Posts tagged “Transformers”

Tuesday, 11 April 2017

Well, This Exists: The Cybertronic Spree

From left to right: Rumble, Arcee, Unicron, Soundwave, Hot Rod, Spike, abd a Quintesson.

From left to right: Rumble, Arcee, Unicron, Soundwave, Hot Rod, Spike, abd a Quintesson.

Even though this band has apparently been around for three years, I only just heard about them this last weekend. The Cybertronic Spree is a group that dresses up in astonishingly-accurate Transformers costumes and plays the songs from the Transformers: The Movie Soundtrack. Take a look:

Their self-stated premise is:

HOTROD, ARCEE, RUMBLE, UNICRON, SPIKE, SOUNDWAVE, BUMBLEBEE, AND A QUINTESSON HAVE BEEN BROUGHT TOGETHER BY THE POWER OF ROCK. TOGETHER, THEY ARE THE CYBERTRONIC SPREE.

Not only are the costumes astonishingly accurate, but they’re built in such a way that the band members are still able to effectively play all their instruments! It’s a pretty remarkable achievement. Except for the guy dressed up as Spike, that’s an easy costume.

They also pepper their act with non-Transformers songs, and they have a couple of excellent choices, like this super-obscure theme song to the 80s Droids cartoon, which was about the adventures of C-3PO and R2-D2 before Episode IV.

Oddly enough, I can’t find any record of them playing Weird Al’s “Dare to be Stupid” song, which was on the Trasnformers: The Movie Soundtrack. I’m not sure why, maybe there’s a different rights issue involved?

Anyway. So there you have it. That exists.

Categories: Music, Videos.

Saturday, 1 October 2016

“Of the Month” October 2016

TV Show of the Month:
gfallz
Gravity Falls

What a perfect show for Halloween, filled with scary supernatural elements like zombies, dark magics, monsters, and gnomes! It’s also a really frikkin excellent show, one that very carefully and slowly builds its mythology and world, all without sacrificing the immediate humor of the moment. Top-notch actors like Linda Cardellini, Kristen Schaal, Jennifer Coolidge, Will Forte, Nick Offerman, Nathan Fillion, Alfred Molina, Louis C.K., Mark Hamill, John Oliver, Patton Oswalt, and even Neil deGrasse Tyson have lent their voices to the characters. It also built towards a planned ending and then actually ended! It’s only two seasons. You can watch it on Hulu. Do so. For Halloween.

Album of the Month:
cbf8bit
The Crazy Boy Floyds: 8-Bit Halloween

A great little collection of catchy songs about a Werewolf/Skeleton combination, the Grim Reaper, a generic Monster, and an Urban Legend. Go listen to them. Do so. For Halloween.

Video Game of the Month:
foreawa
Transformers: Earth Wars

What does this game have to do with Halloween? Umm… giant robots? Whatever, I’ve been playing this game very consistently for over a month, so it’s p-much a lock to be included in my “of the month” choices this time. It’s a resource/building/battling game, where you collect resources to build a base from which you launch sorties against opposing players’ bases. If you like that kind of thing, this is a very casual version (I usually just pick it up for a couple of minutes at a time a few times a day). Plus it’s nice to send some old faves like Ironhide and Bumblebee into combat on your behalf. If you do start playing, join my Alliance: “Seattleites”

Categories: Of the Month.

Thursday, 22 September 2016

Describe Myself in 3 Fictional Characters

There’s a thing going around the internet right now where you’re supposed to post the pictures of 3 fictional characters that, when combined, best describe you as a person. I think there’s even a couple hashtags for it. Yeah: #3FictionalCharacters or #ThreeFictionalCharacters. Anyhoo, I did one. Here it is without comment:

Sam Weir, Bumblebee, and Balki Bartokomous

Sam Weir, Bumblebee, and Balki Bartokomous

Qualifier: Original cartoon Bumblebee only, not any of the other versions of the character.

Categories: Life, Pictures.

Saturday, 25 July 2009

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen


Optimus, the Last of the Primes

This movie was horrifically vilified when it came out. Reviewers were saying it was the worst movie ever made. It got less than either Wolverine or Terminator Salvation on the Tomatometer. Is it really that bad? No, of course not. It is, unfortunately, not terribly good, either.[Read my full review]

Categories: Movie Reviews.

Thursday, 7 February 2008

Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito, & Sandra Bernhardt: Villains United!

