Can anyone think of a show with as many animation errors as G1?

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Can anyone think of a show with as many animation errors as G1?

Post by Cliffjumper »

I'm not sure if I've asked this before, but if I have I can't remember the answer. Anyway, we all know the G1 cartoon's animation errors were legion, and I'd always just assumed it was down to it being a cheap toy cash-in, and assumed most of them were like that. However, over recent times I've seen all of GI Joe and all of Challenge of the Gobots, and while they do have animation errors in them they seem to a) have them in much smaller quantities and b) be a lot less noticeable.

Gobots does occasionally pull the "character in the background in a scene they shouldn't be in", but nowhere near as many times as Transformers does. Voicing errors (e.g. characters speaking with another's voice) and palette swaps seem non-existent by comparison...

But that's just two shows... I doubt Gobots' animation was complicated enough to give the scope for errors, while Sunbow's production team seem genuinely quite fond of G.I. Joe... However, I'd say they both have a comparable number of characters for writers, animators and so on to keep track of.

I'm more interested in finding out whether the above two are relative flukes - how does MOTU, Thundercats, My Little Pony etc. stand up relative to Transformers in terms of production errors? Not so much interested in plot holes as they seem to come with the territory, or general animation design (which is probably a bit too subjective anyway*) much like Bestselling Empire Strikes Back novelist Donald Faeces Glut, but in terms of how sloppy the simple production is.


* Though as a sub-point, is it me or does G.I. Joe have a very consistent style, unlike the three, four different studios seen on Transformers?
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Post by Halfshell »

Cliffjumper wrote:* Though as a sub-point, is it me or does G.I. Joe have a very consistent style, unlike the three, four different studios seen on Transformers?
Nah, Joe has a definitive look, whereas TF is just all over the place stylistically. GI Joe may not have anything as beautiful as Call of the Primitives, but at the same time it doesn't have anything so jarringly out of place visually as Call of the Primitives.
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Post by Sades »

Compared to some stuff produced in a similar time frame, most of Transformers be ugly, yo. Animation errors? Don't recall... and trawling youtube looking at random clips isn't helping me any.

I went looking for examples, but just ended up wanting this toy instead. Robotix was frigging awesome...



I think Jem was better looking than Transformers was.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Blimey, so the main selling point of Robotix toys was crushing men to death between their mighty jaws? Hardcore!

I suspect the cause of the problem with Transformers is that you've got lots of characters who are completely identical and lots and lots of different colour schemes, both are which are ripe pickings for a cheap studio to screw up on. With the Joes, there's some variety of costume but everyone's basically one of three skin tones and there's a lot of green, whilst Gobots apparently mostly focuses on a very small cast with a couple of guest stars per show which is probably easier to keep track of.

With other shows, I suspect you'd have to be a bit of fan to really spot similar errors as well. You could stick Joe Bloggs in front of most G1 episodes and apart from really obvious errors involving the most famous characters they probably wouldn't spot half of them. I certainly wouldn't know if half the minor He-Man characters were the wrong colours.


Or.... the final animation checkers were useless and should have been tracked.


[This does feel very familiar, have we not had this thread recently?]


EDIT: Ah, not so recently, the best part of two years ago:

http://tfarchive.com/community/showthre ... ion+errors

Double Edit: Ah, I think we were perhaps all repressing it as we have our old chum Catalyst Dragon revealing the second greatest thing about where he lives after the fact people get shot up by lunatics all the time is they don't use acronyms...
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Post by Halfshell »

inflatable dalek wrote:With the Joes, there's some variety of costume but everyone's basically one of three skin tones and there's a lot of green
GI Joe also has one massive advantage over Transformers - generics. Be it the Joe greenshirts, the Cobra blueshirts, Vipers or Crimson Guards, if a scene calls for a crowd or army, hey presto.

But with TF, it's like "er... grab that model. I don't care that he's on the wrong side or dead or somewhere else in the scene already, we need to pad this out to look epic!"

Whereas Geoff or Andy could just quickly scribble something in the background for one panel.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Though at least with Transformers there's some wriggle room thanks to the precedent of both character who look like other characters but in different colours and for people like Skids to show up, say two lines and never be seen again. It makes it easy to rationalise half the barking decisions in Five Faces of Darkness as just a bunch of Seekers, Soundwave lookalikes and... err... Galvatrons we haven't seen before. Possibly.

