Epic Win: The Death of Starscream
Submitted and Written by Jose S
In 1986, while fans were still reeling from the soul-crushing deaths of fan-favorites like Optimus Prime and Ironhide (as well as the miracle-working mech medics who probably could have saved them, Ratchet and Wheeljack), Transformers: The Movie added one more dead body to the pile by giving Starscream the most flashy and undeservedly cool-looking death in non-anime cartoon history.
I recall that Starscream continues to be present in a ghost-like form, kind of like that book, The Lovely Bones. (Wow, I never expected to discuss Transformers and The Lovely Bones in the same sentence.)
I’m meh about the Transformers, but that name is just so cool!
This movie is about my only experience with the 80’s transformers.
Beast wars was my first connection
From what I remember, they actually brought him back. There was an episode where one of the transformers ended up in this kind of hall of memorials, and Starscream’s memorial was just the bottoms of his feet. Later on, he kept popping up as a ghost for a while, before finally returning. I think he actually got shot…again, in his return, which is what told the Decepticons and Autobots that he’d returned.
DUN DUN DUN!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWmnpr-0jRI
I hated Starscream. If it wasn’t for him ruining Megatrons plans, The autobots would have been finished off long ago.
Who’s the baddass plane that delivers Galvatron?
Cyclonus.
Thx. I hope they put him in the next movie. Given, he will be something wholly random and different, like a dodge viper, but still.
There was an entire Transformers canon that has absolutely nothing to do with the travesty movies. I suggest you familiarize yourself.
There are two major win lines from this movie:
“Starscream, you’re an idiot”
And
“Your bargaining posture is highly dubious”
This movie is way WAY better than that Michael Bay-splosion fest.
BA-BA-SPLOOOM
A) Nice RatBat icon.
B) I think the line is actually “you’re an idiot, Starscream.”
C) One more line – arguably the best – Spring said during the assault on authobot city: “I’ve got better things to do tonight than die.”
ugh – not “Spring” – “SpringER.” yech.
That description was stolen from Cracked.com
Blast from the ass
Unless Digimon can count as an anime this wasnt the coolest death in non anime history.
Not to mention deaths in newer shows like Justice League
What else would Digimon be? It was a cartoon made in Japan. It’s even in anime style.
he brought it on his self dump Megatron out into space and see what you get lol
I’d like to vote about 100,000 times for this.
Starscream was my favorite Transformers character. I was sad to see him go, but this was the perfect death scene for him. He finally gets what he has been forever scheming for and dies 5 seconds later, hah.
ummm..not to burst any bubbles, but Transformers is anime.. digimon also anime. Transformers is just old anime. http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?show=anime&aid=3397 The series continued on a bit different in Japan than it did in the US, but it is still technically anime. And Starscream was my favorite character as well.
No, the Transformers shown in the States from 1984-1987 wasn’t anime. It was written and produced here, then animated overseas as a cost-savings measure.
Pretty much all American animation was and is done overseas, doesn’t make any of them anime though.
Robotech, however, was adapted from three separate anime series; I wonder if that’s where the Transformers=anime urban myth got started.
Sorry to be sort of a fanboy here… but lets correct a couple basic points on the description here.
First off, I hate to break it to anyone, but this IS anime. While it was written and produced by Americans and then exported world wide, the animation of the episodes was produced in japanese studios that were already churning out plenty of similar material. The original toy line was picked up at the tokyo toy expo and was crafted from a japanese source. The experience in making the seasons released in the US taught the basics of how to craft these chars and created tool sets to use as templates, to which the japanese continued the story well beyond what american audiences ever saw.
As for Starscream… Only the shell is gone, As it was mentioned he roamed around as sort of a ghost after this event.
Also, as the cannon goes, Starscream made a bargain with unicron to restore his body in exchange for assistance in turning cybertron into Unicrons body. Starscream betrayed unicron and was on north american shores, last saw in generation 1 shot into space.
As the cannon goes, it is also clarified in beast wars that as a result of the bargain made with unicron, that Starscreams spark is indestructible. To which makes what ever body he has somewhat irrelevant to his “existance” Although in most cases the same could be said about most transformers anyway.
So Ive just geeked my brains out.. Later.
Um, actually, MANY made-for-TV cartoons written and produced in the United States had their animation produced overseas, and usually somewhere in the Orient, most often South Korea. That doesn’t make these cartoons “anime” any more than, say, a Harry Potter novel with illustrations by a Japanese artist is “manga”. Both The Simpsons and Batman: The Animated Series had a significant amount of episose animated by the South Korean studio AKOM–are they “anime”?
