Although we’re still a few months away from Michael Bay’s third live action Transformers movie adventure, “Dark of the Moon,” fans looking to satisfy their ‘bot fix can tune into a CGI animated series for the small screen, “Transformers: Prime,” on The Hub (Discovery and Hasbro’s kid friendly, joint network venture) when it premieres next Friday, February 11.
Even better, MTV News was lucky enough to chat recently with two of the men behind the machines, executive producers Bob Orci (co-writer of the first two Bay Transformers movies) and Jeff Kline, wherein they revealed how much they pay attention to what fans have to say, and what impact it has on their work.
Orci, who admitted he reads fan commentary almost incessantly, revealed that he pays close attention to fan reactions for fresh and new perspectives on the work, particularly when plot details or spoilers leak online.
“Another [way to guage reactions] is after [fans] see the movies or the miniseries,” Orci added. “They’ll say things about a character or describe the character in ways you’ve never thought of. Suddenly it gives you another voice in your head, another trait,” he said. “In a way, [fans] are adding traits.”
One specific example is with the case of Arcee, a beloved female autobot who almost made it into the first live action film, was barely in the sequel, but has found new life and fan favoritism on the animated series.
“The uprising in terms of when we were doing the movie, for Arcee, seeing once we looked at all the comments in the aggregate, it felt like we missed the boat,” Orci recalled. “One thing we wanted to do, we actually had Arcee in the first draft of the movie and the consensus was ‘Well, it’s weird enough that there are talking cars and robots, we don’t want to confuse people with a gender switch.’
“Then in the second one [“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”] we barely used her. We killed her off way too early,” he said. “So this is a chance to do what we’ve always wanted to do with her and that was out of seeing fans go, ‘No.’ They had the same debate [about Arcee].”
-MTV
