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Independence Day for Transformers Live Action
An anonymous reader writes "Transformers, the long-planned, live-action movie based on the robot-morphing cartoon, comic and toy franchise, will roll into theaters July 4, 2007, DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures announced Wednesday.
Michael Bay (The Island, The Rock) will direct;
Steven Spielberg will executive produce.
"
Let's hope it's not another AI flop. Seriously though, cool concept, but I'm curious as to how they're going to pull it off "live action"
I haven't lost my mind. It's backed up on disk somewhere.
Wow, how did they get speilberg to sign on for a toy movie? I wonder what his motivation is since he can do whatever the hell he wants... and it's my beloved transformers...
anyone have any insight?
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
I can't wait to go to the theater and watch them slaughter the current generation of tranformers to help introduce this years "New and Improved" series of transformer toys! It will be like 1986 all over again...
Define live action.
Seems to me that there would need to be so much computer animation in it to make it work that it might as well be a cartoon anyway.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
So the transformers was a masterpiece of cartoon art with riveting plotlines? I loved Transformers when I was a kid too, but it was because it was fun. Frankly I doubt they could come up with a less plausible storyline for the movie than the cartoons featured. Hoping to rehash all your nostalgia is most of the reason people hate the rehashing of old greats, and to me this is an unrealistic expectation.
Let's see, according to imdb, here are the billed screenplay writers:
John Rogers (screenplay) and
Roberto Orci (screenplay)
Tom DeSanto story
Alex Kurtzman screenplay
Googling around, it seems like John Rogers will be the head writer. His creidts? Catwoman and The Core.
(Budget/US Box Office)
Catwoman: $100 million/$40 million
The Core: $60 million/$30 million
Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman? Episodes of Alias, the Island, MI3, Zorro sequel. I highly doubt the Island will be good, and sequels just for money usually don't have stellar stories, so not looking too great.
The only possible saving grace in the bunch is Tom DeSanto who is credited for the story in X-Men. Hollywood must seriously be about the connections. I just don't know how anyone would be willing to invest money in the guy who wrote Catwoman or The Core.
I didn't instal it for many reasons. I'll give you just one example. While I have not done this for over a year, I bet it is the same. Go to ESPN's website without flash. It loads quicker. Go to their website with flash, and you get a huge distracting 1/3rd the size of a 17 inch monitor flash graphics. And you can not disable it. It is worse at some websites that use Flash for their advertising. I HATE FLASH FOR ADVERTISING. It is about as distracting as the banner that flashes from white to red "YOU HAVE WON... click here*".
I want control over my computer, and I want it to be easy. I don't want to have to read a tech manual to learn how to disable something. It is one of the reasons I will not instal Real Media on my computer.
Did Macromedia steal your bike or something?
They stole my time and my nerves. And that is just as bad.
Or are you one of the few dozen folks still relying on a 28.8 connection?
Is this supposed to be a knock on people without broadband. Should the whole internet work flawlessly for those with 350k connections, and screw the rest for simple text pages?
Do you have any idea how many people use AOL or dial up? And NEWSFLASH, that 56k modem ain't 56k, I have looked at over a dozen dial-ups, and the best I EVER saw was 8k a second, most are like 4k or 5k a second. If a 56K modem ever gave a consistant 35k a second, broadband never would have caught on like it did.
It is simple for me. If a website does not work the way I want it to, I don't visit it. End of story. The person putting up the website must do so in a way I approve of, if he expects me to visit it. And in my case, I think I share criteria with millions of other people.
And oh, I surf with javascrip disabled too. It is one of the reasons I no longer use email services which require javascript to be enabled. I'd rather open up a source code window and read the html and find the links myself than let javascript do it.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Isn't it a bit late for April Fool hoaxes?
I mean seriously. . . Transformers? What's next, a big-budget movie adaptation of HR Pufnstuf?
Yep, I can bet I'm gonna burn a lot of karma on this one. But I just don't get it. We're talking about a cheesy SatAM cartoon designed as a half-hour long toy advertisement. Right? On top of that, its heyday was 20 years ago.
