Transformers Earthspark Cast Revealed with Danny Pudi as Bumblebee

Danny Pudi means union voice actors again, which gives me hope for this series after the terrible voice acting in the last several shows. Hopefully it means Cullen will be back this time, fingers crossed.

I don’t think I could properly express my joy at this.

I do think I can properly express my sudden irritation at how the Netflix series sounded awful all throughout. (Sure was pretty though)

Bumblebee and Cliffjumper in the morning. Has to be a thing. Also shattered glass Bee from the darkest time line.

Danny did a pretty good job voicing Huey in the DuckTales reboot, so I have high hopes for his rendition of Bumblebee.

No comments on Zeno Robinson being in this? He's been rising in fame as a voice actor very rapidly in recent years.

Or the fact that we got two brand-new characters' names in Thrash and Twitch.

Zeno Robinson reveals which new Transformer is Thrash - https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1545867330411843586

On the one hand, actually competent voice talent is always a plus.

On the other, they keep describing this as a Paramount+ series and never talk about a Nickelodeon premiere date, and I'm starting to doubt more and more it'll ever air outside streaming.

Earthspark details revealed.

Oh dear. The character designs still look hideous, and making your only major white human character a villain is not a good look. On the plus side Megatron is going to be a tiltrotor, but that aside...oof.

BURBANK, Calif.—July 22, 2022—Nickelodeon, Paramount+ and Entertainment One (eOne) today announced the voice actors breathing new life into original and franchise favorite characters in the upcoming Paramount+ original animated series Transformers: EarthSpark. The all-new animated series (26 episodes) introduces a new generation of Transformers robots--the first Transformers robots to be born on Earth--and together with the human family who welcomes them in and cares for them, they'll redefine what it means to be a family. Transformers: EarthSpark is set to debut exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S. in November, and on Paramount+ and select Nickelodeon channels internationally. The new series joins the globally recognized Transformers powerhouse franchise.

The news was revealed during an exclusive panel at Comic-Con International: San Diego 2022 featuring voice cast members Danny Pudi (Bumblebee), Kathreen Khavari (Twitch), Zeno Robinson (Thrash), and co-executive producer Dale Malinowski and executive producer Ant Ward. Mike Cecchini (Editor-in-Chief, Den of Geek) moderated the panel, which also revealed a first look at the series.

The new voice cast and their Transformers: EarthSpark characters are:

Sydney Mikayla (Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts) as “Robby Malto,” a smart 13-year-old boy with an abundance of moxie and charisma. Robby is frustrated by his family’s recent move to a small town until he discovers Transformers bots and is now living the ultimate dream.

Zion Broadnax (Day Shift) as “Morgan ‘Mo’ Malto,” Robby’s 9-year-old younger sister. Though she’s emotionally mature for her age, she’s able to look at everything with a wide-eyed sense of optimism and hope. For her, family comes first no matter who you are or where you’re from.
Benny Latham as “Dot Malto,” the mother to Robby and Mo, surrogate mother to the Malto-bots, and wife to Alex. She’s a loving mother and ex-soldier, so she can flip that switch when she’s pushed.

Jon Jon Briones (Ratched) as “Alex Malto,” the father to Robby and Mo, surrogate father to the Malto-bots, and husband to Dot. He’s a college professor with a Ph.D. in Transformers History who loves sharing his Filipino heritage and wealth of Transformers knowledge with his human and bot kids. He can also rattle off dad jokes like a pro.

Kathreen Khavari (Dead End: Paranormal Park) as “Twitch Malto,” an Earth-born Terran born out of primordial sludge in the cave waters of Witwicky, Pennsylvania, like her brother Thrash. She’s a keen observer of everything around her.
Zeno Robinson (Big City Greens) as “Thrash Malto,” an Earth-born male Terran and a cheeky wild child. Like his sister, Twitch, he was born out of primordial sludge in the caves of Witwicky, Pennsylvania. He’s a bringer of fun and good times with a happy-go-lucky attitude.

Danny Pudi (Community) as “Bumblebee,” a fun-loving veteran Autobot who serves as a mentor to the Terrans as they learn what it takes to be Transformers robots. Bumblebee has a lot to learn about being a big brother and role model. He’s suddenly in a position of authority, which makes him nervous and afraid to show any cracks.

Alan Tudyk (Resident Alien) as “Optimus Prime,” a courageous Autobot leader who has forged a new alliance with humans. The birth of the Terrans has given him renewed hope for the future.

Rory McCann (Game of Thrones) as “Megatron,” the father of the Decepticon faticon who believes in making any sacrifice necessary for the survival of Cybertronian civilization. He’s a headstrong idealist but isn’t unwilling to adjust his strategy when victory hangs in the balance.

Cissy Jones (The Owl House) as “Elita-1,” the physically gifted and confident second-in command of the Autobots. Elita-1 is fair and never overbearing to the team. She listens to everyone and is a bot the Terrans look up to.

