Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

I'm gonna level with you.

This is about the Transformers Movie from 1986. The 30th Anniversary of the Movie was a month ago and I just happened to rewatch the movie the other night.

There is a part of me that feels so nostalgic for the past. One of the biggest parts of my childhood was Transformers. There was a time when I knew all the characters and could tell them apart from the animation errors and laugh in hilarity as someones voice comes out from the wrong character. I even talked in one of the earlier entries here on Gaia about how I viewed the evolution of the very first season pretty much until the movie.

This movie is one staple in my life. Walk with me down memory lane for a little bit, will you?

When I was 3 years, I'd watched Transformers on my brothers old recorded VHS tapes. Sitting in front of a wood paneled CRT television, I would be there everyday entranced by the Autobots and Decepticons and their fight even though I was honestly too young to understand what was happening. Also I should mention we only had the first 3 episodes recorded, but back then it seemed as though I could have watched those episodes for an eternity.

When I was 4, barely able to see the above the bottom two racks of movies at the video store, we had gone to Jumbo Video (think Canadian Blockbuster) to get our weekend movie fodder and maybe a video game. It was my turn to choose (I realize my family was super fair and forgiving because even though I was 4 and my older siblings were 6 and 8, I still had got to choose movies that we watched together, I took my decisions extremely seriously) I found a movie that I wanted to rent. The Transformers movie.
I didn't actually recognize the characters on the cover, but I knew Transformers and I knew this would be amazing. Keep in mind, this is September 1994. In a year, the few re-runs that they had shown on the space channel were few and far between. but I knew enough of the lore thanks to my brother who had seen most of the series by this point. Even my 8 year old sister had managed to be old enough to watch the last run of the transformers series in Canada. So we all heartily agreed, excited that we had never even heard of a movie until that very moment.

We get settled in for the night, still in front of that gigantic wooden CRT TV and popped it in the VCR. And I think that was the first I felt true terror. If you don't know the first scene of this movie, it's about Unicron eating the planet Lithone. The movie opens with a zoom in to a planet with unique cybernetic lifeforms going about their daily business, kids playing, people laughing and chilling and suddenly they spot A GINORMOUS WEIRD LOOKING PLANET COMING AT THEM. The planet gets devoured and we get a neat tour of Unicron's insides as the planet dissolves and digests inside of him. You can see that scene here!
I was horrified and terrified. That one planet ate the other planet,and he's biiig. Subsequently, every other time we rented this movie (which was often) I fast forwarded through this part because it was too intense for me. I probably didn't actually that see that part again until I was around 9 years old. This is immediately followed by MOST ROCKING ******** THEME SONG EVER COMPOSED. Listen to the Transformers Theme Song by Lion here. I've listened to this song for 20 years and never get tired of it. I just, hnnng, love it. It's. so. ********. good. Spoilers in the video, btw. But it has the best sound quality.

The movie was a brutal departure of expectations. I thought I was going to have a fun romp with my favorite characters, only to see everyone die. The equivalent is to have a light hearted kids show with a lot bumbling and good vs evil and then just ripping everyone's throats out in glorious 24 frames per second and 16:9 ratio.

This movie is infamous for what it did. Now, most people know they murdered the poor autobots en masse due to executive meddling and pushing a new toy line for the airing season. Optimus Prime dies in the first 25 minutes of the movie for ******** sakes and traumatized an entire generation of young kids. I DEFINITELY WAS AFFECTED. It's been 21 years, but I'm SURE I cried when Prime died. The kill count is staggering. Optimus Prime, Megatron, Starscream, Prowl, Ironhide, Brawn, Ratchet and Wheeljack are all dead in the first half. My sisters favorite character, to this day, is Soundwave so she couldn't give less of a s**t when everyone else died.

I can repeat this movie verbatim because I've watched it so many times in my life. It's no matter what part or who's talking, I can dish out the entire script. This is the ONLY movie I can do that for.

