@mediaarchaeologylab Hey, I had a copy of this thing! In retrospect, it's kinda terrible, but interesting as an early effort to do CGI with a kid's TV budget
This is not good, but it is amusing. It's trying so so hard to make talking about computers interesting to cartoon-watching kids. But mostly it just looks like a Transformers knockoff.
@mediaarchaeologylab okay, I caught a youtube copy and it was mehhhhh. I can see a few reasons it wasn't picked up.
For one, I think it was late to the "boys toys that transform" party? I think that game consoles were already sucking the oxygen out of the rest of the toy market by 1989?
@mediaarchaeologylab But mostly, it just sucked. Yeah, all of these toy-pushing shows sucked, but I think Computer Warriors put zero effort into "writing" or "plotting" at all. The story felt like it was just Ctrl-C Ctrl-V'd until they finally padded out the airtime. Hey we're flying around on our sleds. Hey, we're doing another ambush! The bad guys split up again, you go after the straggler. Again.
@mediaarchaeologylab I could totally see an executive blowing up like "you barely delivered half of an episode, and you want me to order 30 more of them?". The writers didn't set any story stakes to care about. They didn't present any characters to care about. They didn't tie any element of storytelling together with the toys that they're trying to sell. The "Pepsi can that's also a Bofors" was interesting for 10 seconds, but there was no plan to make the toy interesting beyond a single episode.
@mediaarchaeologylab I figure that you'd have to keep the audience interested for several episodes before you can convert that to a toy sale - there's no such thing as "ordering it instantly" and your next trip to the toy store is several days away. From what I saw in the pilot, I don't think they had any plan for that. I think management saw that weakness before the showrunner's pitch was done.
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