What's the deal with me and Transformers? Pt. 3

It was Fall of 1995 and I had just started art school. And as you see about how well I have mastered drawing, it was money well spent... *rolls eyes* Anyway, as I mentioned before, I was never the most outgoing individual. I like people, but I have this odd neurosis where I think I'm always bothering someone. I need to bring up this stuff here, because its kind of important. In high school, I thought I knew what a friend was... But apparently I had no idea. I didn't have many friends because honestly, my friends in high school were total assholes. I didn't want more people like that in my life. It really didn't help when I found out that my best from since first grade had only been hanging out with me not because he liked me, but that he felt sorry for me... Which really angered me like crazy. I literally think, even though it's been almost sixteen years since I've seen him, I would still walk the other way if he came to me. So in art school, I sort of just stayed to myself. I'm sitting there in Mrs. Lummen's color theory class, just minding my own business, learning the Fibonacci Scale, when from across the room, I hear someone talking about Bruticus. Normally when people talk about Transformers, it's usually the more popular guys: Bumblebee, Optimus, Megatron, Starscream, “the dude with the tapes in his chest”. But to call out Bruticus was a bit ear raising. So I kinda walked over to the conversation, and listened in... And eventually joined it.

This was James Suhr, who you may have remembered me talking about from time to time. Through this simple conversation about Transformers, I made my first REAL friend. One I'm still friends with today, even though he lives on the other side of the country from me. He's as big of a Transformers geek as I was, and this was something I didn't know was possible. Most hardcore Transformers geeks I knew grew out of it by their teenage years. I was a closeted Transformers nerd. And James brought me out of the closet. (Why are you looking at me like that?) I made other friends in college too, and basically, all these friends were anime nerds. We got into anime for various reasons. Some because it was violent and bloody. Some because they showed boobs. Some because it was funny. But me... It was the robots. (I know, I know. You're shocked.) The old school robots, and glints and gleans, of drawn lens flares, and metallic highlights... Not to mention Japanese music seemed to be perpetually ten years behind us in style, so it actually felt like I was watching old cartoons from my youth with my friends. It was like a childhood done all over again. Staying up late night, eating pizza, watching cartoons, making comics and lewd jokes... It was awesome. Now I was the only one of my friends that had cable. Of course I was the one still living at home, since I live in town where the art college was. (Often, my place was used as a laundromat and hanging out place. I was cool with this and so was my mom. She just wished we weren't up so late.)

So things were cool. I had friends I got along with greatly and loved. Then in early fall 1996, it happened. This silly but rather awesome CGI show came on called Beast Wars. It was Transformers... More importantly, it continued from the old show and these were their descendants. It was basically Transformers: The Next Generation. So I taped a bunch of episodes and it didn't go over too well with most of them. (Except James. He loved it from the get-go.) They all thought Rattrap was too cocky, that Optimus wouldn't have put up with him, Megatron was too cartoonish and Waspinator's voice was atrocious. (You see, the show never made it very clear that Optimus Primal and Megatron wasn't the same guys as in Generation One. We went through the entire first season thinking they were the same guys.) But slowly and surely, they warmed up to them. I'd like to think it was because it was a well created show... But I know the truth: It was Rhinox's chain guns of doom.

You have no idea how many people that show converted with that scene where he just lays into Waspinator with his chain gun for like 45 seconds, blowing off his arm. We all sat there, with our mouth agape, just staring at the screen... That they got away with this on a kids cartoon show. This was fucking awesome! And it never let up. It was this slew of nonstop adventure, and mostly it was them playing around, seeing what they could accomplish in CGI animation in 1996. People even warmed up to Rattrap! Quite literally, this show was standing out on it's own. And they threw a lot of nods to the old school guys enough that kept us interested. It was... Really cool. And I was able to share it with a bunch of friends I loved. Yeah, we had other interests too, but this is about why Transformers is important to me... Not why I liked Episode I.

Still one of the best toys ever made.

James and I (and many times my friend Nik as well) would run out to the stores and with our paychecks, buy ourselves the Beast Wars toys. We were dorks, but we didn't care. We were having fun! And we would overhear the kids saying how much they liked the show too, so it was even better for us... Because it was like we were the original pioneers of this fandom and we were passing a torch to a new generation of fans. It was something bigger than us, and at the same time, personal to us. It felt wonderful. Hell, I had forgotten how crappy the Generation 2 comic was. One of the funniest stories ever was when we had gone to Toys R Us. We were like on summer break or something and we went there to get some of the new Transmetal toys. (I don't remember what we got, just that we both got something.) The windows were down. And in the small jeep next to us, these three hot girls comes running out and piles into the jeep right next to us. Me and James, being the manly men that we were, and without saying a word to each other, we decided to keep our heads down and focus ONLY on transforming these toys, to prevent making eye contact with these girls. We already knew we looked like dorks, we figured the best way to get this over with was to make them think we were so obsessed with these toys that we didn't notice them. We still laugh our asses off over how funny the scene was.