And it was always irksome then that TV went heavy into a "what about the children?" mode where the cartoon censorship got heavy. I grew up on Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner Show reruns and I still get annoyed when I see a Looney Tunes cartoon with an obvious censored cut such as a removal of a gunshot. GI Joe and other cartoons rubbed me the same wrong way as well. You'd have the HUGE plane crash/explosion and everyone would come running out of the flames unhurt. It was even more annoying in the live-action stuff like The A-Team: the roof-less jeep explodes and flips over, but they make sure to show you that the two riders in the jeep crawl out OK.
Taken from http://www.portents.com/marek/transformers/tfepgd
I just want to take over the world...Why does that automatically make me EVIL?
How in movies you can say "This will open two years from now on July 4th" and everyone knows it probably will but with video games if you said the same thing anyone with an ounce of sense would say "Third quarter 2008 at the absolute earliest."?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Any of the Mainframe shows were really good. They were this awesome studio out of Vancouver that are most notorious (depends who you ask) for Reboot. They did subsequent versions of transformers that I absolutely LOVED. Transformers meets a real writer.
Seriously man, the Mainframe beauties are to transformers what DS9 is to Star Trek. That really awesome show with great production value, entertaining dialogue, massive story arcs, plot twists and damn fine effects. And both are completely unsung and often ignored.
After this evil director lays this turd is when you should have your first watch of these shows (if you haven't seen it). Just to drive home everything that's wrong with hollywood...
I'm not sure how a post that reads like a parody got modded to +5 Insightful. (At least I hope it's a parody. I've certainly seen parodies that are almost identical.)
He starts out saying how awesome the original series was, then questions why the recent shows which are clearly set in a different continuity aren't just like the old show, and then "reminisces" about the show by half-remembering a few things and misremembering a few others. And he decries the "90's Armada version", which began in 2002.
It's like saying, "Man, I hope they get this new Superman movie right. I loved in the old stories how Clark Kent was all suave, getting all the ladies, like that reporter chick he worked with sometimes. And then he would go off and fight a really brilliant and cunning villain like Mr. Mxyztplk. If they stay true to those stores, it will be a delight for all of us who watched them."
Honestly, I don't care if people can't remember anything about their childhood cartoons aside from liking them. I don't care if people haven't re-watched these things as adults and seen their flaws firsthand. But if they haven't, then their opinions on these things are uninformed ones, and they should present those opinions accordingly.
When a new line of TRANSFORMERS comics was first announced a few years ago from the now-bankrupt company Dreamwave, their president, Pat Lee, made a similar comment. He explained how Sideswipe had always been his favorite character, and how upset he was when he died in the movie. Except... Sideswipe isn't IN the movie. He doesn't appear in a single frame. He was never heavily featured in an episode of the cartoon, or in the comic book. His entire "character" is that he's brash, and he wears a jetpack. Oh, and that one time he made a tunnel with his pile drivers. This is what passed for character development in those days.
"I really liked that show when I was a kid. I hope I like the movie, too," is a perfectly reasonable wish. But that is not the same thing as hoping they make it just like it was in 1984. The animation is a mess of errors, every other episode involves the invention of a new and powerful device which gets destroyed and never rebuilt, and practically every character, including (if not especially) Prime and Megatron is a complete dumbass.
When Megatron made a clone of Prime, he carefully explained his plan to Soundwave, then brought the clone out. Soundwave exclaimed, "It is Optimus Prime!" and cowered in fear. When the Autobots realized that there were two Primes, they couldn't tell them apart even though one of them didn't know any his troops' names. They decided to discover the real Prime BY HAVING A RACE.
"Transformers" was a great children's program, and it has a lot of heart, and a lot of fun ideas. I still enjoy it, but for its nostalgia value, campiness, and lighthearted goofiness; not because it's some sort of perfect series of yesteryear that those cartoon makers today can't match. I watch a *lot* of cartoons, and have since I was young, and in my opinion the programming being produced today is better than ever before. At least, in terms of my current tastes. If I were 10, I don't know whether I would prefer the new TMNT to the old one, or Justice League Unlimited to Superfriends. Young-me *might* like the older shows better, but, I would guess not.
For anybody who is serious about wanting to reminesce about the Transformers cartoon, I recommend The Cybertron Chronicle, by far the most thorough TF cartoon website there is. As well as transcripts of every episode and an extensive character guide, it also has a bunch of interviews with voice actors, a producer, and the voice director. Nice sites for an overview of all of Transformers history (and in considerably less depth than the Chronicle) are Unicron.com and Ben's World of Transformers.