I Love Transformers

John sees fit to burden you with his love of Transformers toys, and how it's totally not a hoarder thing, HE CAN QUIT ANYTIME HE WANTS OKAY?!

I Love Transformers

If you’ve known me for any length of time, then you probably know, I’m a got damn sucker for things. Toys, books, comics, collectibles, board games, Legos, the list is long and ridiculous. It’s definitely what pegs me squarely as Gen X, my love of things physical. One of my Millennial friends who counts themselves a minimalist is regularly horrified by how much stuff I own. When streaming came along, most people purged their CDs and DVDs, to the point where they didn’t even need a DVD/blu-ray player anymore. Me, I still have the first VCR I ever bought in college, and a literal wall of VHS/DVD/blu-rays/4ks to go with it. When we moved houses about seven years ago, I was a little mortified when the movers told me, “Yeah, it’s not typical to need two trucks to carry everything.”

Not mortified enough to stop, mind you. Just mortified enough to push it down deep with the rest of my soul-killing self-hatred.

But I cannot explain the serotonin boost I get when a box arrives on my doorstep. In the moments before I open it, it’s Schrödinger’s Box, with multiple worlds of fun and joy inside. All of life’s problems will likely be solved with the contents. And then I open it, and the joy multiplies when I see my new acquisition. Oh, rapture, a new Decepticon!

All of this to say, I’m a grown-ass man who loves Transformers.

Not ALL Transformers, and certainly not every iteration. The movies, eh. Besides the sheer horrifying scale of the first one, with tiny humans juxtaposed against gigantic robots, they don’t interest me terribly. I’ve seen three of them, I think. I keep meaning to watch the rest, it just never seems to happen. We even won the first three blu-rays in a contest some years back, and I still haven't dusted them off.

I also have to admit, anything beyond what’s known as G1, the original generation of Transformers, I don’t have much interest in. Once in awhile, something cool presents itself, but mostly, I’m drawn to the toys and stories I experienced as a kid, which mostly wraps around the cartoon they made from 1984-1987, from the original toy commercial they called a pilot, to the resurrection of Optimus Prime (that's right folks, Optimus Prime died and returned. Like Jesus). You’d think from the stacks of toys in my garage that they made thousands of G1 episodes, but it’s not even a hundred.

I don’t know what it is about them that lights me up. Probably just a thing that brought a certain kind of happiness at a certain age in life, which, given the year Transformers came out, I would've been about 11. I can still remember that first trip to Mervyn’s in Phoenix, where my mom basically told me to fuck off while she shopped for clothes, ugh, so I made my way to the tiny toy nook, and was greeted with a full shelf display of Optimus Primes, a giant red truck with an even bigger trailer, and a fantastic painting of his robotic form on the front of the box. From that first instant, my mind was captivated. A truck that turns into a robot? I’m already sold. I don't even care what they're doing, I need them all with me. And I wasn’t a kid who played with Tonka trucks or anything like that, but even I could see how cool the vehicles were. Before Transformers, my great love had been Star Wars, but given that "Return of the Jedi" had effectively ended the franchise the year before (or so we thought at the time), my little brain was ready for the new cool thing.

Masters of the Universe was around the same time, and boy, did I love those then, but I grew out of them in a way I never outgrew Transformers. Maybe because He-Man started as a cool Conan the Barbarian knock-off, and quickly deteriorated to a toothless cartoon. Same thing with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a fun Daredevil/Frank Miller parody, later a kids megafranchise. What Transformers had going for it (along with G.I. Joe, which was more to my younger brother’s interest), was that it had cool characters. I’m tempted to say the stories were good, but they honestly weren’t. The bad guys want to steal energy and resources from Earth, the good guys stop them, usually using violence. I am, by the way, all for mindless violence in my kids’ entertainment. I’m just saying, I realize the stories weren’t anything special.

BUT... the characters were. Legendarily created in a single weekend by Marvel Comics writer Bob Budiansky (based on treatments, character names and profiles by Denny O’Neill and Jim Shooter), the characters have stayed remarkably true to their origins over the last 40 years. Optimus Prime is the protective father figure and incorruptible Autobot leader. Megatron is his opposite, ruthless and cruel. Starscream is the braying traitor, always looking to get rid of his boss. Ironhide is the loyal, reliable old friend. These profiles were created for the cartoon and subsequent comics, but they also made the genius move of slapping them on the back of the toy boxes, so you knew how your new toy was supposed to act. There it was, in the corner of an incredible painting, a box of text called "Tech Specs," with stats like Strength, Intelligence, Speed, Endurance, all given a numerical value, so you could see who was strong, who was fast, and who was smart. All us little nerds were familiar with stats from Dungeons & Dragons, so adding numerical values, along with a bio, was exactly the kind of thing we needed to kickstart our engines. They all had unique personalities, they all had different jobs. My first Transformers toy was Prowl, an Autobot who changed into a police car. I have no idea what that says about my personality. Probably not more than there weren’t a lot of choices at the store we went to. But in my defense, the thing that intrigued me most about Prowl was his job: Strategist. Meaning he was smart, a planner, and not necessarily the one you want in frontline combat. Which I related to.

