Transformers: The Last Knight Super Fan Event
On March 21 2017, Paramount Pictures, at the behest of Michael Bay, flew in fan-journalists from around the globe to an unusually gray and drizzly Hollywood California for the Super Fan Event, a promotional tour for the upcoming The Last Knight film. TFWIKI.net's Greg Sepelak was on hand and on average mostly coherent for the trip.
The Event
Monday, March 20
The day of travel. No big news here so if y'all want that, jump down to Tuesday.
I was awake at 5am EST to get on my 7:30 nonstop to Los Angeles International Airport, arriving there at 10am PST (1pm EST after the most uncomfortable flight I've ever been on), finally arriving at the Loews hotel just off of Hollywood Boulevard about 11am... where the rooms were not yet ready. Now, this is not a drag on the Loews staff, as they had apparently been unusually swamped that weekend with a massive number of guests all checking out on Monday, leaving the cleaning staff with a loooooooooooooooooooong list of rooms to take care of as soon as possible, and a long list of people checking in as well. I'm sympathetic even when I'm really really tired. I didn't actually get to a room until about 4:30pm (7:30 "my" time), at which point so ready to die.
When I wasn't napping in the lobby, I did wander along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, checking out Grauman's Chinese Theater (though I had been unaware that Peter Cullen and Optimus Prime had left their hand (and tire) prints in the cement out front so no pics sorry), and looking for the important stars on the Walk... and the CVS. Really needed sinus drugs.
At this point I should note that Hollywood Boulevard is less glamorous than Hollywood would have you believe. Were it not for the stars in the sidewalk and a couple of locations like the Theater, Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, Madame Toussad's, etc... it'd really be just another retail-focused downtown street, with both upscale and "downscale" areas. And most of those "name" locations are pretty tightly-packed into a couple blocks.
Paramount was hosting an informal get-together for the attendees at the Dave & Buster's in the shopping center adjoining the hotel later that evening. I mostly just popped in (after an actual in-bed snooze and light shower) as I also had loved ones coming up to visit for a quick hello and hangout. After a bite at Johnny Rocket's, some shop-wandering, and game-time at Dave & Buster's, they hit the road home, and I plopped back into bed, because tomorrow was going to be very, very full.
Tuesday, March 21
Universal Studios
9am, in the lobby to get on the bus. There were a little over 20 people this time, several from the first Detroit visit, but Paramount had brought in international fans from as far as China and Australia this time.
"Genius!"
"Thank you!"
First stop was Universal Studios Hollywood for a go on Transformers: The Ride – 3D. BotCon 2014 attendees may remember this, and while The Ride itself has not changed, the park definitely had. The Harry Potter portion of the park, under construction back at BotCon, was open and fairly busy even on this cool, damp Tuesday morning. The Simpsons seemed to have taken over even more real estate, with more Springfield shops and restaurants, including a small-scale Duff Gardens. We were largely spared Minions, thankfully.
Before The Ride, we got in line to have our pictures taken with Bumblebee outside the main ride hangar. (Sadly, Megatron was not due to appear until a good hour after we would need to leave, forcing us to find other sources of being rudely and hilariously insulted.) Our handlers corralled us away from the gift shop (later! LATER!) and into the expedited line.
For several folks in the tour, this was a first go. For those of us who'd already been on it... well, The Ride is a hard thing to prepare for even if you know what's coming. It's a simulated rollercoaster ride aboard the Autobot Evac, and even though the car is only bouncing and rocking in front of a series of 3D movie screens, it does a tremendous job of fooling you into thinking you're doing things like, oh, plummeting dozens of stories at breakneck speed or being dragged through a city skyline (and through a building or two) on Starscream's tow-line. Well-timed puffs of hot air and mist only add to the sensation that snaps your brain into "oh crap" mode for just long enough. (As an aside... fooling the brain for "just long enough" comes up later on. You'll see.)
The original plan was to ride twice, but a combination of heavy Los Angeles traffic delaying our arrival (look it rarely ever rains in southern California so several days of drizzle may not paralyze the city but it sure as hell will slow it down bigtime) and our pressing neeeeeeeeeeeed to get to the gift shop meant only one go.