Diedrich Bader (Better Things) as “Mandroid,” the villain. He was a scientist-soldier in the war, jaded and ultimately, very anti-Cybertronian. With this new anti-Transformer ideology, he believes Earth and its humans need his protection and surmises that the annihilation of all Cybertronians is the best for the planet.
Transformers: EarthSpark Release Date
Transformers: EarthSpark will debut exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S. in November, and on Paramount+ and select Nickelodeon channels internationally.

Evil Eye wrote:Earthspark details revealed.

Oh dear. The character designs still look hideous, and making your only major white human character a villain is not a good look. On the plus side Megatron is going to be a tiltrotor, but that aside...oof.

You do realise this is just the main cast, right? Still plenty of opportunity for good and bad representation on both sides. Heck, as far as I can recall we never knew Fowler or Silas even existed when they first announced Prime, and they were pretty significant characters.

So, is the preview clip region-locked? Because I can't see it.

Also, minor pet peeve, but why do we get the name of every human character - even the Terran Transformers get a human last name - and the human villain only gets a "code name"?

More humans than bots. Gee...where has that happened before?

Just watched the trailer. For a kids show the animation is far superior to Cyberverse, so that is a huge plus. Still not too keen on the acting though. I'll probably give the show a chance fully acknowledging however it is not for me.

First-Aid wrote:More humans than bots. Gee...where has that happened before?

Masterforce?

Megatron: "Holy CRAP, what is happening on Nickelodeon?"
Starscream: "A good Transformers cartoon?"
Megatron: "A.... a GOOD Transformers cartoon!? Something decently written with a well-paced plot and an interesting cast of characters, broadcast on a non-exclusive platform entirely from within your KITCHEN?"
Starscream: "Yes?"
Megatron: "May I SEE it?"
Starscream: "...No."

So, Optimus and Bumblebee look based their evergreen designs, Megatron's got a copter altmode like Animated, Elita-1 is a tough-looking offroad truck, Wheeljack looks a LOT like his Studio Series Bumblebee movie toy, Swindle seems to have a mostly original design, and Bombshell looks based on his Combiner Wars Legends class toy.

Region locked video.

Why it's still a thing?

-Kanrabat- wrote:Region locked video.

Why it's still a thing?

There was another one on YouTube a bit ago, but Paramount flagged it immediately.

So quick Google on some of the actors. We basically have Sandor Clegane as Megatron and Wash (or Dutch to keep it purely Transformers-related) as Optimus.

...now I want to hear Optimus say "I'm a leaf on the wind, watch how I soar".

Show looks like it could be fine, the budget is certainly at it's largest since TF-Prime but a decent budget alone does not make a show great, so we'll see how it ends up.


The only thing that actually bothers me about this show from what we know about it is literally the entire head design of the female-child, it's literally an uncanny hell-spawn of Unicron with the size of the eyes and the head and well everything compared to the other human designs in the show which look fine.


Ah and it being behind Paramount + so I'll never watch this show legitimately since I'm in Canada and we don't have that service here.

First-Aid wrote:More humans than bots. Gee...where has that happened before?

Please count again and tell me how many humans vs how many bots there are.

As much as Alan tudyk is awesome he forgot to act as a human in the rookie recently and seemed stuck in his resident alien role :p more cast of powerless is never a bad thing tho.

MaximalNui wrote:

Evil Eye wrote:Earthspark details revealed.

Oh dear. The character designs still look hideous, and making your only major white human character a villain is not a good look. On the plus side Megatron is going to be a tiltrotor, but that aside...oof.

You do realise this is just the main cast, right?

Yeah, hence why I said "major" character.

Evil Eye wrote:Oh dear. The character designs still look hideous, and making your only major white human character a villain is not a good look.

Sometimes I almost miss the days when we were so smugly secure in our privilege that we weren't wringing our hands over representation in media and expecting every cartoon family to have a token white man in it. But then, I guess most of us aren't.

I am disappointed that the main villain is human though. On first read I thought he was a Transformer that hated Transformers, which sounded really interesting. Kind of like IDW Sandstorm.

I'm really interested to see what Megatron's role is going to be.

As far as humans' involvement in war as passive observers versus active participants, one thing the Bay movies did get right was the weapons. Budiansky's bios back in the day mixed sxifi tech with conventional weaponry, calling out machine guns, missiles, and bombs, especially for the Decepticons. They used high-end versions of weapons that are standard fare for Earth military vehicles. Their armor, when called out as exceptional, was still made of familiar materials, and it wasn't usually called out as exceptional.

The cartoon bent more scifi, though no more so than G.I. Joe - Transformers had laser guns and scifi shenanigans, but so did humans - who were frequently inventing things advanced enough that the Decepticons needed to steal. Bots could also be repaired oe outright built on Earth using resources available here, and your average Autobot could be roughed up a bit even with a traffic-speed collision, so they weren't usually supposed to be invincible.

Dr. Caelus wrote:so they weren't usually supposed to be invincible.

One was...



Anyway, region-locked video. Did we get a release date? As long as it isn't as sleep inducing as Siege, I'll at least give the pilot episode the benefit of the doubt.