Marvel Productions/Sunbow Productions–the guys behind Transformers, not to mention G.I. Joe, Jem, Inhumanoids, Bigfoot and the Muscle Machines, Robotix, Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, and The Incredible Hulk (what, no one ever noticed that all these shows looked the same?)–used the same animation studios for most of their material produced in the 1980s, reportedly Toei and later, AKOM. So are all of the shows I just listed anime, just because they were animated by studios that also produced anime.
Declaring “animated overseas = anime” is like saying that all Flash-animated products are web cartoons, when, for example, a significant amount of Adult Swim programming produced in-house at Turner was created with Flash.
The base definition typically used for anime is “Japanese Animation,” and this is to broad. Anime used to just mean animation, but there have been specific things that are characteristically anime which Transformers seasons 1-4 do not have.
If the first four seasons of Transformers as released in the US had been completely produced in Japan, then yes, it would be anime. Only the animation was done there.
The Japanese released Transformers series, Headmasters, Masterforce, and Victory. These are truly anime. Produced head to toe in Japan and using Japanese anime style storytelling with ridiculous concepts such as foes running away animatedly (the Dinoforce in Victory was horrible about this).
For the most part, US animation targeted at the boys market as Transformers was did not typically go down to such extremes except where the animation studio added it in (Sludge’s eyes popping out in the movie).
Anyone who has watched a range of anime can easily tell that the US released seasons of Transformers just are not anime. They don’t feel like anime, they feel like American cartoons. And that is what they are.
“Coronation, Starscream? This is bad comedy.”
Little did Galvatron know, Dane Cook would emerge.
To paraphrase Condi Rice’s favorite excuse for everything “No one could have anticipated that a mountain of suck like Dane Cook would emerge”
OMG when Glavatron stepped on that crown, I had my first orgasm. Yes, I’m a weird one.
If you’re just going to stand there while someone takes the time to turn into a gun and shoot your ass, you deserve what you get.
Megatron, whom he’d thrown out of an airlock earlier in the day, looked and sounded much different, so when he arrives on the doorstep completely reincarnated and with new abilities, I can see how it would throw Starscream a bit off his stride.
Also notice that Galvatron didn’t say yes or no, leading to one of the great fandom debates over whether they really are the same person, or Galvatron is a completely new individual who just happens to have Megatron’s memories.
Wow! that should’ve been shown at an epilepsy party!
And that was Leonard Nemoy as Galvatron and Orson Wells as Unicron.
First we crack the shell…. then we crack the nuts inside.
“A Noun” must be doing some serious mind altering drugs to think that The Movie was not in the storyline of the series.
In fact, there were several installments of the series after the movie, that continued the movie’s timeline, as part of the same syndication contract.
Shortly after the Movie, The Japanese market took notice of the American series (from seeing the Movie, and looking into where it came from), and commissioned their own, UNRELATED, Transformers series (and multiple ones over the last two decades) that used similar characters, but pretty much had to replace any ones they didn’t personally have the rights to (the toys used in the series made for the American market originally came from multiple sources, including Skyfire being a Macross VF-1 toy much superior than the Robotech toy by Matchbox of the same mecha).
Later on for the US market, came
Generation 2 (which I never saw – I’ve been told it was a retooling of the original series – might be “A Noun”’s series he’s thinking of),
Beast Wars (which seemed to be a completely different universe initially, until the revelations of the later seasons – Starscream even made an appearance, possessing Waspinator),
Beast Machines (a horribly written, continuity-busting supposed continuation of Beast Wars),
an unrelated anime Transformers series, dubbed for US release, that also incorporated reimagined versions of the go-bots (originally a competitor series, also poorly drawn, and whose toys were actually from Mospeada, the third series of the 3 that were made into Robotech, and looked nothing like what the go-bots animation showed, for legal reasons) that for all intents and purposes was Transformers meets Digimon in style (I believe it was a translated Transformers show from Japan)
and most recently, Transformers the Animated Series, which used a contemporary anime style so stylized in such a manner that the style chosen made it impossible to make toys for that would transform.
I’ve worked anime cons for over a decade, sometimes as a department head for one of the parts of con operation. As such, I get to occasionally hang out with people from Japan who work in the industry, and their US/Canadian counterparts.
Thundercats is routinely argued about over whether it is considered anime, because it was done in an anime style contemporary to its origin.
But – Point Blank – NONE in the industry consider the pre-Movie Transformers series anime, but Western-style TV animation contracted to an Asian studio, as that style of art was not done FOR any of the Asian markets, only for the Americas and Europe.
The parts of the series, that continue on from the events of the Movie, generally ARE considered anime, as are all the series afterward (even the CGI BW & BM, as they were inspired by anime).