Yeah, that's the stuff...
UPDATE: Forgot this part. Kup and Hot Rod were awesome. Good times...
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
This is truly excellent. Thank you!
I'm putting that in the DVD player when I get home. It may be sad that I've never seen Citizen Kane, but I've seen Orson Welles as Unicron dozens of times.
My Megatron toy was my prized possesion as a young lad. It was such a cold blooded toy. Mostly metal, a .45 with a scope and a silencer...god I loved that toy...
"Proceed to your oblivion...", proceed indeed!
"Wanna bet?"
Fucking love Starscream, that backstabbing little weasel.
I'm frigging thirty years old and Optimus Prime's plowing through Decepticons to that corny "The Touch" song is still awesome.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYAAbbuEpnw
You will never think of that song the same again...
Aesthetically, what Michael Bay did to Transformers was an atrocity. I don't care so much for the plot, since Transformers plots have been both terrible (OG cartoon and animes) to amazing (the WWII GI Joe vs. Transformers run, Beast Wars)
But seriously, he took iconic, enduring images had turned them into mobile shrapnel. WTF, Bay, WTF.
What is this WWII GI Joe vs. Transformers you speak of?
And, more importantly, is it available on the intertubes?
It's a comic book: http://www.ntfa.net/ntfa/comics/dreamwave/tfgijoe.php
To me the story in it was pretty good but the amazing artwork was what put it over the top.
Gotta also recommend the first 6-issue run of The War Within: http://www.ntfa.net/ntfa/comics/dreamwave/warwithin.php
This was set in the earliest days of the Autobot-Decepticon war, and told the origin of Optimus Prime. Also /agree on Beast Wars, it's a case in point on how good writing makes the difference even in a formulaic kids action cartoon (ok technically it's vintage 1997 CGI).
With the Michael Bay movies, there's a definite lack of respect for storycraft (though some vestiges of it early in the first movie), but for me that's merely disappointing. What irks is the visual design of the characters - jumbled up blobs of parts that all look the same from a distance and evoke no emotion. Fitting, I suppose, if most of them are there to just say two lines (if that), do some neat trick, then get blown up.
Iconic, enduring images brought to you by Hasbro.
True, but c'mon. Saying that commercialism nullifies artistic quality is just a non-starter. Especially since the original Optimus Prime is one of the truly iconic and enduring characters of our times.
He's basically a robot version of Superman with all the values attached, and I wouldn't be surprised if my grandchildren are still collecting Optimus Prime figures decades on down.
My brother were kids when this movie came out and we had tons of Transformers. Our VHS tape of this movie was so worn out, there's a spot in it where the tracking skipped that we were so used to when we saw a new copy of it, we were confused!
When I left for college, he was in highschool, and when finals rolled around for the first time, I got a package in the mail. Turns out he had gone through our old toy bin, found the Optimus Prime we had, and mailed it to me for good luck. God is that the most perfect mix of lame and awesome ever?
Either way, Michael Bay has done nothing but ruin this franchise, even if it was just an excuse to sell kids toys. Good thing this movie's on DVD, without that tracking problem -- I'll be watching this tonight too!!
I think we're acting a little fuddy-duddy about this thing. In the sense that the entire point was to sell toys to kids, Bay didn't ruin anything but rather took everything to a new level. It's not like my nephews were playing with my old Transformers three years ago. Think about all the albums that ruined/ killed rock or hip hop. We're nostalgic for v1.0, tolerate v2.0 and think v6.5 is the end of the world.
thank you...
I guess, but there's a few people here at least, who are older and still love it. I can't imagine that when kids (like 10 year olds or whatever) now who have seen the Bay movies are 30, that they'll give a rat's ass about it - I think that's maybe a little what's different, for me at least.
That movie was traumatic and amazing. I was way too young to watch that many beloved characters die in a row, after dozens of cartoons wherein no one ever, ever died. I was absolutely terrified for every single character by the end, including Cybertron itself, because they'd proven they were totally willing to do it.
