Talk: Bumblebee (Tyran)

So, like I said, this is just to kick around a movie character page until we figure out how we're going to organize everything. There's a few areas I think need adressing.

• First is the disambiguation description. Currently I have it as (Movie) but do we want to change it? I think we should, in at least because we actually have another Transformers movie floating around. Additionally, while the movie is the main focus, there is other content within the canon that is non-movie.

• Continuity Family description. While "Transformers (2007)" is probably the best we have, it'll kind of sound a bit weird if we ever get a further stuff in this unverse at a later date. (Movie) would also a bad term IMO. Not sure if there's a better option though.

• Fiction Descriptions. There's at least three key areas of fiction that will be relevant (four, perhaps, if the IDW movie adaptation has stuff that isn't in the movie). The first is the prequel comic. According to the comic cover (a copy of which can be found here, it's called the "Transformers Official Movie Prequel." Sounds a bit pretentious.. IDW Prequel Comic would be sufficant?

The second is the Prequel novel, which is listed on amazon 1 here. It's labeled as just "Transformers: Ghosts of Yesterday" but I'm not sure if we should point out that it is also a prequel to the movie. The third, of course, is the film.

So, anywho, that's everything I think that needs to be addressed at this moment. Any ideas/opinions/comments/complaints? --UndeadScottsman 17:59, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Oh yeah, and we also need actual pics of the Bee at some point. For the prequel comic, the cover for the first issue should do nicely. (Available at the above link) The only problem is I'm not sure if it's kosher to just snag it off that guys page. As for the main picture, a screencap from the trailer might work; though a picture of that prop that was floating around would be better (but I really doubt it would be kosher. :D) --UndeadScottsman 18:22, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

I apologize in advance for my recent edits. Am in a weird mood today. --Autobus Prime 18:23, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

How can you apologize in advance for something you've already did? :D --UndeadScottsman 18:25, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

See the continuity section of "Earthforce" for a detailed explanation. --Autobus Prime 18:27, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

I move that the debate about the best way to suffix these articles be shelved until the movie prequels are out- in the hopes that:

• The characters 'read' as another iteration of the G1 characters, rendering this debate unnecessary.
• The prequels themselves present some handy blanket catchphrase for referring to their continuity.

-Derik 19:26, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

This was prompted by a review of the first issue of the prequel comic being released. Like I said, it comes off as different as G1 as Armada was.--UndeadScottsman 19:31, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

And really, to answer whether or not this is "another iteration of the G1 characters" would require just what that entails. Where is the line drawn between "reimagining" and "new version?" As I mentioned elsewhere, what's the big difference between Armada Optimus Prime and G1 Optimus Prime? They're pretty much the same character. At least as similar as G1 toon Optimus was to G1 IDW Comic Optimus--UndeadScottsman 19:35, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Fundamental universe construction.

And I wasn't aware there was a review out-- where? -Derik 19:39, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Whoops. I posted a link above but I guess I didn't point out it also had a review. Here ya go again. SPOILERS AHOY!

I would second the sentiment that sorting out a lot of this stuff should be put on hold until the prequel materials actually start being released, and we can get a somewhat more clear look at the shape of the movie-verse. --KilMichaelMcC 20:47, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Spoilers

I'm somewhat handicapped by not reading the article because I choose to, but I can't help that notice that we have a fiction summary from an issue that is not out yet without a spoiler tag. For the love of God, why are we doing this? I asked almost nicely. --ItsWalky 17:11, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

The main reason I didn't spoiler-tag the article is that I completely made up the whole fiction section. --Autobus Prime 17:15, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

And that's what I get for not reading it, I guess. I have been punk'd. --ItsWalky 17:17, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

So what I did was basically like leaving a ticking alarm clock in a case of Twinkies and leaving it at the baggage check, but without the feds knocking on my door? Never intended to do such a thing but it still makes me chuckle. --Autobus Prime 17:22, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I cleared out the misinformation and added a direct link to the main Bumblebee article. I'm not even sure which other pages link to this movie specific one.

