Max Steel: Team Turbo Fusion-Tek (alternatively titled as Fusion Tek Part One, Fusion Tek Part Two and Fusion Tek Part Three) is the second and last movie released in 2016 and overall the fifth film of Max Steel. It was produced by Vera M. Hourani, written by Rob David, Matt Drdek, Lloyd Goldfine and Eugene Son and directed by Sam Chou. It was the last film to be animated by Arc Productions.
In UK, the movie was transmitted by over three days, being them August 31 and September 1 and 2. The movie was split up into three different episodes only titled as "Fusion Tek". The movie was available online shortly after its debut on TV only for UK viewers. In September 3, the movie officially aired in Latin America alongside with Team Turbo as a two-hours marathon.
Max Steel and his new Turbo Team are put to the test when a robot zombie rises from the grave intent on eating all of humanity’s brainwaves! Can Team Turbo survive to stop the Technopocalypse?
Current Synopsis
After Mortum manages to escape with the powerful Connect-Tek, he mutates into a terrible robot zombie. With a insatiable hungry of vengeance, Mortum wander around absorbing the brainwaves of the humans, and the more he absorbs, the stronger he gets. By infecting the humanity with his techno-virus, Mortum will become their ultimate overlord. After C.Y.T.R.O., Tempestra and La Fiera were infected, Max must battle against his new friends in order to free them from Mortum's control.
Plot
"More, MORE!"
The movie starts with Mortum's hand emerging from his grave. After he unbounds from his grave, Mortum saw a couple who were apparently lost. He silently went on their direction and shouted "Brains!". When they saw him, they get scared and the zombie releases his hands on them and ultimately absorbs the brain energy of the man. The woman, upon seeing what happened with her boyfriend, tries to run away, but she is ultimately transformed into a robot zombie by him. Afterwards, Mortum sights Copper Canyon and yells to get more brains.
In the next day, Max and his Team Turbo saw few thieves stealing gold bars from Copper Canyon's bank. Max and his team goes Turbo and Max uses his Connect-Tek sword to slash the guns of the thieves. Another thief comes and manages to escape with his allies. Upon seeing that, Tempestra, La Fiera and C.Y.T.R.O. split up and went after them. Eventually, they were successfully stopped by Max's team and Copper Canyon citizens cheered up them. Upon seeing that, C.Y.T.R.O. asks if they were in pain and Rayne explains him that they were just cheering.
Meanwhile, Mortum reaches his hideout and leaves a destructive path behind by absorbing the brainwave of every single human that he saw on his sight. He eventually reaches his assistans while eating the brain energy of two unnamed scientists and afterwards asks for their help, despite they couldn't understand him. Mortum gets angry and launches his hand at the blond assistant, who states that there were only few days for his day off before being transformed into a zombie. Afterwards, Mortum ironically states that he feels much alive and better than ever. Scared, his nephew agrees. Mortum then proceeds to upgrade the Connect-Tek (or his brain) and states that the device had both destroyed and remade him. He says the more brainwaves he consumes, the stronger he gets, despite he would need more brain energy as he gets stronger. He then explains his evil schemes and ultimately commands his mindless zombies soldiers to bring his brains.
"Fellas, whatever this guy's got, I think it is catching!"
Meanwhile, on Copper Canyon's streets, Max and his friends were hanging out. Alex mentions about his amazing moves and says he should be a solo act, which Rayne humorously says that she wouldn't miss him. After Alex buys a hot dog, Max discusses with his teammates about new Turbo Modes and they get really excited. Suddenly, Rayne sees a zombie and Max tries to help the man, but he shouts "brains!" and he gets scared. Alex, upon realizing that the zombie was the hot dog vendor, throws up the hot dog. Suddenly, a large horde of zombies start approaching them. Max and his teammates go Turbo once again to save the day. La Fiera uses his brute strength to knock down many zombies, but Max advises him that they were still Copper Canyon civilians. Meanwhile, Tempestra knock down few zombies by creating a tornado. C.Y.T.R.O. tries to contain the zombies by blocking their way with a bus, but they easily climb up the vehicle. After some time fighting against the zombies, Max sees how they are transforming other humans into beings like them and suggests to Steel to create some kind of protector to their brains. La Fiera was later caught off guard by a zombie who started to feast on his brainwaves, but luckily Tempestra saves him and jokes by asking if he still wanted to be a solo act. The zombies mysteriously stops and sends the brainwaves to a common place. Meanwhile, Steel scans a zombie to create the Brain Shields. Max deduces that they should follow the brainwaves to that place.