I've just realised I've made exactly the same mistake about the set up in Gobots in this thread as I did in the first one despite Cliffy's attempts at education.
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Post by Jaynz »

Really it usually boils down to AKOM and Nelson's contract with Sunbow at the time. AKOM will give you bad animation and many of the animation errors in Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, and even Batman: The Animated Series. Animation errors in that show are particularly jarring... which is why AKOM got fired from it.

But here's the thing, there are animation errors in GI Joe, Jem, Inhumanoids, Robocop, Thundercats, TMNT, etc... So I really wonder just what it is you're really comparing things to? Seriously, did you just plain forget the entire DIC run of GI Joe? And Gobots was "error-free" and a model of good animation? Are you ****ing kidding me?

Sure, I get it, it's another 'piss on G1' thread and is very popular with a lot of the fandom these days. But, seriously, this is straw-reaching to the point of just making shit up.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

TFVanguard wrote:But here's the thing, there are animation errors in GI Joe, Jem, Inhumanoids, Robocop, Thundercats, TMNT, etc... So I really wonder just what it is you're really comparing things to? Seriously, did you just plain forget the entire DIC run of GI Joe? And Gobots was "error-free" and a model of good animation? Are you ****ing kidding me?

Sure, I get it, it's another 'piss on G1' thread and is very popular with a lot of the fandom these days. But, seriously, this is straw-reaching to the point of just making shit up.
I'm making stuff up? Point out where I say Gobots was error-free and a model of good animation. Go on. Or maybe go for the bit where I say there are errors in Gobots (though there are undeniably fewer than in Transformers), and the animation wasn't good (which is probably why thee are fewer errors, due to the drawings being less complex). So go on, point out where anyone said that. Did you actually read any of this topic?

Regarding GI Joe, I plain forgot the DIC run because I haven't seen it, and unlike yourself, I don't like making stuff up. The Sunbow stuff certainly has fewer (fewer means "there are some but there are less than the other thing", not that there are none... as you seem to be struggling with this concept, I'll take no chances here), though, which is what I was referring to.

Robocop, Jem, Inhumanoids and so on? Fantastic, assuming it isn't as made up as the rest of the paragraph, that's good info - I'm genuinely curious as to whether many comparable shows have that amount of errors (that's the bit where I ask "How does MOTU, Thundercats, My Little Pony etc. stand up relative to Transformers in terms of production errors?"... I probably should have said "How do MOTU etc", but I think it's pretty easy to understand.

I haven't seen many other cartoons of the same age and background. I was asking a question, with reference to the only two similar series I've seen more than the odd episode of. I'm sorry if your apparently deliberate decision to miss half the post has send you off into one of your idiotic, myopic rages, really I am, but that honestly wasn't the intention.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

I haven't seen any MOTU for a while, but I do recall with the DVD's I started to find the reused stock animation of characters walking, He-Man thumping things ect really distracting after a while. In fairness it wasn't made with the intent you'd watch six in a day but it really got annoying. Transformers seemed to have very little of that, there's Prime's transformation (which, fair enough, would look the same every time), the odd establishing shot of Autobot/Decepticon headquarters and not much else.
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Post by Jaynz »

Okay, Cliffy, I over-reacted and I'm sorry about that. So I'm going to ignore the tone and just reply straight.

You have to keep in mind that Transformers came out at a time where syndicated cartoons consisted of recycled shorts of Hanna Barbera cartoons deemed unfit (too old) for Saturday Morning Networks, Popeye shorts, Bullwinkle, and the like. If you were very very lucky, you might get Battle of the Planets or Speed Racer.

Hanna Barbera had a stranglehold on western animation during that time, culminating on 3 hours of Smurfs, endless Flintstones riffs, and so on. Other studios (such as the fledgling Sunbow) could only get on slots that Hanna Barbera dictated to the networks. This meant that shows like Spider Man and his amazing fans were often thrown into the slots which would get pre-empted for sports on local affiliates.

So Sunbow went into the syndication market. Here's the bitch, though, Syndication meant HUGE front-loaded packages to get shows out there at the time. You could have a pitch (a movie), but if you were bought, you had best get your episodes out en masse for the distributor. This meant you did them in a hurry, and farmed out animation to who you could.

