Random movie scene thread

[DanielSimpsonDay]

I agree. This scene is far more jarring than the death of Optimus Prime. In hindsight, it is hard not to think it was all driven by Hasbro's desire to sell more toys. Kill off a bunch of old characters and introduce a bunch of new ones.

The did the second part of that with G.I. Joe: The Movie, too, but they stopped short on the killing. The story I've heard was that due to the backlash over killing off Optimus Prime (temporarily), they changed their plans to kill Duke and actually had him survive in the G.I. Joe movie, which came out a year later.

The bigger difference between the two was that Transformers: The Movie mattered in its universe -- a lot -- and G.I. Joe: The Movie didn't. In fact, G.I. Joe: The Movie, IIRC, was the end of the cartoon series and never built on the new characters it introduced.

With Transformers, the new characters introduced in the movie were thrust to the forefront precisely because the old characters were killed off. They take on a huge role because they're among the few survivors of the Battle of Autobot City, not necessarily because the older characters have just disappeared. If it glosses over their introduction and individual back stories it's because they're fighting and then running for their lives the entire movie. The new characters also mix in with some of the older ones. Bumblebee, the Dinobots and a few others all survive the movie and are featured throughout it.
The G.I. Joe movie was a lot more ham-fisted with the introductions, and the existing characters barely show up at all even if it was just to be killed off or phased out.

Also, since there was another season of the cartoon, they were able to build on the movie's long-lasting consequences.
You had Unicron's head still orbiting around Cybertron and posing a threat; Rodimus Prime trying to be the guy who follows The Guy as the leader of the Autobots and struggling to live up to the task; the Decepticons in shambles after losing the war; and plenty of other fallout.
They did bring back Optimus Prime (and Starscream) during the next season of the cartoon, but the other Transformers stayed dead or altered.
The episode where they brought Optimus back was kind of creepy. The Autobots come across a mausoleum in deep space that contains the bodies of those who died during the movie, which are eventually destroyed forever. They find Optimus as a mind-altered zombie that, in a great bit of continuity, still has the same battle damage from his fight with Megatron, and he rides to his apparent (but not really) second death in a shot where he's on fire with one arm and one eye missing.
The final season of the cartoon felt a lot more "grown up" and darker than the first two years of shows.

Long story short, the Transformers was able to take what has largely been defined as a cold-hearted cash grab and turned it into the defining point of its narrative saga. If you chart the four-year story arc of the Generation One Transformers, it's almost like a trilogy where there's the stuff before the movie, the movie itself, and then everything after. And almost every other iteration of the Transformers since has worked pieces of the 1986 movie -- like Unicron, the death of Optimus, and the Megatron/Galvatron transformation -- into its story as well. Calling it just a way to kill off one set of characters and introduce another really doesn't do justice to what they ultimately did with it.

Don't get me wrong. They did it well, certainly much better than G.I. Joe. I mostly enjoyed the movie and the show. I was just talking about the reason why the changes were made. They crafted a good story around the toy-driven cash grab.

I had forgotten the part about the zombie Optimus Prime story with the mausoleum. I remembered the one that came after it, with a human who hated the Autobots using Optimus Prime's body to lure the Autobots in and infect them with spores that made the infected turn insane and violent. That all lead to another "You've Got the Touch" moment, with unleashing the power of the Matrix saving the day.

Goddamn, I love this. What an unexpected and delightful rabbit hole.

 

[outofplace]

Goddamn, I love this. What an unexpected and delightful rabbit hole.

I'm not sure how much of the episodes are on YouTube. I'll have to watch later, but here is part of it.

 

[Batman]

Don't get me wrong. They did it well, certainly much better than G.I. Joe. I mostly enjoyed the movie and the show. I was just talking about the reason why the changes were made. They crafted a good story around the toy-driven cash grab.

I had forgotten the part about the zombie Optimus Prime story with the mausoleum. I remembered the one that came after it, with a human who hated the Autobots using Optimus Prime's body to lure the Autobots in and infect them with spores that made the infected turn insane and violent. That all lead to another "You've Got the Touch" moment, with unleashing the power of the Matrix saving the day.

Yeah, the "Hate Plague" episode (which was the de facto series finale, IIRC; I think there was one more miniseries with the Headmasters/Targetmasters after it) was weird but fun. It kind of reminded me of when we used to play tag on the playground as kids, where if you caught somebody they joined your team and sometimes you'd pretend to be monsters or something.
That one had its share of destruction, too. I don't think they killed any Transformers, but they did have to rebuild and rebrand Bumblebee as Goldbug after the Aerialbots got infected, formed Superion, and tore ash through most of the Autobot army.

 

[Batman]

I'm not sure how much of the episodes are on YouTube. I'll have to watch later, but here is part of it.

The first episode where he comes back is called "Dark Awakening."

 

[outofplace]

I guess I know what I'm doing when I have some free time later today.

 

[garrow]

W. is a forgettable movie, but Josh Brolin is so good in this scene.

 

[cyclingwriter2]

Not to the keep the Transformers threadjack going, but my two cents. Being in the prime viewing age for that movie at the time, there were two things my friends and I talked most about:
— Spike saying “ship.” I want to say kids stood up and applauded.
— the death of prime was crap because we had learned two years ago in the first mini series that he couldn’t die unless you killed all three parts of him.

As for the post movie series, I hated the quintessicons, but loved the episode where Rodimus Prime travels through the history of cybertron, learns the Quints created the robots, the overthrow, the eventual war between autobots and decepticons and the explanation as to why transforming became a thing.

 

[garrow]

While this is hardly the most famous scene in the movie, I just love the elegant way of covering a lot of exposition.

 

[SFIND]

W. is a forgettable movie, but Josh Brolin is so good in this scene.

One of several great scenes in that film. For as far-out as Stone can be, he seems to dramatize real events well. There are several good scenes in Nixon too. The release of all of Nixon's tapes in the decades since Stone's film has shown more of his scenes were closer to reality than what many thought when it came out in the mid-90's.

 

[outofplace]

While this is hardly the most famous scene in the movie, I just love the elegant way of covering a lot of exposition.

I was having trouble figuring out which was my favorite scene from the original, but this is my favorite from the sequel. Connery and Ford are just so darn good. The father's pain at thinking his son is dead and joy at finding him alive is great, but what makes it is that brief look of pleasure on Indy's face in that moment of feeling his father's love.

 

[Scout]

This is just about as perfect as you can get.
The radio call...
The people running to get to other spots...
The camera hauling forking ash to get those motion shots...

Just gorgeous filmmaking.

 

[Neutral Corner]

Network has a lot of great scenes, obviously, but here's my favorite:

What's funny about that is that I really liked Network. Loved it when it came out. Own the Paddy Chayevsky novelization. "It's a big, fat, big-titted hit" stuck with me all these years. But I'll be damned if I had not forgotten that Robert Duvall was in it.

It's hell to get old.