C.Y.T.R.O. releases his energy ray and supposedly kills Mortum
In the meantime, Mortum was feasting on various brainwaves. After he ends his feast, he attempts to absorb the brainwaves of his own nephew, referring it as "dessert". Luckily, Max and his team arrives just in time to save him. Tempestra uses her Thunderclap Whip to electrocute Mortum, then La Fiera attacks Mortum with his claws and ultimately C.Y.T.R.O. uses a green ray that completely annihilates the villain. Max then asks if Tempestra was alright, and then she asks Mortum's nephew if he was too. He says he is and Max asks what was that thing. Devastated, he states that it was Mortum, who was almost unrecognizable due to his mutation and proceeds to talk about his background story. Afterwards, Steel deduces that if in fact Mortum was remade by Connect-Tek, he couldn't simply be destroyed. Mortum's poligons reunites and his shadow appears, scaring his nephew, who ran away, and Rayne. Mortum transformed into Turbo Trap Mode, a hybrid of a humanoid, a centipede, a scorpion and a spider. Mortum fights against Max's team and easily defeat Max's allies with his new form. Ultimately, Mortum manages to restrain them in the walls and proclaims that he was hungry and proceeds to absorb their brain energy. However, Steel manages to complete the brain shields just in time. After Mortum saw Steel, he stayed amazed and captured him, bent on dissecting him to his own purposes. He later destroys the pillars of his base while Max's team were incapacitated and escapes.
Copper Canyon on havoc
After the base was destroyed, Max and C.Y.T.R.O. woke up and started to search for his friends, especially Steel. C.Y.T.R.O. confirms that Steel wasn't there and Max starts to feel dizzy and ultimately faints. C.Y.T.R.O. looks at Copper Canyon and sees the damage that Mortum and his zombies had caused.
Meanwhile, Mortum sees Commander Kilgore's aerial forces on Copper Canyon's skies. He states that Copper Canyon was only the beginning and proceeds to create a temple that now works as his base. His zombies approach him and reveal Steel, who makes a joke related to his temple. Mortum says that he was only making those jokes because he was just scared like all other civilians lurking in the dark, despite they could be saved by him after each one of them become a part of him. Mortum's voice and body temporarily glitches and Steel once again makes a joke about it. The zombie creates a energy shield around Steel and decides to dissect him, piece by piece.
Sometimes Mortum's mouth doesn't opens when he says something in his Turbo Scorpion Mode.
The edges of the poligons or other plates on Mortum's body sometimes pass through other parts of his body. This is seen on his initial form and his Turbo Trap Mode.
When Mortum releases an energy wave on Max and his friends, his energy sphere is missing in the next scene.
The blades on Max's back are missing when Tempestra and the others share their powers to Max fight off Mortum.
Events
Continuity
The movie takes place weeks or months after the Team Turbo movie.
Mortum survives the explosion of the Connect-Tek and becomes a robot zombies as result, now possessing a constant need for brainwaves.
Noteworthy Events
In some point of the movie, Mortum transforms the entire Earth into robot zombies like him, making him the first villain to manage to transform the whole planet into mutants.
Max unlocks Turbo Mega Mode to fight against Mortum's Turbo Ultimate Mode.