Optimus' death made me cry, while Galvatron snuffing Starscream was just hardcore. Heavy stuff for a kid starting grade school. I don't know that my parents ever knew just what they'd let me watch that summer.
I can't believe in all the hype for the the last two movies that this is the first clip that I have seen from the original Transformers: The Movie. The movie is genius; it was the first cartoon I ever saw where beloved characters died. I'm reasonably certain that a chunk of my moral compass was set by this film: protect your friends and loved ones at all costs; everyone and everything dies; people who have been openly scheming against you forever never stop scheming until they throw you from the train; compassion and love of your fellow beings are all that stand between good and evil; and never stop fighting the bad guys because when they win, they destroy everything in their paths.
Oh and The Touch will be playing at my funeral. That song rocks.
Which reminds me of another epic moral jaw-dropping first for me in that film. There was this one robot, sole survivor of his now-extinct race (whose planet got eaten in the teaser just to establish that Unicron does not mess around). He was found in a prison cell, awaiting trial for criminal trespass,, where some of Our Heroes got captured after themselves crashlanding on the Quinteson planet. Even as a wee kid, I knew that his narrative role was supposed to be befriending Our Heroes, getting rescued, and getting justice for his people by being crucial to beating Unicron.
So the trial starts, with Our Heroes watching. Lone survivor stands on an execution plank, and the robo-bailiff asks the five-faced Quinteson judge for a verdict. The judge spins until a face like a skull wearing a pharaoh's helm stares forward. The judge proclaims, "Innocent!" ... AND THEN THEY DROP THE EXECUTION PLANK. And he dies. And then the trial of Our Heroes starts.
I was stunned and horrified. They'd completely upended the way it was supposed to go (again!). The juxtaposition of a Justice System rendering the correct verdict while imposing murderous injustice burned into me with more outrage at a fictional System than probably anything until the Pegasus prisoner torture-rape in Battlestar Galactica. Heady stuff. Especially for a kids cartoon created to push toys.
Michael Bay is no genius, that's for sure, but he sure knows how to use a crane. You gotta give him that.
You need to see this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq1_6D9QS9Y
Outside of the weird surreal ass dance number in the middle of the movie, this movie actually holds up quite well. Unlike the GI Joe movie which is just terrible.
Maybe the best cartoon movie I saw as a kid. Definitely the best cartoon movie based off a cartoon TV series. That GI Joe one was pretty damn decent though IIRC (cobra-la and all that).
Cool.
As someone who actually saw this in the theaters when it originally came out, had it on VHS and now has it on DVD, thank you for posting this.
When I was twelve, I considered myself a smart, canny city kid. I rode the bus to magnet school downtown, commuting like a grownup from my distant neighborhood at the end of the Orange Line. I knew who the mayor was, and harbored a child's version of cynicism about Vietnam and Nixon and inflation (thanks to too many parental dinner table conversations). I made a connection between my dad's intermittent unemployment and doing my homework--it was up to me to work hard and take care of business, because the grown-ups certainly didn't have it all under control.
So I was kinda ashamed that before tackling said homework in the afternoons, I watched and loved this lowtech epic Japanime about . . a spaceship made out of a World War II battleship. I know. But love it I did. Maybe the child in me really wanted stories about being cool and heroic and saving everybody that didn't involve turning into an adult and years and years of time. And math, and Latin.
So, your post about robots makes me a little more sympathetic to that past version of myself. Not to mention myself now. Hey, if you can admit to your robot-loving past in the digital pages of The Atlantic Monthly, then I can, uh, also do that.
Plus, realize the power of a kickass theme song:
We're off to Outer Space
We're leaving Mother Earth
*TO SAVE THE HUMAN RACE!!!!!*
The transformers soundtrack is probably the best musical thing to be produced in the 80's.