The Only Good Armada

Since 2001, the Transformers franchise has gone through a number of reboots (most of them being pretty poor). It first started with Robots in Disguise which told the story of the Autobots vs. the Predacons. Then came the Unicron Trilogy which consisted of Armada, Energon, and Cybertron. More recently, the reboots have gotten better with the film series and the awesome Transformers: Animated. There was at least one slight highpoint in all of the reboots prior to Transformers: Animated, the second half of Transformers: Armada.

The story for this series centers on the conflict between the Autobots and the Decepticons. Caught in the middle are a mysterious race of micro-sized Transformers called Mini-Cons. The Mini-Cons can combine with any Transformer and give them new powers and abilities. Megatron wants the Mini-Cons so he can bolster his own power and the power of his forces. The Mini-Cons are discovered on Earth in 2002 by a group of teenagers, who accidentally activated a beacon which drew Megatron and Optimus Prime to Earth.

After the first episode, the show really tanked due to poor dialogue, bad story telling, limited characters, and bad animation. This was due to a rushed schedule in the United States, so animation was incomplete and the dialogue couldn't be translated correctly. However, midway through the series, things improved drastically. The series stopped focusing on the whole "Pokemon, gotta catch em all" mentality and focused on the schemes of the traitorous Decepticon Sideways. This led to Starscream defecting to the Autobots (this Starscream was a very deep character), and eventually another death of Optimus Prime. The battle then took both sides back to Cybertron and Optimus Prime would be revived during the journey. It is discovered that Sideways is a servant of the evil Unicron, and the Transformers must unite as one race to battle the chaos bringer. The remaining 13 episodes of the series focused entirely on the Transformers war against Unicron.

Although the second half of the 52 episode series still had some dialogue problems and a few mistranslations, the show essentially did a complete 180. The animation was superb, the story was richer and deeper, and some of the best sequences in the series occured. It took over 12 minutes of episode time for Unicron to transform, there was an awesome battle with Nemesis Prime, Starscream took on Galvatron and sacrificed his own life to prove Unicron's existence, and of course the final showdown between Galvatron and Optimus Prime. Probably the most memorable story element was the more heroic character of Starscream as he truly did consider joining the Autobots for good and his sacrifice to unite the Transformers is still one of the greatest moments in the multiple animated universes of the franchise.

If you are an Armada fan, skip the first box set and pick up the second one. Rhino was able to release this a few years ago after their license for the Transformers had expired. The box set is a sweet collection (although the bonus features are poor). It is still relatively cheap on Amazon, but the price has been steadily climbing. Unlike every other part of the Unicron Trilogy, this box set was great to watch.