Others have already done strips on Michael Bay's fuck-up of changing characters and their designs for the upcoming live action Transformers movie, but they seemed to only take the stand of "Oh that silly Michael Bay. Won't he ever learn? *Giggle*" They're missing the big picture here: Michael Bay does not understand anything about the movie he's supposedly making... The movie a generation of now well-paid Americans (who would like to buy many tickets for said movie) has been waiting 20 years to experience. Bay has completely missed the mark on not only the main characters and their appearances, but plot as well. Explanation coming.

True, "it's only a movie," but I've been raised to believe that if one is going to do something (whether it's build a house, make a webpage, or spend $200Million on a motion picture) one should do it right, and not shittily. Hence my (don't want to say "anger," but) disturbance with Bay's choices so far. He's turned Bumblebee into a Camero, Megatron into a jet, Devastator into a tank, Soundwave into a helo-plane, and Prime into a really gay, long-nosed truck with flames painted on the side? That's zero for five in my book.

Just imagine the classic, flat-nosed, red, white and blue Optimus Prime truck rolling up to the camera for the first time, and transforming into the giant autobot leader that we all know and love (whom even my parents know by sight alone). You'll have to imagine it 'cause we sure as hell ain't gonna get it next summer. And now we know that Devastator won't be a kick-ass amalgam of half a dozen Constructicons merging into one enormous behemoth, he'll just be a tank. A tank that should have been Megatron if Bay was going to completely delete the idea of him being a big ass gun. The only way that anybody could have screwed up a movie about titanic robots fighting each other and blowing shit up is if they abandoned the source material.... And that source material?... It's been abandoned like a red-headed crack baby on the steps of an inner city orphanage.

But what really kicks the goat in the nads is the reason for some of these changes, especially Prime's alteration, has been regulated to Bay's thinking that a movie about gigantic, transforming robots needed to be "more realistic." What the fuck? People don't give a shit if you (through the magic of movies and a computer program) make the robot Prime a little larger than he would physically be able to be if he was just the red and blue, flat-nosed truck. Fudge it a little, but give us what we've waited 20+ years for... Why bother making a Transformers movie if you're not going to MAKE a Transformers movie? When the plot of said movie is going to revolve around Spike Witwicky trying to get laid, that is not a Transformers movie. When you turn the heroic little VW beetle (the David in the midst of all those Decepticon Goliaths) into a stylin' Camero, that is not a Transformers movie. When you remove Optimus Prime's face plate and plan to give him the voice of somebody other than Peter Cullen (and Megatron the voice of somebody other than Frank Welker [if they were going to be cast, they would have been already... I doubt it's going to happen, children]), that is not a Transformers movie.

Come on now, Bay, these are just the basics of making a Transformers movie. How can you blow these self-explanatory bits right off the bat? All you had to do was watch one half-hour episode from the classic 80s cartoon (i.e. the only "real" Transformers with any real fan-base) and you would have gotten it... You would have understood. Did you honestly think that you knew better? Well, even if you did you should have known that it was not what your target audience wanted. Remember the American Godzilla, Michael Bay? Yeah, probably not, and that's my point. They did everything wrong there as well. They changed who and what Godzilla was, what he looked like, and what his purpose was, and it became the biggest theatrical joke of the 90s. It was just a giant lizard running through Manhattan, it wasn't Godzilla. The Wal-Mart nearest me now has over 50 DVDs sitting in the $2.99 bin at the front of the store hoping that shoplifters will steal it just to get it off their backs. In two years, that will be Transformers the live action movie.

-the Rossman