Transformers Animated is an interesting area of the Transformers multiverse. I don’t hate it, I did enjoy it when it originally aired, but I have trouble connecting to it as well as I do other continuities because the vibe was changed from a war story to something more akin to superheroes and supervillains. That would be fine but we also get human supervillains, with the only superhero being a non-canon character in the tie-in comics. There were episodes that were kind of off for me. However the majority were quite enjoyable. It definitely has a unique art style, since some of the creators also worked on Teen Titans, and executive producer Sam Register was also the big honcho at Cartoon Network, which could be a bit of bias on his part frankly. Like the first Robots In Disguise it serves as a sort of break between longer continuities. For RID it was between the G1/Beast era and the Unicron Trilogy. For Animated it’s between the Unicron Trilogy and the Aligned Continuity.
I also wonder what impact my 2008 medical problems have in dimming my excitement? It’s one of the reasons I can’t get into Spectacular Spider-Man and a lot of people think it’s one of the best Spider-Man cartoons.
However, it also had a huge influence on the franchise going forward. Bulkhead would get a counterpart in the Aligned continuity that we’ll start exploring next time. It secured Ratchet as a old curmudgeon, something closer to Kup than his old G1 self. While the movies created the idea of the All-Spark future incarnations seem to bear closer to the Animated version. (That seems to be the case with the current Cyberverse cartoon.) The show also brought back more traditional G1 versions of Arcee and Blurr while developing the new incarnation of Shockwave. The first episode even uses footage from the G1 cartoon as old war footage, since in this version the war was ended. Optimus Prime in this version is an academy washout who stumbles upon the aforementioned All-Spark while working with a space bridge repair team. Transformers Animated is both unique and complementary of the franchise and influenced it.
I won’t say it’s the most important series in the franchise but it is quite important. The question is whether the intros live up to it. Japan created two intros of their own with their own animation studio rather than use the US intro. Let’s look at the US intro first.
