Transformers: Energon (cartoon)

Unicron Trilogy continuity family « Energon » Toyline Cartoon Commercials Comic Mini-comic Mini-comic 2

Believe it or not, this isn't entirely the worst Transformers show.

Transformers: Energon, known as Transformers: Super Link (トランスフォーマー スーパー リンク Toransufōmā Sūpā Rinku) in Japan, is a cartoon series produced by Actas Inc. and Studio A-CAT. It aired in the US from January 2004 to June 2005 for 52 51 episodes, in support of the toyline of the same name. It is a direct sequel to Armada and forms the second part of the "Unicron Trilogy", to be followed by Cybertron.

The show takes place ten years after the finale of Armada, opening in an age of peace on Cybertron and Earth which is destined not to last long. Energon pits the Autobots against an array of villains: the reborn Megatron, the barely functional Unicron, and the mysterious Alpha Q and his Terrorcon minions.

Energon, like Armada, was written and animated in Japan and dubbed by Vancouver-based Voicebox Productions for US consumption. The series introduced to Transformers cartoons the technique of combining cel-shaded computer animation with 2D hand-drawn animation, creating a fusion between the CGI of Beast Wars/Machines and traditionally animated series such as Car Robots/Robots in Disguise.

For Super Link, "Taiyō no Transform!!" plays as its opening theme and "Calling You" for its ending theme. Meanwhile, Energon would reuse a piece of music originally made for the corresponding commercials of the Robots in Disguise toyline with minor modifications.

Characters

Episodes

Main article: List of Energon episodes

† Clip show
"Return! Our Scorponok" was to be "Scorponok's Scars", but it never aired and was allegedly never dubbed.^[1] It is not considered to exist in the English version of the series.

Criticisms

The fiction of the Unicron Trilogy got off to a rocky start with adult fans with the Armada cartoon, and many fans had hopes that Energon would be a return to glory. Alas, it was not to be; Energon, the televisual representation of Transformers for its 20th anniversary year, is widely considered the worst Transformers cartoon aired in the United States.

Conceptual and storytelling flaws

Plotting

The primary flaw of Energon is that it does not have enough plot to fill 52 episodes. The first half of the series moves at a respectable pace, and around the 20th episode, the villains achieve their objective—the restoration of Unicron. However, because there are another 32 episodes to fill, an attack by the Autobots and their allies deactivates Unicron. The storyline is then essentially repeated for twenty more episodes. But after defeating Unicron a second time in the series, there are still thirteen more episodes to go and, with the driving aspect of the original plot gone, viewers are served with an "interesting" storyline full of repaints and combiners.

Character development

Character development in the series was lacking. Characters would often be given personal subplots that motivated their existence in the series. While some got to resolve their issues, others would often be killed off or mindwiped, therefore eliminating any chance of a follow-through. Some subplots would even get dropped entirely without any acknowledgement in order to keep the series' main plot going. Almost every Autobot character carried over from Armada continued to grow, while the Decepticon characters all have their memory erased at one point or another, letting all previous development go to waste.

Examples include:

• Demolishor's uncertainty with the Decepticon cause gets resolved by having him sacrifice himself to save Megatron, then Megatron resurrects him with no memories.
• Inferno's struggle against Megatron's Decepticon programming is brought to an end by having him kill himself, then be resurrected.
• Kicker's hatred of Transformers vanishes with no explanation after roughly two episodes.
• Much like Kicker's hatred towards Transformers, Rodimus and Optimus Prime's ideological feud over whether Unicron should be destroyed is resolved after Rodimus puts himself under Optimus's command for the mission to defeat Galvatron, and the dispute never comes up again.
• Armada main human characters Rad, Carlos and Alexis are still present, but are regulated to strictly-background roles and contribute absolutely nothing character-wise despite their heavy involvement in the previous Cybertronian conflict, nor does this cause the Transformers themselves to view them with any level of reverence a longtime and trusted ally would warrant.
• Wing Saber's dedication to capturing Shockblast is gone after he captures him. Even when Shockblast escapes again, Wing Saber doesn't say a word.
• Starscream's standout character development in Armada is gone. After having died in Armada, he is resurrected "incomplete" as an assassin and spy for Alpha Q, losing all of his memories in the process. None of the characters who knew him in Armada say a word about it—including Alexis, the human with the closest bond to Starscream. What little development Starscream gets in his new form eventually goes to waste when Megatron wipes his mind, making him his loyal servant.