And in the process, you completely obliterated the entire reason this page was created in the first place (see the top of this talk page), and added a real spoiler to the beginning of the article! Brilliant! --Andrusi 17:18, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Time For a Real Page

When is it going to be time for a REAL BB (Movie) page? All the other characters pretty much have them now and we know how things will be set up. It was a good joke, but I think it may be time to let it go and give him a real, useful entry. Opinions?

I'm honestly surprised it hasn't already been fixed. :D--209.193.18.195 11:20, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree - there's plenty of officially-released info and stuff from the IDW comics and novel to form the basis of a half-decent serious article. --FFN 11:36, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Car geekings

I noticed Bumblebee's identified as a 1967 Camaro. Is this model year stated anywhere officially? He looks more like a second-generation body style, which ran from 1970 to '81.

I guess this is as good a place as any to say (argue?) that the Camaro can concievably still fit with Bumblebee's original "economic" character traits. If he is indeed a second-gen, that seems to be the model that ran during the beginnings of the 1980s fuel crisis, and thus lost power in favor of economy (implied from the Camaro's Wiki entry.) The upcoming fifth-generation has at least one modern fuel-saving technology, cylinder-cutoff.

If, you know, that even needed to be said. The Camaro's a great car for Bumblebee to pick to make good with human youth anyway.-Sntint 10:17, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

I believe its actually a 1974 Camaro. Walky made a mistake, methinks. --FFN 10:07, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

I have the prequels handy, and Sector 7 says he's either a '75 or a '76. -Derik 22:40, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm dyslexic! Fix it! --ItsWalky 22:46, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Disambig suffix

Is there a reason (Movie) is capitalized when things like (planet) are not?

I would assume because "Movie" has been what we're calling the continuity family. Come to think of it, I'm kinda not sure whether it oughta be capitalized or not. --KilMichaelMcC 20:32, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

That makes sense, a continity family would logically be a Proper Name, so it works.

(Man, I can't WAIT 'til we figure out a better name for this continuity family and we get to change all the links...) -Derik 20:40, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

User:DiagnosticDrone will do it. He likes that kind of thing. --Steve-o 20:44, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

Amusing tidbit

I ran across the following amusing (unused?) text string while poking the undercode of Transforemrsgame.com. It made me laugh.

Bumblebee is an Autobot. See Bumblebee run. See Bumblebee throw a car five hundred feet through the air smashing a large, heavily trafficked office building slaughtering hundreds all in the name of "Proecting" or "Defending" the Earth, or whatever they want to call it today. Thanks Bumblebee, you're a real pal!

But seriously. Bumblebee was in the original Transformers movie for like, less than 10 seconds total and it worked out great. Why is he being given HotRod like airtime in this new movie? Better yet, WHERE IS HOTROD? I mean, COME ON PEOPLE. What are you thinking?!

Old spare pic

Old promo render --FFN 16:23, 17 June 2007 (UTC)

Chatty Cathy

Currently the article says Bumblebee can't talk. We've got other sources that say he can't speak without pain (and chances of aggravating the injury?) And then of course there's the movie, where the Autobts say he can't talk- until he does under... bizarre circumstances. The can't talk section clearly needs changing- but I'm at a loss as to what it should say. -Derik 19:55, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

He can`t talk without pain. At the end, the AB,s fix him. Get it? Good. Shut up.--Autobotx1010 22:17, 18 August 2007 (UTC)

Bumblebee knowing about the witwicky family

Is it stated in a prequel material how come Bumblebee knew about the relation between the Witwicky family and the Allspark? And how come the Decepticon never did the connection until hacking POTUS in the movie?--193.191.211.52 06:42, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

In the prequel comics, Bumblebee did a Schwiggle (Google) search for "UFOs" or something, which brought up Captain Archibald Witwicky's "Ice Man" discovery. He then apparently spent the next four years stalking Witwicky's various descendents. --ItsWalky 06:45, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Possible error

In the Bumblebee new Camaro toy section:

"Contrary to popular opinion, the yellow pieces on the back of Bumblebee's feet are not supposed to be heel spurs, nor have they not been misassembled. They are supposed to fold up to emulate the detail found on the CGI design."