The gift shop had also changed since BotCon 2014 in small but notable ways. The exclusive Deluxe Evac, Optimus Prime and Bumblebee toys have new packaging, a modified and cleaner take on the Age of Extinction merchandise packaging with big character portraits up front. The Kre-O Kreon 4-Pack of park characters has been re-done with the revamped 2015-style Kreon, plus giving Evac some new chromed bits. And plushies! Yes, a 10-inch plush Evac! I'm kicking myself now for not buying one, but things were quickly getting expensive... especially since the park had in some of the Cyber Battalion figures, the only place in the US to buy them. And at $32.95 a whack, I could only justify one... Starscream. And you know what? As a one-off oddity purchase, he's pretty dang great. The store also had the whole of the first wave Robots in Disguise "Combiner Force" toys... but nothing of Titans Return that I saw. Interesting.
All in all, there's a ton of stuff in the Universal gift shop that I'm pretty certain you can't get anywhere else, and if I'd had the time to catalog it all, I bloody well would have. Oh well... another time. I'll be back some day. Oh yes.
Soon it was back on the bus (through a part of the park they don't let guests through, ha ha!), and on to our next destination...
Paramount Pictures
The Paramount lot was a rather more casual visit, with a light drizzle popping up time and again. It started with a lunch in a nice outdoor patio, with a special guest... Sqweeks! A remote-controlled animatronic model meant for promotional visits (the actual full-sized used-in-the-movie version is safely tucked away) warbled and rolled around as we got some salad, chicken, fish and fruit. Unfortunately, Sqweeks was one thing we couldn't take pics of. It was a really neat little piece of machinery, complete with a painted-on "WASH ME" in the "dirt" on the back of his dome.
We were split into small groups for the Paramount studio tour, taken through a couple of rooms with props and costumes from some of their big films. One room had its wall dominated by a huge chunk of the original AllSpark prop... but I must admit the thing that got me going "oooooh" were the costumes worn by Raul Julia and Angelica Houston for The Addams Family. I love that movie and I will fight you.
Our smaller group piled into one of the extended golf-carts used for tours, and off we went, passing by the grassy park areas used in about a billion productions, notably by Community (someone just perked up). The palm trees were disguised by simply wrapping fake bark around them. The first part of the tour was pretty Transformers-light, but that was fine, as we got little history lessons and trivia bits, such as how William Shatner discovered a fire back in 1983 while trying to beat out Leonard Nimoy to the other productions' lunch setups, saving millions of dollars in damages by alerting crews to the fire so early on. We also saw the spot where Isabela Moner sat for the "Fight Like A Girl" promotional bits... which is right outside the same alley a pre-serum Captain America picked up a garbage can lid and used it as an impromptu shield. There was a lot of talk of how Lucille Ball did so much for the studio and actors, from creating a day care so writers would not have to quit their jobs to become full-time housewives, to pushing hard for productions like Star Trek and more. We got to check out a few studio sets, including daytime talk show The Doctors and Nickelodeon's The Thundermans. We passed studios where some of the biggest TV shows out there were filmed, and some of Hollywood's biggest names got their start. We even passed by Hasbro's Allspark Pictures offices, in the Lucille Ball Building.
Then it was a hangar for showing off bigger props from quite the eclectic mix of movies. Here stood a colossal prop Bumblebee from the first film as well as the original movie Optimus truck cab, not far from a transporter from the new Star Trek movies (as well as young Kirk's hoverbike... not the one from the final film, but a prop used before the scene was re-done), a Cobra motorcycle from Rise of Cobra... and the dead grandma from Bad Grampa next to a city street from Team America: World Police. Oh, and a Count Olaf portrait hanging on the wall. Like I said, eclectic mix.
