I’m beginning to doubt the original Transformers were as good as I first thought.
A few years ago, my friend’s fiancee declared she’d never watched the original Transformers, and would never watch them. She felt that Michael Bay’s sucky Transformers served as a good reconstruction of the original source material. After flipping her the bird, upsetting the dining room table, and threatening to defecate on their wedding’s dance floor, she agreed to watch the original 1980s series to understand the show’s utter difference from Michael Bay’s hideous desecration.
Unfortunately, after forcing her to watch the second episode of the first season, I realized she was right. The entire show consisted of explosions, chase scenes, stocky dialogue, clunky cartooning, and thinly veiled reasons for Transformer transformations. I was horrified. I remembered the beauty of the 1986 Transformers movie my friends and I re-watched in college. I felt ashamed wondering if I mis-remembered its awesomeness.
However, when I re-watched season one, episode one, I saw the beautiful narrative, the well-constructed details of Cybertron, and the melancholy surrounding the loss of the Transformers’ home planet that I remembered. So, now I have to wonder are the Transformers as kickass as I thought, or are they just halcyon childhood memories?
Does the series offer more than meets the eye or is it just crappiness in disguise?
Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye
Clacked by An Nicholson 
on Sep 27, 2011 @ 08:00 EST5EDT
I bought the complete series on DVD and started rewatching it, so I totally understand what you’re feeling. It’s not the same, watching it as an adult, because it’s written for kids. As an adult I may cringe at the dialogue, but when I was watching it as a kid, I thought that same dialogue was really clever and funny – in other words, it’s perfectly suited to the mental level of a child, which is as it should be.
Even as a preteen or teenager, I remember watching some old episodes on VHS and being so caught up in the story. I don’t know what season it was – I think Megatron kidnapped Optimus or something… who knows? But the story was compelling. I intend to rewatch the whole series because it left such a powerful impression on me. It wasn’t about special effects or brilliant dialogue (obviously) but rather the characters and their history together.
Michael Bay faced the challenge of translating a great cartoon for kids into a great movie for adults. Instead of focusing on the characters and their history together, while raising the writing to an adult level, he managed to bring over the worst aspects of the cartoon and lose the best.
Ruby, you have captured it perfectly! I thought the third movie made a move towards the old school relationships with the CGI characters. Unfortunately, Sam’s antics made him more cartoon-y than the actual cartoons –
I agree – Bay did improve in that area with the third one. And I admit it’s kind of cool that Leonard Nimoy played the Big Bad in both the 1986 and the 2011 movies.
Watch the original animated movie then we can talk…
As I said above, I loved the ’86 movie. Glad to see you did as well.
BTW – the 1986 movie is still awesome, An. You didn’t misremember it!
Starscream: Megatron – is that you?
Megatron/Galvatron: Here’s a hint. (Obliterates Starscream)
Like the Star Wars movies, probably best enjoyed when you are thirteen years old.
I cheated a bit in my childhood by reading the Transformers and G.I. Joe comics as I watched the cartoons. Furman and Hama helped by giving me a much more engaging story, and TV gave me bright and pretty moving pictures.
Everyone else is right, though. The Animated Movie is far and away the best of the four, and exactly as good as you remember it. Going from the TV series to the movie is an abrupt and sobering jump in maturity and I, like many of my friends, am not ashamed to admit I cried at certain parts of it.
I actually like Bayformers, and found Dark of the Moon‘s Galvatron–>Sentinel Prime transformation to be very sentimental. I still would have liked to have seen the Dinobots and Omega Supreme, though.