Dr. Caelus wrote:

Evil Eye wrote:Oh dear. The character designs still look hideous, and making your only major white human character a villain is not a good look.

Sometimes I almost miss the days when we were so smugly secure in our privilege that we weren't wringing our hands over representation in media and expecting every cartoon family to have a token white man in it. But then, I guess most of us aren't.

Look at it this way- if it were the other way around and the only revealed main character who WASN'T white was the mad scientist villain, there'd be complaints. It works both ways; if you're claiming to be diverse, you need to be, well, diverse. And "Everyone is one race except the villain" is not that, regardless of what those races are. It could be that everyone was from Venezuela except the villain who was Mongolian and it would be equally ridiculous.

Prime, for all the things I found subpar about it, did it right. You had a white kid, a Japanese kid, a Latino kid, a black agent (also the best character incidentally) and it never felt forced. Likewise, Animated has the main human character be of Indian descent, and she's one of my favourite humans in Transformers. This? It just feels very much like pandering. Not even to black fans or even black kids- rather, to people who literally just want to see THEIR worldview given credit, THEIR egos stroked (even if they aren't black themselves) at the expense of everybody else, even though they can literally go to any other property for that already.

A mainstream cartoon having representation of other people in it? That's cool, no problem. A show aimed at a black audience? Why not? But mixing the two together seems incompatible- you're going for a show that's supposed to have as broad an appeal as possible specifically targeting a relatively niche audience.

Honestly I would have thought the classic Japanese approach of "Mukokuseki" would have been a better one- making race beyond basic skin colour pretty indeterminate and honestly utterly unimportant to the story or character's personality. To children- you know, the actual audience for these shows- even assuming they care about being "represented" beyond basic skin colour and sex, their main draw to a character will be "They're cool/cute/funny!".

Plus, quite aside from anything else, the character designs are objectively hideous.

AllNewSuperRobot wrote:

Dr. Caelus wrote:so they weren't usually supposed to be invincible.

One was...

Yes! Literally the exception that proves the rule! THE big bad, resurrected by an evil god of destruvlction to be his ultimate warrior SHOULD be nigh unstoppable, and that loses a lot if everyone down to Bumblebee is essentially made of immortal playdoh that just soaks damage like a sponge.

Evil Eye wrote:Look at it this way- if it were the other way around and the only revealed main character who WASN'T white was the mad scientist villain, there'd be complaints. It works both ways...

It doesn't actually work both ways.

I'm new here so forgive me for not knowing how to respond properly, but to the gentleman Evil Eye; youre reasoning for your first comment mentioned that black fans wouldn't even want this. Now I know I am paraphrasing so I do suggest you all read his comments fully, but, unless you are black what place or right do you have to speak on our behalf? Even if you talked to 100 black fans you still don't get to speak for what we do and don't want. I was born in 1995 and while most of the older stuff I watched was secondhand, one show I really loved was armada and animated. Carlos was a brown character and so was Sari. Also the villains of animated were all white and that wasn't an issue, so why now? I grew up with two loving parents and a younger brother and this show finally give me a chance to see characters who look like me join in the adventure. Yes I am happy that a black family is the lead cast because representation matters. This show paints us in a positive and non stereotypical way and that's all I've ever wanted. It already hurts enough when I get discriminated against in real life but to come here and see it?

Like dude, it's not woke or an agenda. We just want a chance to be represented and to join in the story. Why do some of you get so upset for that? And you complain about the only villains being white bothers me even more. Transformers isn't suddenly about to demonize all white people by making them villains. And NO. This show isn't just aimed at black people. If I can enjoy Generation 1 even though the main cast is white there's no reason you can't look past the main characters here being black. Let us have a chance to be the lead without making us feel terrible for it. We're not a political device, we are human beings and when we read other fans saying stuff like this it hurts us and makes us feel like we'll never be truly accepted by the Fandom. I've always wanted to draw transformers comics and be involved with the brand but comments like Evil Eyes make me think that might never happen. You can not like the designs, that's fine, but the whole Black comment and White villains comment was unnecessary.

Evil Eye wrote:Plus, quite aside from anything else, the character designs are objectively hideous.

I found some photos of the trailer.Talking about design:Mandroid is the best looking one to me.Between humans?Nono!He reminds me vaguely of the professer Mortum.

No one will be surprised if the two terrans "pets of death" get buffed at some point.

Evil Eye wrote:Look at it this way- if it were the other way around and the only revealed main character who WASN'T white was the mad scientist villain, there'd be complaints. It works both ways; if you're claiming to be diverse, you need to be, well, diverse. And "Everyone is one race except the villain" is not that, regardless of what those races are. It could be that everyone was from Venezuela except the villain who was Mongolian and it would be equally ridiculous.

Prime, for all the things I found subpar about it, did it right. You had a white kid, a Japanese kid, a Latino kid, a black agent (also the best character incidentally) and it never felt forced. Likewise, Animated has the main human character be of Indian descent, and she's one of my favourite humans in Transformers. This? It just feels very much like pandering. Not even to black fans or even black kids- rather, to people who literally just want to see THEIR worldview given credit, THEIR egos stroked (even if they aren't black themselves) at the expense of everybody else, even though they can literally go to any other property for that already.

