From kendrick@io.com Fri Oct  6 13:12:24 CDT 1995
Article: 24075 of alt.toys.transformers
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From: kendrick@io.com (Kendrick Kerwin Chua)
Newsgroups: alt.toys.transformers
Subject: TF Weekday 10/6 - The Secret of Omega Supreme
Date: 6 Oct 1995 13:11:56 -0500
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TF Weekday Oct 6 1995 - The Secret of Omega Supreme

The EI/AD: The Robo-Smasher is this episode's Evil Invention, a little
squat thing with legs and tentacles that picks up unsuspecting mechanoids
and reprograms them automagically into Decepticons...

The plot: The Decepticons begin mining a strange asteroid for energy,
prompting Prime to find Omega Supreme, the only space-worthy Autobot
besides Cosmos. Prime learns that Omega was once one of the Guardian
robots, and that the safety of Crystal City was his responsibility. He
was betrayed by the once-friendly Constructicons after they were captured
and reprogrammed by Megatron. They escaped and rejoined Megatron on Earth
four-million years later, and Omega followed them the whole way. End
flashback. Now the Constructicons are mining ore off an asteroid that
turns out to be the eggshell of a huge metallic monster. Omega goes up to
stop the green machine and accidentally hatches the egg. Ol' Taco-boy
chooses to chase the Constructicons down rather than save San Francisco
>from  the creature, until Prime hunts him down and talks him out of
revenge for its own sake. Omega sees the light, and lures the creature up
to the egg again. Meanwhile, Megatron has discovered that he can't get
anything but dust out of the ore and converts his processor into a
cannon, hoping to blow away the egg (and Omega) forcing the creature to
stay on Earth for its food. Prime takes them on solo and prevents this
>from  happening. The creature finds his egg again, eats it, and leaves.
Omega comes away with a new sense of responsibility.

The characters: Omega episode. Catch it while you can, you don't get many
of these. The robo-smasher explains Omega's distant and stoic attitudes,
and you understand why a nominally menial servant is suddenly motivated
to choose a faction. The knowledge of this internal struggle makes Omega
much deeper by leaps and bounds; you can't go back and watch previous
episodes without this nagging at the back of your mind. The
Constructicons are nasty and slimy (at least after the Smasher gets them)
but the writers can't seem to make up their mind who is in charge of the
team, Hook or Scrapper. Granted, Hook is in the traditional leader spot
in the gestalt, but Scrapper is a much more interesting guy. Prime is
preachy but right. And if there's one thing you can't stand (or ignore)
its a person who preaches at you, practices what he preaches and is
always right. :) And Cosmos gets to be mischeivous and ambitious and
lonely and frustrated, just like he should be. Bonus PC points for
fleshing out his hispanic accent a little further in this episode,
although you won't hear at at its full until Megatron's Master Plan.
Cameos by Tracks, Beachcomber, and Powerglide, all of whom do cannon
fodder duty with the requisite one-liners.
   BTW, this episode is full of GIJoe voices. Scrapper sounds
myserteriously like Major Bludd when taking on Omega up on the Asteroid.
Devastator also sounds remarkably like Destro when parrotting the 'It's
for your own good' line back at Omega. Of course, these voices are
Michael Bell and Arthur Burghardt respectively, so it's not a wonder...

The plot holes: Lots of obvious ones, like the fact that the
Constructicons have earthen vehicular modes on Cybertron four-million
years before the fact, that the Robo-smasher is a really dumb idea, and
that the Constructicons don't seem to have a faction alliegiance in the
distant past, even though the wear the Decepticon symbol.
   For those of you keeping track, this episode revises the Constructicon
origin as given in 'Heavy Metal War', where Megatron claims that he built
the Constructicons on Earth in the caverns where his power chip rectifier
machines lies. Here, the Constructicons are neutrals whose marbles are
rearranged by Megatron. This is even further contradicted in 'Five Faces
of Darkness', where you have a flashback scene showing Megatron being
built BY the Constructicons. The comic book origin, just by way of
comparison, has Shockwave building them for, uh, constructive purposes
when he arrives on Earth to take over command.
   This episode feels very... Japanese. Giant Lizard monster is destroyed
by Giant Robot who saves city and allows nature to follow its own due
course at the same time. Godzilla is done along these lines, I'm told.
   Oh, bye the way? Omega Supreme is too heavy to stand on the Golden
Gate bridge. I'd like to see a scene where Taco boy falls through and
splashes in the bay. :)

Moving pictures: Well, it's Toei... So it's better than your
Hanna-Barbera grade stuff from 'City of Steel' but it's a bit messy. It
seems that Omega fits all his component parts inside the rocket when he
transforms for spaceflight, but do you think he cold make up his mind how
he transforms? Occasionally the rocket gantry towers stays attached to the
rocket as a booster unit, and sometimes it doesn't. You don't really have
a lot of animation to speak of this episode, really. There are a lot of
panning still shots and frozen action shots that really screw with the
watchability of this episode.
   Take for example Prime standing on the arctic tundra with a smoking
gun, a scene they show three times with dialogue laid over, as if they
couldn't be bothered to show Prime's face when he talks. Also, there is a
really big scene where Omega is blasting a pit in the surface of
Cybertron to catch the newly reprogrammed Constructicons in, where the
scene just freezes... For about four seconds you see the smoking pit, and
then for another four seconds you see Mixmaster frozen in time, turning a
corner. This is one scene they should have cut, IMO.
   Oh, and the big glaring error... Sideswipe is shown standing next to
Megatron in the opening scene where he responds to the Constructicons
report. I'm tempted to want to say that this is suppoed to be Breakdown,
since they have a tendency to mix up characters by their vehicle modes...
But 'The Key to Vector Sigma' hasn't even happened yet. Chalk another one
up to ignorant animators.

The cuts: A few scenes where Hook is radioing back to Megatron about
their status are cut out, as well as a bit of plot exposition at the
beginning. They seem to make a big deal out of cutting position shots and
establishing shots that make the episode feel a lot more rushed than it
already is.

Toys they should reissue: Omega was really not that popular a toy... even
if I have two of him. Perhaps a smaller, more gimmicky version of Omega
would be an appropriate re-issue. Omega would look really cool in the
blue and white of the 'original' Guardian robots. A shooting tank-turret
and a voicebox would be nice, cheap gimmicks too.

Quotables:
"Keep San Francisco clean! Leave!" *BLAM*

"We're all one with the universe, you know?"
"We're about to become one with the pavement! Duck!"

KKC, wonders if anybody from Kenner/Hasbro is reading the 'Toys they
should Reissue' part of the reviews...
--
kendrick@io.com - Kendrick Kerwin Chua - WTB: 80s Transformers and GIJoe toys
"What would you have me do with Washington,Destro? Pepper it with spitballs?"
Necronomcon FAQ home page at http://www.io.com/~kendrick/necronomicon or anon
FTP at io.com:/pub/usr/kendrick -Personal home at http://www.io.com/~kendrick