Transformers Animated on Cartoon Network

This may be heresy to those true Transformers fans out there, but I was never a huge fan of the various incarnations of Transformers. Transformers: Cybertron, Beast Wars, Transformers: Billabong, none of them ever really did anything for me. And the new movie--well, let's not talk about the movie.

So I had, well, pretty much zero hope for the new Cartoon Network series Transformers Animated.

If you haven't seen it, the premise is this. Optimus Prime is trying to protect the Allspark from the Decepticons. His efforts end up bringing him and a few other Autobots to Earth, where, unbeknownst to him, Megatron has already been for years, severely incapacitated. Of all the people on Earth--professors, military personnel, scientists, engineers--the Autobots end up teaming up with a kid to help them.

Sound familiar?

And what if I told you that in this one, Optimus Prime is not voiced by Peter Cullen? Do you have any hope left at all?

Well, you should. The series is actually respectable, believe it or not.


Here's where this show and the movie part ways:

In this one, Optimus Prime, rather than being the leader of all the Autobots, is actually a fairly low-level officer in the Autobot army, with a reputation as being an unreliable maverick (think of him as sort of the Autobot Jack Bauer). He tranforms into a fire truck.

There are only a handful of Autobots with him on Earth. There's Ratchet, the grizzled veteran of the Autobot/Decepticon wars who transforms into an ambulance, Prowl, the ninja-esque warrior who transforms into a motorcycle, Bulkhead, the strong-but-dumb behemoth who transforms into a swat truck, and, of course, Bumblee, the comic relief childish one who Transforms into a regular yellow car with a siren on top, so he can fit in with the rescue-and-law-enforcement theme of the other Autobots.


The story takes place in the city of Detroit in the near future, when robots that can do menial jobs are starting to become common. The Autobots befriend the designer of all these robots, Dr. Isaac Sumdac, but don't know the technology came from Megatron, whose head sits in Dr. Sumdac's lab, trying to teach Sumdac Cybertronian technology in the hopes that one day Sumdac can build him a new body.

The kid is Dr. Sumdac's daughter, Sari. To me, the best fix of the show is that they actually found a plausible reason why the Autobots would hang out with her, of all people. See, there's this key that can harness the power of the Allspark, and for some reason when the Allspark first sees Sari, it gives her the key. So the Autobots keep Sari around because the Allspark told them to. It's a kind of faith and curiosity that makes them keep her around--only later do they actually become friends.

Her key fuels a lot of the plots. Rather than give life to anything it touches, like the allspark in the movie does, it gives sentience to already-working robots. Think of it sort of like how kryptonite created the freak-of-the-week in the early days of Smallville. Thus we get such iconic characters as the Dinobots, Soundwave, and Wreck-Gar.

But there's also a bigger story going on here. Not only does the Megatron story progress each week, but many stories feature flashbacks to the lives of the Autobots before they came to Earth, creating a broader mythology for the Autobot history.

That's not to say the show is particularly heavy. The supervising director, Matt Youngberg, worked on Teen Titans, and it shows. The animation style and humor on this show is very similar to that one. Lots of slapstick comedy, lots of jokes about people (and robots) being too dumb to know stuff.


I think my favorite touch is making Blitzwing, the triple changer Decepticon who goes from robot to tank to jet, have multiple personalities. That was brilliant.

So there you go. It's not the Autobots you grew up with, but it's not a dismal failure either. It's a decent show with some good plots and some fun potential. Here's to a long life for it.