Transformers

One of the reasons that I wanted this kinda format and site was that I wanted to be able to give my thoughts on things that I was interested in. Both now and when I was a kid. A large amount of the nostalgia and desire to talk about this is stuff was generated from a site called X-Entertainment. I guy there named Matt has written a lot of stuff not only about the transformers, but other things that were happening at the time that he was a kid (which is about the time that I was a kid). I don’t want to recreate his work or write like him, but I do want to tell you some things that I think about this stuff as well.

Today I found a site called TFArchive. I spent a large amount of the morning looking through the content that is availible on that site and it has sparked a couple things in my mind that I think are interesting. Some it is about Transformers specifically and some is about story-lines in general.

When I was a kid I missed out on the whole Robotech wave of Sci-Fi. I was just getting old enough to understand what was going on when FASA started taking the ashes of Robotech and creating the BattleTech Universe. Todd’s brother was the first to tell me that some of the ‘Mechs in Battletech were little more than Aerotech fighters from Robotech. He lent me a book which contained the whole history of the Robotech series in it. Read in this format it is more of a story and less of an action cartoon series, but I was still able to get the drift of the series. The interesting part of reading it was that as the story went on good characters started getting killed off. What I have found from reading this style stories since then is that it really isn’t a big deal for good characters to get killed in storylines like this. I was reminded of that today while I was looking at the storylines from the transformer television shows and comic books. In “Transformers the Movie” in the opening 30 minutes almost every Autobot that people knew of got killed. The only one that even got a good death scene was Optimus Prime. The rest (Brawn, Ironhide, Wheeljack, Prowl, Huffer, and Ratchet) all got smoked without a second thought. Now when I was a kid I thought that was pretty bad, but now after I have read the plotline from the comics that seems lightweight. In the comics Optimus Prime is killed and resurrected more times than Freddy and Jason combined. There are more deaths in this storyline then there are in the Godfather movies. One of the few Transformers to actually make it through the whole transformer storyline in both television and comic was Soundwave the Decepticon tape deck. Almost all of the other Transformers either got killed and then reactivated eventually or just got smoked. I now understand why this stuff is done. Because they have to introduce new characters into the stories so that they can sell more toys. It has been acknowledged by some of the people that wrote the movies, television shows and the comics that they were often forced into plotlines so that new toys could be put into the market.

The other thing I noticed is how cool this still seems. Maybe I am having my mid-life crisis now (which sucks since that means I am only going to live to 44 or so) or maybe these things are really just that cool and fun to watch, but I find myself downloading episodes from the television shows and finding people that have scanned the comics into their computers. It is a blast to get to watch some of this stuff with a different perspective than when I watched them before. It also makes me wonder though, what if it were possible to resurrect these shows and storylines? There are hundreds if not thousands of fan sites for Transformers on the internet. There is also a push to bring out new episodes on regular television (Actually I think there is already a new season on, though the bots are more Japanamation style) since the new wave of children have not seen this stuff and will most likely go into a Transformer phase as well if it is put out. The problem with that though is that the shows will again be driven by the desire to sell toys and action figures. Since I am sure HASBRO still owns the right to the Transformer name it would have to be underground style but would it be possible to write scripts/stories for the Transformer universe that didn’t revolve around new toys? Are there such things already out there? I am sure that there are people that are TF fans that can draw, so are there already stories in the making? Google fails to give me these answer readily, but I am investigating. 🙂