Throwback Thursday: Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the stub and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS. The AFOS blog's year-long TBT series concludes its run on December 10.

That skydiving scene in 3-D was amazing.

The rest of the movie can go fuck itself.

Transformers: Revenge of The Onion

Here's the best one-paragraph summary of Michael Bay's Transformers I've ever come across (while reading the A.V. Club):

Everyone complaining that Michael Bay's 2007 blockbuster Transformers had inappropriate sexual contact with their childhoods is forgetting one thing: The original '80s cartoon had an awful lot of problems too, starting with wildly inconsistent animation and some pretty basic '80s cartoon plots, in which the bad guys engaged in generally harebrained schemes unworthy of titanic alien-robot forces of destruction. That said, Bay's movie should have been a slam-dunk in the "scary robots" department, simply by virtue of introducing giant, homicidal, heavily armed metal men to Earth. Instead, much like Lucas in Phantom Menace, Bay went for goofy designs and goofier behavior. His Autobots and Decepticons look like unassembled, building-sized Erector sets, and their use of already-dated human slang and contemporary references, plus the generally insipid, adolescent tone of the movie, robbed them of all majesty and menace. And hey, more of them are on the way this summer.

It's as if the A.V. Club read my mind. The '80s Transformers cartoon's animation was choppier than whatever the ShamWow guy does to his nuts.

"Shutup, I Love This Title Screen," Part 13

Cowboy Bebop

Director Shinichiro Watanabe's Bebop main title sequence--clearly inspired by animator Herbert Klynn's splashy split-screen titles from I Spy and It Takes a Thief--was justly praised by the A.V. Club for being one of "22 TV Opening-Credit Sequences That Fit Their Shows Perfectly." The Bebop titles were accompanied by the coolest original theme ever written for TV, "Tank!" by Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts.

So the Jewfro'd Spike Spiegel might be played in live-action form by that great Jewish actor Keanu Reeves? Oh Lord. I'm taking that casting possibility as seriously as the "Cher to play Catwoman in next Batman film" item from a British paper. (Those U.K. rags are as trustworthy a source as Fux News. What's next? "Streisand to play Harley Quinn"?)

A live-action Bebop flick is an inane idea. If it gets greenlit, whoever Fox or producer Erwin Stoff will get to direct the flick will probably look for all sorts of ways to botch it, like not hiring Kanno--whose music was such an integral part of the original show--or cramming in dialogue where there shouldn't be dialogue. Part of the beauty of the show was its minimal dialogue. (I can't stand anime, but I dug Bebop, and the music and dialogue--or lack of it during some episodes--were why I enjoyed it when it first aired on Adult Swim. Speaking of which, maybe I ought to check out some Bebop eps from my DVD collection that I haven't watched yet. I never finished watching the entire series.)

The only director whom I think could pull off a live-action Bebop is Peter Yates, who has a knack for exciting action sequences with no dialogue (Bullitt, Breaking Away), but he's not exactly an A-lister anymore, I doubt any of the present-day Hollywood suits have ever seen his work and I'm not sure if Yates would be interested in anime-based material.

By the way, Selma Blair would be perfect as Faye Valentine. She's got the stems to play Faye.

Hollywood, leave the '80s cartoons alone

Because of the success of Transformers, movie studios have moved on from filming mediocre features based on sitcoms (Bewitched, The Honeymooners) to making equally mediocre projects based on cartoons from the '80s, a rather lousy era for animation (except for Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, I can't think of an '80s cartoon that ever approached the caliber of later shows like The Simpsons or Batman: The Animated Series). New Regency wants to launch its own Transformers-like franchise with Voltron, while Italian Job remake co-stars Mark Wahlberg and Jason Statham are rumored to be reuniting for a G.I. Joe film. Tobey Maguire's production company just bought the film rights to Robotech, the Roots of mecha cartoons (trying to squeeze Robotech into a two-and-a-half-hour live-action feature would be like trying to make a two-and-a-half-hour film out of, well, Roots). News items about long-delayed Thundercats and He-Man adaptations continue to haunt viewers like me who grew up watching those cartoons but don't think they've aged well--or would make for great live-action films either.

The He-Man franchise already blew it once with Cannon Films' 1987 Dolph Lundgren vehicle Masters of the Universe. The Mattel higher-ups expressed their shame about releasing toys that contain dangerous amounts of lead. If only they were equally apologetic about the Masters of the Universe movie, which isn't as poisonous but can induce seizures in viewers who are unable to sit through a Cannon Film, especially one that features so many flashy and annoying laser ray effects.

Hollywood needs to stop turning to the RetroJunk site for movie ideas. If there's one animated series that I'd like to see adapted to film--hell, I'd just be glad to see it return in any form other than comics--it'd be the lesser-known Megas XLR (2004-05), a too-short-lived Cartoon Network giant robot spoof that was sharper and more entertaining than the '80s cartoons it parodied. (Titmouse, the studio that created Megas, is currently busy producing Adult Swim's delightfully gory Metalocalypse.)

Megas is the story of Coop Cooplowski, a Jersey schlub who stumbles upon the future's most coveted superweapon--a giant robot that its time-traveling female pilot, Kiva, hid in Earth's past from extraterrestrial baddies. A live-action Megas movie would be the perfect vehicle for Tyler Labine, a scene-stealing veteran of good but short-lived shows like Dead Last, Kevin Hill and Invasion (hopefully, Labine's much-buzzed-about Reaper won't join that list). Labine was born to play Coop, and he even sounds like David DeLuise (Dom's son), who voiced the lazy but bright gearhead on the cartoon. Megas' Kevin Smith-meets-Robotech premise has tons of potential as a live-action feature (unless any one of the filmmaking geniuses listed in the A.V. Club's "10 Directors You Didn't Know You Hated" article gets his mitts on Megas--then the movie's really in trouble), and unlike the overlong, overstuffed Transformers, it wouldn't take over an hour for the lead robot to finally appear.