A mainstream cartoon having representation of other people in it? That's cool, no problem. A show aimed at a black audience? Why not? But mixing the two together seems incompatible- you're going for a show that's supposed to have as broad an appeal as possible specifically targeting a relatively niche audience.

Honestly I would have thought the classic Japanese approach of "Mukokuseki" would have been a better one- making race beyond basic skin colour pretty indeterminate and honestly utterly unimportant to the story or character's personality. To children- you know, the actual audience for these shows- even assuming they care about being "represented" beyond basic skin colour and sex, their main draw to a character will be "They're cool/cute/funny!".

Plus, quite aside from anything else, the character designs are objectively hideous.

Dude your comments about the race of the characters is utter nonsense, families are usually comprised of one race, who cares if the villain is white or any other skin color, who cares if the family is black, you bring up Animated who's main family was both also one race and the human villain's in that show were also mostly white but you ain't saying nothing about how that show did it huh? TFP was diverse in it's cast because guess what it's human cast wasn't a family! Turns out that's a pretty different god damn dynamic.


You act like we know the whole cast for the entire show but we don't, and even if these are all the humans why does it matter?


What's even different here? What's different to having the black family this time as opposed to the white family in RID or in the OG G1 cartoon? (which had other characters of other skin colors as occasional allies which can also be the case here.)

Just straight up, your worldview here from how you present it is just straight up wrong and backwards thinking, why is it only that people say stupid stuff like this when the main characters are anything but white.

Dr. Caelus wrote:Sometimes I almost miss the days when we were so smugly secure in our privilege that we weren't wringing our hands over representation in media and expecting every cartoon family to have a token white man in it. invincible.

Also, just pointing out that no matter of your gender or race, living in any 1st World country comes with a buttload of privileges. Many that we are not even aware of because of how comfortable our lives are.

Having the luxury to worry about toys and cartoons is proof enough.

Deadput wrote:

Evil Eye wrote:Look at it this way- if it were the other way around and the only revealed main character who WASN'T white was the mad scientist villain, there'd be complaints. It works both ways; if you're claiming to be diverse, you need to be, well, diverse. And "Everyone is one race except the villain" is not that, regardless of what those races are. It could be that everyone was from Venezuela except the villain who was Mongolian and it would be equally ridiculous.

Prime, for all the things I found subpar about it, did it right. You had a white kid, a Japanese kid, a Latino kid, a black agent (also the best character incidentally) and it never felt forced. Likewise, Animated has the main human character be of Indian descent, and she's one of my favourite humans in Transformers. This? It just feels very much like pandering. Not even to black fans or even black kids- rather, to people who literally just want to see THEIR worldview given credit, THEIR egos stroked (even if they aren't black themselves) at the expense of everybody else, even though they can literally go to any other property for that already.

A mainstream cartoon having representation of other people in it? That's cool, no problem. A show aimed at a black audience? Why not? But mixing the two together seems incompatible- you're going for a show that's supposed to have as broad an appeal as possible specifically targeting a relatively niche audience.

Honestly I would have thought the classic Japanese approach of "Mukokuseki" would have been a better one- making race beyond basic skin colour pretty indeterminate and honestly utterly unimportant to the story or character's personality. To children- you know, the actual audience for these shows- even assuming they care about being "represented" beyond basic skin colour and sex, their main draw to a character will be "They're cool/cute/funny!".

Plus, quite aside from anything else, the character designs are objectively hideous.

Dude your comments about the race of the characters is utter nonsense, families are usually comprised of one race, who cares if the villain is white or any other skin color, who cares if the family is black, you bring up Animated who's main family was both also one race and the human villain's in that show were also mostly white but you ain't saying nothing about how that show did it huh? TFP was diverse in it's cast because guess what it's human cast wasn't a family! Turns out that's a pretty different god damn dynamic.

Because having the entire main character cast be from one family is not great. And let's be real- if it were a white family we'd be having people accusing it of "white supremacy" and demanding the husband be made black or something.

You act like we know the whole cast for the entire show but we don't, and even if these are all the humans why does it matter?

They're clearly the MAIN cast, hence why they've been shown to us. As for why it matters...did you read my post?

What's even different here? What's different to having the black family this time as opposed to the white family in RID or in the OG G1 cartoon? (which had other characters of other skin colors as occasional allies which can also be the case here.)

