Transformers Geek Out

Warning: what follows may annoy, but will certainly reveal old-school geek cred.

The day has come. That Michael Bay Transformers movie is now in theaters, playing at a whopping 2 hours and 23 minutes. Now, I'm all about big robots throwing down, and, combined with my brothers, own 112 of these toys, but come on! Apparently too much time on flesh and blood and not enough time on Autobots and Decepticons. That's all fine, I guess. It's a director's prerogative to have characters that people can identify with and care about, and he picked a couple of teenagers to move the story along. But what if I want to identify with the Autobots? What about my needs? Thanks for nothing, Michael Bay.

Now here's where I really geek out... I can understand wanting to update the Transformers' looks and concepts. Making Starscream an F-22 Raptor, instead of the old F-15 Eagle, that makes sense. A few of the older bots don't have much relevance these days, like the Decepticon Soundwave and his underlings. Soundwave was a portable cassette recorder and he was the communications officer. His lieutenants were all minicassettes (sized properly too!). Well, in our iPod generation, that doesn't really work too well. Frenzy, who used to be one of those minicassettes couldn't exactly show up as an MP3 file, now could he? So Soundwave is out, and Frenzy shows up as a boombox. Eh. But my real beef is with the Autobot choices. Some of the old characters' vehicles are still around in updated versions, but noooo! The producers had to make a whole bunch of product placement agreements with GM. So now, Bumblebee, who used to be a VW Bug, appears as the new Camaro instead of a new VW Bug. And Jazz, who used to be a Porsche 911 with the racing kit, appears as a Pontiac Solstice. Here's how they're supposed to look:

Then there are the Autobot minivans. Yes, Autobots had Japanese minivans originally, so I totally understand getting rid of these cars. Ironhide is now a badass pickup truck. Fine with me. But Ratchet, instead of being an ambulance, is now a huge modified Hummer H2 labeled a search and rescue vehicle. Here's how Ratchet used to look:

And then they just made up a bunch of Decepticons besides Megatron, Starscream, and Frenzy. Great. Will I still see this movie? Yes. Will I sound like some crotchety fanboy while I wait in line for it? Yes. Will I tell people about my awesome cookie jar? Yes.

More than meets the eyes! I've got cookies!

Update: Soundwave responds to being left out of the movie!

"F*cking iPods!"