NOR have they NOT been misassembled means that they HAVE been misassembled. Have they or haven't they? Either way, I think this warrants a change of wording. C.V. Reynolds 10:32, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I made a typo. --FFN 11:41, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Toy Page

What is with the toy page, it's all over the place! There's Robot Heroes in the middle of the RC toys, Legends Class in the middle of the Deluxe Section, heck this is more of a Bumblebee toy page, than his bio page! 198.166.226.72 08:52, 3 January 2008 (UTC)

I sorted the toy list. Anyone who thinks it was better the way it was before please state so here; otherwise I propose adjusting the other movie characters' toy pages in a similar fashion.--Nevermore 19:36, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Looks good, Nev--sorting by mold and then by chronological release order works pretty well for these. Splitting off the section to its own page might still be worth a look, but either way, I'd be in favor of this organizational structure for the movie toy sections.--Awa64 21:10, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

I think it's a good idea to split this page so that the toys themselves get a page on there own, the toys page is HUGE.--Grand-majin 21:37, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, that's definitely an improvement! - Chris McFeely 11:45, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Apparently M "this is how we do stuff here" Sipher didn't agree. And decided to ignore the talk page too.--Nevermore 00:22, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

You know, we originally seperated the FABs, Cyber Slammers ect out of what we considered the 'main line' (Legends, Deluxes, Voyagers, Leaders)... until M Sipher decided to change everything, which resulted in the gigantic, confusing toy list. I say we keep Nevermore's changes, because it is clean, organised, logical and easy to read, and makes it easy to edit because you know which sub-section you're after, instead of editing one giant section. After all, out of all of us, who is the most logical and organised here? Nevermore, that's who. I don't even like him and I can say that. --FFN 14:04, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Though everything seems more easy to find this way, I think the Screen Battles releases should be next to each other. --ItsWalky 15:54, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

That's one of the very few things I haven't figured out yet - same thing about packs that contain two different Bumblebee toys (Evolution of a Hero, Ultimate with Titanium), which would theoretically require double entries.--Nevermore 16:12, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

At the very least, I disagree with splitting up Robot Heroes, Cyber Slammers, FABs, Replicas, and the like into one-item subsections. I don't like having a billion subsections for such minimal content each. It's one thing for a franchise to have a subsection, it's another for what boils down to a size class with only one thing in it. And I strongly disagree with the notion that all movie character pages should be like this; the majority of movie characters just flat-out don't have enough stuff to remotely justify this kind of splitting. Bumblebee is an anomaly. Prime doesn't even have this much stuff, let alone Jazz or Ironhide or even Megatron. sPlitting them up into a bunch of subsections would be ridiculous.

Frankly, I do prefer the straight linear listing. I think it gives a better impression of how the releases progressed through the series. And I'd just as soon drop the mile-long parentheticals to boot.--M Sipher 16:20, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

I think I'd be grudgingly okay with big subsection splitting —for Bumblebee only— if we split his toys into their own article, like we have for G1 Prime and some others whose pages have gotten overly huge. Bee's article is certainly goddamn huge enough to split off the toy/merch section into its own page. --M Sipher 16:28, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

My problem with a chronological list is that with ten different toys being released within the span of three months, there's nothing much gained from pointing out which toy was spotted in stores three days before the other one. On the other hand, six different deco variants for Bumblebee being spread across the entire page, with FABs, Cyber Slammers, Ultimate BB and Legends scattered in between makes it a lot more confusing. Likewise, for Jazz, there are three distinct variants of the Legends toy alone, plus three or four versions of the Deluxe toy, plus FAB, Cyber Slammer and whatnot. Generally, having all versions of a mold being listed in release order makes it waaaay more easy to navigate, and easier for the "average", non-you-and-me visitor to understand which toy is a redeco of which than having a note saying "Premium Bumblebee is a redeco of Deluxe Bumblebee version 2", and then having to scroll up to look for that toy. And how many versions of a toy justify a different sub-section for you, anyways?--Nevermore 18:51, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