If it doesn't matter, why are you so adamant in defending it? But I'll tell you why it's not great.
1: America (where this is presumably set) is a majority white country. If it were made in, set in and made for Jamaica, I'd be a bit surprised if the characters were all white, or Hispanic. There are bits of America that are more black, but even so, setting the series in such a specific environment limits appeal. If they want to go for "realistic representation" then for a children's toy-promoting cartoon, which NEEDS as wide an appeal as possible, it DOES NOT MAKE SENSE to aim solely at a minority. It'd be like if the target audience were Mormons; the majority of children in America buying Transformers and watching the cartoon are not Mormons. It isn't going to work.
2: Why does the whole main cast of humans need to be from the family? Why can't it just be the brother and sister, with the parents as incidental characters, and the other two main kids being, I dunno, Christopher (a white boy) and Lailani (a Filipina girl)? That's how you do GENUINE diversity- you know, having MORE THAN ONE GROUP REPRESENTED.
3: It's obvious WHY they've done this. It's partly to gain kudos from the (probably childless and white) people on Twitter that want every single media property on Earth to conform to their (patently stupid) personal politics, and partly so when it inevitably fails they can blame its failure on "racism" and call everyone who criticized or just didn't watch it as a "white supremacist chud" or whatever. Which is bad enough with a franchise for adults, but for a kid's show is downright grotesque. This has nothing to do with wanting positive representation for black people or whatever, and everything to do with wanting to shield their pet project from criticism in the worst way possible.

Want a similar example? Look at the upcoming LOTR Amazon series. It looks...bad. Very bad. But because it has a black Elf in it (which makes zero sense in a setting based on old England and written by a man who extensively studied Anglo-Saxon history) you can't criticize it without being smeared as a proto-Klansman. Which seems especially pointless with a fantasy work- if you want to make an LOTR-like fantasy story similarly inspired by IRL mythology, but wanted a black main cast, you can! There's SO many fascinating mythologies and cultures to draw upon- Africa alone has thousands, and then you have Aboriginal culture which is absolutely incredible. In fact, that's FAR more doable than trying to make what is, at the end of the day, a vehicle to sell toys to American children, but using an almost entirely black cast. But no, the greedy, lazy gits in charge of the Rings of Power production didn't WANT to make a new story, that would take effort and time- they wanted a quick buck with a gimmick to sell the product and also use as a shield against critique. Hence why they just took an existing and comprehensively explored setting like LOTR and wore its skin like a suit.

Also there's the fact that having the sole main-cast white person be a villain is classic nu-media virtue signalling/anti-white dogwhistle but that's a whole other story.

Just straight up, your worldview here from how you present it is just straight up wrong and backwards thinking,

Because...? What's wrong and backwards thinking about saying "this won't appeal to the average kid"?

why is it only that people say stupid stuff like this when the main characters are anything but white.

I mean that's patently wrong. Just talking about things I found annoying, look at Avatar The Last Airbender's original live action movie. They took a really interesting world with fascinating cultures inspired by Asia, and made everyone white. That sucked. As for stupid criticisms, look at Overwatch, which I genuinely enjoyed until Blizzard came out as essentially stooges for Communist China and its despotic tyrant. People had a fit every time a new character came out that wasn't black (especially if they were white, poor Ashe!). And when they DID bring out a new black hero- Baptiste- they got mad because he wasn't a black WOMAN. So yeah, saying "people only get mad about non-white people appearing in media" is completely incorrect on every level.

Earthspark will not work as a mainstream Transformers cartoon. It will not appeal to the average child. It won't appeal to the average adult fan even. It's just a poor decision all around. Adding non-white characters or even a main protagonist? Sure. Making the ENTIRE main protagonist cast one entirely black family in a country where less than 15% of the population is black? That doesn't make sense, like, at all.

The sad thing is that they're CLEARLY doing this to deflect any possible criticism as "racism" or whatever. And you're playing into their hands.

Evil Eye wrote:Making the ENTIRE main protagonist cast one entirely black family in a country where less than 15% of the population is black? That doesn't make sense, like, at all.

The setting isn't indicative of the target audience though. This cartoon (and subsequent toyline) aren't exclusive to the US, as far as I'm aware. There's a wider world and all that.

Secondly, what do real world percentages matter to fiction?

Lastly,

Evil Eye wrote:"this won't appeal to the average kid"?

What's the source/basis for that? What appeals to the average kid in 2022 isn't the same as their forebears from ten, twenty or thirty years ago.

This is looking pretty good so far. Some entertaining human characters, top-notch voice cast, our first human villain in a while, and Megatron in a non-tank alt mode.

Evil Eye wrote:Earthspark will not work as a mainstream Transformers cartoon. It will not appeal to the average child. It won't appeal to the average adult fan even. It's just a poor decision all around. Adding non-white characters or even a main protagonist? Sure. Making the ENTIRE main protagonist cast one entirely black family in a country where less than 15% of the population is black? That doesn't make sense, like, at all.

The sad thing is that they're CLEARLY doing this to deflect any possible criticism as "racism" or whatever. And you're playing into their hands.

This chunk right here explains quite enough.

Good job exposing yourself

Looks like somebody completely missed the part where the father is Filipino.

Sabrblade wrote:Looks like somebody completely missed the part where the father is Filipino.

Didn't catch that he was Filipino until reading the cast announcement stuff now, the character wasn't focused on in the trailer.

So there we go, it is a diverse family.

AllNewSuperRobot wrote:

Evil Eye wrote:Making the ENTIRE main protagonist cast one entirely black family in a country where less than 15% of the population is black? That doesn't make sense, like, at all.

