SDCC 2010: Transformers Panels come up short

The Transformers Panels have come and gone for the opening day of SDCC and we have nothing to really show for it.
There was very little discussion of toys. The War for Cybertron figures were shown briefly during discussion of the game. Some time was spent talking about the Powercore Combiners line, essentially reiterating that this line wasn’t replacing anything, only supplementing. They wanted to expand the world of combiners. When it came to talking about Generations, some of the new figures were shown including Hailstorm, Breacher, Seaspray, Terradive, Tomahawk and Highbrow. None of the showstopper reveals that happened at Botcon were shown here. No Jazz. No Thunderwing. No Scourge. No Windcharger. No Tracks. No Perceptor. No Grapple. No Lugnut. No Skullgrin. And what a lot of people were waiting for, No Kup.

Most of the discussion on both panels focused on Transformers: Prime. We got to see some new slides of what Ratchet, Arcee and Cliffjumper will look like (pictures after the jump). We also get our first look at the human characters. In addition, we were shown Decepticon troopers, which were described as being similar to Storm Troopers from Star Wars. No names. Just generic Decepticon bodies. Some avid fans may pick up on the fact that the Autobots had their own version of storm troopers in Transformers Animated in the form of AutoRoopers. Google that one, kids. Animated got that inspiration from another special place in Transformers history.

From what I can tell, it sounds like some very rough footage was shown as well, but there isn’t much on that. Frankly, it doesn’t feel like this show is as far along as they wanted it to be on the production side of things. They compensated for that at Botcon with lots of new toy reveals, but that was absent here.

[Update! – Crazy] IGN posted the teaser test footage from the panel! Added to top of post.

Images and more after the jump

This is a blog and we state our opinions here. Zac and I were on GChat earlier discussing the panel and here is how we reacted.

Zac: Transformers Prime Teaser Trailer – http://www.tfw2005.com/transformers-news/transformers-prime-39/transformers-prime-teaser-trailer-170263/

me: what a tease
i’ll add it to my post

Zac: Fall is only 2 months away, right? the still don’t have final models?

me: yeah i’m mentioning that in the post
it doesn’t look like they are where they intended to be

Zac: Maybe launching a Tv network and animation studio is something you can’t just do in 18 months.
since a 2 hour MOVIE takes 2 years.

me: its a good thing they axed the really popular currently running show though
boy that had to go

Zac: You can tell that was a corporate decision, not an artistic one.

me: i can’t get myself to like anything from Prime so far if for no other reason than it partially killed animated

Zac: I don’t think it did.

me: the network did, but i cant separate the two

Zac: Now that they own the factory and the widget, its less likely we’ll see a preamature cancellation for prime.

me: i also can’t get excited for what is going to amount to more movie-like toys

Zac: You know what I don’t like about this video?
2 robots MINDING THEIR OWN BUSINESS
then bumblebee comes in and starts a fight.
Autobot terrorism is back.

me: good point

Zac: HUNT FOR THE DECEPTICONS!

         

Images are mirrored from TFW2005