While I don't have much opinion either way on this, I will throw in that it looks very, very odd to have the Legends class toy as the first entry on the list. Given the way most Transformer characters evolve, it makes it looks like that was his main toy incarnation, and everything else a later evolution (even though the Movie toys are an exception to the usual rules.) -- Repowers 16:46, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, what do you think the "main" Movie Prime toy is? Voyager or Leader? The difference between the movie line and older lines (especially G1) is that there's a bunch of different toys for the same character in different size classes and gimmick-based sub-lines released around the same time, rather than ONE toy being released, then a new toy not until several months (or years, even) later. I started with the smallest size, then moved on to the next largest size class, and so on. Putting one toy as the "main" toy would not only be pretty subjective, but also screw things up more. Again, Leader or Voyager Prime? Deluxe '77 Bumblebee or Deluxe '09 Bumblebee? Do we sort the list by "importance" of the toy? So Deluxe '09 - Deluxe '77 - Ultimate - Legends? or what? Again, highly subjective. Starting with size classes ("Legends Class", "Deluxe Class", "Voyager Class", "Leader Class" and Ultimate Bumblebee), sorted by ascending price point, and then having what Hasbro officially calls "Fast Transforming Fun" follow is not.--Nevermore 19:03, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Bumblebee's gigantic mass of merchanidse is a very rare EXCEPTION even among the movie characters, and making broad, over-arching rules out of exceptions is ridiculous. When G1 Prime's toys got split off into its own page, we didn't do it for every other toy-character page because that would have been pointless. Jazz's much, much smaller handful of toys is not remotely confusing without splitting everything up by sizeclass/pricepoint unless you're easily confused by, say, rain, and this holds true for pretty much the entire movie character set. And there does not have to be a rigid, exactly-calculated demarcation amount. We don't have them for a lot of other things on this wiki, like subgroup categories. You make the exception for Bumblebee's toy-page, you note the exception to the stanards and the reasons why on the actual page, then you do not do it for everyone else who don't need the separate toy-page because there is no need to. What is the point in separating the lone Robot Replica or Cyber Slammer of a character with maybe a dozen releases (if you include multi-packs of toys unchanged from individual release) into a subsection but to pad out the TOC? If we split the Legends out, why aren't we doing it for cybertron and Classics characters? Because there's no point. --M Sipher 19:42, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Okay, then about Prime. Listing toys in release order gives us the following anomalies: 1) Robo-Vision Prime being listed before regular Voyager Prime, but called a "redeco" of the toy that was released later. I would call this confusing, especially in a where-the-hell-do-I-find-this way for incidential visitors. 2) UK/Japan Nightwatch Prime and US Nightwatch Prime being listed several screens apart, rather than back to back. Again, I really see no reason WHY release order should take priority over size classes/molds. I could do with different sub-sections, but having all variations/repackages of a mold listed back to back IS more useful than having them all over the place. The only actual argument I see from your position is "too many sub-sections", but that doesn't even remotely touch the question why "release order" should be soooo superior.--Nevermore 21:19, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

The Robo-Vision is easy. You just say "An exclusive redeco that was ultimately released before the mainline toy was as part of a special arrangement with Target". I mean, that's what it was. A simple, one-sentence explanation. Exclusive "predecos" happen in other Hasbro lines. And why are you listing the non-US Nightwatch Prime releases separately, exactly? Is there ANYTHING about them that can't be handled with a second paragraph ("The UK/Japanese releases of this toy, which predated the US release by about a month, added a tumor to Prime's big toe and came with an AllSpark cube accessory") as part of the US Nightwatch Prime entry, as so many other slight international variants listed on every other page are? (In fact, the normal retail Japanese 70's Bee shouldn't really be separated from the US one.) And we do release order because that's how it is on the wiki, on the hundreds of applicable pages. That's what 99.9% of the time works out best. Once again, making broad rules out of rare exceptions is a bad idea. --M Sipher 21:42, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

I just want to add that Siph's system is essentially 100% unusable as a reference for heavily-merchandised movie characters. What sane person is going to find a list of over a score of toys released in the same year sorted by date of first retail sighting useful? It makes you go through every single entry on the page if you just want to know what decoes of the '09 body Deluxe have been made. Rotty 21:56, 12 February 2008 (UTC)