Season Review: RoboForce: The Animated Series Season One

Boy, if only you kids today understood what the 1980s were all about. It was about long hair, it was about girls named Stephanie, it was about Saturday morning cartoon marathons while your parents made bacon and eggs in the kitchen (or just stuck you with a box of cereal, which also works). One of those series was RoboForce which was one of many toy lines from American brands attempting to get in on the explosion of Transformers going bananas in merch sales. Unfortunately, whether you were the Gobots, the Robo Formers, Robo Force or the litany of others attempting to do just that, they simply had no chance against Japan’s line of toys accompanying an animated series that had just so much lore. Fast-forward to today, and Brian Volk-Weiss has assembled a collection of almost famous toy brands to create NacelleVerse, a shared universe that is starting to build up it’s prowess with a number of comic book adaptations already in play and now RoboForce the first of THREE (the others being Biker Mice From Mars and Barnyard Commandos) animated series being made available to help set the tent poles for future adaptations.

But, they gotta be good,right? For RoboForce: The Animated Series now streaming on Tubi that means director Brian Volk-Weiss teaming up with Dwayne Johnson’s Seven Bucks Productions and launching this 22-minute six-episode series that positions the franchise almost like an animated dramedy for a slightly younger audience. From the first few episodes, we clearly see Brian Volk-Weiss attempting to learn the ropes of animation. Clunky shots, writing from Gavin Hignight and Tom Stern trying to find a correct balance in plot development, and the dialogue that I was getting ready to shoot out of a cannon and right into the Atlantic Ocean. Fortunately, as time goes on, everyone seems to find a semblance of a workable series that may have had a rough launch but makes up for it with a thrilling dismount.

Set in Detroit in the year 2089, the plot follows Soraya Aviram’s (Julee Song) newly created RoboForce team, designed to aid a burgeoning intergalactic society on Earth. However, on the very day of their debut, rival tech mogul Silas Duke(Kelly Bingham) unveils his advanced “Utopia Aegis 101” bots (Callum Hollett/Colleen MacIsaac), instantly rendering RoboForce obsolete. The team is disbanded and forced into mundane, menial jobs for 15 long years, their heroic potential seemingly wasted.  

But their time finally comes when Duke’s Utopia bots are mysteriously infected by a rogue code, turning them against humanity. With no one else capable of stopping the technologically superior robots, the forgotten RoboForce, led by the reluctant Maxx 89(Chris Coculuzzi) and featuring members like the powerhouse Wrecker(Dave Beynon) and the capable Sentinel(Katherine Norris), must rise from the scrap heap, overcome their obsolescence, and finally become the heroes they were meant to be.  

For an animated series geared towards the younger crowd, I actually came away impressed with a lot of the plot developments that happen during the course of the show’s season more specifically near the end when we experience friends become foe, foe become friends, and yes, a couple of interesting cameos near the end that clearly shows where the Nacelleverse wants to go in the future. What I didn’t come away with was a heartless attempt to try to “cash in” on nostalgia and just peddle a bunch of brands into a forced universe that wasn’t going to work. Instead, the series really does have a load of gusto to it, entertaining action sequences (don’t expect high-end anime level of production, but still very much serviceable) laden with likable characters that may be perceived as a bit corny but anybody that is from that decade knows that animated television was all about being corny and this series perfectly embodies that in spades.