Transformers: Energon (cartoon)
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Transformers: Energon, known as Transformers: Super Link (トランスフォーマー スーパーリンク) 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 in Canada 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.
Also, the show takes place in the year 2020, which happens to be one of the worst years in the real world. Kinda fitting that both are terrible.
Characters
Note: Many characters from Armada are present and not listed below, particularly the Mini-Cons; that being said, they are far less... important now. (Ex: Kicker's constant use of the Street Action Mini-Cons while barely giving any regard to them.)
| Autobots | Decepticons | Humans | Others |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Main Cast
Team Rodimus Team Bulkhead
Combiner teams Others |
Main Cast
Combiner teams |
Regulars
|
Episodes
- Cybertron City
- Energon Stars
- Scorpinok [sic]
- Megatron's Sword
- The New Cybertron City
- Megatron Resurrected
- Megatron Raid
- Starscream the Mysterious Mercenary
- Battle of the Asteroid Belt
- Energon Tower
- The Legend of Rodimus
- Crisis in Jungle City
- Kicker Beware!
- Energon Grid
- Rodimus Friend or Foe?
- Go for Unicron!
- The Return of Demolishor
- A Tale of Two Heros
- Battle Stations
- Alpha Q: Identity
- Shockblast: Rampage
- Survival Instincts
- Each One Fights...
- Unicron Unleashed
- Open Fire!
- Ripped Up Space
- Team Optimus Prime†
- Protection
- Improsoned Inferno [sic]
- Jungle Planet
- Bulkhead
- Farewell Inferno
Return! Our Scorponok - Crash Course
- Omega Supreme
- A Heroic Battle
- The Power
- Optimus Supreme
- Unicron Perishes
- Ambition
- Wishes
- Galvatron!
- Break Through
- Distribution
- The Omega Train
- Deception Army
- Ironhide Team
- Formidable
- Galvatron Terror
- Destructive Power
- Spark
- The Sun
† Clip show
"Return! Our Scorponok" was to be "Scorponok's Scars", but it never aired and was probably never dubbed. It is not considered to exist in the English version of the series.
Criticisms
| “ | Something cool finally happened! | ” |
The fiction of the Unicron Trilogy got off to a bad start 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 televised in the United States.
Conceptual and storytelling flaws
Plotting
The primary flaw of Energon is that it simply does not have enough plot to fill 52 episodes. The first half of the series moves at a respectable pace, and around episode #20, 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 until Unicron is reactivated again and destroyed again. But even then, there are still thirteen more episodes to go, and with the driving aspect of the plot destroyed, viewers are served up a virtually pointless storyline full of repaints and combiners, which added nothing to what had already taken place.
Individual episodes are likewise padded out with time-killing scenes such as stock footage sequences, generally a minimum of three per episode. An incredible amount of time is consumed in communication and report scenes, in which the characters stand around in front of video screens and tell one another things that the viewers already know.
Character de-evolution
The series takes a very dismissive attitude towards characters and their development. Except for Ironhide (who survives the series and resolves his long-running feud with Scorponok), the writers seemed unable to carry personal subplots and conflicts through to any conclusion. Instead, they would either quietly drop these opportunities for character development, or (much more gallingly) the characters would die and/or get mindwiped, so the stories would not have to be resolved. Examples:
- Demolishor's uncertainty with the Decepticon cause? "Resolved" by having him sacrifice himself to save Megatron, then having Megatron resurrect him with no memories.
- Inferno's struggle against Megatron's Decepticon programming? Brought to an end by having him kill himself, then be resurrected, only to do absolutely nothing for the rest of the series.
- Kicker's hatred of Transformers? Vanishes with no explanation after roughly two episodes, save for the occasional kick to Ironhide.
- Rodimus and Optimus Prime's ideological feud over whether Unicron should be destroyed? Rodimus puts himself under Optimus's command for the mission to defeat Galvatron, and the argument never comes up again.
- Wing Saber's dedication to capturing Shockblast? Well, he captures him . . . but when Shockblast escapes again, Wing Saber doesn't say a word.
- Starscream's standout character development in Armada? Thrown out the window once he's resurrected with the only explanation given being that he's brought back "incomplete." None of the characters who knew him in Armada say a word about it including Alexis, the human with the closest bond to Starscream. Alexis and Starscream don't even have so much as one scene with each other.
Many similar examples exist.
Promoting toys
Of course, any Transformers series exists to sell toys, but in promoting the abilities and gimmicks of its toyline, Energon frequently ignored common sense to the most amazing degree to shoehorn these concepts into a setting and story where they didn't make sense.