To promote the film, Mattel released a toy line containing approximatelly the same amount of action figures as the first toy line based on the Team Turbo movie. Instead of having red details in the box, it only featured yellow and grey details with the members of Team Turbo in the left side of the box.
The toy line was also released early on 2016 on the end of May instead of June, the month where the second wave of action figures hit the stores.
Production
The movie was announced alongside with Team Turbo when Mattel released its content for 2016. The initial synopsis featured a similar plot where the robot zombie would be a new character emerging from its grave with the intent of absorbing the brainwaves of the humanity, existing (and not appearing) before the events of Team Turbo. However, the plot of the movie was changed after Professor Mortum was introduced in Team Turbo, who eventually became the robot zombie. It is unknown if Mortum wasn't planned to appear in the series and was added in the last minute or it was a strategy to protect the villain's name.
After the Team Turbo movie debuted on TV, its sequel was already on production. The design of the new Turbo Modes, Mortum's mutated form and other characters were made first than their animated counterpart, which had notable differences.
Censorship
There were few scenes from Team Turbo Fusion-Tek that were cut by some channels, most likely because they were deemed too violent or dark for children.
Cartoon Network cut some parts of Team Turbo Fusion-Tek (especially the beginning of the movie). The brazilian version of the film also featured words that the show wouldn't normally use, such as "kill", "dead" and other words from the same genre.
Gallery
Max Steel: Team Turbo Fusion-Tek's gallery can be seen here.
Trivia
It was the longest film of the series ever released, since it has 66 minutes instead of 44 minutes like the previous ones.
It was the first movie to be released first in another country instead of airing first in Latin America.
When Max and his team captured a zombie, Rayne referred him as "Smiley", which might be an allusion to Psycho, a character from the classic series. Psycho was generally referred as smiley by Max or occasionally by other N-Tek agents.
Poster used to promote the movie.
The movie was released in the Cinépolis movie theaters in October 1 to 16 on solely on Mexico. In 2015, the company also presented Maximum Morphos.
Additionally, a Chilean movie theater known as Hotys Cinema also showed the movie and even made a trailer for it, which can be seen here.
Commander Kilgore said that Copper Canyon would turn into a giant parking lot, which might be a reference to the season finale of the second season from the classic series, when John Dread was about to destroy Geneva and moments before he said that it would turn into a parking lot.
Commander Kilgore is a reference to Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore from the Apocalypse Now movie.
Alex makes a reference to a character Brainiac from DC Comics when Mortum tried to absorb his and Rayne's brainwaves but ultimately fails, and he says "Sorry brainiac, but this kitchen is closed!".
The plot in some points is similar to the Resident Evil 3 game, initially released for PlayStation. Besides the film's main antagonist being a zombie (ironically, Mortum and Nemesis, the main antagonist from the game, have both two different forms that they use in battles), there was a part in the movie where Commander Kilgore wanted to blow up the whole Copper Canyon with a missile so the zombie infestation wouldn't go any further, similar to when Raccon City would be entirely devastated by a missile because of the same reasons.
The illustration.
The figure seen on Mortum's past is a reference to Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. The illustration is based on the ideal proportions of a man's body, which might make an allusion to Mortum's mission to perfect the human animal.
It is the second movie where N-Tek doesn't appears doesn't appears during important events. This is most likely because of the budget.
In UK, some parts of the movie were cut, most likely due to the time limit. For example, in the first minutes of the movie, the moment when Mortum's hand arised from its grave was cut and skipped to when he was already getting out of it.
In Latin America, when the movie was transmitted by Cartoon Network, some parts were edited or cut by unknown reasons. For example, when Mortum's nephew was revealing the villain's past, the part where the Connect-Tek explodes on his face was edited to only one explosion that faded to black.
File:Reference - L'Étranger vs Max.pngWhen Tempestra uses her electric whip to attack Mortum, his chest glows. It makes an allusion to the first fight of Max vs L'Étranger (Mortum is based off on him) from the first episode from the classic series, entitled as "Strangers".
