For millennia mankind has looked to the heavens, hoping that we were not alone. We have sent our small, frail craft out into the void signalling that we are here, please come and visit. In a universe of infinite promise, infinite horror also exists. Far from our world a race of ageless, powerful robots has warred since time immemorial and now that war has come to Earth. Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots has established a base on Earth, but not far, in their ship, the Decepticons wait to destroy both the Autobots and their human allies...

Transformers Prime: Dangerous Ground is the first part of the show's first season. The computer animated show was created by Hasbro, which owns the rights to the toy franchise, and originally shown on The Hub, also partially owned by Hasbro.

I point these facts out because Hasbro, having so much control over the product, could have made a cheap uninteresting show, instead Prime is a surprisingly well made animated show. It’s the small things which matter and give an indication as to the amount of thought which has gone into the show.

Overall, the show's visuals are heavily stylised, with the three main human protagonists, Jack Darby, Miko Nakadai, and Rafael Esquivel, being drawn out of proportion with actual people. Further they fulfil a number of stereotypes. The youngest male, Rafael, is the brains of the trio, so of course he wears glasses. Miko, who is of Japanese extraction, wears trousers and is generally a tom boy. And the eldest teenage boy, Jack, is generally the heartthrob type, not one fat, lazy, afraid or stupid kid here. The characters are designed to appeal to their own age specific age bracket and sex.

But, if you pull back from the obvious marketing aspects of the show you start to notice particular things. For a start the quality is shown in attention to detail. Optimus has chrome on his chest which reflects the surrounding environment. The Decepticons are even more threatening and visually evil than their movie counterpoints. Both backgrounds and the characters are highly detailed.

The scripts, while not exactly Shakespeare, succeed in being entertaining without talking down to their young audience, although parents of particularly young children might want to watch the show first as there is a large amount of violence.

With Darkness Rising comprising the original miniseries, the disc kicks off with the first episode of season one, episode six, which may cause some confusion. Megatron is near death and Starscream assumes the mantle of leader of the Decepticons, but he is not naturally accepted. In order to cement his authority he resurrects a legendary warrior, Skyquake, but the Autobots arrive, just in time for a fight to ensue.

Episode Seven has the Autobots recovering a capsule from the arctic enwrapped in a block of ice. The Autobots may not have seen The Thing, but you suspect the writer of this episode has. When the ice thaws it releases a hoard of Scraplets, metal eating vermin. Their attack on the base threatens the return of Optimus and Arcee from the Arctic, where they are freezing to death.

Episode Eight and Wheeljack, an old friend of Bulkhead, has found his way to Earth after hundreds of years wandering the galaxy. Keen to greet his old friend Bulkhead persuades Optimus to let him onto the secret base, but things are not what they seem.

Episode Nine and we have a chase episode when Agent Fowler asks the Autobots to transports a powerful power source to a military base. Due to its instability it has to be transported by road, but hot on their heels is M.E.C.H, an organisation intent on gaining access to the best technology.

Lastly, we have Episode Ten, where both the Autobots and Decepticons discover that the Energon Harvester resides in a museum, the race is then on to see who will get to this powerful device first.

The disc I received was a check disc and so may not represent the finished product, I say this as, up front, the disc gives you different options, English, Dutch, Russian, Arabic and Icelandic, but no matter which option you pick the show is in English, although you can change this to Dutch once you get into the menu proper. There are no options for subtitles and I wonder if this is what the original language options were for. The picture is crystal clear as is the audio, but the disc contains no extras.

6

Charles Packer