Promoting toys

Cars in SSPPAAAAACCCCEE!!!.

Of course, every Transformers series exists to sell toys, but in promoting the abilities and gimmicks of its toyline, Energon turned the toy commercial tendencies up to 11.

In choosing to set most of its action in the void of space, Energon robs the Transformers of any real reason to transform. They can all happily fly in both forms, inviting the question of why transformation is necessary. But, to promote the fact that the toys transform, characters routinely change to vehicle mode anyway, even in outer space. Everyone can control their flight with no problem in either form, completely invalidating the need for any variety in alternate mode. Conversely, on occasions when it might make sense to transform to a speedy vehicle form for fast or long-distance travel, characters often choose to run to where they're going instead.

Whereas the English version of the series takes its name from the central plot element (the collection of Energon), the Japanese version, Super Link, takes its name from the main thematic concept/gimmick: Autobots Powerlinxing. The Japanese version of the show contains a lot of waffling about the symbolic nature of this ("Even when one heart is weak, together, we are strong!"). These combinations are used in most battles, but the resulting combined soldier rarely shows any sign of enhanced firepower compared to their components.

Further failing to advertise the combining gimmick are the "Maximus" combiner teams. For about 90% of their screen time, the three giants are seen in their combined super robot modes, rarely splitting into individual vehicles. The central torso units are only seen as individual robots in a few occasions, while the limb components are neglected any acknowledgment as being individual characters.

Production flaws

Art and animation

Rescale what now?

Energon, animated by Actas Inc. and Studio A-CAT, introduced a new concept to Transformers cartoons: the blending of CGI with traditional hand-drawn animation. The animators rendered the Transformer characters in cel-shaded CGI while animating humans and other aspects of the show through traditional means. The show would use CGI to show many characters in motion at once, often with a high frame rate that gives them a very fluid appearance (for example, the many charges of the Battle Ravage Terrorcon drones, replete with numerous stamping legs and bobbing heads and tails).

The above images feature: A horrified Ironhide witnessing Demolishor's death; a surprised Ironhide asking a question; a determined Ironhide charging into battle, and a fighting-mad Ironhide striking a decisive blow. Can you figure out which is which?

On the other hand, the CGI animation is rather primitive in comparison to older series such as Beast Wars and Beast Machines. Characters possess no sense of weight and cannot move in any manner but the most basic. Even walking is a challenge for characters with bulky models like Ironhide, who is often reduced to swinging his arms and legs back and forth while sliding along a predetermined path. Also, the black-line outlines of character models were often not rescaled for different shots, resulting in the characters sometimes appearing as indecipherable masses of heavy black lines.

Are you @&#%$ kidding me?!

Additionally, "emotion" is nonexistent; the blank-faced CGI models could not easily display any facial expressions beyond "mouth open" and "mouth closed". Numerous characters don't have facial animation, even ones with mouths. Most prominent among these is Alpha Q, who has no facial animation even though he has four faces! In some cases, when a character needs to emote visibly (Megatron's pronounced yawning, Inferno's tortured screaming), or to do something visually dynamic (acrobatic transformation), Munetaka Abe would pick up where the CGI failed and replace it with hand-drawn animation to create more emphasis.

