Voice Chang­ers

Red Mer­cury have listed two new Voice changer hel­mets for Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen. The Opti­mus Prime model has been updated with new sound effects, voice clips and bat­tle dam­age dec­o­ra­tion. The sec­ond is a Bum­ble­bee hel­met (no images yet):

Ulti­mate Bumblebee

Red Mer­cury also have a pre-order page for the new Ulti­mate Bum­ble­bee: the flip down mask has been remolded, the paint work is more accu­rate and there is also a new arm weapon:

High priced Combiner

TFW2005 has found one more DCPI listing:

087–06-0292 TRA Dri­ver MV2 Human Driver

And have also revealed the pri­ce­points for the two com­biner listings:

087–06-0146 TF MV2 Com­bin­ers = $29.99
087–06-0294 TRA Com­biner TF MV2 = $99.99

So, the Supe­rion and Briti­cus Max­imus sets are likely the $29.99 list­ing, while the $99.99 list­ing could be some­thing else. Maybe some­thing… ‘devestating’!

Hat tip to Seib­ertron.

IGN sat down with TF2 writer Roberto Orci to try and get some scoops out of him, noth­ing major was revealed but it is good to see some of the rumors float­ing around being con­firmed by an offi­cial voice; Rav­age and a Pre­tender are in Revenge of the Fallen.

IGN: Last time we spoke, you revealed that Sound­wave was in the movie and hinted at the pos­si­bil­ity of Rav­age, so I’m won­der­ing if you can say any­thing more about what new char­ac­ters will be in Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen.
Orci: So I said Rav­age… maybe?

IGN: Pretty much, yeah.
Orci: [As if giv­ing a big reveal] Ravage!

IGN: [Laughs] Damn, I should have told you that you said Rav­age for sure!
Orci: Hmm… I’ll give you an exclu­sive here. There is a Pre­tender. I’m going to get killed for say­ing that.

IGN: Sto­ry­wise, how does the sequel com­pare to the first one?
Orci: It’s an extreme [jump] from the first one. The out­ra­geous, crazy humor is more out­ra­geous, but then so is the seri­ous side of it and so is the stakes of the Trans­form­ers plot and the seri­ous­ness with which some of their mythol­ogy is treated. So it kind of swings wildly between those two extremes, and that I think was one of the suc­cess­ful parts of the first movie. Again, some of the die hard fans will be equally annoyed at some of the things they see, but I can also say they will be more grat­i­fied than they were for the first one, to see how some of the Trans­form­ers story and how their bat­tle takes place in the sec­ond one.

IGN: There was a leaked image the other day of a Side­swipe toy. I don’t even know if Side­swipe is in the movie, since the toys some­times include extra char­ac­ters, but the look of this toy was more like the orig­i­nal Trans­form­ers than the first film. On the design side, are the Trans­form­ers look­ing the same in this one, or are there some tweaks?
Orci: Well, you know, your favorites – Opti­mus and Bum­ble­bee – look the same. Some of the new Trans­form­ers com­ing up, even the old Trans­form­ers that we had, have ben­e­fited from the fact that — I actu­ally heard this from ILM — because they had all the ren­der­ing and the stuff from the first movie, they were able to get much more spe­cific and artic­u­late with their range of motion and emo­tions in the sec­ond movie, which has a big­ger bud­get and it has all that research and devel­op­ment sunk into the orig­i­nal mod­els. So there’s going to be more artic­u­la­tion of the char­ac­ters facially, so I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing that. I have not seen how far they’ve taken it.

The green Chevy Beat con­cept car as seen as Skids in Rvenge of the Fallen is being renamed for its pro­duc­tion release — ahead of its appear­ance at the Detroit auto show, from Beat to Spark — a name that also com­ple­ments another new GM car, the Volt.

Source: Auto­blog

Vari­ety have con­firmed rumors that the first Revenge of the Fallen trailer will make its appear­ance dur­ing the Super­bowl on Feb­ru­ary 1st:

Nearly every stu­dio will push pics dur­ing the big game, air­ing on NBC Feb. 1, with the movie lineup nat­u­rally made up of sum­mer tent­poles whose stu­dios hope to appeal to the nearly 100 U.S. mil­lion view­ers that tune in to the broadcast.

Con­firmed for this year’s ros­ter are high-profile titles like Paramount’s “Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen,” “Star Trek” and “G.I. Joe”; Sony’s “Angels and Demons”; Dream­Works Animation’s “Mon­sters vs. Aliens”; and Universal’s “Land of the Lost” and its fourth install­ment in “The Fast and the Furi­ous” fran­chise. Dis­ney is also plan­ning to use the game to raise the pro­file for Pixar’s next toon, “Up.”

The movie blurbs will in many cases show off footage from the pics for the first time. Par has yet to unveil a sin­gle frame of the “Trans­form­ers” sequel and will use the Super Bowl to make the big reveal.

Bow­ing the fresh footage will gen­er­ate heat for the pics con­sid­er­ing the broad­cast attracted 97 mil­lion view­ers last year and con­sis­tently ranks as one of the few annual tele­vised events in which auds pay atten­tion to the com­mer­cials and talk about them afterward.

Just had a heads up from Jalop­nik that the new Chevy Beat, fea­tured in Trans­form­ers: Revenge of the Fallen, will be mak­ing its way to the Detroit auto show after a sneak pre­view on the Today Show with Matt Lauer. Watch Video clip.

