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

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. ) 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.

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...

...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 two.