Soon though we started hitting the real back lots, where Transformers-related stuff was waiting. Soon we headed into Technicolor's audio booths to take a look at the ridiculous editing process that goes into movies. There are actually three different audio teams working on the film: one for dialogue, one for sound effects, and one for music. These three departments work semi-separately, laying down tracks to the footage provided so that when the final edit begins, each piece can be separately adjusted for the tone desired. Most impressive was the sound effects department, where we got to see a couple minutes of a chase sequence from -presumably- early in the film (with a mix of semi-finished, rough-animatic, and not-yet-added CG robots), with no dialogue or backing music. Here, every single sound is a separately-recorded piece of foley, recorded in the controlled studio environment. Every footstep, bullet impact, tinkle of glass, door creak, ev-er-y-thing. The sound captured live at the shoot is merely used as a template for timing. This allows for the final edit to adjust volume to emphasize/downplay sounds as needed for the scene: loud echoey footfalls in a wide-open space, or the quiet whine of a tiny rotor for a tense close-in shot. Hundreds of individual sound files for just the sound effects in a few minutes of footage.
Soon it was back outside where the drizzle was threatening to become a proper rain, but our next visit was in the roadway between studios, appropriately on Michael Bay Avenue: Optimus Prime. The shiny, sleek truck form he took in Age of Extinction was waiting for us, with stunt driver extraordinaire Randy Peters on-hand once again. There was even a professional photographer there to snap pics of us all in front of, and inside, the big bot. And from there, a short hop to an almost-empty hangar, where five vehicle-mode Transformers awaited for photos. Crosshairs, Bumblebee, "Mohawk" (production name, final might change), Drift and Barricade sat in shiny glory. I admit it's Mohawk that was the coolest to me: a vicious-looking Confederate Motorcycles "Combat" model bike, an alt-mode new to the franchise. Randy's assistant (dangit I didn't get his name!) started him up, and even at a slow roll that bike has some pipes. Randy started up Barricade's lights, and I think there are still some residual color blobs in my vision from that display. We had plenty of time in the hangar, a bit of a nice chance to stop and collect ourselves.
It was rather fortunate that this was when it decided to give us something that properly qualifies as "rain". It was brief but more than you'd want to be outside in for any length of time.
Afterwards, the bus was brought back, and after another too-long drive, back to the hotel for a shorter-than-planned break. Our given itinerary only stated "Transformers activities" for the next thing, so while many of us had some guesses, we didn't actually honestly expect where we ended up next...
Michael Bay Pictures
This was one place where pictures were definitely verboten. Bay's LA offices are an honestly understated, modest studio-apartment kinda deal. Frenzy and Raphael from TMNT: Out of the Shadows watch over the reception area next to a little kitchenette watched over by Leatherface, Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, which is where I really wished we could take pics because ohmygod lookit giant happy doggies
Michael Bay's newest pets, 15-week old English Mastiffs Bumblebee and Nitrozeus, were watching us from a plastic corral by the spiral staircase to the upper floor. Nitro was way chill and a tad shy, but Bumblebee was full of beans and she wanted to say hi to and play with everybody, occasionally trying to climb the fence. We were invited to have some snacks at the kitchenette which included a vending machine with a Doritos-deco Optimus Prime on the side, but there were adorable gigantic puppies to play with. A few minutes later Bay's older dog Rebel (another Mastiff) joined us, the dogs normally given free run of the studio... oh and Michael Bay was there too. Right. Him. The guy who suggested this whole shebang.
Sorry but there were happy friendly dogs.
We all went up to a little meeting area, past a few writers and staffers (plus a tiny Pomeranian) to a sitting room with a patio to just talk, give us the chance to ask some questions before some more "structured" stuff. I got in the first question: "Do you sleep?" He had to stop and think about that.
Here's where it's... iffy what I can and can't talk about. Bay had a lot of stories, and asked us to not give away various spoilery details of what we'd see. I choose to err on the side of caution... but I can certainly talk about him. At the Detroit shoot he seemed a bit impatient... not actually with us, but he was definitely in "work mode", in the middle of shooting a Big Important Plot Sequence. Preoccupied. Not enjoying the downtime as stuff got set up because he had to be working. But here, with the footage shot and well into the editing phase, he was breezy and gabby, clearly delighted to be talking about something he absolutely loves doing... even as he constantly chides himself on the in-progress stuff and lost opportunities. He rags on his own work almost as much as the fandom does. He sighs over Revenge of the Fallen, not happy with the results but ultimately believing in the end he made the right decision to press forward through the writer's strike ("I mean what are you gonna do, fire five hundred people?"). He openly admits he was immediately dismissive about working on Transformers out of the gate, but in the end Steven Spielberg and Hasbro won him over with the concept: the scene idea that really sold him was honestly one of the lightest from the first movie, where a bunch of 30-foot robots are trying to hide in plain sight around a human house. And he's quite happy with the results of the latest movie, the story and universe thanks to the Hasbro writer's room, where tons of lore was brought in and pored over to be mined for ideas, with Hasbro suggesting a few "gimmicks" that ended up in the final product.