The setting isn't indicative of the target audience though. This cartoon (and subsequent toyline) aren't exclusive to the US, as far as I'm aware. There's a wider world and all that.

There is, it's true- and the majority of places it's going to be shown on TV with the toys sold alongside aren't majority black either. if the goal of making the main family black is to appeal to a black demographic...well, that's corporate suicide. You're limiting the appeal of your MASS MARKET CARTOON to a small proportion of the world.

Secondly, what do real world percentages matter to fiction?

They matter because, as mentioned, if the goal is "authentic representation" or whatever, it's failed, and also as mentioned, because if you're appealing primarily to one demographic beyond "kids and TF fans" (already a bad move) you wanna pick one that's proportionately large.

Lastly,

Evil Eye wrote:"this won't appeal to the average kid"?

What's the source/basis for that? What appeals to the average kid in 2022 isn't the same as their forebears from ten, twenty or thirty years ago.

This is self-defeating logic. If the suggestion is that representation matters and that, in order to appeal to modern audiences (and specifically in this case black audiences) then it stands to reason that by having the entire main hero cast be one, entirely black family, you're alienating everyone else. If the suggestion is that kids will be able to relate to the characters regardless of race...why do we need to have black representation then? Why would a black kid have any more trouble relating to a white character than vice versa?

If you want to make people feel represented, then represent them. Assuming the audience are even old enough to understand race, making them an artificial majority is going to be confusing at best ("Gee, Tommy, why is everyone in this show black?" "I dunno Alex, seems weird to me!") or outright insulting at worst ("How come everyone in this show looks like me and not Alex? Why doesn't he deserve to be a hero on the show?").

Plus, you know, this is aimed at children. And the average well-adjusted child has barely any concept of race, unless in the 26 years since I was born there's been genetic modifications performed on the populace to make children develop prejudice at a biological level. When I was a young lad, I didn't treat my black friends any differently from my white friends, because I didn't see how their skin colour was even remotely important. I remember when we first had the concept of racism (via Apartheid) explained to us, and we were all completely confused. Heck, I remember thinking "Hang on, what's a black person and what makes them different from a white person?" and being completely bewildered when I was told it was LITERALLY a skin colour thing. So if the goal of this show is going to be to present racial issues to kids, for one thing it won't work (because kids are naturally colourblind unless conditioned otherwise, so most likely it'll just go over their heads) and for another thing, don't push your worldview on children, that's social engineering and NOT OKAY.

There is no good reason- marketing or moral- to make the show like this. It is CLEARLY someone either trying to pander to a group they shouldn't, or pushing an agenda. Either way it's poorly-thought-out at best and plain stupid at worst.

TLDR: If representation doesn't matter, there's no reason to make the show like this and it will sabotage its success. If representation does matter, this is a TERRIBLE way of doing it.

Evil Eye wrote:

Deadput wrote:

Evil Eye wrote:Look at it this way- if it were the other way around and the only revealed main character who WASN'T white was the mad scientist villain, there'd be complaints. It works both ways; if you're claiming to be diverse, you need to be, well, diverse. And "Everyone is one race except the villain" is not that, regardless of what those races are. It could be that everyone was from Venezuela except the villain who was Mongolian and it would be equally ridiculous.

Prime, for all the things I found subpar about it, did it right. You had a white kid, a Japanese kid, a Latino kid, a black agent (also the best character incidentally) and it never felt forced. Likewise, Animated has the main human character be of Indian descent, and she's one of my favourite humans in Transformers. This? It just feels very much like pandering. Not even to black fans or even black kids- rather, to people who literally just want to see THEIR worldview given credit, THEIR egos stroked (even if they aren't black themselves) at the expense of everybody else, even though they can literally go to any other property for that already.




A mainstream cartoon having representation of other people in it? That's cool, no problem. A show aimed at a black audience? Why not? But mixing the two together seems incompatible- you're going for a show that's supposed to have as broad an appeal as possible specifically targeting a relatively niche audience.

Honestly I would have thought the classic Japanese approach of "Mukokuseki" would have been a better one- making race beyond basic skin colour pretty indeterminate and honestly utterly unimportant to the story or character's personality. To children- you know, the actual audience for these shows- even assuming they care about being "represented" beyond basic skin colour and sex, their main draw to a character will be "They're cool/cute/funny!".

Plus, quite aside from anything else, the character designs are objectively hideous.

Dude your comments about the race of the characters is utter nonsense, families are usually comprised of one race, who cares if the villain is white or any other skin color, who cares if the family is black, you bring up Animated who's main family was both also one race and the human villain's in that show were also mostly white but you ain't saying nothing about how that show did it huh? TFP was diverse in it's cast because guess what it's human cast wasn't a family! Turns out that's a pretty different god damn dynamic.

Because having the entire main character cast be from one family is not great. And let's be real- if it were a white family we'd be having people accusing it of "white supremacy" and demanding the husband be made black or something.

You act like we know the whole cast for the entire show but we don't, and even if these are all the humans why does it matter?

They're clearly the MAIN cast, hence why they've been shown to us. As for why it matters...did you read my post?