Jalop­nik also spec­u­late that the car on view will be a pro­duc­tion model rather than a con­cept as pre­vi­ously seen in New York.

As hinted by Nel­son on Michael Bay’s Shoot for the Edit blog, Empire and USA Today do indeed have the first offi­cial pic­tures from Trans­form­ers 2 along with some juicy scoops and rumor con­fir­ma­tions — SPOILERS herein: Dev­as­ta­tor con­firmed. Dev­as­ta­tor made up of mul­ti­ple robots con­firmed. Sound­wave con­firmed. Jet­fire crossover confirmed.

USA Today

Arti­cle 1: LaBoeuf, Fox Really under fire in Trans­form­ers 2

Juicy spoil­ers and plot synopsis…

This time, the story finds Sam and Mikaela under attack by the evil Decep­ti­cons because of some­thing Sam has learned about the ori­gins of the Trans­form­ers and their ancient his­tory on Earth.

To acquire this knowl­edge, the invad­ing Decep­ti­cons need to cap­ture Sam instead of kill him. Mean­while, the U.S. mil­i­tary and an inter­na­tional coali­tion has united with the good-guy Auto­bots to fight back the vil­lains’ attack.

Some of the most impor­tant new­com­ers are in the robot cast: Decep­ti­cons Sound­wave, a fear­some com­mu­ni­ca­tions expert, and Dev­as­ta­tor, whose arms and legs are built out of other Trans­form­ers. And on the Auto­bots’ side is Jet­fire, a vil­lain whose age and broken-down phys­i­cal­ity leads him to help the Auto­bots [see scratched out decep­ti­con logo on Jet­fire].

Arti­cle 2: ‘Trans­form­ers’ breaks out the big guns for sequel

The U.S. Depart­ment of Defense gave its offi­cial stamp of approval to the Michael Bay-directed film, not only allow­ing pro­duc­tion amid the pris­tine dunes of the Army’s New Mex­ico mis­sile range, but also let­ting film­mak­ers fol­low jets and fighter planes through the sky from nearby Hol­lo­man Air Force Base. More scenes were shot on the Navy’s air­craft car­rier USS John C. Sten­nis, and Marines fill the ranks of the strike team bat­tling the invad­ing Transformers.

Among the equip­ment the movie is using in this desert sequence alone: two A-10 Thun­der­bolt II “Warthog” tank-killing jets; six F-16 Fight­ing Fal­cons; 10 armored Humvees; the Army’s Golden Knights para­chute team; two Abrams tanks; two Bradley tanks; two missile-launcher vehi­cles; two armored per­son­nel car­ri­ers; and a quarter-mile of the mis­sile test­ing range, cleared of unex­ploded ord­nance and built into an Egypt­ian town and tem­ple. (Signs warn not to cross a perime­ter just over the gyp­sum dunes, because live bombs could be hid­den in the sand.)

The final bat­tle the mil­i­tary is help­ing Bay cre­ate is sup­posed to be an enor­mous fire­fight in Egypt, but much of it is being shot in the White Sands dunes in a town built over the roughly quarter-mile cleared span.

Empire

Spoil­ers from the Empire arti­cle pro­vided cour­tesy of Alien­bot:

- Bay and LaBeouf con­firm the Fallen is a sep­a­rate char­ac­ter.
– Egypt­ian hiero­glyph­ics …turn out to be depic­tions of Trans­form­ers who vis­ited Earth.
– Bay claims Mega­tron is not com­ing back and the tank is just a new toy.
– Around 40 robots.
– Bud­get is $200 mil­lion.
– Ramon Rodriguez is the one hold­ing on for dear life to a pole while cars are flung.
– Dev­as­ta­tor appears at the pyra­mid, he’s prob­a­bly 50 feet tall because that’s the height of the cam­era crane they used on location.

Note the hand injury in this image — prov­ing it has been worked into the movie.

Pos­si­ble Fallen images

With Fallen now cited as a sep­a­rate char­ac­ter in ‘Revenge of the Fallen’, it’s a good time to point out some mys­te­ri­ous shots found on Lin­ing up TV, which claims to have on set images of The Fallen. Behind an old pic­ture? Doesn’t seem to fit inline with the Egypt­ian plot arc we are see­ing, I’ll clas­sify as fake for now.

TF08 have snagged a back of packet image show­ing the Chey Volt’s robot mode and char­ac­ter name which is “Jolt”, appro­pri­ate con­sid­er­ing the elec­tric nature of the vehicle.

The robot comes with ‘elec­tro whips’ which make him an ‘almost unstop­pable whirl­wind of crack­ling energy’. The detail on the robot image falls inline with the con­cept art and style of the Trans­form­ers movie franchise.

This is nigh on con­fir­ma­tion that the Volt is in fact a Trans­former, as recently speculated.

He is chaotic and impul­sive, always out for the next big adventure.

Trans­form­ers at the moon have heard from Para­mount Pic­tures UK that the Eng­lish release date for Revenge of the Fallen will be the same as the US date, June 26th 2009.

It’s good to see us Brits not being delayed again — it was pretty tough blog­ging about The Dark Knight release know­ing that I had to wait one extra week to see it!