He spoke a lot about shooting in 3D, about pushing the technological boundaries. Why 3D tends to not look good and give people headaches, which was fascinating to listen to. Aside from most movies having their 3D "artificially" pulled out of 2D footage (which he noted really looks kinda awful when a shot has dozens to hundreds of individual particles the eye may try to track in any given second, as any explosion-heavy flick would), Bay talked about the ebb and flow of what shots need 3D and what doesn't. When to use it and where, and for how long. It's about fooling the brain (see? told you we'd get back to that!) into a "3D mode" just long enough so it fills in the non-3D bits without straining. James Cameron had convinced him to try and shoot in 3D (it's so weird to think about people that high up just casually chatting with each other about projects, but there you go), and he did and wasn't happy with the results, so he's been pushing the technology further and further. The rigs on The Last Knight are bleeding-edge tech being put through one hell of a first test; if the results work well here, they'll look good for just about anything anyone else can throw at them.
And he seems pretty dang happy with what these cameras are doing.
We then moved to a different building, the workspace, where several editors were working to put together the rough cuts of the movie using non-final CG footage. Bay led us to his personal editing suite, and quickly began to obsess over the big TV used to show the footage... fiddling with the display controls and how he really needed to get a better one in there, joking how he'd just throw away the existing screen. (I'll take it!) The rig had only been recently put together, as Bay had only come back to this office a few days prior after roughly eight months of location shooting, and it wasn't where he wanted it to be.
It was here that Bay demonstrated something he'd told us about himself in passing... he has a photographic memory of his shoots. Dates, times, order of things shot. (One fan had noted he was at one of the England shoots, and Bay was able to narrow down the exact date and what specifically they had been shooting.) This extends to his ability to remember where every shot, every edit was on his machine, as he breezed through folder after subfolder to pull up exactly the clips he wanted to show us with lightning speed. "But my closets at home are wreck," he jokes.
(Speaking of lightning speed, whatever computer he's got has got to be an expensive beast, as it pulled up these massive files near-instantly. Every time we saw the movie peoples working on their editing tech, I got pangs of jealousy over just how smooth and not-choking-on-file-sizes the equipment was.)
We were treated to several early sequences, including a rough-cut of the opening several minutes, which starts not with narration, but with a massive battle. (Sorry folks, I'm going light on the spoilers.) Seeing this footage, with the wires and prop gimbals and the odd camera drone for overhead shots not yet edited out, really drove home how much of what you see on the screen in any of his movies is not CG, especially since most of the CG elements were in an unpolished state, making it easier to pick them out. They might use more effects to hide the things that make the real objects move than for the final visible-in-shot CG elements! Hundreds of actors and extras in this sequence, folks rigged to wires to fling them around, men in fireproof outfits to writhe in flames (and 3~4 guys off-camera per person on fire ready with extinguishers to put them out). Without spoiling too much, this opening battle scene involves giant flaming balls of death, and some of them are very real. Any of them screaming through the air and thudding into the ground are CG (the explosion of earth upon those impacts are real, actors flung away by wire), but the close-in shots of these hell-balls rolling along the ground, crushing anything in their path? That's real. They're attached to big rolling rigs to control their movement, and very much on fire. Those poor souls crushed underneath, though, are CG, the rare use of CG "actors". Massive props close to the camera are real things built for the shoot, but are replicated in the background as CG.
Bay was quick to point out the real vs fake elements after the rough cut, and showed us raw footage from the location shoot to compare with. Bay loves real action, and uses CG sparingly. This gave him the chance to again remark on the 2D/3D conversion problem, pointing out the bits that would look awful if someone tried to force 2D footage of the elements into 3D.