Sunbow, of course, wasn't the only animation company sick of the networks, so package deals for syndicated cartoons (the after-school blocks) came out of the floodgates. To get funding, of course, these companies linked up with toylines in a symbiotic relationship which makes Tipper Gore cry to this day. Thundercats, Brave Starr, and a whole schlew of shows under this formula were rushed out. Some were better than others.

This trend resulted in a lot of action-oriented toy-shows. While Transformers was plagued with errors, it was far from alone in this aspect. Awful animation, bad dubbing, and 'rejected Superfriends scripts', was the rule of the day. Transformers didn't escape all this, of course, but a lot of shows were mired in it.

The fact that Transformers can hold up, reasonably well, with most animation released now is a stunning feat. But to look at 1984 and the extremely limited options that kids had on television at the time, it's not too hard to realize just WHY it was so amazing.

Sure, it wouldn't be the legend that it is, of course. But you have to keep in mind the times.
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Post by Hound »

Vangaurd, again you seem to miss the actual point of the thread.

Cliffy's not overtly making a case for the original cartoon being worse compared to He-Man or My Little Pony.

He's just asking one simple question.

Do the other cartoons made around that time have the same amount of animation errors?

My point is you're not answering that question. I suppose your defense of the Transformer cartoon is commendable but save it for a more appropriate thread, ok thanks!

I've got the first volume of MOTU and Silverhawks, I've got all of GIJoe, Centurians, Thundercats, Dinosaucers, Voltron and Ducktales on DVD and I don't think any of them quite reach the amount of animation errors I notice in the original Transformers.

I'm gonna go with Dalek on it being down to so many of the characters looking exactly alike aside from the coloring.

Edit: I'd be curious if anyone could speak about Superfriends and it's like. Also Smurfs or My Little Pony and some of the other less "just for boys" cartoons.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Thing is, I was thinking about that and I'm not entirely sure that's the whole answer... Okay, it is for maybe the Seekers, but Blades and Vortex don't look any more alike than Scarlett and Lady Jaye... From poking around on the internet, it seems GI Joe's "famous" animation mistake was mixing up the character models for the Cobra Trooper and Officer (the difference is a triangle on the helmet), which isn't something I'd notice, but as there really don't seem to be that many other errors (to the point where they're weirdly a lot more noticable, like the one where Beach Head's balaclava disappears).

The DIC stuff I don't ever intend to watch - the opening five-parter was so universally awful on every level and I'm not picking through a season or two of that to find out just how funny Big Ben's voice is (though I'd wager "very funny"). Bearing in mind that I could get it for free in an afternon with minimal effort... TBH, in the context of what I'm asking it's basically an irrelevance - it's a continuation of the same continuity by a different studio with a near-total cast and crew overhaul, and effectively a new series

Gobots' trademark error was switching Dr. Go and Baron Von Joy, which happened four or five times at most... There was also a habit of neglecting continuity for flashbacks, but seeing as said characters would nearly have lines spoken by the correct VA (making them a lot harder to ignore...) that seems to be more of a colossal scripting blunder (in line with many others) than an animation error.

So, yeh, I'm working with references from two other series that can reasonably be compared that I've seen, and am simply asking whether Transformers has an unusually high number of animation errors. And as a sub-question, I'm pretty curious as to whether many other shows of the era have obviously different art styles in the way Transformers does with Toei (was it Toei?) and AKOM.

It's just I've always taken it as received wisdom that every cartoon in the toy tie-in 1980s Western genre was riddled with the same mistakes and quirks, and the two I've watched through really haven't been for the post part. Well, Gobots (especially) has the "Superfriends rejects" scripts and the cavalier attitude to continuity, but the animation seems a lot less error-filled (though I'm well aware of it being so primitive possibly makes it a special case).

