How the Transformers Changed My Life
The Transformers: The Movie (1986) was the first cultural product I immersed myself in so fully that I stopped caring whether it was good or not.
By JONATHAN SIRCY
Some cultural either/or decisions function as synecdoches for your personality. Do you like the Beatles or Stones? Celtics or Lakers? Kate or Rooney Mara?
Let me add another to the list. For Americans of a certain age, your choice of Transformers or GI Joe is an equally telling proclivity. The 1986 animated film The Transformers: The Movie (1986) helped me make my choice.
Transformers and GI Joe might at first appear to be different versions of the same Reagan-presidency/military-industrial-complex/total-market-saturation era. Hasbro made both toy lines. Marvel issued both comic books. Sunbow animated both television series and animated movies. But these connections only served to underline their basic differences, and this is something I intuitively grasped when I saw the the Transformers movie the first time at the age of 5.
Put simply, GI Joe is Dwayne Johnson while Transformers is Shia Labeouf.
GI Joe is for conservative frontrunners while Transformers is for progressive geeks.
GI Joe is NSA. Transformers is NASA.
And I say this as someone who owned both lines of toys, read both comic series, and watched both television series (which is as good a way as any to say I’m internally conflicted 98% of the time).
I grew up in a conservative evangelical church that forbid its congregants to go to movie theaters. This subsequently gave every movie I got to watch the aura of forbidden fruit. When I saw The Transformers: The Movie just after it had been released on home video, I fell into outer space.
The Transformers: The Movie was the first cultural product I immersed myself in so fully that I stopped caring whether it was good or not (later I learned that critics universally panned it upon its release). I didn’t purposefully try to memorize the entire script so much as I started remembering its plot points and dialogue as I would the past day’s events.
I would only play Joes with the action figures. Once I saw Transformers: The Movie, I would imagine myself as the film’s combatants while humming the film’s heavy-metal (like its protagonists!) and keyboard-heavy soundtrack to myself. It was the first movie for which I was self-consciously nostalgic, and I’ve consequently owned the movie on VHS, DVD, and Blu-Ray.
My entire culture career — high or low — has been a series of Transformers-launched obsessions:
The movie introduced me to Orson Welles, who (ironically?) provided the voice for a gigantic planet-eating villain for his last official screen credit.
I could mark my own cultural maturation when I discovered why a kids movie would want the vocal talents of Robert Stack (Ultra Magnus) and Leonard Nimoy (Galvatron).
I realized why Hot Rod, a rebel Autobot with a cause, had to be voiced by Breakfast Clubber Judd Nelson.
And when in Boogie Nights’ Dirk Diggler and Reed Rothchild bent the laws of time and space by recording Stan Bush’s “The Touch” — a prominent song on the TF soundtrack — three years before it was even written (!), I knew “The Touch” was exactly what the Transformers had given me.
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