Are they not even robots anymore? He looks like a demon. What the hell is he going to transform into? A meatball?

Looks like poncing up for the sake of it. FFS.

Well Megatron was never allowed to be a gun again (toy wise at least) anyway, as it was too good a replica for the real thing, hence why he was turned into a tank for G2. However this looks a bit weird even for me, unless it's meant to be some sort of endoskeleton.

The new movie was always going to struggle as soon as the emphasis seemed to be put on the humans rather than the robots :(

Oh sweet Jesus.

His alt-mode is "Alien Jet" and the in-story reason for this is that he never assumes an Earth--based form, which, as mentioned, most people had assumed would be a tank. This is not a bad move in itself, since it's a reasonably in-character point that if he didn't need to change his form (he didn't choose to, in the G1 cartoon, for instance) then he wouldn't want to. What is a bad more, is turning in a shit design like this. I never expected a 100% faithful G1 movie. I also didn't expect them to get things this fundamentally wrong.

Heh, wondered how long it would be before you posted about this, James :-)

And all this is without mentioning the ridiculous flame design on Optimus Prime...

This is a problem with most remakes of programs you saw as a kid. They think they're improving it, or bringing it to a new generation, but all they really do is taint a memory of when it was good.

I saw Willo the Wisp narrated by James Dreyfus today, FFS! They've changed Edna into a fecking silver widescreen thingy. I'm ashamed theres proof http://www.willothewisp.co.uk/

What are the actual episodes like? Jamie Rix is a good writer, so I have high hopes. As for Edna in widescreen: it was bound to happen. Just imagine our reactions as kids if she had been an old 405 line box...

My daughter enjoyed it, I was too busy chuntering on about the "old days" to listen. I know Edna needed modernising, its just disappionting when they change something that had good memories the way it was.

It's less point-missing than the magic roundabout movie, I suppose. But there's something nastily bright about the colour scheme. And the whizzing around digital Evil Edna isn't the end of the changes that make everything feel a bit off. Edna looked like an old battered antiquated TV set when the programme first aired, and she walked with a pace that matched the energy of the original series! Now it's all antics and camera angles and colours that remind me more of the Care Bears than Willo the Wisp. It's not even about nostalgia. The voices of the characters bleed into each other because they're so similar, and Willo the Wisp is looking like a generic Caspar the Friendly Ghost. At least it looks like *actual painted 2D animation cels* though, which is enormously rare.

Megatron, however, can fuck right off. I don't understand for what purpose anything would need to look like that, let alone a Transformer. "To look scary" isn't good enough.

The Willo the Wisp site has a trailer for the new series, by the way. In case you didn't look closely enough to find it: http://www.willothewisp.co.uk/Willotrailer_480.wmv or Quicktime: http://www.willothewisp.co.uk/Willotrailer_480.mov

Its all wrong.

Okay - this is really bizarre. Compare this: http://youtube.com/watch?v=kEJ_XMub3BI with this: http://www.taylors.tv/media/04.Mavis_350.wmv. The latter seems to be a beat-for-beat remake of the first scene of the former. Even more weirdly though, the former actually appears to be a hybrid of some kind, with the new Willo (as far as I can tell from the resolution) and a not-quite completely modern Evil Edna at the end.

Can anyone here put me sane? Or should I just stop looking for trouble?

My fellow geek, I trust that you are now eating these words?

Here's hoping the next two films will be at least as much fun as this was!

Has anyone watched the new cartoon? I... well, words fail me. It's so completely demented.