Sunday, July 31, 2022

Transformers Energon mini-rant

* You can skipped this section if you want. This is meant to be a prelude to my next article*

Once upon a time in the early to mid-00s, we had the Unicron Trilogy. Three separate anime shows that was set in the same timeline. Opinions on it are mixed. It's middle entry, Energon was the most hated of the bunch and called the worse Transformers show ever made. Trust me, Michael Bay was a breath of fresh air when his movies came out, well at first. By then, we started getting well beloved shows like Animated and Prime while Bay kept making movies. By then, Energon was no longer a recent memory in our heads.

Energon had a great start with it's 1st ten episodes but afterwards, the show went downhill. All the interesting and well developed characters from Armada and the 1st 10 episodes of Energon had their character development ignored or thrown out the window. Everyone else was way too 1-dimensional. Any cool story direction that could of happen was ultimately ignored. The plot the destroy Unicron was like supposedly done early on, but it's body turns out it survive and they repeat this plot like three times.

The show is a bore to watch and it's full of wasted potential. The dubbing is a jumble mess and the CG animation is horrible. Everyone does this weird floatily run while they have two expressions, Open mouth and closed mouth.

The 1st ten episodes were great at the time with it setting up the story, building new threats, making Megatron have the coolest comeback ever. Afterwards, I got nothing but headaches.

Despite everything Energon did to make me bash my head on the wall after the 1st part, the one time I actually enjoyed this show was this one episode. Unfortunately the dub itself ruined this. I'm not against anime dubbing or anything. Y'all watch shows whatever way you want, dub or sub. However if the dub is so infamously horrible, I would recommend the sub version right away.

The problem is Energon's prequel, Armada had a deadline from Cartoon Network, The show aired six months before Japanese version did and what we had was incomplete animation with rushed dubbing. Every character got their names mixed up and say stuff that doesn't make sense due to the rushed deadline. Don't even think of getting the DVDs, cus it's only has the English version cus it was treated more like an American series rather than your typical anime.

Energon followed suit and aired a whole month before the Japanese version and it too was full of dubbing errors. Now the 3rd entry, Cybertron was far better received as the show aired half a year after the subbed version and took the time to translate the show and add some funny jokes and actually fixed a few plotholes in the Japanese version.



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