As stated above, the show's CGI compares very poorly with Beast Wars and Beast Machines, both of which came out many years prior and were fully animated in CGI, and which had characters who boasted complex, nuanced facial expressions and fluid, constant body language—even those with inhuman faces and bodies. Compared to either of the prior, Energon's character models have exceptionally low polygon counts for the day, which often results in hard edges and faceted surfaces on what should be round and smooth objects, such as tires. Energon likely received a lesser budget and a wider spread of character models to create in comparison to those two shows, which were some of the most expensive animated television programs ever made at the time.

Even within the limits of the animation, many bad editing, design, and lighting choices make the series difficult to follow visually. Unicron's body—primarily black, to match his Energon redeco toy—is frequently lost against the blackness of space. When Alpha Q energizes Unicron's head, it becomes the Energon Orb, with no visual indication as to what it used to be. Scenes set underground or within Unicron's body are commonly underlit, to the point that the characters can't even be distinguished. Strange elements such as the rift in space are inconsistently animated and described by the characters, making it difficult to figure out what they are.

Editing

Anyone who's got a spare "i" and needs an "o"?

At times, Energon tends to flow like a single feature-length film chopped up into 22-minute segments. Thus, confusing, unclear elements like the rift in space and Unicron's dark, partially re-energized body are routinely shown in closeup without any introductory establishing shots, making it extraordinarily unclear what's happening or where for the viewer who's just watching one particular episode by itself. This "chopped-up film" sensation is not uncommon in Japanese animated series with a defined length, but Energon is a good example of the method being used rather poorly. The show's scene editing is abrupt and choppy. Battle animation in particular cuts between numerous, very short scenes, showing several simultaneous but unrelated events that are all happening in real-time, making it difficult to grasp the significance of any of the events shown. When boiled down, this editing style often serves to mask the fact that not much is actually happening.

Yeah, why?

Like Armada, Energon was dubbed and edited rather hastily to make the episodes air on time. This results in some episode titles having typos, such as: "Scorpinok", "A Tale of Two Heros", "Improsoned Inferno", and "Deception Army". Only the latter two of those four errors were corrected for the DVD release.

Music

Despite a good soundtrack in both versions, Energon uses music in inappropriate moments; in "Imprisoned Inferno", the episode ends with triumphant music despite being a very somber event.

Scripting and dubbing

Why do we always come here
I guess we'll never know
It's like a kind of torture
to have to watch the show!

The original Japanese Super Link cartoon is sluggish and confusing... but the conversations make sense, something that was lost during production of the English Energon dub.

The dub of Energon seems more rushed than Armada, which is known for being so hurried that dubbers were working with unfinished animation, got names wrong, and had moments of dialogue that didn't jibe with the action. Energon has completed animation (sans some early episodes), and usually has names right. There are still a few exceptions, such as Misha, who gets three different names during the course of the show, and Downshift and Cliffjumper getting their actor's recordings switched rather frequently, causing them to have their names swapped between episodes and other characters referring to them by the wrong name.

The rushed dub script is full of mistranslations. Though some elements needed to be altered to suit a Western audience, it seems that many portions of the dub were never checked to see if they made logical sense. As a result, the script is stilted, perfunctory, and repetitive, constantly throwing in cliché, time-killing phrases like "We've gotta [repeat the plot which everyone already knows]", "Let's do it!", and "It's time to [perform some action that's already obvious]". There are also several instances of new dialogue added, much of which don't match what is occurring onscreen. The final result is a show with some non-sequiturs and more than a few moments of nonsense.

This is no ordinary blade. This is the Star Saber!

One example exists at the start of "Team Optimus Prime": Dr. Jones says, in a frustrated tone, "I can't get back the energon I sent to Kicker. That's impossible!" The entire notion of "getting it back" is absurd on the surface, akin to trying to get back water that went down a drain; saying that not getting it back is impossible is even more ridiculous. The original dialogue is a passive lament, more along the lines of "It's not like that energon I sent is ever coming back." Similar examples exist in nearly every single episode of the show.