What was most interesting was Bay taking us through the process of putting together a later short sequence that was heavy on the CG (virtually all of the background that isn't floor). This sequence involved Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) and a lot of water moving at speed. A lot. He actually started by showing us the rough footage shot on a massive outdoor set, from multiple cameras. The action shot on this rig is actually split up in the final footage by using those multiple angles, as Wahlberg goes from a full run to a skidding stop to blooosh. (Bay, being up-close to Wahlberg with his own camera, also got doused shooting this bit.) The scene opens with a wide high shot, which was taken on the rig via wired camera timed to dolly in timed to get in close by the time Wahlberg reaches the stop-point. He then showed us a rough-cut of the final sequence, where it opens even further out than the real footage, and when we first see Cade he's a tiny CG actor... but the long dolly-in shot swaps him for the real deal pretty dang quickly (where other productions might have had the whole uninterrupted shot us a CG actor). We go from wide-shot that dollies in to a low angle looking up directly at Cade's face as he skids to a halt, to a different angle as he scrambles only to get hit by an oncoming wall of water. Bay had the whole sequence of shots and angles in his mind at the beginning, and set up the rig and multiple cameras to capture each one all at the same time, without having Wahlberg stop-and-start repeatedly in the middle of a rather physically intense action.
Dinner was getting close, but Bay was happy to show us more in-progress clips, concept art, and more while the bus was on its way, and answer more questions. Some of the footage we'd seen at Paramount, but a slightly different cut. He also showed us an all-low-poly-CG, super-rough "concept" sequence for the opening battle, a thing quickly put together to give an idea of the types of action they wanted to capture at the shoot. I get the feeling he could have talked for hours, all while working on the actual final film. But apparently there was some more stuff waiting for us after dinner...
Dinner and (Part of) a Movie
We were driven to a Mexican restaurant whose name I did not catch, and got a back room with an all-you-can-eat deal set up and a bar. Real tacos, not that Taco Beelzebub hardshell-and-ground-meat stuff. The bar had only alcohol and water tho, which meant non-alcohol-imbibing me needed to flag down someone for some caffeinated sugar-water. It was all around good stuff, though I was trying to save space because there was a molasses-braised-or-something steak on the hotel menu and I hadda try that when I got back.
Bay showed up after a bit to have a drink and a nosh and casually chat with folks, and he had another surprise for us. Eventually we got back on the bus to go a few blocks down, to what I do believe was IMAX's main offices.
We shuffled into a theater, and for some reason most of the folks seemed to crowd to one side of the theater instead of the good spots in the middle. (I don't go to the movies often, but I hate sitting anywhere not in the middle of the row.) After a little chiding from Bay more people shuffled over, and he told us we'd be seeing... not a "sizzle reel", but a series of scenes with nigh-complete effects, trimmed in places, giving us much more of the story than what's been revealed before. All in all it was about 23 minutes of mostly complete scenes ending on more of a traditional short-cut teaser of some of the stuff towards the back end. I will say that things have very definitely gotten worse for both the Cybertronians and humans in the time since Age of Extinction. The reel wasn't quite done, but a version of it will be sent out to theaters for viewing on April 4 at select locations across the US.
And yes, I'm going to be vague here, but I will say that we saw expanded parts of the trailers and clips that have been officially released so far, along with the opening battle (of which only teeny snippets have made their way to trailers yet). From the battle (I think we actually saw less in this reel) to the introduction of Izabela and Sqweeks and their first meeting with Cade, some Cybertronian lore, a goodly chunk of robot carnage (Grimlock is actually pretty adorable here), and the introduction of Sir Anthony Hopkins and Laura Haddock's characters (plus the screen debut of Freya!)... plus more of Cogman, who had been part of the studio footage. I think people are going to like Cogman. He steals a scene or two. We did get some good close-ups of him, and on the IMAX screen his gold filigree and mass of spinning, ticking mechanisms under the plating were really good-looking. And taking a good look at the way the robots moved and emoted... ILM's animators know their stuff, man. We did get a few seconds of Hot Rod, and just the way he moved was entertaining.