I have to tell you about this dream I had last night. It was one of the craziest in recent memory. I didn’t actually dream it in order, but I’ll try to have it make more sense here:

Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor from the Superman movies, Danny DeVito from the Romancing the Stone movies, and Sandra Bernhardt from Hudson Hawk all teamed up to bring about an apocalypse. Their plan: to use two tiny, gold-filled barges in a small pond on the side of a hill to perform an arcane ritual during a lunar eclipse to summon Unicron. 

I’m completely serious.

My brother, Geoff, and I were all secret agents (who were staked out in the house I grew up in) who were supposed to stop this from happening. 

Unfortunately I was distracted by having to deal with an enraged (and strangely small at only about 10 feet tall) Optimus Prime, who had arrived on earth in his day-glo dune buggy and was driving it around the city like a maniac, looking for those who were in league with his arch-enemy Unicron.

I eventually got him to calm down some, but the time I wasted in dealing with him meant that the united villains had time to initiate the ritual! Mike & Geoff called me to tell me that they’d pinpointed the location where the ritual was taking place, so I hopped in my car and started driving north on the freeway to get there. I looked off to my left and saw the moon for just an instant before it was completely enveloped in black. Not just a lunar eclipse, this was unnatural, black-magic black. It was a portal! I had to hurry and stop the ritual before Unicron could cross through!

Suddenly, though, the black disc of the moon got all distorted and stretched out. I asked Geoff (over the car’s radio), “Is that supposed to happen?”

“Um… I don’t think so,” Geoff answered.

Pretty soon the moon suddenly blinked back to normal. Had the ritual succeeded or failed? I drove on, arriving at the side of the hill just after dawn.

Disguising myself as an elderly black gentleman, I secretly parked the car out of sight and climbed the hill, pretending to be merely out for a morning stroll. I soon came across the site of the ritual and saw what had prevented it from happening: there had been a small landslide that had filled half of the pond and buried one of the barges! We’d been lucky.

The villains’ henchmen, dressed in the red uniforms of the aliens from the V miniseries, were busy draining the rest of the pond and digging out the barge. One of them saw me and shooed me away with, “Hey, you’re not allowed to be here!”

“What’s going on?” I asked in my elderly black gentleman voice.

“We’re just cleaning up a landslide,” the henchman said. “Nothing to see here. Move along.”

I glanced down the hill towards the pond where I saw the three main movie villains all acting very upset. Sandra Bernhardt was so upset that she was drinking the bottle of Champagne that they’d planned on saving until after they’d summoned Unicron.

I made my way back down to the bottom of the hill and was confronted by a confused but unreasonably attractive young Japanese woman who wanted to know what was going on. I kind of hit on her while telling her that it was just some forest workers cleaning up a landslide. She giggled and thought I was a charming old man. Something seemed suspicious, though; she seemed very out of place.

I excused myself and made my way back to the car and drove back to the house where Mike and Geoff were. For some reason they were making elaborate, extremely risky plans to retrieve the gold barges. But I got the sense that they didn’t want to retrieve the barges to stop the ritual, but because they wanted the gold! They’d gone all greedy! And I was certain the plans they were making were going to compromise all three of us (if they hadn’t already), so I quickly gathered my things and slipped out of the house through the backyard.

That night the trio of villains had cleaned up the hillside and pond and were ready to try again. There was a funny scene where they all waded into the pond up to their waists except for Danny DeVito, who was so short that the water came up to his chin and he had to tilt his head back to keep from getting water in his mouth. They stood in between the two barges. Gene Hackman kept on having to shove them apart because they kept on drifting together, threatening to crush the trio.

They looked up to the moon and started calling out things like, “O Unicron, great and powerful! We implore that you hear us!”

After doing this for a while Gene Hackman and Sandra Bernhardt got bored and waded ashore, but they told Danny DeVito that he had to stay in the pond for the ritual to work. Sandra Bernhardt started drinking more Champagne. Danny DeVito was upset, especially when as a side effect of the ritual the pond water started to rise! There was even wacky background music as Danny DeVito struggled to stay afloat and keep the barges from crushing him!

At some point I had a conversation with Optimus Prime in which we realized that even if we stopped the ritual this time, someone might try again and succeed later in the future. The only way to be sure was to destroy Unicron completely. At that, my dream cut to a scene of a Unicron-sized Optimus Prime grappling with Unicron.

What was the ultimate outcome? I have no idea. I’d like to assume that Optimus Prime won, but my dream ended with Danny DeVito still struggling in the pond while Sandra Bernhardt drank Champagne with Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor. So I guess I’ll never actually know.

Categories: Dreams.