by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring

I first saw The Transformers: The Movie when I was in high school, exploring a wave of ‘80s nostalgia for my own childhood and fueled by the VH1 series I Love the ‘80s. A close friend of mine was shocked that I knew “Walk the Dinosaur” by Was (Not Was) and Paula Abdul’s “Opposites Attract” but not “The Touch” by Stan Bush: “You know, from the Transformers movie?” This was a few years before Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg would team up to launch the live action careers of both Optimus Prime and Megan Fox. I knew about Transformers, but I mostly associated them with toys I wasn’t into as a child. I barely even knew the animated series existed, since it ended when I was a year old. And so I was introduced to the power pop/hard rock mash of one of the most exuberant songs ever composed by humanity. 

In the leadup to the newest entry in the franchise, Transformers One, an animated film with a  star-studded voice cast (Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry, Scarlett Johansson, Keegan-Michael Key, Steve Buscemi, Laurence Fishburne, Jon Hamm), I thought I would revisit the first Transformers movie to see how the cultural footprint of the series has changed in the almost 40 years since its initial release. 

As I’ve mentioned previously, I was a few years too young for The Transformers animated show when I was a kid–the toys were around, but I was all in on Ghostbusters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Batman–but I’ve come to enjoy the franchise in film form. I have yet to dive into any of the television shows, but the current Transformers comic by Daniel Warren Johnson and Jorge Corona is so much fun because of the incredible artwork. One thing about Transformers that I appreciate as a franchise is that each incarnation (including that comic book) establishes its own version of the fight between the Autobots and the Decepticons, making it pretty easy for new fans to jump on board anytime a new incarnation starts.

The Transformers: The Movie is sort of an exception to this rule. Taking place in between the second and third seasons of the original animated series, it jumps ahead 20 years from season 2, and sets up an entirely new status quo. The impetus for doing so? Selling more toys. 

The Transformers series began in 1984, and, thanks to Ronald Reagan, the Federal Communications Commision (FCC) no longer cared if children’s programming was basically a half hour long commercial for toys. Most of these ‘80s properties still kicking around today–like He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, My Little Pony, and Transformers–only came into being because of the synergy that could be created through the emotional link that a narrative cartoon could develop between a child and the toys being sold. When The Transformers was being developed, the toy characters were explicitly coded in familial relationships with the human characters on the show in order to maximize those emotional connections. On the show, this was not much of a problem, narratively, because there were no character deaths in the series. However, characters like Optimus Prime, Starscream, Ironhide, Prowl, and others were killed off in the movie to clear space on toy shelves for new characters. 

Ron Friedman, writer of The Transformers: The Movie, argued against Hasbro’s bloodlust: 

One of the things in my background was an understanding of how kids connect to icons and stories. It happened when I was an architectural student at Carnegie Tech. The Provost asked me to participate in a pilot program to determine what causes children to attach themselves to comic heroes. I was sold. A couple of days a week I would interact with kids presenting them with new games, characters, and traditional icons. The department of psychology, with the school of business, would try to create a formula that assessed when kids became connected and what emotional triggers caused them to lock on. A lot of it was common sense because I had kids and saw how they responded. It was really useful because it validated what I saw myself when I as a kid connecting to various comic book, cartoon, and film characters. It gave me some insight into what I needed to do and was one of the reasons I didn’t want to kill Optimus Prime.

Optimus Prime was the transcendental figure that is the glue for every legend or story.  The transcendental character of big daddy, big brother, your personal champion, the repository of all that is good and worthy. He was the true center of the Autobot family. I think about the gathering of various comic icons and their peers as families. Who was Megatron? The worst possible father figure.  He topped King John in the days of Robin Hood. Who was Starscream? He’s Iago, the treacherous second in command. The bad uncle or younger brother who lusts after his older brother's wife. I recognized that I needed to assign family identities to characters in order to create the recognition factor that young people need. They cannot verbalize this; it’s beneath the surface. To remove Optimus Prime, to physically remove Daddy from the family, that wasn’t going to work. I told Hasbro and their lieutenants they would have to bring him back but they said no and had “great things planned.” In other words they were going to create new more expensive toys.

