From kendrick@io.com Mon Mar 20 18:37:46 1995 Article: 7504 of alt.toys.transformers Path: illuminati.io.com!nobody From: kendrick@pentagon.io.com (Kendrick Kerwin Chua) Newsgroups: alt.toys.transformers Subject: TF Weekday: Friday 14 October Date: 14 Oct 1994 08:54:58 -0500 Organization: Illuminati Online Lines: 68 Message-ID: <37m2ji$rcv@pentagon.io.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: pentagon.io.com A Prime Problem, featuring Optimus Prime and his evil twin Skippy... Megatron, Soundwave, and Starscream discover a ravine in the Earth that contains crystals dangerous to circuitry, explosive on contact. The Autobots investigate while the Decepticons attack them from their secret base near the ravine, and Laserbeak knocks Prime out and takes photographs. Megatron, using holograms of Prime, creates a mechanical clone that leads the Autobots away, leaving the real Prime. However, Megatron's puppet has a few flaws and doesn't know all the Autobots or Teletran-I very well. When the real Prime shows up at headquarters, the Bots devise some tests that fail to reveal who is real. Lured back to the ravine, Megatron creates a duplicate Starscream for hte clone Prime to destroy, in order to win the Autobot's trust. However, Windcharger and Spike discover the secret base. Spike is captured, and Windcharger escapes, falling into the ravine. Windy escapes certain destruction, tries to warn to Bots about the crystals, and brings news of Spike. When the clone dismisses Spike's incarceration as unimportant, the Bots realize who's for real and vaporize the clone. Megatron runs away. It's a cliche, but for robots it's a cliche that never fails. Extra touches like the clone Starscream and the control helmets that Megatron wears make this otherwise tired plot breathe with new life. Again, i have to laud the animation as some of the greatest ever produced. It seems that the G2 animation team added some special effects to heighten the effect of the glowing, explosive crystals deep in the ravine. Also, when prime crawls out of a hole in the ground, you have an amazing shot of the background rotating around him, a la Heavy Metal. Both effects are just short of amazing. Only a few nitpicks. Starscream's "destruction: sequence is totally ruined by the fact that Thundercracker is standing behind him, coloured incorrectly to look like... Starscream (!! Get it right, dammit) Also, you wonder why they haven't before and don't continue to use this cloning process to create tons and tons of Con warriors or more Autobot clones. Perhaps this would be a good excuse to create Pretender shells... In the beginning sequence, you see Soundwave eject a tape that becomes an automatonic sensor drone. The transformation is creative and unique, and you wonder why Hasbro didn't create a slew of little tapes that became all sorts of stuff. I'd like to see Swivvy eject a tape that turns into a gun, or a tape that turns into a targeting helmet, etc. etc. Maybe we can create our own... Listen closely to the music in this episode. Some of it, to my ear, seems to be totally unique, never used in any other episode. It's possible that they recycled some old Inhumanoids or GIJoe music that I've just forgotten, but it's nice to hear something besides the old horns-n-strings every ep. Toys they should reissue: Soundwave Soundwave Soundwave "I'm sorry there's only three of you. Clobbering less than four Decepticons is boring!" "Yes, I'm really me... myself... whoever I am." KKC, has a particular hatred of UK comic publishers and the US Postal Service right at this very minute. Going off to work at that job I quit four times and went back to... -- Kendrick Kerwin Chua - kendrick@io.com - "Hey man, your bike's on fire." Necronomicon FAQ keeper, OS/2 guru, Transformer collector and cartomancer. BeastBox on Transformers MUSH, interrogator and comic relief extraordinaire. FTP Anonymously to io.com and find the Necronomicon FAQ in /pub/usr/kendrick