Before I begin - since I will be discussing a Hasbro property, I want to bring up the fact that staff at Wizards of the Coast, a Hasbro subsidiary, have successfully won a union and are now bargaining for a contract. You should support the union here.
The 1986 Transformers show lurked over my nerd-dom for a long time. I got into the franchise in the early 2000s as an impressionable preschooler who dove headfirst into the 2001 Robots in Disguise show (does anyone else remember that one?), and then loved Armada and was more intermittently into Energon and Cybertron. I got rid of my Transformers toys in 2006ish, and then was left to look longingly and regretfully at the toys released for the Michael Bay movies. Even then, I could tell there was something off about those films (I rewatched them recently and concluded that they’re not terrible but they are seriously hampered by being late 2000s blockbusters but that is an argument for another day), but I enjoyed them as impressionable boys do. All of those, though, I knew ultimately came from this cartoon from before I was born: The Transformers, released in 1983.
I wasn’t entirely unaware of the contents of that show when I was a kid; my parents bought me a video tape of the 1986 movie as well as another with two episodes (City of Steel and A Prime Problem), which together formed my view of that show for a long time. I remember being spellbound by the animation of the movie, and bits of those episodes stayed with me as half-remembered snippets for over twenty years (like Long Haul’s line in the former of the aforementioned episodes “Remove! Remove! Always remove! I didn’t join this outfit to be a dump truck! For whatever reason, I also remembered Mixmaster’s particular verbal tic in that episode and that episode alone). But then, last year, I finally got around to playing War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron, both great games that take a military science fiction approach to the basic conceit of Transformers, and I felt that, at some point, I should actually get around to watching the cartoon that started it all (along with the eighties Marvel comics, of course). And then, to my joy, it turns out Hasbro put the entire show, excepting the movie, on one of their YouTube channels. I went on this quest in earnest.
The thing that struck me again and again about this show is how clearly very few people involved in its creation actually gave a shit about it as a work of art. Every comment one of the writers, Donald Glut, made about the show in retrospect sounds like more polite versions of “why do you still give a shit about this?” Glut, whose most prominent work is probably the novelization to The Empire Strikes Back, nevertheless created several characterizations and wrote several memorable episodes, which to me is a sign of how good he is; even his phoned-in scripts are entertaining. The animation is often clearly phoned-in, with many, many obvious errors with little regard to consistency or continuity. More broadly, there’s a sort of slap-dash quality to the writing, not necessarily the dialogue (which is usually serviceable if never particularly deep), but rather the coherence of the world. You have Atlantis out of nowhere in one episode, never mentioned again, and in another episode the main characters are sent back to Arthurian England for no particular reason.
But it’s this potpourri of SFF influences on the different episodes that I think ultimately made the cartoon, and from there the franchise, the success that it was. As I watched it, I came to understand why so many kids came to love this show, as the sheer variety of situations, the sheer diversity of the little nooks and crannies of this universe both on Earth and on Cybertron as well as elsewhere, comes together in a way that feels vast rather than inconsistent. Sure, we have talking, transforming robots at war with one another, so why not Atlantis? Why not time travel to Arthurian times? I have a hard time putting my finger on why, precisely, this worked out the way it did, but it did.
Somewhat surprisingly, most of the time the show is not obviously a toy commercial. Yes, the robots look cool and can do things, but for the most part the fast-paced adventure plots don’t feel too contrived to sell a toy (there are, of course, exceptions). The toy-driven nature of the show is much clearer when you take a look at the broader narrative arcs. The show starts with the Autobots’ ark stranded on Earth, and there is a fairly small cohort of both Autobots and Decepticons for the first season and the opening few episodes of the second season. But, after those few episodes, for no reason whatsoever there are more and more new robots, on both sides of this war, that were never established previously. The cast grows and grows, to the point that the Protectobots, a team of five Autobots that can combine, are inelegantly squeezed into the final episodes of the second season, the last before the 1986 film. This is also at the expense of human characters, several of whom appear only a few times but could have been turned into series regulars to its profit. The one who comes to mind first is Raoul, who appears in two episodes set in New York, a city which is given a certain grotty atmosphere that is ultimately a kid-friendly pastiche of a Scorsese film of that era. He is a product of that particular era in the city’s history and as such he feels rooted in a way that few human characters do. I wish we got more of him. Likewise, I wish we got more of Carly, the girl who eventually gets romantically involved with Sam Witwicky but is ultimately both more intelligent and more daring than he is (it’s why, after finishing the first two seasons, I came to see how Dark of the Moon was a massive character assassination on Carly. She is far too interesting a character to be reduced to eye candy).
Another reason the show has endured as long as it has is the voice actors. Peter Cullen and Frank Welker are legends for a reason, after all, and the voice actors more generally are one of two groups of people involved in the production of this show who are clearly giving it their all. It can be very surprising to see how certain actors provided so many voices; both the rasping voice of Megatron and the breathy voice of Soundwave are both Welker! All of these voices are unique, all capable of giving their characters a vibe, which provides a certain depth.
The other group of people who clearly gave a shit about their jobs are the composers. There were but two of them: Johnny Douglas and Robert J. Walsh, who produced the wide variety of background music in the series. What struck me, looking on from forty years in the future, is how much of it is orchestral. You’d think that your giant transforming robot show would have a lot of synthesizers, more electronic music, to go with the artificial nature of the protagonists. There is some of that, yes, but for the first two seasons the score is overwhelmingly recorded via orchestra, which felt like a sixties World War II movie - tell me this doesn’t sound like something out of the golden age of those films. There are even leitmotifs! There are bits for triumph, and for planning, and for panic. The spacier third season changed this, halfway through, to a soundtrack with more synthesizers that quoted liberally from the score of the 1986 movie, which worked for the pulpier feel (the particular sound of the old score just felt out of place in the new setting, feeling less John Williams and more Ernest Gold).
