The Four Color Media Monitor

ComicBook posts an argument that GI Joe and Transformers don't need a crossover, at least not in the live action films:

At the end of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Noah Diaz (Anthony Ramos) has a meeting with Agent Burke (Michael Kelly) who reveals that this supposed job interview has a greater purpose. It turns out Burke works for a secret agency that will now help take care of the Diaz family and is very interested in what transpired with the Transformers down in Peru. As the scene wraps up, Burke hands Diaz a business card and reveals that he’s a member of G.I. Joe.

With that reveal, two Hasbro/Paramount franchises finally became one in their live-action incarnations. Since then, a screenwriter was hired for this potential crossover blockbuster while Chris Hemsworth was once rumored to headline the feature. But even though Paramount and Hasbro might be high on this potential endeavor, the world doesn’t need a Transformers and G.I. Joe crossover film.

Transformers Movies Don’t Need More Humans

Across seven live-action Transformers movies and shifting directors, one criticism has endured above all: they keep centering the human characters above the robots. Despite the Autobots and Decepticons technically being the titular characters of this franchise, the focus is always on folks like Noah Diaz, plucky high school students, or Texan inventors. The humans get center-stage across the Transformers saga while the robots play second-fiddle to their derivative drama. A big crossover with G.I. Joe would just exacerbate this problem by integrating more human characters than ever into this saga.

So their reasoning stems from supposedly having too many humans to spotlight, at the expense of the robots? Well it's easier to convey emotions and expressions on humans than it is on a figure like Optimus Prime, who in many incarnations to date had no mouth (and neither did Soundwave). Something which I recall the early toy models of Bumblebee didn't have either, and in the Saturday morning cartoon TV show, they took liberties with this to actually give the robot's animated counterpart one. I'm sure Bumblebee wasn't the only one. In any case, if you're not going to build any serious character drama centered around the robo-stars, then why should it be a surprise if humans take the focus? After all, doesn't the common fan want to see some human casts developed who can express only so much awe and excitement in meeting all these living robots who even change to vehicles and animals? Such humans are often meant to represent a special wish fulfillment on behalf of the audience.

All that aside, I honestly think the writer should be saving such an argument for how DC/Marvel have been doing things repeatedly and relentlessly for 40 years now, ever since Secret Wars set company wide crossovers in motion, and by the mid-2000s, it got to the point where this really ruined their output, along with some of the worst writing and characterization to litter their shared universes. Of recent, there's been One World Under Doom, and that too comes long past the point where the audience might at least find the premise exciting. If anything, such a tale did not need to be developed as a company wide crossover, and could always have been depicted in a stand-alone story published in paperback/hardcover. Let's also consider the 5-plus dollars you'd need to pay for every single issue of many series, and there you have just one of the problems at hand.

Tragically, these mainstream news sites no longer argue against company wide crossovers and the negative influence they came to carry, and likely haven't ever since Identity Crisis, Avengers: Disassembled, Infinite Crisis and House of M came about. That's the result of sellout mentality, sadly, and if that's the case, it only makes clear many specialty news sites were never really against the crossovers, so long as certain PC representatives were running the store.

Labels: crossoverloading, dc comics, history, licensed products, marvel comics, msm propaganda