BW Media Spotlight

“How many blue crayons do you own?”

A half hour. Not even that.

Tonight I was going to review the fourth installment of Michael Bay’s Transformer movie, Age Of Extinction. Until The Last Knight hits theaters (and a movie that wants to sell itself to me by having Optimus Prime attack the Autobots is not doing a good job of it) it’s the only Transformers movie I have yet to see.

I didn’t even make it through the first half-hour of the FX Movies broadcast.

Why, you may ask? Well, it’s not like I didn’t know it was about humans treating Autobots as the bad guys. But there’s a scene in there that just made me realize it was dumber than that. I’m pretty sure I know where the story is headed because it’s been done before. But it’s also an extension of a problem I see in the adult-targeted side of the Transformers multiverse. See, I grew up at a time when the Autobots were allied with the humans. (Except in the comic but I’ll come back to that.) In the cartoon humans and Autobots joined forces against the Decepticons. The humans knew their own planet and energy sources while the Autobots protected them from the Decepticons. It was a good showing.

That’s hard to find now. Of the currently active series, the web series is set on Cybertron so we won’t count that, and four are on Earth; two of them are shows for kids and two of them, one a comic and the other a movie, are targeted for grown-ups and the heck with the target audience for the series. Yes, Hasbro throws a bone to the adult collectors but this started as a product for kids. Not 80s kids, but kids who are not yet adults. And apparently adults don’t like heroes or something.

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