I think his beef was more that...Well, yeah, it shows tragedy, but it's not doing it for some big message. It's doing it for the purpose of getting kids to buy the new toys by murdering the old ones, and...Yeah, I can see how someone would think that's a bit scummy. Its murder of Optimus Prime was a calculated move to say "Hey, kids, that guy's dead now, but there's this new guy, you like this guy now, buy all the new stuff!" The death of Optimus, and of so many characters, pretty much all of whom had names and personalities and at least one episode devoted to them....Basically, every Transformer they kill isn't just a nameless extra, they were some kid's favorite and that, is a great story decision: As a way to tell the audience that no one is safe, that the stakes are higher then ever, that this is war, not just another episode where everything will be wrapped up at the end. But it, the death of Optimus in specific, but i'm certain that wasn't the only death mandated) wasn't the decision made by the writer or the director or anyone on the creative side: It was a decision from Hasbro corporate. And, well..That kinda ruins the whole thing. If someone came into your child's room, and smashed all their toys so they had to buy new ones, you wouldn't call them a bold visionary writer: You'd call them a fucking psycho. Don't get me wrong, I think Transformers The Movie has some novel concepts, and that it manages to transcend being "just" a commercial, i 've brought up before how Hasbro's plan backfired, how they brought back Optimus because, ironically, they had gotten kids so attached to the product that the commercial no longer worked AS a commercial..But it is a commercial. Henson was not opposed to commerce, but I think he always wanted commerce to serve the needs of art, not the other way around. You sell toys so that you can afford to make movies, you don't make movies to sell toys.Throughout the entirety of this story, there have been many creative decisions in either the paths of historical characters or developments in fiction and media that I have greatly disagreed with. What stopped me from posting a critique like I did in the above post was that I could understand how it happened, lots of times it was due to alternate histories created by Henson Disney that prevented a series of particular events from occurring that lead to the outcome I like, and it was written in a way to express how media is greatly changing from our history with the purpose of focusing on divergences in entertainment and occasional nuance and counterpoints. For the 80's cartoons, there has rarely been any counterpoints or nuance outside of the POV bias, we haven't been hinted at how 90's tv cartoons are going to change from the 80's, the 80's cartoons that aren't involved with Disney haven't changed, and it seems that for posts it only exists to negatively compare to the divergent media. One case being the Transformers chapter where the main takeaway is that Jim Henson hates the movie because somehow a film that shows kids tragedy and that sometimes great change and good endings requires great sacrifice is bad and heroes always got to win.
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