Monday, August 25, 2008

(Sky)Raiders of the Lost (green) Ark

I've been doing some research for my "25 years ago in Transfromers" series and I came across a pretty decent copy of the very first Transformers commercial ever aired. So I YouTubed it because unbelievably I could not find it anywhere. (Or more believably, I could not figure out the right search terms to find it in the first place. THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE.)

This commerical is significant because it uses character models and animation color schemes that were not used in the cartoon. The Ark and Decepticon spaceship are totally different from what was used in the cartoon, Megatron has a black helmet and a different fusion canon, the jets have black faces. There are more differences. I think that the comic cover at the end is even different from the comic that eventually came out. In addition to the Autobot and Decepticon sigils in the upper left corner, it looks like Jazz is shown flying by Optimus Prime's leg instead of Gears as in the published version of the comic. You too would be able to see these things clearly if the uploaded version didn't have so much pixelization or image blocking or whatever they call it when you look at YouTube videos that look like crap.

THE YOU IS ALWAYS GREENER IN THE OTHER TUBE

The YouTube quality is so atrocious that instead of making me a big internet hero I expect this video will instead be a source of ridicule and embarrassment. Kind of like my whole experience with toy robots in the first place. I hate that horrid audio lag every video I upload to YouTube always ends up with. Why does everyone else have such pretty YouTubes and mine are so awful? I'm trying to figure out where I can upload the original because it looks very pretty compared to the YouTube version, but what can you do? What gets me is if I am going to jail for uploading copyrighted stuff to YouTube I at least wish it would look great.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you ever run across the first commercial for G.I. Joe could you let me know? It was similar to this ad (good find btw), but it was removed from YouTube the last time I looked for it. I love that ad!

Evil King Macrocranios said...

I am really not up to speed on GI Joe. I did come across a GI Joe commercial but I'm pretty sure it's not the first one. It was a totally animated one that had snow and glider scenes and it ended with a very shadowy Destro cameo, like if they were introducing him for the first time. I would think YOJoe.com has this stuff already, but like I say, I don't know jack about Joe.

Anonymous said...

In my experience, uploading an AVI file to YouTube causes the audio to be out of sync with the video.

My digital camera creates AVI files, so I convert them to MPEG in my video editing software before uploading them. Doing it that way works fine for me.

Evil King Macrocranios said...

Holy crap thanks a lot. That's probably exactly what I need to do. The original file format was .rm so I'll look around for a converter.

Weasel said...

Hey, I remember watching that commercial with Prime. Good times, good times. Hate the lag, though. Curse you, YouTube!

 

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