From kendrick@io.com Mon Mar 20 18:36:07 1995 Article: 7322 of alt.toys.transformers Path: illuminati.io.com!nobody From: kendrick@pentagon.io.com (Kendrick Kerwin Chua) Newsgroups: alt.toys.transformers Subject: TF Weekday: Wednesday 5 October Date: 5 Oct 1994 08:28:20 -0500 Organization: Illuminati Online Lines: 52 Message-ID: <36u9lk$i3e@pentagon.io.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: pentagon.io.com Dinbot Island, part I, featuring the Dinobots. Powerglide and Bumblebee discover a strange island in the middle of the ocean where time seems to be standing still. Odd energy waves inhibit their flight and seem to be the cause of the time warp, where Dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures are kept alive on the island. After a training disaster, Prime decides this island is an ideal place to train the Dinobots. Megatron, after hearing Laserbeak's espionage report, decides the island is an ideal place to collect energon, and he traps the Dinobots in the bottom of a tar pit. Meanwhile, Bumblebee and Spike discover a time wap that brings Wooly Mammoths into downtown Astoria. A great episode that withstands the abuses of the G2 animation and the slightly alterred sound effects. A nice touch is the inclusion of most every major character to date in that episode. Triple Changers are seen collecting energon cubes, and all of the six original minibots appear somewhere in the background. Also, it was nice to see that the episode depended more on the science fiction and less on the fight scenes to keep the story moving. It's interesting to compare this episode to the origin of the Dinobots in the comic book. For those of you who don't know, in the comic an escape pod carrying five Autbots landed in the Savage Land, a small pocket of jungle with Dinosaurs in the middle of Antarctica. Like the ark, the pod rebuilt the five Bots to look like what was then the dominant, large lifeform, IE dinosaurs. So they weren't Wheeljack's intelligence-impaired babies, like in the cartoon. Although Grimlock had a severe speech impediment, it didn't stop him from making leadership decisions. In the G2 comic, Grimlock is effectively second in command under Prime. I think the reason Furman wrote him with the speech impediment was to stay slightly consistent with the characters portrayed in the movie. If there's anydoubt, this episode and it's second part pound home the idea that most Autobots cannot fly on their own. Bumblebee requires the use of a jetpack, and later on so do a good number of Autobots. Also, we see established the buddy relationship between RedAlert and Inferno. "You can't save a guy without doing a commercial!?" "Go Away! Me Grimlock doing finesse... Whatever that is." "It's a PLANE... It's a ROCKET... NO! It's POWERGLIIIIIIIIIDE!" "Dinobots follow POWERGLIIIIIIIIIDE!" KKC, almost typed Red Laertes up there, been reading too many Greek Tragedies. which is a shame since I have two papers due tommorrow that have nothing the hell to do with Greek tragedy... -- Kendrick Kerwin Chua - kendrick@io.com - "Hey man, your bike's on fire." Necronomicon FAQ keeper, OS/2 guru, Transformer collector and cartomancer. BeastBox on Transformers MUSH, interrogator and comic relief extraordinaire. FTP Anonymously to io.com and find the Necronomicon FAQ in /pub/usr/kendrick