Then Jumbo Video closed in September 1999 in my hometown when I was nine, right as I came back from Greece. We tried to buy as much as we could from them. We managed to pick up Ocarina of Time and few other video games and movies but The Transformers Movie had been bought already. I was heartbroken. For two years, I couldn't find hide nor hair from the Transformers movie. VHS was being streamed out and DVD's were coming in. It was hopeless.

Then on a trip to New York a few years later, I managed to find my way into a f.y.e. video store and while wandering the isles I found the Transformers Movie Collectors Edition on DVD. I almost DIED. I didn't own any DVD's. I was 11 and I didn't own any movies but I couldn't consciously pass this up. I had 20$ from my dad but in the Electronic Boutique across the hall there was a Final Fantasy IX artbook that I REALLY wanted too!
I'll spare you my inner dialogue and the mental crisis I suffered while standing in between the video racks and posters of new releases. It didn't last long. I turned and bought the Transformers Movie without another thought. I watched the Transformers Movie around 77 times that year. And watched it the next and the next and the next. Ever since I was 4, I have seen the Transformers movie at least once in a year. Except when I was 10. From April 1999 to October 2001, I didn't see anything involving transformers.

Why did I even hunt for it? Why was I so obsessed with it? I still kind of am. What was it about this movie. I loved Sailor Moon around the same time. And Dragonball Z, and Samurai Pizza Cats and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. and Gundam Wing. and I think Pokemon was around this time too.
I remember all of these shows with a strange kind of fondness. I know they're all one half 90's cringe and the other half amazing.
Transformers has a strange charm. Something that merges all the great things of the 80's with rocking hair metal. The show itself was always really basic and limited due to production and time constraints. Which is why the movie is so jarring, the animation was so impressive, they made everything look so shiny.

A lot of people called this movie animated Star Wars and I can see why they would say that. The Sci-fi and Space Opera genre wasn't exactly mainstream in '86. It was still viewed as kitsch.
Though Transformers set in motion an amazing precedent. Movie adaptations for animated shows! In Japan this was already a thing, but the West? All we had gotten before hand were standalone animated movies. Which were amazing but none were expanding a universe that already been laid out, and Transformers showed that their universe was actually bursting with everyday life!

The history behind this movie is quite cool, too. Though the movie didn't preform very well (Budget was 6,000,000$ and it only made around 5,900,000$ so they lost a bit and that's always a bust if it's under budget.) They had Orson Welles, Leonard Nimoy, Eric Idle, Casey Kasem and Scatman Crothers. The one thing that made Transformers so memorable is that they had very unique and interesting voice actors who made their stiff counterparts on screen come to life.

Looking back earlier at the Unicron opening scene there was always something that bothered me about. Check the scene at 2:14. On the left side of the screen, the swirling debris is showing something but I could never tell that, I always it was an animation error. NOPE. (Though there are a lot of them in this movie, xD) It's actually city scenes from the anime Fist of the North Star! For literal YEARS I wondered what I was looking at.

A popular bit of info too is that Orson Welles passed away only five days after recording all his lines for his role as Unicron and he hated this movie notoriously. This trivia kind of bothered me for a long time, why would he be in a movie he hated. Though after unearthing a lot of bits and pieces throughout time, I found out that Welles was actually very fond of animation and wanted the role. His failing health is likely what caused him to be so vindictive.

Also Leonard Nimoy was embarrassed by his role as Galvatron, it was said that he didn't like to talk about his involvement. This was due to back in the day where animation wasn't taken very seriously. Although as you can see by Dark of the Moon, Nimoy was pretty much over it.

BLARGH. I could talk about this all day. Like. All day. HIGH FIVE IF YOU LEARNED SOMETHING NEW.

I think if I have a chance I'll talk about my favorite shows/anime like I did with my video games list. Also can you tell I really don't want to study for midterms? This was a long one!