Outside of these accidents, there are also some strange changes made deliberately; chief among them being the tendency for Primus to be ignored. In one episode, Primus would be dubbed accurately, talking with other characters normally, while in the next, he would be edited out, with his lines erased or given to other characters, and references to him replaced with "the core". Other odd instances include Terrorcon drones having spoken lines randomly inserted in some scenes, never attributed to a particular Terrorcon; a strange tendency for various characters to exclaim that "Unicron is coming to life!" every time Unicron's body is manipulated by other characters, and a steadfast refusal to acknowledge the deaths of any characters.

Given all of this, the quality of voice acting frequently suffers throughout the show. This can be a common result of the antiseptic ADR (Additional Dialogue Recording) environment, where actors perform solo, with no one to play off of. But Energon is particularly bad in this regard. Lead talents such as Garry Chalk and David Kaye still turn in strong performances, but actors for many of the secondary characters struggle to make something of the material they're given, often sounding flat and uninspired, or just confused. There are many times when all the actors have no idea what their lines mean in the greater scheme of things, nor any idea of what they're talking about; the Dr. Jones quote cited above is also an example of this problem. There's also a pronounced amount of "filling dead air", with characters talking from offscreen or making noises like "Uhh?" where there was none originally.

Animation models

 

Left: Cyclonus's pre-final model used in "Megatron Resurrected".
Right: Cyclonus's finalized model used in "Kicker Beware!".

As mentioned further up in this section, the animation wasn't entirely up to snuff due to a multitude of different reasons. While it is pretty clear that some episodes were not ready to air but were pushed out anyway due to production deadlines, it seems that even the earliest of behind the scenes production materials were also somewhat rushed; one of the biggest being the animation models. Like Energon's predecessor, Armada, Energon was also very big on keeping the character models as accurate to their toys as possible, however; it appears that the show's production team had settled into work on the show before all of the first wave of toys had been fully designed, leading to several characters within the first few episodes to feature models that did not match their finalized toys. These inaccuracies were sometimes as small as a character using a weapon that was rendered in the wrong color, to characters featuring entirely different designs altogether. Production materials for both the show and Hasbro/Takara's toy designs that have since surfaced on auction sites and fansites suggest that some of these designs are based on prototypes of the toys and even hand-drawn design sheets by Takara employees.^[2][3]

Most of the unfinalized designs for the main characters that appeared in the first few episodes appeared to subside by roughly the eighth episode ("Starscream the Mysterious Mercenary") and were replaced by new toy-accurate models. Unfortunately, other minor characters that appeared in earlier episodes, such as the Street Action Mini-Con Team, never received new models (though arguably, the Street Action Mini-Cons didn't need to be redesigned as they were depicted in vehicle mode a lot of the time and were mostly shown using hand-drawn animation in order to interact with Kicker). Among some of the aforementioned production materials, dates are given on model sheets indicating that the models had been finalized in December of 2003; only a month before the show's debut and several weeks before the first wave of Takara products were distributed, meaning that the first few episodes were likely nearing the final stages in production, leaving no room for corrections to be made in those episodes.^[2] Some of the unfinalized models can also be found in issues of TV Magazine, as well as surfaced cartoon scale charts.

Among some of the characters that were affected are:

Sureshock's concept drawing by Takara that her CGI model for the cartoon was based on.

