Giant Freakin Robot

How would you like to design a toy that took vengeance upon the person who did almost everything within his power to destroy the legacy of that toy and its franchise? No, I’m not talking about whatever demon seed designed Rubik’s dodecahedrons, I’m talking about Michael Bay. Let’s all come together and design a Transformers toy that looks exactly like Michael Bay, so what we can attach a toilet brush to it, and every time he says stuff, we can make it explode. I guess the toilet brush is a detonator. I haven’t gotten far into the blueprints.

Toy company Hasbro is in fact crowdsourcing their next toy design for a release in time to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Transformers brand. It’s a first for the company, and a pretty novel idea all around.

Jay Duke, VP of the Transformers brand, says:

This is the perfect way to kick off our anniversary celebration and the ‘Thrilling 30’ line of special edition figures. It will be tremendous fun for everyone to keep track of the entire process from the designing of the character; leading up to its introduction as a toy and watching it become a part of the TRANSFORMERS brand.

We’ve featured some of the most mind-numbingly awesome Lego creations on this site in the past, because Legos remain cool while other toys go the way of the dinosaurs. (But not, incidentally, the way of dinosaur-inspired Minecraft creations.)

And since building-block creations are always more fun with movie tie-ins, here are a handful of Lego-tized theatrical posters for your viewing pleasure. Though there are a bunch more, these are the ones concerning themselves with the science fiction genre. Sadly, no creators are named, so it’s unclear whether this is the work of one person or an entire community. (Or even one miniature figure with Photoshop.) Take a look at more below and contemplate how much better Cowboys and Aliens would have been as a Lego movie.

For some reason, everyone seems to hate Michael Bay movies, yet they continue to be some of the highest grossing movies of all-time. His movies are generally mindless, bombastic, and loud, but he creates a visually stunning world that audiences seem to flock to. The latter portion of his career finds him making an endless number of Transformers movies, beginning with the 2007 original. Bay is currently working on the fourth installment of the franchise, Transformers 4, due in theaters in 2014.

While you can bet there will be plenty wrong with the upcoming sequel, CinemaSins recently revisited the first movie in their video, ”Everything Wrong With Transformers in 7 Minutes or Less.” While some of them are glaring plot holes and inconsistencies, most of the faults they found are mere nitpicks. After all, no movie is perfect, especially one made by Michael Bay.

The best “sins” pointed out are all the product placement moments (Panasonic, Mountain Dew, Burger King, and Chevrolet). With a movie about transforming robot cars, it’s expected to have a few real car manufacturers in the spotlight, but the transforming soda vending machine is legitimately terrible. What benefits could a transforming vending machine have? [If it could transform Pepsi into Coke, I'd be onboard. - Ed.]

Ever since Marvel Studios took a risk with the films leading up to The Avengers, other movie studios and producers are looking to replicate that shared-world success with other popular franchises. From X-Men: Days of Future Past to the Justice League, crossovers and team-up movies should be a hot new trend in Hollywood going forward. In that regard, can Paramount and Hasbro do the same thing with the Transformers and G.I. Joe franchises?

In an interview with Cinema Blend, producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura talks about the possibilities of making a Transformers and G.I. Joe crossover movie. Transformers and G.I. Joe both take place in the same Hasbro universe, and have appeared in each other’s comic book stories from time to time. Bonaventura realizes that both franchises can team up, but he would rather keep them separate to fully take advantage of their rich mythologies. Bonaventura explains:

I don’t know necessarily why, but I just think there’s so much that’s so rich in the mythologies that I don’t think they need to draw from the other. I think, I didn’t rule it out for me and I think those things have somehow for me, sort of in the past, they made me feel like a little bit cynical exercises in just drawing money out of something. It’s not to say you couldn’t do it well, but both these properties have such rich mythologies with so many characters, that you could go a lot of movies before you start running out of ideas of what to do. But it’s not to say, if we found the right… I’d hate to set out to do that, but if I heard a story where we went, ‘Oh my God…,’ I could see a story right now about machination, machination of war and that could lead you sort of intrinsically to a Transformer.