To the TF cartoon in general, I'm actually fairly ambivalent... It used to piss me off, but I take it more for what it is now, know which episodes are genuinely irritating and should be skipped and can enjoy it as a bit of nostalgic fluff for the most part.
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Post by Jaynz »

Hound wrote:Vangaurd, again you seem to miss the actual point of the thread.
No, let me sum up more simply. The answer to Cliffy's question is 'yes'. There are a lot of errors in other shows at the time. Some are far worse than others, often depending on the studio involved. DIC and Filmation were atrocious in their errors, for example. Of course, a lot of these shows just didn't do well - either they were so bad that no one watched them, or the toy lines just didn't support them for long (if at all).

There are a couple of things which makes G1 a bit more of a victim. One, the Franchise has been going nearly non-stop (with only a year-long break in 1991) for nearly thirty years. I can't actually think of a toyline, much less a toyline with cartoon tie-ins, which go back nearly that far so largely uninterrupted. That means that G1 is going to get a lot more 'watch' time than, say, Silverhawks or even Thundercats. A lot of people, a lot of time, that means a lot more errors get spotted and reported.

The second does get to what you were saying. The errors that we're likely to catch have a lot to do with model use. Swapping the seeker's colors was a pretty commonly spotted error because, hey, dammit, that's Starscream who's supposed to be there, and not Skywarp.

Transformers just appears a lot more glaring for this type of error. Wrong models, mismatched voices, etc. played all these shows, of course, but I haven't seen a Centurions web-page devoted to the fact that the wrong suits were often used in shots, or colored wrong, etc.

But I was just pointing out that Transformers, at that time, was a fairly unique beast in a lot of ways. I do know that Sunbow often lamented that their release schedule was so tight (particularly for the first batches of season two and three, which is where most of the errors pop up) that they had to skirt the usual error-catching pass. It didn't help that AKOM (which had the majority of these episodes) was so ****ing awful that there were more errors than the average as well.
I've got the first volume of MOTU and Silverhawks, I've got all of GIJoe, Centurians, Thundercats, Dinosaucers, Voltron and Ducktales on DVD and I don't think any of them quite reach the amount of animation errors I notice in the original Transformers.
GI Joe is a little harder to see, due to some of the overall generic-ness of the 'human model'. The layering errors, etc, are there in places, though. You just don't get the jarring issues of Starscream and his brothers, and Prowl and his brothers. They didn't use AKOM as much for GI Joe as well, so that's a big difference. (And, of course, we're talking Sunbow here. DIC was just awful.)

Voltron, of course, was recycled anime so a lot of the errors were cleaned out long before it actually became Voltron. If you want to see what 'would have happened' otherwise, just take a look at 'Fleet of Doom'. "Both Voltrons TOGETHER!"

Centurions often mixed suits and colors, even with only the three (later five) to deal with. I can't speak to Ducktales but I found a LOT of errors in the early-season batches of both Darkwing Duck and Rescue Rangers. So Disney Television was definitely not immune.
Edit: I'd be curious if anyone could speak about Superfriends and it's like. Also Smurfs or My Little Pony and some of the other less "just for boys" cartoons.
Smurfs often had the advantage of 'how the hell could you tell' between a lot of the characters not named 'Brainy' 'Papa' or 'Smurfette'. When they started doing the 'knight in training' episodes, though, the usual errors got more obvious.

Superfriends is a bit of an odd beast as well, as there are actually several series that make up Superfriends and some are better than others. Most of the outright errors are in later episodes which tried for better animation (competition was hitting them hard at this point), but the early episodes were just awful in artwork - so I guess it was less to error check.

Of course, Tom and Jerry had the infamous 'Yugoslavian' episodes that are infamous for their errors, bad sound mixing, and overall suckitude. Yet Cartoon Network loves to play the hell out of them.

In my opinion, the absolute worst stuff came from a short-lived studio that became infamous for 'lifting' Disney movies and series and putting out their ripoffs as 'specials' on TV before going to video and then finally DVD. The studio had several names, but you'll know their work like 'Alladin' and 'The Hunchback' and so on, which are usually $2 DVDs somewhere near the Disney ones. Sadly, some parents don't figure it out.
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Post by Jaynz »

Cliffjumper wrote:So, yeh, I'm working with references from two other series that can reasonably be compared that I've seen, and am simply asking whether Transformers has an unusually high number of animation errors. And as a sub-question, I'm pretty curious as to whether many other shows of the era have obviously different art styles in the way Transformers does with Toei (was it Toei?) and AKOM.
Definitely. Probably the easiest example to point out is a little outside of our scope here (as far as being in the 1980s), but it's one of the most obvious. Batman: The Animated Series, had a handful of episodes animated by AKOM. The artwork was very bad, animation choppy and with some layering and coloring issues. AKOM was actually fired for their shitty work there.