I didn’t binge this show and I think that was the right call; I watched one or two episodes a day, mostly, with the exception of multi-episode events which I watched the whole way through in one sitting. I think this was the right call; these older series, with less connective tissue between episodes (and frankly a raft of continuity issues), benefit from letting the characters stay in your mind a while, so that the underlying repetitive structures don’t become too obvious. I started in January and ended in April, and remained mostly consistent to the one episode per day rule. It became a ritual I looked forward to, for as long as it lasted.
And this, of course, brings us to the movie, and what a movie it is. The movie is the first two seasons of the show, but more epic - better animation, better voice acting, better writing (none perfect, mind you, but definitely on a higher plane). It’s a better movie than it is a toy commercial, seeing how Hasbro treated its characters like the disposable toys they thought they were, rather than the beloved icons of childhood the children in question did. And so, the deaths of Optimus Prime and so many other stalwarts of the cartoon were decreed with no thought to the fact that people actually loved them, to be replaced with shiny new toys with not enough writing done to make them lovable.
(in fairness to them, Hasbro has tried to make up for it)
I had watched the movie on VHS as a kid several times without the benefit of familiarity with the series before it; now that I have, I realized what I was missing. The conflict between the Autobots and the Decepticons in those early seasons is a conflict fought under conditions of utter scarcity; their wars are fundamentally for fuel, regularly raiding power plants and the like for the bare necessities of their continued existence. There is a sparseness to those seasons that doesn’t really come into relief until you compare them with the movie, which begins with a lush view at a fully functional Autobot base on the moons of Cybertron with the stated intention of soon liberating the planet from the clutches of the Decepticons. The music in that sequence, a soaring number by Vince DiCola, is designed to highlight the awe of this new state of affairs, the rough-and-tumble Ark of the series replaced with Cybertronian civilization in its resplendent glory. The same goes for Autobot City, which is more detailed than anything that came before it, and the battle for that city is a crowning achievement of the franchise.
I have a vivid memory of watching this movie as a kid and finding the Quintessons to be terrifyingly fascinating, all through that one scene where Kup and Hot Rod are thrown to the sharkticons. The way that these various scary faces coexist around a central bulb with tentacles, each a personality that bickers with the others, lodged itself in my mind and never really let go. That’s why I found the way the Quintessons were portrayed in the third season to be so disappointing; none of them get a name, none of them really get a personality, and as such they are just sort of a blob.
After the movie, the third season felt like a step down. The movie wasn’t free of animation errors but neither did it look as shoddy as the rest of the cartoon could look. The third season, the one that is the most openly space opera, looks all too fake. This is unfortunate, as the upgraded animation of the movie really sold the vastness of space and therefore the vastness of the story, something that the third season is lacking. You have the growing pains of the new cast; this season has a strong idea for a cast dynamic, with the rookie Rodimus Prime contrasting the experienced, firm-handed Optimus, while leading and serving the more experienced Kup and Ultra Magnus. There’s also one of the few female transformers, Arcee, and the first to be a major part of the cast. Not unlike Avatar: the Last Airbender, Rodimus’ arc is about the burdens of being the chosen one.
In terms of deeper themes, there are two major ones beyond the obvious one of “buy Transformers toys.” Much of this show, if you think about it for a bit, is about anxieties regarding the nature of industrial civilization as something capable of both great accomplishment but also great destruction. This becomes very obvious when you consider the Constructicons; I find it very telling that construction vehicles were chosen to be Decepticons. All six of them have vehicle modes that can be used to create things, oftentimes good things, but together they can combine into a gigantic robot literally named Devastator. This suggests a dialectical relationship between the positive and negative aspects of the second industrial revolution; that which creates can also devastate.
There’s one particular episode in the earlier part of the second season that has a heavy subtext about this, namely The Master Builders. In this episode, Autobots Grapple and Hoist, who turn into a crane and a tow truck, respectively, are possessed by the idea of building a solar power collection device, and in the process of doing so are offered help by aforementioned Constructicons, who claim to have defected. The episode bounces between these two groups, one building for altruistic reasons and the other building for sinister reasons. Again and again, you are confronted with their fundamental similarity. The difference is the choices they make with their awesome powers of creation. Throughout this episode, I was reminded of The Bridge on the River Kwai, particularly the character of Nicholson, played by Alec Guinness, the British engineer captured by the Japanese whose love of building is harnessed by his captor and used against his own people. Both Nicholson and the two Autobots are entranced by the act of creation, but refuse to think about on whose behalf they are creating, and to the detriment of their own.
The other big thematic category that appears a lot in this show is the cost of warfare on the environment and on the combatants. The conflict between the Autobots and Decepticons is a resource war for their own survival. Their sustenance is energon, and energon can be created from terrestrial sources of energy, such as oil or hydroelectric power. A surprisingly high percentage of episodes in the first two seasons are about raids on power plants and the like, and the results are always destructive to the environment around them. One episode has the Insecticons running roughshod over Indonesia, and another features Constructicons drilling into the Earth’s core. Both sides of this war are concerned with survival, but they differ in what they are willing to justify in its name.
I finished this show with an understanding of just why this toyline became a cultural juggernaut. When you get down to it, the show is simply fun, and in a way that creates a universe that feels like it could be endlessly explored. It’s rough around the edges, yes, and it’s a bit janky, yes, but by the end I found it quite charming if you can stomach something which was obviously created to sell toys. By the end of the last episode, there was part of me, somewhat surprisingly, that was sad it was over.
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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy
