Reboots suck.

It was this or a picture of Enzo.

I've talked about this a long time ago, about respecting the rules of the franchise's universe you're working in. Whether it be sparkling vampires or not understanding that robots can have brothers, you always need to read up a bit and learn a little bit about the story you're working on. It never hurts to at least acknowledge that you're familiar with what came before, even if you're not fond of it... Because that way, you avoid reboots. Honestly, I am a huge opponent of reboots. In fact, I often find a reboot to be the lazy coward's way out of a complex problem. When DC comics relaunched last September, like a lot of people, I wasn't too hot about it. I mean, while there are some books I absolutely love, like Aquaman. (And I gotta admit, I've developed a bit of guilty pleasure for 'My Greatest Adventures') But I'm not too sure if it was worth losing a married Lois and Clark, as well as Stephanie Brown's well deserved graduation to the pointy eared cowl.

He's basically be the same character from
TF: Animated, but I have to admit, I'm
very glad he returned in TF: Prime.

One of the biggest problems I believe that hurts franchises like you wouldn't believe is the constant rebooting. Transformers actually suffers from this to a degree that the fans probably don't realize. Because we know any time now, a reboot WILL happen, it makes it really hard to become emotionally attached to any version of a story. One of the reasons the Generation One universe was so prominent for Transformers Fans is because it was so long lived. That universe was ongoing from 1984 all the way until 2000. Since then, there's been three universe reboots with that franchise. (Robots in Disguise, the Unicron Trilogy, and Animated. Only the Movie and Aligned universe are still intact... For now.) And because of this, if we mention Bulkhead, we now have to specify WHICH Bulkhead we're talking about. And the fact that the team line-up of the Autobots from Animated to Prime are almost virtually identical, outside of swapping out a brooding ninja badboy motorcycle with a brooding ninja badgirl motorcycle, I'm not sure if it makes it better or worse. And it's not just the toy robots. We have a new Spider-Man movie coming out this summer, which is in turn a reboot, from a franchise that didn't really NEED a reboot. Whether you liked Spider-Man 3 or not, other than Venom, nothing was so screwed up that a reboot was necessary. I mean, unless you just laid a 'Batman and Robin' onto the public, a reboot should be the absolute last resort. And even then, I'm not too sure a reboot was needed. (I'm glad they did it, but you could have worked around it.)

If Frank can overcome
THIS, then everyone
else has no excuse.

And that's one of the problems I've noticed with out entertainment culture. We're too eager to scrap what came before and start over again. It's almost like if we have one bad story in the series, we think the entire thing is tainted, and needs to be “re-done right” which is just crazy. If James Bond scrapped the entire series every time he had a crappy movie... Hell, we would have never gotten out of the Roger Moore films. Part of a long established history of a franchise is the bad crap too. The Punisher's had some great stories told over the years by Chuck Dixon, Mike Baron, and Garth Ennis. He's also had some horribly stupid pieces of crap that you cannot believe got approved, such as 'Punisher dies and becomes a vigilante angel' (which just wears off), and 'Punisher gets a surgery to make him a black man' (which wears off in three issues), and 'Punisher gets turned into a Frankenstein monster' (which he's magically healed from.) Every franchise that's worth a crap has these stories. For every 'Wrath of Khan', there's a 'Final Frontier'. We're human. No matter how good people like to think we can be, eventually, we all tell an Episode II. Unless you have severely screwed things up so badly that you can't even ignore it like Highlander 2, the answer is never to restart it over. I'm a firm believer in the theory of “Make that piece of shit shine.”

If you tell a crappy story, just counter it with a good one. And that's how you do it. Some people believe it's just easier to just trash it or start over again, and while it's true it's easier... It's not better. Because no one really likes sitting through the origin story over and over again. And unless you have screwed things up to a level of giving Superman a bastard child and making him a deadbeat father, it really is better to just move on and tell a better story. 2008's Hulk movie was one of the best ways I've seen this done. It didn't contradict the 2003 movie and still served as a sequel to it, but at the same time, it didn't dwell on it either, making it a decent movie that stood alone. Just don't dwell on the garbage... Move on and tell better. I think it's why the current issues of the Transformers comics are so amazing. Yes, it's following up on a massive cataclysm that came at the conclusion of a rather lackluster run of stories, but they're not dwelling upon it. They're just telling good stories. They even made Drift cool. (Imagine my surprise at that!) Yeah, that almost two and a half year run of lukewarm stories still exists, but it's in the past now, and if they had rebooted the universe again, we wouldn't have the stories we got now. It's like the old phrase of “why is there evil?”

“Why are there bad stories?” So we can appreciate the good ones.