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By Anthony Breznican, USA TODAY
The motto of the Transformers has always been "more than meets the eye," but director Michael Bay wishes less had met the eye of sci-fi fans over the past year as raw images of his shape-shifting robots leaked online.
The appearance of each new vehicle or robot — sometimes mixed with hoax images — sparks furious debate among devotees of the pop-culture touchstone of 1980s childhood, and it has put Bay and studio DreamWorks on the defensive before their characters are truly ready for their close-ups.
Today, coinciding with the annual Toy Fair in New York, the studio plans an official debut of scenes and characters from the movie, in theaters July 4.
The leaked images have raised the bar for DreamWorks to impress those who think they've already seen it all.
In some ways, it's a high-end problem: What studio would not want people to be so curious about a film that they're breaking down firewalls to see parts of it?
"We're trying to protect the surprise. And you like to be judged on the final product," producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura says. "Ultimately, it's fantastic that they care this much. And it forces us to ask ourselves every single question going into it, because you don't want to disappoint."
Di Bonaventura and Bay say art department computers registered thousands of hack attacks during the production. "Someone hacked into my own personal computer and got my script," Bay says. "We know that because it had some of my changes on it. Isn't that insane?"
In another major reveal, the yellow vehicle Bumblebee was showcased online in the early days of the shoot last year, and some purists slammed Bay for changing the character from a Volkswagen Beetle to a sportier Chevrolet Camaro.
Photos of a full-scale mockup of Bumblebee in robot form, apparently snapped by a crewmember, were met with greater approval. Says Bay: "They took big pictures of it and put it on the Internet, and everybody thought it looked cool. But I was like, 'That is not what he looks like' because we couldn't do all the fine detail (on the stand-in)."
Though the leaks sometimes got ahead of the movie's marketing plan, they may have only created more curiosity about the Transformers movie, which is being executive-produced by Steven Spielberg.
Ryan Yzquierdo, 30, of Chicago, features some of the early shots on his Transformers fansite Seibertron.com, and says he is optimistic about the movie and liked the script, though some of the character designs disappointed him.
"But my family and friends who aren't Transformers fans love the new designs and think they're awesome," he says. "So maybe I'm wrong."