons Master Plan 1/2

Golden Lagoon

Sea Change

Surprise Party

Madman's Paradise

Nightmare Planet

Only Human

and the list goes on but these are some of the ones to avoid at all costs

 

Season 1 with the original MTME arc is still probably the best out of all of them.

 

Strangely though I really liked some of season twos throwaway eps the best. Childs Play, Hoist Goes to Hollywood, The Girl who Loved Powerglide, and Triple-Take Over are probably some of the worst conceptually but are great fun because the writers go outside what one normally expects from a cartoon and twists it in such a mediocre way it ends up being so bad it's great.

 

Also the characters in G1 for the most part were no less annoying/obnoxious than most of the human characters to come in the later shows. I'd take the Armada kids plus Kicker minus Fre and Billy over Spike/Danial any day.

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With all of the talk of nostalgia, I must say that it can only go so far. There plenty of things from my childhood that I'm no longer interested in.

 

I have great respect for G1 as a whole. The toys, on their own, are very good. Accessories, for instance. I know that shoving a gun in an alt-mode's body cavity is all the rage these days, but I prefer G1 accessories. We will never see that many variations on alien laser guns again. Such variety is impossible when the gun must also be able to attach to the alt-mode. The cartoon had the best music and voice acting around. And, while they clearly did reuse some animation cels, I still respect the animators for doing what they can to make all of the transformations take place within each scene. The voice actors really brought the characters to life. You can't find someone like Scatman Crothers today. The character designs were great, even improved upon in the case of Ironhide and Ratchet.

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I like G1 for the same reasons I still eat cap'n crunch.

It makes me feel like a kid again. to watch the old episodes, or finally get a rodimus prime figure. It's not that the show was amazing, or that rodimus prime was a great figure ( he's not BTW.)

It's that every afternoon after school, I would watch the show, and I begged for a rodimus prime figure for every gift giving holiday for almost 3 years and never got one.

some people, like me, enjoy G1 for what it used to mean.

others like it because they are woefully incapable of moving on.

they want everything to be a remake of G1. every show, every toy. never mind the crappy construction and playability of the old toys, or the disjointed story and poorly animated (at least in the later seasons...)cartoon from the eighties.

they want every transformer to be the same optimus and megatron. the same cheese story. all video games have to be remakes of link to the past. all movies have to remakes of starship troopers. only one good bond. kirk was the only captain. vader always had the suit. bright colored spandex is the only wolverine.

some people can't accept change in any form. they live lonely lives, forcing their opinions on whatever hapless employee makes the mistake of being in the toy aisle at the same time as them. I know, I work retail. don't be these people. If you like G1, good job. so do I. but I can also accept change.

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:tfevil Well I wouldn't quite say I'm in the minority, vocal yes, . . . but not the minority. Futhermore, if you guys don't like your diecast toys or any inclusion of it for that matter, then would you please sell me or give me your undesired toys, I'll give them a good home. . . And no not on ebay either, I'd like to be buried with my gen 1 collection thank you very much. I'll just say I was insipred that's all! :krem :sun

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:tfevil Well I wouldn't quite say I'm in the minority, vocal yes, . . . but not the minority. Futhermore, if you guys don't like your diecast toys or any inclusion of it for that matter, then would you please sell me or give me your undesired toys, I'll give them a good home. . . And no not on ebay either, I'd like to be buried with my gen 1 collection thank you very much. I'll just say I was insipred that's all! :krem :sun

 

I would, but all my G1 stuff is either broken ( usually where the die cast meets the plastic.), or imported and on display for sentimental reasons.

I made the mistake of buying Titanium WW OP. now, he lies in a pile of broken sadness, along with a couple of megazords, whose only crime was being weighed down with useless metal.

 

Oh, and a little off topic: if you plan on getting any older PR zords, especially sentai mecha, make sure you find out what the die cast content is. you can wind up paying a crap load in shipping to import these bastards due to the added weight from the metal. learned this the hard way.

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:tfevil Well I wouldn't quite say I'm in the minority, vocal yes, . . . but not the minority.

Yes, yes you are. We all love G1, but your refusal to accept anything new is indeed a trait of the rabid fanboy minority.

If Hasbro and TT had gone in the direction you desire, Transformers would have sank into the oblivion never to return around the early/mid 1990's.

 

I made the mistake of buying Titanium WW OP. now, he lies in a pile of broken sadness,

This line made me laugh. My RiD Ultra Magnus knows that pain all to well.

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G1 love is nostalgia pure and simple.

 

Sure, it's the first and laid a lot of groundwork - but of the hundreds of characters and concepts present in the show, only a small fraction of those are carried over into the later series. An even smaller fraction are carried over completely unchanged.

 

And what of the other concepts and characters? They were mediocre to terrible, even when compared to other franchises at the time.

 

I love the feeling I get when I slide up with some peanut butter crackers & Kool-Aid to watch "Call of the Primitives" at 4 in the afternoon. And I've toyed with purchasing the US Masterpiece Starscream and corination gear to put on a shelf at home - but it is because of the notstalgia feeling these things bring me that I like them. The fiction or the toy alone won't do it for me, becuase they're not really very good.

 

The franchise is, right now, at a place where both the current fictions and toys are far superior to what we had in the 80s.

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:tfevil Well I wouldn't quite say I'm in the minority, vocal yes, . . . but not the minority. Futhermore, if you guys don't like your diecast toys or any inclusion of it for that matter, then would you please sell me or give me your undesired toys, I'll give them a good home. . . And no not on ebay either, I'd like to be buried with my gen 1 collection thank you very much. I'll just say I was insipred that's all! :krem :sun

I'd say you're definitely in the minority. Just because I'm not G1 crazy doesn't mean I hate it or that I hate die-cast metal, I just think things have moved on (on the whole) in the right direction. If you can't see that people can like more than one thing then you are obviously in the "EXTREEEEEME VIEWS!!!!!" minority. A common characteristic of a rabid fanboy.

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