DVD Review: Transformers Cybertron Collection Two (2005)

Posted by Retrokaiser On Saturday, August 23, 2014 1 comments

"Transformers Cybertron Collection Two" is the second half of the show "Transformers Cybertron" and is also the sixth (and final) volume of the "Unicron Trilogy". In this half of the show we see that the great black hole is getting even greater and the time to save the universe is running out fast. The Autobots and Decepticons are still battling over the Omega Lock and the Cyber Planet Keys with whomever obtaining them having some great power. Sadly neither the Autobots nor Decepticons get their hands on it, instead we have Starscream (who has gone rogue) get his hands of them and uses some of that power to make him a crown that makes Starscream not only huge power wise but also huge in size as well. Turns out that there is still hope for the Autobots as there is still one more key to be found on a planet named "Gigantion" but in order to get there they need to build a special device to get them to that planet. The reason why is due to that planet getting sucked into a worm hole and is now residing in another dimension. Can the Autobots travel beyond their dimension to grab the key so that they can stop the Decepticons and close up the black hole? I sure hope so as this story is giving me a headache. (Click "Read More" to read the full review).




As you could tell by the end of my opening paragraph you can see that the writing in this show isn't all that good. This show had some very sloppy writing that would leave you feeling very baffled but that's not the worst part, the worst part is that the story was pretty boring and uninteresting to where I wasn't caring for what was going on and I had a hard time trying to pay attention to the show. Despite being part of the "Unicron Trilogy", Unicron doesn't appear in this show at all and when they do mention Unicron it sounds so forced and cheap like they didn't know what they were doing while working on this show.

When the show does take a step forward and introduce something interesting they drop the ball very quickly and the show ends up taking two steps back. This show also seemed like they were trying very hard to fill the "52 episode" season slot that the show feels like that it ended on "Episode 50" with all that follows being unneeded filler that didn't add anything to the show (like this show's story was adding anything to begin with). One odd positive I can say about this volume is that this has both the best episodes and worst episodes of the whole "Transformers Cybertron" show, mind you that the "best" episodes weren't all that good to begin with as they're mediocre at best hence the "odd" in "odd positive" (darn that sounded like I was talking down to the audience).


Most of the action in this show was very bland and un-exciting to where I was very bored but there were a very few action scenes that did get me very excited due to the nice use of lasers and fist fighting. Character wise they got the nature of the Autobots and Decepticons right but still I was only a fan of a few characters as most of them (both Transformer and Human) were very bland, generic, and can get super annoying and childish to where the kids will even think that this show is too childish.

The art-work in this show uses a mixture of 3D animation and 2D animation and for the most part it looks pretty bad. The 3D models are used for all of the Transformers while the 2D is used for all of the human characters. The 3D models have aged a lot and I like the body designs for the Transformers as I liked how they looked robotic but what I didn't like about the designs were their faces. The faces of the Transformers looked weird and creepy as they tried to make them look like a mixture of human and machine and they also had lips that looked so bad that they looked a little bit like ducks and women at clubs that wear too much make-up (it's not mean if it's true).


My main problem with the art-work was with the backgrounds for the action scenes as they were full of ugly 3D models and were also very inconsistent to where one shot we see the Transformers battling in space, the next shot we see the same Transformers battling on Earth, then it cuts back to them battling in space again. What I mentioned was just one example and the sad thing is that this happens quite a bit during this volume and it left me with a huge headache. I didn't hate all of the backgrounds in this show as there were some that I enjoyed that did look very beautiful but they didn't appear until the last half of this collection and by that point this show was beyond saving.

The 2D art-work has a very basic look and sadly also suffers from aging. Some episodes the 2D art-work looked good but a good amount of the episodes had very cheap looking art. I wasn't impressed with the designs of the human characters as they looked generic and unoriginal and could easily be mistaken for background characters found in other shows done by "Gonzo" (the team that did the 2D art-work for this show). The scenes where they had 2D characters interact with the 3D characters were alright and they did blend together most of the time but there were some scenes where the 2D characters looked like cardboard cut-outs.


Animation for the 3D designs looked cheap with very floaty character movement, choppy mouth movements, and there was even some clipping (where 3D models go through each-other without collision like a ghost going through a wall) going on and it left me thinking of the classic password for "Doom (1993)" ("IDDQD" is that password).  The 3D characters were animated decently during the action scenes which is a positive. Animation for the 2D characters was okay with smooth character movement but very odd looking mouth movements.

The voice acting in this show wasn't good as there were a lot of annoying voices that did not go well with a lot of the characters. This show uses accents terribly as there are some characters that speak with a "Scottish" accent but then the characters suddenly switch to an "Irish" accent during the next scene and they even switch accents during the same sentence in some cases. There were some voices that worked very well with certain characters but unfortunately there is more bad sounds than good.  The acting itself sounded very rushed and  cheesy due to the sloppy writing and bad dialogue.


The soundtrack to this show was fifty-fifty as I did enjoy a half of the songs.  Songs I liked were the heroic sounding ones that sound like they were left in from the Japanese soundtrack as they made me feel very energetic and powerful. The other half of the soundtrack were awful with crappy rap remixes of the original G1 Transformers songs plus some very, very, veeerrrryyy overplayed dramatic music that became very sickening to listen to.

There is a very tiny special features section found on this collection that contains only two things. One is a selection of profiles based on the Decepticons and it wasn't all that special as it wasn't very entertaining and full of generic information. The last special feature was a picture gallery with photos of the Decepticons from the toy-line based on this show. I liked the designs of half of them as they had nice detailing and sculpted well while the others just looked like cheap McDonald happy meal toys.

Overall I can easily say that you shouldn't even bother watching this show what so ever due to how much of a mess it is. This show shouldn't even been marked in the "Unicron Trillogy" as it has nothing to do with "Transformers Armada (2002)", "Transformers Energon (2004)", nor does it have anything to do with Unicron in general. Just stick to "Transformers Armada (2002)" and "Transformers Energon (2004)" and avoid this piece of work as not even Starscream would sink as low as to watch this. Very bad show.


Title: Transformers Cybertron Collection Two
Animation/Production Studio: Televisa Internacional, Venevision Internacional, Gonzo, Sunwoo Entertainment
Genre: Animation, Action, Sci-Fi
Running Time: 538 minutes (26 Episodes)
Distributor: Madman Entertainment
Rating: PG (Mild animated violence)
Price: $49.95
Recommended: No

1 comments:

Hill said...

NO!!!! THIS SERIES IS BETTER THAN ENERGON!!!!

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