Lights up, and after Bay joked about "throwing up in the corner here" over the various mistakes he saw and wanted to fix, we had another round of Q&A, plus a few more stories of production SNAFUs, notably the absolute nail-biting closeness of getting the final print of Age of Extinction in on time, where Bay ended up finding out who the exact people were who would be transporting the drives with the movies on them for each individual market and when that had to be.
We returned to the huge lobby, where drinks and desserts had been laid out (chocolate and hazelnut-butter puffs oh ye gods), and Bay gabbed informally with folks. A Chinese fan presented him with a yards-long hand-painted banner of most of the characters from the prior four movies, which Bay was flabbergasted by. There were photo chances and some more talk about the screener we'd just seen; Bay was worried that the cut (which he hadn't done) took out too much of Hopkins' more serious bits, and contained too much Cogman-comedy. For me the amount of Cogman was fine, but spreading the footage out a bit more with the more serious parts of the scenes would definitely help the screener. He was definitely thinking about putting more of serious-Hopkins back in the screener. He also remarked that there were more Hound scenes in the movie, but John Goodman's schedule had meant he hadn't recorded his lines yet, and Bay really didn't want to show any of that footage "in full" with the temp voice. "You gotta have Goodman." We got a group photo, some IMAX goodie bags (moleskine notebook, neat!), and piled into the bus.
Sadly, as the event ran long, didn't get back to the hotel in time for room service, so no molasses beef for me. Much to process, and with a Dr Pepper from the store around the corner, I mulled over everything and started to figure out just what in the hell I'd write. Eventually, 3am somehow started to be the time, and the car to the airport would be there at 7:30.
Oops.
I still had to figure out how I was getting all the crap into my carry on luggage... which included the goodie bags we got at the hotel that I'd neglected to mention til now because I got mine late. I ended up stuffing my clothes inside the voice-changer helmet they gave us and flattening the important boxes and t-shirts and such. Managed to get them all in! Falling asleep, however, was harder.
SPOILER TIME!
A few days after we got back and reports started going up, we were given the go-ahead to talk in more detail about what we saw! So let's dig into it, shall we? Bullet-points and spoilers ahead!
- The movie opens with a brutal medieval battle between some hordes (wearing armor that looks suspiciously Decepticonny) and the forces of, yes, King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Arthur's forces are in trouble, vastly outnumbered, but Arthur remains confident that Merlin will deliver the weapon they need to see victory...
- Among the Knights is the rarely-included-in-fiction Sir Morien. Nice.
- Merlin is... not particularly trusted by the knights. 'Cuz he's... let the record show that the witness made the "drinky drinky" motion. But he does have access to incredible power in the form of Cybertronians, in particular a massive, three-headed Cybertronian dragon. Yeah, Arthur's forces win with this little bit of help.
- Following the events of Age of Extinction, all Cybertronians are persona non grata on Earth, to the point where humans have developed a new special task force to hunt them down. Which would be easier if more Cybertronians weren't arriving constantly, getting into scraps in major population centers. They're looking for something...
- Chicago is mainly a giant abandoned robot graveyard, with a few scraggling survivors hiding from mechanized patrol drones. We've seen a goodly chunk of the beginning of this sequence in released footage, with Canopy being both home and friend to orphan Izabella. It doesn't end well for poor Canopy. This is also where Cade and Bumblebee come in, having been alerted to the break-in by a group of troublemaking kids...
- Cade is working out of the abandoned city, repairing Cybertronians and keeping them hidden... yes, even the Dinobots. Grimlock, Slug, and "mini-Dinobots" were seen, and it's a safe bet Scorn will be around given the toy (we didn't see him in the footage). Bee and Crosshairs are still with him, and Crosshairs is still being a bit of a jerk about everything...
- Unfortunately, this latest scrap has brought the military to his doorstep, with William Lennox leading the team. How has the former NEST Major and Autobot ally come to this?... Frankly we dunno yet. But Lennox's team will be trailing Cade all movie...
- Apparently TRF isn't the only one chasing Cade, as Barricade is also hunting for the humans. If it weren't for a little big interference....