In choosing to set most of its action in the void of space, Energon foolishly robbed the Transformers of any real reason to transform. They can all happily fly in robot mode (in space, on planets, anywhere), inviting the question of why transformation is necessary. But, to promote the fact that the toys transform, characters would routinely change to vehicle mode anyway, even in outer space. Cue innumerable scenes of cars, trucks, and snowmobiles driving through space. Characters would even transform to vehicle mode on the ground, and then drive away into the air. Everyone could 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 contained a lot of waffling about the symbolic nature of this ("Even when one heart is weak, together, we are strong!"). Unfortunately, the fact remains that, almost without exception, these combinations are used in straight firefights, where combining two soldiers into one means fewer guns to fire at the enemy. Further, the resulting combined soldier rarely shows any sign of enhanced firepower.
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 only their combined super robot modes, rarely splitting into individual vehicles. The central torso units are seen as individual robots for perhaps 5 seconds in the entire series, and the show doesn't even acknowledge that the limbs could be individuals.
Production flaws
Art and animation
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. On the plus side, this allowed for a consistently high level of hand-drawn animation quality (especially enjoyable after the often scattershot quality of Armada). In particular, the show uses the 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.)
On the other hand, the CGI animation is positively primitive. 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. 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.
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 at all even though he's basically nothing but four faces. In some cases, when a character needed to emote visibly (Megatron's pronounced yawning, Inferno's tortured screaming), or to do something visually dynamic (acrobatic transformation), Munetaka Abe would pick up the animation slack, and the CGI would actually be replaced with hand-drawn animation just because it looked more impressive. Does that seem right to you?
Also, the show's CGI compares very poorly with Beast Wars and Beast Machines, both of which came out years previously, both of which were fully CGI (without the crutch of hand-drawn animation to fall back on), and both of which had characters who boasted complex, nuanced facial expressions and fluid, constant body language — even the ones with utterly inhuman faces and bodies. The only way to spare the animators' reputation is to assume that Energon's budget was minuscule in comparison—and, to be scrupulously fair, Beast Wars was one 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
At times, Energon tends to flow like a single feature-length film... a film that has been mercilessly 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. To be a little bit fairer, this "chopped-up film" sensation is not exactly uncommon in Japanese animated series with a defined length, but Energon is a good example of the method at its very worst.
The show's scene editing also tends to be very abrupt and choppy. Battle animation in particular routinely cuts between numerous, very short scenes, showing several simultaneous but unrelated events as if the viewer must be kept up to date on all of them in real-time. This makes 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 happening.
To make things worse for the credibility of the editors, "Scorpinok", "A Tale of Two Heros", "Improsoned Inferno", and "Deception Army" all have blatant spelling errors in the titles! Making it more annoying is that only the latter two of those four were corrected for the DVD release.
Music
This is maybe the only good part of Energon... because the soundtracks for both versions are outstanding. The music created uses a combination of orchestral and synthesized sounds, and has pieces that can be used in any situation. Sadly one of the issues in Energon is the use of music that does not fit the tone of the scene; in "Imprisoned Inferno", the episode ends with triumphant music despite being a very somber event.
Scripting and dubbing
I guess we'll never know
It's like a kind of torture
to have to watch the show!
| “ | We warped into another galaxy on the outer reaches of the solar system. | ” |
—Kicker being a nincompoop, "The Return of Demolishor" | ||
The original Japanese version of the show is, in short, sluggish and confusing... but at least the conversations make sense. Even that got lost when the show was ported for North American consumption.
The dub of Energon seems even more rushed than Armada, which was already 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 generally got completed animation, and usually got names right—but Misha gets three different names during the course of the show, and Downshift and Cliffjumper are constantly confused.
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 blatantly obvious]". There is arbitrary new dialogue (that seems to exist purely due to writers' carelessness) which does not match what is occurring onscreen. The final result is a show with some bizarre non-sequiturs and more than a few moments of genuine nonsense.
To cite just one example: 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; and further, the original dialog 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 deliberate changes, chief among them the tendency for Primus to be intermittently ignored. In one episode, Primus would be dubbed accurately, talking with other characters normally, while in the next, he would be deliberately 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 simply to make noise where there was none originally. Take a drink every time someone goes "Uhh?" to break the silence, and you'll be hammered by the first commercial break.
| “ | I really wish they would put this terrible series out on DVD. Not because I really want to watch it again, but because it would fill that unsightly gap between Armada and Cybertron with unsightly content. | ” |
—The nicest words ever spoken about the Energon cartoon, "Gustavo!", August 2008 | ||
Home video releases
Super Link
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)
Geneon Universal Entertainment will release the entire episodes in one set, with corrected & enhanced animation.
- Transformer: Super Link DVD Set (2016)
Energon
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)
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")
Footnotes
- ↑ No, really! In every preview for Super Link, Alpha Q promised the audience that "Something cool might happen" in the next episode. When the series ended, he finally declared that the promised coolness had, at last, come to pass. He might be crazy, but he's not entirely wrong in the head.