• Optimus Prime: Optimus Prime has red windshield frames instead of white and blue super mode helmet antennae until certain shots in the fifth episode. Additionally, his super mode helmet configuration, handgun, and drones spend nearly the entire series matching the early Takara control art as opposed to the final figure. Optimus' super mode is actually wholly taken from said early art, but the differences to the final figure are minor enough that it goes unchanged throughout the entire series.
• Cyclonus: Cyclonus's first model featured gold tips on his lavender-ish rotor blades, gold arm cannons and light gray chest windows. His second model changed his cannons to dark gray, removed the gold tips from his rotor blades and switched out the light gray windows for dark blue (examples shown above). This second model appeared in fewer episodes than the first as he was reformatted into Snow Cat not long after the changes had been implemented.
• Jetfire: Jetfire's model remained mostly the same, the only major difference shown was his gun, which was depicted in gray, before later changing to a shiny red to match the transparent red plastic used on the Takara version of the toy.
• Megatron: After he first redesigns his Energon Sword, it became a tiny, green arm-mounted tank with the sword blade protruding from the front of the tank and the turret positioned towards the back of the tank. In later episodes, it is changed to a larger toy-accurate tank in black, with the blade protruding from the rear of the tank.
• Strongarm: Strongarm's first model featured robot feet based on Takara drawings that sat under his windshield feet. In his second model, the "secondary feet" were removed. Amusingly, the legs of the original Takara drawings used an entirely different design.
• Sureshock/Perceptor: While the other two members of the Street Action Mini-Con Team had pre-production designs by Takara that didn't stray too far from their finalized toy designs, Sureshock and in turn, Perceptor, featured entirely different pre-production designs that made it into the cartoon and were never rectified. On the other hand, these characters started to slowly disappear from the background of later episodes or were only shown as hand-drawn vehicles interacting with Kicker, so they didn't really need to be redesigned. In terms of Perceptor's design, only the Sureshock parts of the combined mode differ from the final toy, everything else is fine.
• Shockblast: Shockblast is a slight oddity, as he never appeared in the first eight or so episodes, but still used an unfinalized model in various scenes throughout his debut episodes; most notably in "Shockblast: Rampage". This model used a pink deco with different shades of green. This alternate model also appeared in several TV Magazine issues.

Airing and Syndication

Energon initially airing was on on Cartoon Network from January 2004 to December 2004. It later briefly aired starting in fall 2018 on the syndication package KidsClick, lasting until November 3, 2018.

Home video releases

Super Link

Still a mess, but now in a language you can't understand!

Main article: Interchannel

The Super Link version of Energon was released on DVD by Interchannel in Japan while the series was still on the air.

• Transformer: Super Link — Volume 001 (2004)
• Transformer: Super Link — Volume 002 (2004)
• Transformer: Super Link — Volume 003 (2004)
• Transformer: Super Link — Volume 004 (2004)
• Transformer: Super Link — Volume 005 (2004)
• Transformer: Super Link — Volume 006 (2004)
• Transformer: Super Link — Volume 007 (2004)
• Transformer: Super Link — Volume 008 (2004)
• Transformer: Super Link — Volume 009 (2005)
• Transformer: Super Link — Volume 010 (2005)
• Transformer: Super Link — Volume 011 (2005)
• Transformer: Super Link — Volume 012 (April 20, 2005)
• Transformer: Super Link — Volume 013 (2005)

Main article: Geneon Universal Entertainment

Geneon Universal Entertainment released the entire episodes in one set, with corrected and enhanced animation.

• Transformer: Super Link DVD Set (2016)

Energon

Main article: Paramount Pictures

When Paramount Home Entertainment released a handful of Energon collections on VHS and DVD in 2004 and 2005, several episodes were re-dubbed to fix numerous mistakes that occurred in the episodes that were broadcast, as well as throwing in some new dialogue.

• Transformers: Energon—Volume 1: The Battle for Energon (June 27, 2004)
• Transformers: Energon—Volume 2: The Return of Megatron (2004)
• Transformers: Energon—Volume 3: Shockblast Unleashed (2005)
• Transformers: Energon—Volume 4: Omega Supreme (2005)
• Transformers: Energon—The Ultimate Collection (2008)

Main article: Shout! Factory

Shout! Factory released the complete series on a seven-disc DVD set, plus an individual volume release of the first disc from the complete set, in 2014.

• Transformers Energon: The Complete Series (2014)
• Transformers Energon: Volume One (2014)

Foreign names

• Mandarin: Biànxíng Jīngāng: Néngliàng Jīngtǐ (China, 变形金刚：能量晶体, "Transformers: Energy Crystal")

References

External links

• Transformers: Super Link at the Japanese Wikipedia