- The hovering drones seen in trailers are "TRF" (Transformer Response Force) machines, and they're after Cade. Cade, Izabela, and Cade's shop assistant (we didn't get his name) are on the run, hiding in (mostly) abandoned buildings to get away... and then they run into Cogman, who has also been sent to retrieve Cade.
- Cogman is the servant of Sir Edmund Burton (Hopkins), and has been tending to his family for generations. (There's a cute little reference in the explanation scene, but that I won't give away.) He's voiced by (if I remember correctly) Jim Carter, the butler from Downton Abbey. He goes from prim-and-proper to ridiculously violent in an instant, and is fun to watch.
- Cogman has long-range communications... in the form of old-style telephone speaking and listening tubes that pop out of his body.
- Cade somehow has ended up with a Cybertronian artifact, tied to the Knights of the Round Table (which latches onto him physically. He's kinda stuck with it). This is a key element to the plot, but its significance... well, we've not seen it yet.
- Cade is "persuaded" to joining Cogman at Burton's castle, which is guarded by a World War I tank... that is also a Cybertronian in disguise. "Poor chap still thinks it's... 1914... no, 1918." The old bot loses his parts when transforming and I demand a toy of him.
- Burton has also brought Viviane Wembly (Laura Haddock) to his castle, though she was a little less politely "convinced", being brought here by Hot Rod, who is also working with Burton. She's not real happy with this. Hot Rod, for his part, tries to plead silently with her, and his body language is flourish-y.
- Burton explains that the two are key to uncovering the mystery of why, over the course of human history, the Cybertronians keep coming to Earth. Why is our planet so important to them? We also get a bit more history... humans weren't the only knights at the Round Table. Turns out there were twelve Cybertronian Knights who saw in Arthur and his men the good that humanity could achieve to, and joined them... and Cogman please.
- The planet is littered with ancient Cybertronian starships long-buried. A major sequence involves Burton sending Vivian and Cade to one sunk deep under the ocean (followed by the TRF of course).
- Among the Decepticons is a rusted-out VW Microbus, with the "VW" emblem replaced by a Decepticon sigil. I also demand a toy.
Wednesday, March 22
Four hours is enough sleep, right?
Okay I got little to nothing here. The flight back was early and uneventful (other than re-affirming that Delta apparently doesn't think seats need cushioning), and whatever theoretical jetlag the 3-hour time-jump might have inflicted was lost in the swirling miasma of abstract concepts that my circadian rhythm had mutated into well before this trip.
But I'm back and have relayed this information to you. Enjoy, let's?
Gallery
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It's a bird and Superman! -
Tank up on coffee then get on a ride designed by Bay? What could go wrong? -
Bee is probably a Gryffindor. -
These belong in a museu- err, a theme park! -
Nothing important, just some random queue crap that caught my eye. -
I already owned this set and I actually was gonna buy it again before I realized it was a variant. -
Plushie! -
Got $300 to spare? -
Souvenir packaging got an upgrade around the time of Age of Extinction. -
Some rare Stinger merch! -
The lot where they shot the "ocean" bits of Star Trek 4 is still used today. -
...well. Thank you for sharing, list of shows on the right-hand side. -
Tish! That's French! -
A better sense of the size of the AllSpark chunk. -
Aaaahhh Rickyyyy, I wanna be in the toooooyliiiiine. -
I'm huge! -
Could be worse. He could be waiting tables off Rodeo Drive. -
Man Donald Trump ripped off my bit! -
Nhaice. -
Almost everyone has the symbol on their wheels... -
He just gets pointier. -
Rebel rebel. -
Due to licensing, Drift lacks any external Autobot symbol. -
The thick blue crime. -
Meme: updated.
Notes
- The badges given for the event oddly have the date as March 23, aka Thursday, aka when most of the folks should have made it home by. I sure hope they were home by then.
- Bay Pictures' screening room has, as part of its decor, the drug-stuffed corpse with the fall-off top of the head from Bad Boys II in a glass case. He said that one night an alarm was tripped at the building, and when the security guard came in to check things out, a dark room with a flashlight... well. Someone needed an change of pants afterwards.