This picture is my new reason for living. It makes me want to go out and buy an [I ♥ Q] bumper sticker.

Is it just me, or does anybody else really fucking HATE the way Bumblebee looks as a robot? His vehicle mode kicks all ass, and with a car this good looking I can totally forgive him not be a Volkswagen:

But this robot mode:

Jesus, that’s fucking horrible. You know, there’s a lot of negativity floating around on the internet just looking for a focus, and this movie has received more than its fair share for something that nobody’s even seen yet. Most of it has been completely baseless spiteful conjecture, and I refuse to add to that. But this is what everyone is telling everyone else Bumblebee looks like, and if that’s true, then WHAT THE FUCK?! This is a HORRIBLE design. I wanted to see TransFormers with big ass car parts in thier robot modes. I wanted to see TransFormers that actually look like they turn into other things. That’s what made the originals so damn cool. They were big damn robot soldiers with missile launchers and shiny laser guns and shit, and one of them had a chest that was very clearly made out a Corvette. That was an intrinsic part of their appeal. This thing looks like some sort of mechanical insect. The concept art wasn’t too much better:

The problem is pretty clear: TOO MUCH DETAIL. All boiled down, the TransFormers are suppose to be war machines. I’ve never seen any war machines with exposed innards and spikey pieces sticking out like this. The TransFormers were blocky because that was a more solid design for the toys, but it also made sense militarily because the less spindly shit you have sticking off of you, the less will get blown off when Thundercracker drops a payload of fragmentation missiles on your ass. You ever see a tank with a buch of cool shaped holes in it? You know why? Its an ancient military secret that has been passed down since the Mesopotamians first discovered it. Gather close, my friends, and I will pass it on to you now: holes lessen the effectiveness of armor. They tend to let shit in, like bullets and fire and shrapnel and death. The armor is there to keep that shit OUT. Optimus Prime may have looked like a big red brick with little red brick arms, but until 2005 when Megatron cut his ass open with that lightsaber he found, Prime didn’t have any convenient holes in him for enemies to shove grenades into. That was probably on purpose.

I’m not ready to give up hope on the movie or badmouth what I haven’t seen, but if this is Bumblebee, then he looks like shit. Even his face is pissing me off. He looks like he’s wearing one of those creepy JapaNazi gas masks from Jin-Roh. They should have bypassed using this or the face he had in the cartoon and gone with the original toy design, which had Viking horns and a faceplate like Optimus Prime’s. As a matter of fact, Bumblebee’s original badass toy face was about as close as we ever got to a 3D version of the Decepticon logo. Check it out:

Ain’t no school like the old school.

And “significantly less encumbered with suck” is my new favorite adjective phrase in the whole wide world.

Which isn’t to say that they both don’t suck, they do. But as far as sucktitude goes, Dare is significantly less encumbered with suck when placed toe-to-toe with The Touch.

Alright, Q, seriously, how do you know he doesn’t like those songs? You don’t even really know the guy. He’s into quite a bit of late 70s/early 80s rock, a lot of which features heavy and extensive synthesizers to drive the music. Trust me; he likes those songs.

Some of us – scratch that, MOST of us – listen to what we like because we like it. If we like it for purely emotional reasons, then guess what – WE STILL LIKE IT. Just because you subject yourself to things you can’t stand so you can unearth some lost memory or feeling is no reason for you to assume that the rest of us do. I certainly don’t. I LIKE “The Touch.” Its not the best song on soundtrack, but I think is a decent song. Its not well written enough to be of broad interest to most music lovers, but when I have the CD in, its one of the songs I rarely ever skip. I dig the synth organ opening riff, and I think the guitar solo was nicely restrained, especially considering that it was written and performed in a time when it could easily have been WAY overdone and no one would have criticized it. Sure, the bridge is weak as hell – it honestly sounds like something Stan Bush just dumped in there as a placeholder and then forgot to fix later – but the rest of the song holds together really well.

That having been said, though, Dan, I have to ask: you really like “Dare”? I am the biggest TransFormers nut in the known galaxy, and even I have to say that song gets pretty fucking irritating. I don’t know this for certain, but “Dare” sounds like it was written specifically for the Autobot City battle scene, because I can’t see that song really working anywhere else in the film or, god forbid, as a single for radio airplay. The weird thing about “Dare” for me was that it took a while for me to notice I didn’t like it, because the synth bridgework and the melody of the lyrics “Dare; dare to believe you can survive” are both really well put together. The niceness of those parts of the song kind of masks the awfulness of the rest of it.

You like the movie that they were attached to and the nostalgia and memories that they conjure. Just like I can’t stand Guns N Roses, but I love listening to them on the radio because of what they conjure for me now.