Around this time, we had access to the interwebs at school, because we all didn't have home computers or access at home. (I know, it sounds strange to you Millennials, but home internet access is not that old. Technology advanced like crazy in the past ten years. Hell, it was during this time I made the jump from cassette tapes to CD players if that tells you anything.) So we got to use the internet for the fist time at school. I didn't bother too much with it. I only used it in between classes to look up television schedules for shows I was interested in. I never even bothered looking at the discussion forums. They might as well not even have existed at that time for me. (This is going to be a big point soon, so that's why I brought that up.) James went online and found a bunch of information on the Transformers from I wanna say the ATT usergroup... I can't be certain. But basically, it was a FAQ about Transformers. A lot of it I knew of... But there was a lot of it I didn't know about. Such as the fact that even though the show ended here in 1987, it kept going for another three to four years in Japan. Star Saber? Overlord? Dai Atlas? Violen Jigar? Who were these guys? What the hell was Planet V? What was a Brainmaster? Basically... There was more. There was so much more than I even suspected. (Ha! I bet you thought I was going to make a “more than meets the eye” reference, huh?) So, there was a season four, five and six afterall. Finding this out... It really awoke that inner child in me. I wanted to know as much as I could about this. And during this time, that's when I found out that not only did the old shows continue on beyond what we got... But it was STILL GOING ON! There was a Japanese Beast Wars show called Beast Wars II and a new one called Beast Wars Neo! Oh my God, no way!

I know, it's cheating using my own
picture as opposed to an official one,
but I've always liked this guy.

I'd hit the bootleg VHS tapes dealers and buy a couple of the Beast Wars II DVDs. It was something new... Something I hadn't seen since I was a child. The intro would come on and we'd be like “Yeah, now THIS is what we were talking about!” And then... And then we got drunken Apache... Tasmanian Kid... Moon... Good lord, this was awful and wretched... I loved it! I'd go to a comic convention, and we'd see some new toys there, of characters we had no idea who they were. An ankylosaurus? An Optimus Prime looking white lion? Hey, a penguin! Yeah, we bought them! We had no idea what their stories were. (We couldn't read or speak Japanese.) So we made them up. It was usually thanks to looking at Ben Yee's Beast Wars site that we even had names for these guys. There was this whole new world of stuff, and I had no idea where to begin. We were kids again. And that felt wonderful.

The show Beast Wars came to it's conclusion in spring of 1999, the same time my friends graduated college. (I didn't because I changed my major, so I was behind them.) Now don't get the idea that it was only JUST Transformers we engaged with each other about. In fact, it was just a small part of what we all did. We made comic books, we went to conventions, we listened to music, we took road trips... We had fun. It wasn't one thing but many. However this retrospective is supposed to be me talking about my connection with this franchise, and it would be silly to spend several paragraphs of talking about Escaflowne, me dressing like a Blues Brother, Chicken Burger incidents, working in a comedy club, Episode I, mistakes of dying my hair dark colors, and kicking myself because I didn't try steal Angela from her boyfriend. In time, all but two of them would eventually move away. Sometimes they were charming, and sometimes they were jerks. Sometimes they were annoying, and sometimes they were the most awesome people on the face of the Earth. I still talk to some of them online or over the phone, but I miss them. It was a feeling of friendship and family that I've never had before or since, and if there's any in the justice in the universe, you'll have had (or will have) people just as wonderful in your life as well. And it was all started, because of a shared memory from our youth about a silly toyline.

Now this would normally be where the “Stand By Me” story would end. We'd all go our own ways, and we'd grow up and live our lives, and one of our kids would ask us if we want to go play, and we'd turn off the computer or something. But there's the thing... The story never ends with “the end” because it never ends. Life goes on, whether we got a happy ending or not. And this is no exception. Fall of 1999 brought us a new era of my life, which would drastically alter it to a point I can't remember what it was like before: I got my first computer. And that's when I discovered internet discussion forums, Beast Machines, Car Robots, Transfandom.com, Botcon and OTFCC convention trips, Dreamwave, trips around the world, almost getting married, and my comic book art changing for the better... All having their genesis with these dumb robots.

Yeah, part four is gonna be kinda long.