![]() In principle this must work out properly, since I'm certain that this didn't bother me as a five-year-old, but all these years into adulthood, I am more just kind of stunned and dazzled - not even in a bad way - by the unrelenting speed with which the 84-minute feature races through plot points and new narrative sequences. Having long since mislaid the ancient memories that would tell me exactly who they are, I confess to finding much of The Transformers almost mystifying in how damn little sense it makes it's a constant barrage of visual, auditory, and narrative information that feels like it's sweeping us away on a tidal wave more than presenting a chain of events for us to follow. Not to mention that the new toys are all introduced, while the old toys simply show up as though we'll know exactly who they are. One cannot help but notice the way that every character is referred to by their given name repeatedly, especially when we're meeting them for the first time, the better to remember which one is which when Mom is helping you look on the higher store shelves. I'm not going to pretend that The Transformers: The Movie isn't precisely what it is: it's selling a product. So surely there must be something going on here.Īnd for sure, there's definitely something. The other thing the anecdote tells is that, despite, this, people did care, and there was a backlash because of just how much people cared. So that's what we're dealing with: not merely a product for which artistry wasn't expected, it is maybe fair to call it a product from which artistry was deliberately banished. That anybody would care about this toy commercial enough to bother having a backlash at all was simply not part of their calculation. For Hasbro and their Japanese partners at Takara, the reason to do a movie was less for the sake of the movie, than for having a grand-scale clearance event ushering out the old toys and announcing the even better new toys that you could go right to the store and buy on your way home from the theater. None of which should distract from the point: it is a toy commercial, and anything else it might do was a second-order priority in comparison. ![]() The Transformers, which aired 98 episodes between 19 (the film was released, and took place, between the second and third seasons), is not the most egregious of these, though it may be the most recognisable, and certainly has had the longest cultural footprint. It has been noted many times that American children's television animation in the 1980s, much more that at any other period in history, was dominated by advertisements: many of the best-loved cartoon series were thinly-veiled toy commercials and sometimes "thinly-veiled" would be paying them a compliment. ![]() This tells us the two most important things: first, obviously, that the Hasbro people had absolutely no interest in this film as anything whatsover other than product. The anecdote that I think most faultlessly sums up everything there is to say about The Transformers: The Movie, a 1986 feature cartoon adapted from a television series based upon a toy line, is that the Hasbro toy company executives who paid for it and were very excited to see it usher in a new product line were completely unprepared for the outrageous backlash from upset fans and their parents when the series' main character, a space robot who turns into a semi truck, was killed at the break between the first and second acts (the parents also had a separate backlash, when a film that could not possibly be more narrowly aimed at the 10-and-under set, in addition to killing off a beloved character, had another character yell "oh, shit!"). A review requested by Jack, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.ĭo you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
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