Kids cried in the theaters; parents were livid; and all of this likely contributed to the film’s lack of box office success. Turning animated television into theatrical movies was a relatively new idea as well. After Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear (1964), and A Man Called Flintstone (1966), only The Smurfs has made the leap for the next 20 years, until a trio of movies in 1985–He-Man and She-Ra: The Secret of the Sword, The Care Bears Movie, and Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer. Again, thank/blame Ronald Reagan accordingly, but there was cash to be had, with studios and licensors wanting to milk a fad for anything it was worth. 

All of this might make it sound like The Transformers: The Movie is a soulless cash grab. But that’s never been the impression I’ve gotten from actually viewing the film. In addition to the amount of care put into the characters by the writers, the budget for the movie was six times per minute compared to that of the television show. Animation was executed by the legendary Toei Animation Studios, and their vice president, Kozo Morishita (Dragon Ball Z), spent a year in the United States working on updating the art direction to include more details and dynamic lighting. This gives the film the feeling of a blending of western animation and anime. The level of mechanical details and density of design places this film as a sort of halfway point between Star Wars (1977) and Akira (1988). The show’s voice cast–which includes the renowned Peter Cullen and Frank Welker–was augmented by famous names like Judd Nelson (Hot Rod), Leonard Nimoy (Galvatron), Robert Stack (Ultra Magnus), and Orson Welles (Unicron). Welles infamously recorded his dialogue five days before his death in October 1985. 

As for the story itself, The Transformers: The Movie shows the heroic Autobots at their most desperate. The Decepticons have conquered the Transformers homeworld, Cybertron. When the Autobots there send a call to Earth for help, the Decepticons hijack their spaceship and use it as a Trojan horse to attack the Autobot City on Earth. The Autobot and Decepticon leaders, Optimus Prime (Cullen) and Megatron (Welker), are mortally wounded, allowing for a new status quo to begin to emerge between these warring factions. Meanwhile, the massive planet-sized Transformer, Unicron (Welles), is searching for new worlds to consume when he stumbles across the dying Megatron in deep space. Reforming him as Galvatron, Unicron sets off to devour Cybertron. Meanwhile, the Autobots regroup and head into space to stop Unicron and the Decepticons. This story is told with bright colors bordering on garish, emphasized by a hard rock soundtrack (which also features “Weird” Al Yankovic’s Devo parody, “Dare to Be Stupid.”

Critics at the time thought it was nonsense–annoying nonsense to boot. But I think that’s what I love most about it. I’ve only seen scattered episodes of the two seasons (65 episodes) of television that preceded it, but that actually enhances my enjoyment of the movie some ways. While I lack the emotional connection to the show’s characters, I love the feeling of being dropped into a world in media res and forced to sink or swim along with it. The Transformers: The Movie recaps shockingly little of what came before, laser-focused on its audience of eager eight-year-olds who carefully cut out the character bios on the back of toy packaging, collected the comic books, and debated the characters and lore on playgrounds. They showed up and were treated to a parade of character deaths, beautifully rendered in animation, and their point-of-view character, Daniel Witicky (David Mendenhall) is on the verge of tears for the entire 85 minutes. The combination of serving only its core audience and also engaging with their emotions for maximum trauma is nothing short of audacious. It is as if Empire Strikes Back had revealed that Darth Vader was Luke’s father right before killing both of them off in order to place Boba Fett and Lando as the series’ new main characters. 

All of this audaciousness comes about simply because the people hired to make this movie did their best to tell an interesting and engaging story in spite of the hardline toy sales-based mandate of their corporate masters. There are so many movies from the 1980s that are about class, consumption, and the aspirations of the middle class that are associated with the spirit of the Reagan administration (all of John Hughes’ output, Back to the Future). But The Transformers: The Movie shows war as an inevitable end point of conflict over resources disguised as ideological conflict, while the specter of ruining our planet looms ever closer. It is bleak but still offers hope that the good guys can win despite the odds. There are so many reasons for this film’s target audience, Generation X, becoming more and more conservative, but they clearly got so caught up in the spirit of who could have the most toys that they did not internalize Optimus Prime’s values. 

In an age where the cartoons and toys of the 1980s are doomed to live forever, you might as well embrace the ones that you find interesting, nostalgia or not. And for me, The Transformers: The Movie is the exact thing that could only come to exist at one point in time. In an age of deregulation, a time before intellectual property was the de facto currency in Hollywood, and when a movie could truly “Dare to be Stupid.”