Other examples of AKOM's awfulness can be found in Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, and Simpsons. Basically any time you sense a 'morphing' effect between keyframes rather than regular animation, it's AKOM. If Yakko Warner just looks OFF to you in a way that's not intended by the episode.. it's AKOM.

Toei's usual shortcuts would be lower frame-rates and smaller amounts of characters on screen. This leads to fewer errors (particularly in layering) because there are fewer elements to worry about. Granted, we're not talking Filmation levels here, of course, which just has not excuse for its levels of suck.
To the TF cartoon in general, I'm actually fairly ambivalent... It used to piss me off, but I take it more for what it is now, know which episodes are genuinely irritating and should be skipped and can enjoy it as a bit of nostalgic fluff for the most part.
I admit, I sometimes wonder what a "Transformers: Kai" could be like. 39 episodes carefully re-spliced and re-edited from the pre-movie era... There's a lot of that early season two batch that I would love to see gone. It'll never happen, of course, but it's an intriguing idea.
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Post by Hound »

Cliffjumper wrote:Thing is, I was thinking about that and I'm not entirely sure that's the whole answer... Okay, it is for maybe the Seekers, but Blades and Vortex don't look any more alike than Scarlett and Lady Jaye...
Yeah but it's not a stretch to assume the guy animating that part just mixed up one helicopter guy for another in his haste or that they were supposed to have random background TFs and no one told the guy drawing them that Brawn or whoever was dead.

My question is are we making a distinction between bad quality animation and actual errors? Because Vangaurd isn't.

There weren't any (that I can think of) actual errors in the Batman cartoon there was just a few episodes that didn't look as nice as others. That's a difference.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Mmm, I've seen some of the Voltron episodes that were made as Voltron, and Fleet of Doom, and the drop in quality from the dubbed Golion/Dairugger episodes is absolutely massive. I'm guessing American companies just didn't pay most of the studios well enough, and then of course there's the turnaround thing... Mind, there's such a big difference in the way Japanese and American cartoons were made at the time it's not fair to compare them - at the risk of massive generalisation, American cartoons of the period were made to sell toys, whereas their Japanese equivalent sold toys to make cartoons.

Fair point on the relative lack of evaluation... I think it's fair to say G.I. Joe is a bit of an exception - not perfect (of course... even the most lavishly produced animes have the odd error), but simply for being ahead of Transformers in terms of creation it probably stayed just ahead of it in terms of priorities, scheduling, the staff assigned (the likes of Ron Friedman, Flint Dille and... [Buzz Dixon, was it?] seem quite fond of the thing in interviews and the like, which contrasts badly with what we've heard from Transformers staff) and so on.

The interesting thing, thinking about it, is that while a fair few number of GI Joe characters are as similar-looking as the Seekers (Grunt and Short-Fuse, for example), whether by default or design they don't actually appear in the same episode all that often.

Thinking aloud (well, in type) by the time of its' first full season there were, what, fifty Joes, compared to, what, about half that number of Autobots for most of Season 2... I wonder if that gave the production team a few more options for chopping and changing the ones appearing in each episode so they were always a mixed bunch...

Plus, of course, the GI Joe toyline (after the first year or so) went to considerable lengths to avoid much duplication - Leatherneck replaces Gung-Ho as moustachioed closested marine in the toyline. Their character models aren't miles apart, but seeing as Gung Ho is discontinued they can put his in the draw - whereas Ironhide and Ratchet or Prowl and Bluestreak were sold alongside each other.