What's even different here? What's different to having the black family this time as opposed to the white family in RID or in the OG G1 cartoon? (which had other characters of other skin colors as occasional allies which can also be the case here.)

If it doesn't matter, why are you so adamant in defending it? But I'll tell you why it's not great.
1: America (where this is presumably set) is a majority white country. If it were made in, set in and made for Jamaica, I'd be a bit surprised if the characters were all white, or Hispanic. There are bits of America that are more black, but even so, setting the series in such a specific environment limits appeal. If they want to go for "realistic representation" then for a children's toy-promoting cartoon, which NEEDS as wide an appeal as possible, it DOES NOT MAKE SENSE to aim solely at a minority. It'd be like if the target audience were Mormons; the majority of children in America buying Transformers and watching the cartoon are not Mormons. It isn't going to work.
2: Why does the whole main cast of humans need to be from the family? Why can't it just be the brother and sister, with the parents as incidental characters, and the other two main kids being, I dunno, Christopher (a white boy) and Lailani (a Filipina girl)? That's how you do GENUINE diversity- you know, having MORE THAN ONE GROUP REPRESENTED.
3: It's obvious WHY they've done this. It's partly to gain kudos from the (probably childless and white) people on Twitter that want every single media property on Earth to conform to their (patently stupid) personal politics, and partly so when it inevitably fails they can blame its failure on "racism" and call everyone who criticized or just didn't watch it as a "white supremacist chud" or whatever. Which is bad enough with a franchise for adults, but for a kid's show is downright grotesque. This has nothing to do with wanting positive representation for black people or whatever, and everything to do with wanting to shield their pet project from criticism in the worst way possible.

Want a similar example? Look at the upcoming LOTR Amazon series. It looks...bad. Very bad. But because it has a black Elf in it (which makes zero sense in a setting based on old England and written by a man who extensively studied Anglo-Saxon history) you can't criticize it without being smeared as a proto-Klansman. Which seems especially pointless with a fantasy work- if you want to make an LOTR-like fantasy story similarly inspired by IRL mythology, but wanted a black main cast, you can! There's SO many fascinating mythologies and cultures to draw upon- Africa alone has thousands, and then you have Aboriginal culture which is absolutely incredible. In fact, that's FAR more doable than trying to make what is, at the end of the day, a vehicle to sell toys to American children, but using an almost entirely black cast. But no, the greedy, lazy gits in charge of the Rings of Power production didn't WANT to make a new story, that would take effort and time- they wanted a quick buck with a gimmick to sell the product and also use as a shield against critique. Hence why they just took an existing and comprehensively explored setting like LOTR and wore its skin like a suit.

Also there's the fact that having the sole main-cast white person be a villain is classic nu-media virtue signalling/anti-white dogwhistle but that's a whole other story.

Just straight up, your worldview here from how you present it is just straight up wrong and backwards thinking,

Because...? What's wrong and backwards thinking about saying "this won't appeal to the average kid"?

why is it only that people say stupid stuff like this when the main characters are anything but white.

I mean that's patently wrong. Just talking about things I found annoying, look at Avatar The Last Airbender's original live action movie. They took a really interesting world with fascinating cultures inspired by Asia, and made everyone white. That sucked. As for stupid criticisms, look at Overwatch, which I genuinely enjoyed until Blizzard came out as essentially stooges for Communist China and its despotic tyrant. People had a fit every time a new character came out that wasn't black (especially if they were white, poor Ashe!). And when they DID bring out a new black hero- Baptiste- they got mad because he wasn't a black WOMAN. So yeah, saying "people only get mad about non-white people appearing in media" is completely incorrect on every level.

Earthspark will not work as a mainstream Transformers cartoon. It will not appeal to the average child. It won't appeal to the average adult fan even. It's just a poor decision all around. Adding non-white characters or even a main protagonist? Sure. Making the ENTIRE main protagonist cast one entirely black family in a country where less than 15% of the population is black? That doesn't make sense, like, at all.

The sad thing is that they're CLEARLY doing this to deflect any possible criticism as "racism" or whatever. And you're playing into their hands.

Evil Eye, you can go find my first response to your comments. I was gonna a keep responding but the fact kne of your reasoning for your comments was "they only represent 15 percent of america" line irritated me. You can't identify with me because of .y skin color. You're trying to act like you aren't but your reasoning are jusy so bigoted. I grew up in a military household in the burbs and have two parents, a dog, a brother, fenced in yard; I had the most text book american experiences and I'm black but your saying non of that matter because I'm black and people can't identify with me? People like you make fans like us so unwelcome. I come here happy because the show I grew up with has some characters that finally look like me. No agenda, no pro black message, just positive representation of us as normal American people and you pick that apart and then try to say what minorities want? I have to deal with this in real life and now my favorite Fandom I've loved as a kid is filled with guys disapproving of a show solely based on the fact they aren't white. You are incredibly racist and you just remind .e that no matter how hard I try to be an upstanding guy, there are people like you who will never give me the credit or equality we strive for. This who exchange and your responses just made me majorly upset. You just solidified the idea that we (minorities) will never be fully accepted in this Fandom. Jeez man, what made you like this?

