Normally I'd let this go unexplained,
because really, we're all obsessed fanboys and fangirls of something,
and for some reason, mine's the robots in disguise. But my dedication
to the franchise isn't just a nostalgic run down memory lane, where I
can pretend to be a kid again. Nor is it an admiration of high forms
of entertainment. (I've seen the movies and seen a lot of the
cartoons... I know that's not true. =P ) Every fan has their reasons
to love something, and I know quite a few of you out there really
couldn't give a crap or less about the Transformers that I often
bring up in conversations a few times too many. But this is
Christmas, so I figured I'd explain why this interest in a toyline
doesn't seem to go away as I get older. I'm going to break this up
into a five part series, as this takes place over the course of
almost thirty years... And let's face it, I get long winded in these
posts as it is! Hopefully by the end, my mindset will make a little
more sense to some of you.
Now the first thing I need to explain
is that there's been SEVERAL times I've decided to leave the
fandom... Retiring my collection to boxes in the closet, leaving out
a select few for memory's sake. But here's the funny thing: I'm in my
late 30s, and every time I plan to move on, it shows up and becomes a
source of strength for me. At every major point and junction in my
life, they've been there. Right now, a couple of the more cynical
ones among you are snickering and rolling your eyes... Well, I'm glad
I gave you a laugh. Here's my history with the franchise, and why
it's so important to me...
I grew up in a lower middle-class
family. We weren't poor, but we weren't loaded either. But I made do
with my toys with a vivid imagination. Like most kids from the 80's,
I had the interest in Transformers and G.I. Joe. I never really was
much of a He-Man fan, as until the Lord of the Rings movies, I never
really gave too much of a crap about fantasy. Being part of the Star
Wars generation, I loved almost anything to do with science fiction
and space in general. I was obsessed with NASA and the shuttle
missions. (Seriously, I cannot explain how pissed off I am about how
pathetic NASA's become over the last two decades. But that's a rant
for a later day.) So naturally, Transformers being the science
fiction brand of the two popular toys, I leaned toward it a bit more.
G.I. Joe eventually became a comic I just read, but Transformers was
an entire franchise I loved, before I even knew what a franchise was.
(I technically got started on the Go-Bots, but to my nine year old
mind, I just considered them smaller Transformers. Little did I know
that decades later, they were going to be retroactively included into
the franchise...) I had the usual... Optimus Prime, Prowl, Bumblebee
(I had the red one), Sideswipe, Hound... I always preferred the cars
over the jets. Probably because to me, cars were something I could
see every day, and I knew how big they were. A jet, except for the
passenger jets my dad would take out of the airport, I never even
seen one up close. So it made perfect sense to me for Starscream, who
turned into an F-15 to be the same height in robot mode as
Sunstreaker.
 |
| OMNOMNOMNOM |
In 1986. I had just switched schools
and I sort of an outcast. (Nerd boy, huge glasses, bad fashion...
Remember this was the 80s. This was not considered adorkable. This
was was the opposite.) I didn't get along with my fellow students,
and my few friends I had were at my old school... I had no friends. I
was beaten up every other day. It's hard to imagine this presently,
as I probably tower over most of them by a good foot now. The only
thing I had was this stupid toy. And then... And a certain animated
movie came out. This movie... It's easy to point out how stupid it
is... It IS a dumb movie. However, there's things that happened in
that movie that did not happened anywhere else. We've all had
cartoons where they made a theatrical movie for it. Be it Smurfs,
Digimon, Pokemon, My Little Pony, even Power Rangers. But (and
Transfans, back me up on this) NONE of them ever did things like the
Transformers movie did. We opened to a giant planet eater. Oh sure,
we've had planet eaters like Galactus before, but none of them ever
just went up to the planet and started mowing on it. He was literally
EATING the planet. Add in the music was this haunting symphony, mixed
in with the cheesiest of 80's Power Rock... Add in the fact that the
animation was this unique mixture of that neat sparkly glows that
only the 80s cartoons could do and heavy shadows, making this
beautiful combination of light and dark that we hadn't seen before.