Tell you what, though (continuing to think aloud), I wonder if that's why the effort went in to redesign some of the Season 2 characters. It might be my memory letting me down, but I can't remember Prowl ever getting mixed up with Smokescreen, either in terms of animation model or palette swap, and maybe the way his robot mode at least was visually distinct (the fatter limbs, squarer head, launchers, roof on the back etc.) helped that.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Hound wrote:My question is are we making a distinction between bad quality animation and actual errors? Because Vangaurd isn't.
Yeh, I'm more curious about errors than animation quality (though I'm also interested in tangiental chatting providing things are civil...). Animation art style is a bit too subjective to measure - someone might, for whatever reason, prefer the animation in the AKOM episodes, or in CotG, or on DIC GI Joe, and you wouldn't really be able to argue about it. You'd think they had bad taste or were mentally impaired or something, but, y'know, ultimately you'd just have to take it as their personal preference.
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Post by Jaynz »

Hound wrote:My question is are we making a distinction between bad quality animation and actual errors? Because Vangaurd isn't.
I answered it with 'yes'. I'm not quite certain how I can make it more simple than that.
There weren't any (that I can think of) actual errors in the Batman cartoon there was just a few episodes that didn't look as nice as others. That's a difference.
With Batman, and shows like it, the actual errors crop up with the no-names. You won't see Batman suddenly colored like the Joker (well, usually), but you might see the two thugs he's wailing on switch palettes all of the sudden. And, on a casual glance, you'll neither notice nor care.

I'm going to follow up with Cliffy here on this thought. With Transformers, you didn't have generic Transformers really. Your 'generic Decepticon' model was just Starscream recolored - solving nothing. With GI Joe, if you needed 30 Cobra troopers you just drew 30 Cobra Troopers (or a handful layered and looped). If you want 30 GI Joe soldiers raiding the base, you had a generic Joe model just for that purpose.

For Transformers, though, if you want a scene with 30 Decepticons, you would need thirty unique models (particularly after Hasbro nixed the genero-seeker). Notice that even the newer Transformers shows don't often try to pull that off, with only Armada really coming close... and suffering the same errors.

There was a GI Joe episode that I can't remember the name of that exemplified this well. It was a really big battle with lots of jets and soldiers and lots of blue and red lines.. yet it occurred to me that there were only FOUR guys with actual names in the battle (I think it was Destro, Baroness, Flint, Lady Jaye... all beaten by a crab). That was a hell of an effective 'cheat' for the show.

This doesn't explain away all of Transformer's errors, but it does explain why so many 'filler' shots have so many wrong characters and models around - particularly if they're skimping on the error-checking.
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Post by Hound »

Cliffjumper wrote:Tell you what, though (continuing to think aloud), I wonder if that's why the effort went in to redesign some of the Season 2 characters. It might be my memory letting me down, but I can't remember Prowl ever getting mixed up with Smokescreen, either in terms of animation model or palette swap, and maybe the way his robot mode at least was visually distinct (the fatter limbs, squarer head, launchers, roof on the back etc.) helped that.
I was thinking that myself. I imagine they took a look at just the sheer magnitude of errors they got in that first season and decided that the new toys reusing molds needed to have distinct character designs so as to avoid that.
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Post by Hound »

TFVanguard wrote:With Transformers, you didn't have generic Transformers really. Your 'generic Decepticon' model was just Starscream recolored - solving nothing. With GI Joe, if you needed 30 Cobra troopers you just drew 30 Cobra Troopers (or a handful layered and looped). If you want 30 GI Joe soldiers raiding the base, you had a generic Joe model just for that purpose.

For Transformers, though, if you want a scene with 30 Decepticons, you would need thirty unique models (particularly after Hasbro nixed the genero-seeker). Notice that even the newer Transformers shows don't often try to pull that off, with only Armada really coming close... and suffering the same errors.

There was a GI Joe episode that I can't remember the name of that exemplified this well. It was a really big battle with lots of jets and soldiers and lots of blue and red lines.. yet it occurred to me that there were only FOUR guys with actual names in the battle (I think it was Destro, Baroness, Flint, Lady Jaye... all beaten by a crab). That was a hell of an effective 'cheat' for the show.

This doesn't explain away all of Transformer's errors, but it does explain why so many 'filler' shots have so many wrong characters and models around - particularly if they're skimping on the error-checking.
Yeah yeah, that's what I was trying to get across. It's easier for some shows to get away with a lot of the shots that we see errors in in Transformers. Even with the seekers in the first season you've got to forgive the paint people for not knowing that there aren't supposed to be two red seekers and stuff. With all the different color schemes they had going on with them, that kind of thing is bound to happen on the kind of schedule they were on.
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