Sometimes even the wisest of men and machines can be in error.

February 19, 2011 7:01 PM

Seibertron is billed as the Ultimate Transformers Resource.

Aside from the 'Energon Pub' forums dedicated to discussion of the toys, cartoons / comics, fan-fiction and more, it features 180,000+ images over 2,000+ toy galleries, showcases some great fan-modded toys (such as the incredible Dinobot combiner 'Extinction'), and links to thousands of Transformers-related videos. The Twincast podcast discusses the latest Transformers news, chit-chats about favourite toys, and looks back over the history of the franchise. And you can join the battle in the MUD-style game Heavy Metal War.

posted by chmmr (8 comments total)

Extinction is glorious.
...As per usual.
posted by Wyatt at 7:10 PM on February 19, 2011

This wrenches me back, kicking and screaming, to my childhood, where I wasted my days on Usenet debating the background of Unicron and arguing bitterly regarding the fine thematic points of a show about robots who turned into vehicles or sometimes dinosaurs or dinosaur vehicles. It culminated in a fifty-chapter fanfiction about my badass original character who died of robot leukaemia (yes) around the midway point and whom the Autobots spent thoroughly mourning for the next squillion pages. He had left them a mix tape to remember him by.*

What I am trying to say is that I hope Seibertron is preserved for future generations forever and ever and ever so that it confuses the almighty shit out of them. My God, ten detailed pages of search hits for fucking Astrotrain.

* My older brother found this story and read my magnum opus out loud, after which I got in serious trouble for kicking him in the groin. In hindsight that mix tape should not have included so many songs by Celine Dion. Transformers has ruined lives.
posted by monster truck weekend at 8:12 PM on February 19, 2011 [15 favorites]

My brother's best friend made Optimus Prime cry.

This was at the first Hasbro-sponsored Transformers convention, a year ahead of the movie. Peter Cullen was already choked up, first being dragged from kiddee cartoons into a major voice-acting role on a summer-blockbuster motion picture by the power of fan demand, and then realizing there was a line more than a mile long to meet with him at his table.

Then "Tom" shows up.

Tom doesn't have a mint-in-box Optimus Prime, or an issue of Transformers #1, or a "Transformers the Movie" poster reprint for him to sign.

Tom has a poster of Eeyore. From Winnie the Pooh.

"When I was growing up, Transformers was my favorite cartoon, because Optimus Prime was my favorite character. Now that my daughter is old enough to watch TV with us, her favorite cartoon is the Piglet Movie, because her favorite character is Eeyore. Thank you for making our childhoods special."

Peter Cullen, the Montreal Man with the roughest, toughest, most manliest voice ever to grace a Hollywood mic, breaks down and loses it.

This is why I can never hate Transformers.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:49 PM on February 19, 2011 [22 favorites]

Extinction is really well done, although having seen it I don't think that I'll be able to remove the idea that Slag (the triceratops) is humping his leg.
Having said that, awesome site. I may have to go looking for the Unicron toy. Because it's Unicron.
posted by Zack_Replica at 9:56 PM on February 19, 2011

Peter Cullen, the Montreal Man with the roughest, toughest, most manliest voice ever to grace a Hollywood mic, breaks down and loses it.


There's a whole bunch of single parent latch key kids from the 80's for who the best male role model they had when they were growing up was Peter Cullen's Optimus Prime.
posted by KingEdRa at 10:19 PM on February 19, 2011 [1 favorite]

Alright Metafilter, quit followin' me around!

I haven't looked at Seibertron in probably two or three years and then about two weeks ago, I decide to check in on it, and I got hooked at crawling through it again. I'll drift in and out of the Toy Galleries every couple of years and I'll buy some fun, oddball Transformer, like the Japanese-only Stampy that turns into a rabbit. I also bought the transforming giraffe from the same Japanese-only line, Longrack. I mean, how can you pass up a transforming rabbit and giraffe?

Anyway, this time my looking at the site has put me in more of a nostalgic mood, and so I have been watching episodes of the G1 cartoon. One or two of the episodes have been nice little sci-fi shorts, but most of them are almost as bad as the old Superfriends cartoon for plot disjunction and terrible continuity editing. Characters appear in a scene who were just shown at a completely different location or having been damaged in a previous scene. Things appear and disappear that characters are holding, etc. It's been great fun to watch!

And, the Transformers animated movie! I saw that in the theaters and was of course blown away by the big surprise midway through the start of the movie. My friends and I couldn't believe it! Now, on rewatching, I love Orson Welles as Unicron, Leonard Nimoy as Galvatron and Lionel Stander as Kup.

The related threads below show two of the other major sites I like for Transformers : Transformers Wiki and Botch's Box Art. One site that I haven't seen on Metafilter that I like to use as a companion to Seibertron, is TFU.info. It is very comprehensive and I like to look at the old character bios from their "tech specs." The tech specs and the file cards (from GI Joe) were some of my favorite parts of 80s toys.
posted by Slothrop at 4:12 AM on February 20, 2011

Oh, and I actually linked to this in an AskMe thread a little while back, but the creator of that giant Dinobot combiner is called "Frenzy Rumble." His Web site is frenzyrumble.com. The interface is a bit annoying, but the work is pretty interesting. He takes apart the original brick-like G1 transformers and rebuilds them around newer construction with some nice results. You can find other nice Transformers customs, including more "Frenzy Rumble" stuff, at procustomizers.com.
posted by Slothrop at 4:17 AM on February 20, 2011

His Web site is frenzyrumble.com

And the Stop Music button is on the lower right, in tiny print.

Great customs, though.
posted by Fleebnork at 5:53 AM on February 20, 2011