How to ruin a simple premise

Last week, tfw2005.com ran a report that there will be a character in TF2 that is a "Pretender". I had no idea what that meant, but if it needed it's own name, it couldn't be good. The post on TFW2005 stated the following:

"Pretenders are Transformers that are hidden inside a shell that acts as their disguise. In the case of Alice, the shell will be an attractive human woman while the inner robot is best described as a hybrid of the Frenzy robot design from the first movie. The Pretender Transformer will have an arm that transforms into an energy weapon, a long tongue, and a scanning tenticle."

Hidden inside a "shell"?!? So basically, this will be a five foot robot who wears a suit of fake skin. Then, I guess it sheds the "skin" and just walks around licking things with its long tongue and scanning a dictionary to learn how to spell the word tentacle.

This has got to be one of the dumbest fucking ideas I've heard of in a very long time.

Look, the Transformers concept is a very simple one: 2 factions of robots that can disguise themselves by TRANSFORMING into something else. Optimus Prime is a huge robot that's made up of parts that also make up a tractor truck. He doesn't add or remove parts to achieve either form - he just rotates and shifts individual and groups of parts until he's a robot or a truck. He doesn't need to come up with some sort of bio-synthetic costume, because he's wise and knows that's a moronic concept. Plus, he's really tall and that would be even scarier.

Now, I'm sure some people will say that this robot will have to resort to this method of disguise in order to get to Sam at college (spoiler alert). I guess infiltrating Air Force One didn't require dressing up.

So I did the only thing I could do - I registered a profile and took my cause to the forum boards of TFW2005. The opinions of the people who had already posted were pretty much along the lines of what I expected; people who were like me and thought it was out of place and lame, and people who thought that it was an awesome concept then and should look even more orgasm-inducing onscreen. In my posts I declared my distaste for this concept to appear in the movie, and voiced the opinion that to me, this just reeks of something other than Transformers. I actually got a private message from someone who directed me to the Transformers Wiki page (http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Main_Page) in order to educate me on the Pretenders. Here's what I found:

"1988 also introduced the Pretenders, bringing non-transforming figures into the line for the first time."

So let me get this straight: to counter my statement that these aren't Transformers in spirit, this dude referred me to a website that informed me that the toys didn't even transform.

Now, if I remember correctly, 1988 was around the time that two things happened: the toys started to get a little goofier, and Nintendo had pretty much replaced everything in the hearts of little boys. Which, I imagine was also the driving force that led to even goofier ideas for the Transformers, like the Pretenders. I am aware that there's lots of concepts that have been associated with different Transformers lines throughout the years. That doesn't make them good concepts, and it certainly doesn't mean that they fit with the tone of the movie franchise. Mass shifting is a good example of this. It's a concept that was extremely prevalent in the TV series - even the main antagonist did it. But when it came time to do a live-action movie, that concept was done away with because it didn't fit with the realistic tone they were trying to establish. And it was a smart move, because it would have looked like shit.

It all boils down to this: money. And with films, that means box office take. And having some anteater-looking robot that masquerades as a sorority sister is going to be far less acceptable to mainstream audiences, because it's too hard to accept by people who don't know the line. Hell, I don't accept it and I've got a blog about the fucking film. And to those who say this will probably only last one scene, I say: then what's the point in the first place?