#what is UP girlies im back on my rescue bots bullshit once again

[cybertron-after-dark]

You bet your ass it is, and Im taking this opportunity to yap about the werewolf meat episode, how far rescue bots as a show likes to test the limits of its age rating, and how often it likes to skirt the horror genre.

Rescue bots is, on its face, transformers for younger kids. The focus is off the war and the violence and the big scary decepticons with guns and swords and sharp teeth, choosing to focus on how the Autobots use their size, power and abilities to help people. But even without an authoritarian faction that needs to be stopped, even without being set in an active warzone, this is still a show about the Autobots working for the emergency services. There is still danger, there is still action, there are still stakes. Smaller-scale, buy no less deadly, and they do not shy away from stating it outright, or dancing right at the line of showing it.

A lot of the threats in this show could take lives if left unchecked; Fires, cave-ins, collapsing buildings, car wrecks, plane crashes, all stripes of natural disasters. They don't shy away from making the disasters feel real. People get hurt. People they make you care about get hurt. And they damn near end up dead once per episode at least.

The lycanthropy meat episode isn't the most graphic example of the disaster thriller aspect, but it IS an excellent example of how the show often leans into horror genre conventions.

(Spoilers for Rescue Bots s2e09 - Feed the Beast ahead!!)

This particular episode is a wonderful showcase of the Rescue Bots crew's understanding of how to fuck around with genre in a kids' show and make it WORK.

It's a simple enough premise: Cody and the bots find what they think is a cryptid called the Maine Ridge Monster, try to get proof it's real, and try to catch it.

Through the episode, we keep getting these shots of the monster framed by cameras. fleeting glimpses and snapshots before it runs off or the camera is destroyed. It gives almost a found footage feel to the episode, if only for brief moments.

And until about halfway through the runtime, aside from through a camera, all we see of the monster is the carnage it leaves in its wake:

The bots, save for Boulder, are straight up afraid of it! It may be an earth creature, but it's fast, it's big, and it's got teeth and claws that sure as hell don't look cuddly. While Boulder is skeptical of any malice for the critter, thinking it must just be a scared, confused animal, the others are just intent on finding it and catching before it can hurt anyone.

And when we finally see it for more than a quick shot, it's on a full-on rampage.

Breaking into a warehouse, tearing apart the wall with nothing but its claws, making a mess of the place, putting up a fight against heatwave, and eventually causing the whole building to start collapsing in on itself, with the bots and Cody inside.

It's a wild animal. A strong one. A dangerous one.

Now, the standard rescue bots episode is still relatively formulaic: Something goes horribly wrong, we're not fully sure what it is, Cody does some poking around, the thing going horribly wrong turns out to be reject tech that was meant to be in the Best Left Forgotten section of the lab's storage that some doofus dug up, Doc Greene finds out how to fix it, the Burnses and the Bots put that plan into action, all is fixed. This episode is no exception. The reject tech in this case was meant to be a canned synthetic meat with an infinite shelf life, but it reacts unpredictably when the poor bastard who eats it isn't exposed to sunlight.

Unfortunately, the two poor bastards who've been eating it all episode are Graham and the mayor, and we find out that's what the fake meat does through a transformation sequence that I honestly find mildly upsetting as an adult. Primus knows how some poor 5 year old in 2012 would've reacted seeing it.

You see that? That's bones. That's bones and fangs and the smartest, sweetest character in this show going completely feral and losing his mind. We are in body horror territory that wouldn't feel out of place in a goosebumps episode. Hell, even the concept of werewolf meat that turns you into a werewolf feels like it came straight from a goosebumps story.

Ultimately, this is still a kids show, so everything ends up okay; They find Graham and the Mayor before they can hurt anyone (or before anyone can hurt THEM given there's an angry mob forming), Boulder gets Heatwave to step off before he can choose violence, talks some sense into his partner, and calms him down until daybreak, where they turn back to normal and Doc Greene has a cure ready. Happy ending.

But like. Happy ending or not, that was horror. That was horror by people with a great familiarity of how horror cinematography and tropes are used. That was a creature feature where nobody was unfortunate enough to really get hurt, but with the threat of it happening constantly looming overhead.

And it is NOT the only example of the crew showing that level of genre savviness. The flying lobsters episode everyone likes to bring up as an example of how goofy this show is? That entire thing was an homage to the Hitchcock movie The Birds. Early on, there was an episode about a fake alien invasion that played out like a proper sci-fi horror flick, and dropped little references to the movies The Fly, Alien, The Blob, and Predator. And THEN had their own homage to The Blob with the Squish episode.

I'm not really sure how to end this quasi-essay or what point I'm trying to make other than that the writing in this show is Batshit insane in ways I love so very much so I'm just gonna leave y'all with the detail that made me want to gush about this episode to begin with.

The only time we see the camera framing applied to something other than the monster(s) is early on into the episode. With Graham and the Mayor as the only ones in the shot.

The fucking cinnamon tography.

Things that canonically exist in the same world as transformers prime because they also exist in rescue bots:

-fairies

-ghosts

-time travel

-still-living dinosaurs

-optimus's third mode, the fucking t-rex

-a machine that cheats death and reverses the aging process

-skyrim, if blades making the arrow to the knee joke is to be taken at face value.

-mass displacement tech the way the fandom's been portraying it for ages

-the exact same altmode-locking paralytic virus from beast machines

-full-on mind control, effective on both humans and bots

-lycanthropy inducing fake meat

-a hal-9000-esque rogue AI intent on turning the world comatose to keep humanity maximally safe

-freaky Friday mind swapping

-time loops

-machine that forces you to sing in full musical numbers

-Allspark day, which is basically cybertronian new years day

We need to start subjecting the prime bots to the weirdass facets of their world.