Knew discussion of "bringing back the G1 cartoon" was coming. Been waiting to play the following card for some time now on the subject of continuing the G1 cartoon in this day and age:
Jim Sorenson wrote the following about this very subject awhile back, explaining why continuing the G1 cartoon today wouldn't work at all:
Precisely. I just rewatched the last 4 minutes of The Rebirth and there's nothing there designed to lead the audience to believe that the series is meant to continue. The deliveries, the musical cues, the overall tone, and of course the Golden Age bit are all designed to make you feel a sense of satisfaction and conclusion. What dangling plot points that are left seem clearly to be of the "it never ends" variety, rather than the "tune in next week" variety.
But to address the larger issue, even if S4 didn't end with a very satisfying conclusion (though what I wouldn't give to be able to skip over to the parallel universe where they gave David Wise 5 episodes to accomplish all of this rather than three!) a direct sequel, today, would be a certain misfire. Consider.
It wouldn't SOUND like the G1 cartoon. Many of the vocal cast has passed on. Some no longer act. Some would just be prohibitively expensive. Wally Burr just had a serious stroke. So you'd be casting new people, with a new vocal director. Maybe the old music and sound effects could be dug up. Maybe. But the voices would certainly be different.
It wouldn't LOOK like the G1 cartoon. The animation industry has evolved. Would it be IMPOSSIBLE to make something look just like Sunbow? I suppose not. But no one's doing that right now, which means you'd have to relearn all those techniques. And that'd, again, be prohibitively expensive. Much much much more likely you'd bring in a modern studio using modern techniques and then get a modern looking cartoon. Maybe they'd use the old animation models. Maybe. But creative people like to put their own spin on things, as they should, and I suspect you'd get all the characters redesigned.
It wouldn't be WRITTEN like the G1 cartoon. Admittedly this would probably be the easiest one to get right, since guys like Wise and Dille are still around. But, as we saw with ReGeneration One, there's this weight of history and expectations that would be hard to resist. Had we gotten a full-on season 4 or a proper season 5 back in the day, the show would have continued to have a zany, episodic structure only loosely punctuated by a few tentpole continuity-heavy episodes. Were someone to try to revisit it now, there would be an overly big focus on the classic characters (the Bumblebees, Soundwaves, Galvatrons, Hot Rods, Grimlocks, etc) and not the new waves of toys we actually got in year 4 and 5. And there would be the temptation to make the series bigger, include season-long arcs and subplots, and that just wasn't how TV was written back them.
And a show that looks, sounds, and is structured differently than the G1 toon, well, it just wouldn't be the G1 toon, no matter what continuity it purports to be in. Better to just move on, make something that can be unabashedly, unashamedly new. If you must, MUST have more Sunbow, I'd suggest that a Dille / Guidi partnership could probably do a credible job of bringing it to the pages of a comic. But I think the whole idea is flawed and unnecessary.
-JimS
I never got through more than four episodes if that much.