Now, on top of that, add in the fact that a bunch of well loved
characters got killed and in some cases, killed very harshly. There
was stories about how children were psychologically scarred from the
death of Optimus Prime, and it was a pretty intense death... If not a
little hamfisted. It expanded the mythology beyond just robots
fighting each other, to include magic, mystery, concepts about the
origin of their species... It was, really unique. If you were a
Transformers fan from that time, you know that feeling I'm talking
about. If you're not... The best way I can explain it is this:
Imagine you've only been exposed to Batman through the Adam West
show. It's action and adventure, but no one ever really gets hurt.
It's just a silly show you like. Then you get the movie and it's the
Tim Burton flick. And you have Batman wearing a black suit of body
armor, people dying (gruesomely at times), everything is dark and
stylish, looking nothing like you've seen before. Now imagine if it
was the same universe... It would blow your mind. That's what the '86
TF movie did to us.
This started a love affair I have with
animation. I started noticing the lack of quality in other shows.
When you're a kid, you really don't care that Huckleberry Hound is
basically animated by three guys during their lunch break... But when
the new shows after the Transformers movie started, that's when I
started noticing this stuff. I was like “You did good there before.
Why's this look like crap now?” (I didn't understand the idea of
animation budgets at the time.) But it was the beginning. I started
noticing things in art. Highlights, shading, when silhouettes could
be used and when they shouldn't. It sounds silly, but that movie was
the beginning of me noticing art... The next movie to push me over
the edge to want to be a cartoonist would come with 1989's The Little
Mermaid... But it started with the robots.
But it wasn't just the animation, as I
was also interested in the stories that was going on. The third
season of the show generally is considered the weakest to many
people, and for good reasons. But for me, it was the most
'universe-building' season. We learned more about who the
Transformers were and how they got there than we ever had in the
previous two seasons combined. The story was becoming deeper and more
involved. As the toyline got more and more expansive, so did the
cartoon. This sparked an interest in me about this fictional
universe, the way the Hobbit, Harry Potter, Star Wars and others did
for their fans. I know there's a few of you that still are thinking
that it's just a toy cartoon, and I understand. But I wasn't the only
one that this franchise touched. (I'm sure there's a Stan Bush joke
there, but I can't think of it.) There's a reason they made three of
these movies and the cartoons are still going on... It sparked a
creative interest in it's fans. Then right when the cartoon and toy
reached an apex of interest, where we got this new planet called
Nebulon, with Headmasters and Targetmasters, and all these new and
interesting things...
 |
| Spacehikers... What the hell? |
...It ended. Just stopped. No more. I
felt cheated. The toys and comics were still going on... But let's be
honest, the comics at that time, weren't the greatest stories in the
world. Those who read it, it was after the introductions of the
Headmasters but before the buildup to the Underbase Saga. It was...
Boring. Literally, I read some of those issues recently, and there's
a whole slew of things I totally forgot about, including the
Spacehikers, Ca$h and Carnage, and Berko and the Circus. (If you're
reading this, not knowing what these are and thinking that these
sound stupid... Don't feel bad. They are.) So the cartoon ended and
the comic was unfulfilling. I was left with two options: Quit the
toys like everyone else did at this time... Or make up my own
stories. I didn't have many friends, so I figured this would be a
better use of my time, than sitting around watching reruns of “You
Can't Do That On Television”.
So I sat down, and I'd think about what
I wanted the stories to be. Some of this was pretty bad, but some of
it was pretty creative I think. (There was some stuff I came up with
that I would find out later on was pretty much the plot to
Transformers: Victory, a show I wouldn't even know existed for at
least ten more years. Maybe someday, I'll have to sit down and write
that stuff out for y'all, if you're interested.) At first I tried to
make do with enacting them with my toys, but at time went on... I
found that limiting. So I started down that road of fanfiction and
fanart. Yes, you read that right... The origin of my interest in
making comic stories came down to me being disappointed in the
existing comics out there. You have no idea how much this has been a
repeated motif over my lifetime.
And those Marvel comics never got any
better... Or did they?
We'll continue this in Part 2.
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