Deadput wrote:

Evil Eye wrote:Earthspark will not work as a mainstream Transformers cartoon. It will not appeal to the average child. It won't appeal to the average adult fan even. It's just a poor decision all around. Adding non-white characters or even a main protagonist? Sure. Making the ENTIRE main protagonist cast one entirely black family in a country where less than 15% of the population is black? That doesn't make sense, like, at all.

The sad thing is that they're CLEARLY doing this to deflect any possible criticism as "racism" or whatever. And you're playing into their hands.

This chunk right here explains quite enough.

Good job exposing yourself

Exposing myself as...what? Someone who understands what the much-vaunted "diversity" and "representation" actually mean and can see this project has done a TERRIBLE job at it? Someone who is aware enough to see that companies will sink to any level to shield themselves against critics, up to and including demonizing them as racists?

As for the father I genuinely didn't know he was supposed to be Filipino, so that's an absolutely fair point- however I would also point out that the character designs are so BAD that I couldn't actually tell him apart from the other members of the family, certainly not to the point I'd go "Ah, he's Filipino!". So whilst mildly less bad than I initially thought, it really just changes the problem from "The entire main hero cast is one race" into "The character designers are so bad at their job they can't make a Southeast Asian character look distinguishable from a black one", which whilst a different issue is still pretty bloody bad. Like, I have a lot of Pinobros and Pinaypals- they're pretty distinctive looking ethnically speaking. Like, genetically they're the result of crossbreeding of Southeast Asians with Latin European (specifically Spanish) people over many generations. Meanwhile, the dad in the family looks like a slightly lighter shade of black, and physically is just as Mars Needs Moms as the rest of the cast.

*walks in to make a comment about a very short snippet of the new cartoon*
*sees all the bullshit happening*
*walks out*

Burn wrote:*walks in to make a comment about a very short snippet of the new cartoon*
*sees all the bullshit happening*
*walks out*

Because you're obviously ignorant and biased. You're a racist and everyone is trying to tell you what's wrong with your statement yet you keep ignoring points and stuck to your outdated worldview. Plus, I responded to you and broke down what was wrong with yourstatement. I'm a black fan and your whole statement jusy absolutely craoped on all of the black fans in this Fandom. Transformers is supposed to be a Fandom welcome to all and we're supposed to be above it yet fans like you come and shut your racist nonsense. You haven't been able to refute one thing I said. Just admit you don't wanna see black people in the lead of things. "You're only catering to one demographic" bs. You don't have to be the same color to identify with someone. I watched g1 and there's no excuse why someone can't do the same. I hate that I have to keep arguing with you but I jusy can't let this stand. Your words are more problematic than you think. No one else brought up race but you so it's obvious race isn't going to be an issue. It's self defeating logic.

My only worry about the show in terms of the makeup comes from what they seemed to be pushing in the promo. They were yammering about how they want to use the show 'to redefine what it means to be a family'.

And whenever Hollywood gets excited about using a show to lean on the scale of social norms, I wince. Not because of any weird agendas they might have - but because it means that entertainment is no longer the main focus of that show. It becomes more about pushing the message, whatever it might be.

A Transformers show needs be about making a good story, with believable characters, a cohesive plot, and thrilling action. At it's most basic level, it should be a story about good vs. evil between two warring factions of sentient robots. If the plot and writing of Earthspark instead becomes subsumed in some crusade to 'redefine the family', then the show will be mediocre at best, cheesy and eye-rolling at worst. It remains to be seen.

This video plays in Canada, at least:

Sabrblade wrote:This video plays in Canada, at least:

Works for me as well.

Even though I'm far from the intended target market it does look to have potential.

DeathReviews wrote:A Transformers show needs be about making a good story, with believable characters, a cohesive plot, and thrilling action. At it's most basic level, it should be a story about good vs. evil between two warring factions of sentient robots. If the plot and writing of Earthspark instead becomes subsumed in some crusade to 'redefine the family', then the show will be mediocre at best, cheesy and eye-rolling at worst. It remains to be seen.

I often disagree with you.
But here, it's AMEN, BROTHER!

I sincerely hope that show will be on Prime level and not suffer the Get Woke Go Broke curse.

-Kanrabat- wrote:I sincerely hope that show will be on Prime level and not suffer the Get Woke Go Broke curse.

This tends to happen because people like YOU look too deeply and see things that aren't really there.

Can we return to topic, please? Thanks.

The initial list of main characters showed more humans than bots, hence my concern. Seeing more bots in the promos makes me feel better but only marginally. This once again looks like G1 Redux...I'll wait until the first episode to decide whether this is worth it. I'm still waiting for TransTech...

First-Aid wrote:I'm still waiting for TransTech...

Funny you should mention that.

Sabrblade wrote:

First-Aid wrote:I'm still waiting for TransTech...

Funny you should mention that.

I hate you. You posted this and I got all excited that maybe....MAYBE, against all odds, we were finally going to get something new.