And the cartoon mostly stuck to these personalities, especially in the first season. Even as a tween, I could see the possible storylines the different characters provided. For example, Autobot Mirage was a good guy, but he was so homesick, he was potentially willing to betray the Autobots to end the war so he could go home. That’s crazy! A good guy who’d turn on his allies?! A robotic Benedict Arnold? I’d never seen that in a kids’ story before, but I was really caught up in all the possible storylines. Would he betray them in small ways they never saw? Or bigger ways, forcing them to expel him? Would he join the Decepticons? GOOD LORD THE POSSIBILITIES FOR STORIES WERE ENDLESS.

And based on the personalities, the toys came alive to me in a way most other toys before or since haven’t. You give me a Transformer from that era, I can likely tell you their personalty traits. At least for the first couple dozen - when they started adding ever more toys to the line around the second season, the personalities got a bit redundant. I can’t really tell my Predacons from my Aerialbots, because they got less screentime, and usually were watered-down versions of ones we’d seen before.

In fairness, even with the clever writing that made up their original bios, the characters likely wouldn’t have to come to life for me without the cartoon, and the amazing voice work. You could tell each character by their voice alone. Starscream spoke in a loud scratchy whine, totally appropriate for a backstabbing worm. Soundwave's voice was entirely done through a modulator, making him sound cold and inhuman. Peter Cullen and Frank Welker famously have contributed multiple voices, as well as dozens of others, including Scatman Crothers and Casey Kasem. It was their voices we heard when we played, and it’s their voices we hear today.

Being that I’m Gen X, which was the first generation of Americans who were allowed to keep their childhood things, my parents never followed the time-honored traditions of throwing out my comics and toys when I got “too old for them.” I mean, honestly, at 11, in Phoenix, in the 80s, I was already considered too old to be playing with toys anyway, so I guess they were just being consistent. It wasn’t til I was well into my teen years that the idea of selling your childhood for big money creeped into the culture. So then, me keeping my Transformers stored in good condition was no longer me being immature, it was me being a genius investor. Sure, I said. I buy them... for the investment. I'm of different minds of the whole collector thing. On the one hand, it's kept Transformer toys alive, on the other, fear of losing an investment keeps way too many toys in the box, like Stinky Pete in Toy Story 2. It's weird, because on the one hand, you spend money to acquire these things, and you get real excited, and then, either because you wanna keep them nice for whatever reason, or you don't have the time to sit on the floor and turn it from robot to vehicle and back, they just sit there.

As I've gotten older, I've tried to not fall victim to fear of missing out, which ends up meaning a couple of things - one, I don't keep all of my Transformers pristine and in the box. I keep a LOT of 'em in the box, I'm not gonna lie and say I'm that evolved, but I try to remind myself, even ones I can sell for twice their value, nowadays, that buys my family a nice dinner at Carl's Jr. Might as well have a cool Transformer. I tell you, if my daughter had even the vaguest interest in Transformers, I would've opened all the boxes in my garage to show them to her. But, she doesn't, and so, I haven't.

Which is the other side of FOMO - nostalgia is great. I love nostalgia. Obviously. But I've seen a lot of Gen X get eaten up by nostalgia, both good and bad. Sure, I love the things of my childhood. I think it's rad to keep toys on my desk to play with when I'm working. I love to read the comics of my youth. I enjoy the new stories coming out of Star Wars, the MCU, and all the others. I don't believe that I need to leave behind childish things to be a man. I would even argue that these things have made me a better man.

However.

For as much as you should enjoy and honor the past, you do need to live in the present, and look to the future.

Gonna pause now for a brief side note: about five years ago, the seasonal fires that annually occur in our neck of the woods blew right in our faces, and we had to abandon our house, grab our cat, and whatever could fit in the car, and go. Our good friends Ed and Menaka took us in (shout out!), letting us stay in their condominium in Redondo Beach. And while we were convalescing at the Condo in Redondo, I had a lot of time to think about all the stuff we’d be losing, all the toys, games, comics, photos, mementos, and such. Boxes of my parents’ various trips abroad. My brother’s high school photo, captured in a cardboard standee. All my signed Joe Lansdale books. And of course, all the boxes of Transformers.

After a week’s time to consider, one of the few things I truly regretted not grabbing was a sketch my mom did of me when I was a baby. When we were lucky enough to return to our home, miraculously untouched by fire, we made a list of things to grab in the event it happened again, and I added the sketch. Transformers, of course, were nowhere on the list. It was a weird feeling, that I had made peace with the fact that we could've lost everything and didn't. We know people who did lose everything in that fire, and for no other reason than they lived just a few miles a different direction. It was the first time I'd really gotten a notion of what it would feel like to not have all this stuff in my life. And the thing was, it wasn't the tragedy I'd feared. It kinda felt liberating.

Five years later, I’m fifty, and thinking a lot about when my parents passed away. They collectively had a lot of stuff for me and my brother to go through, and while I don’t begrudge them that, and wouldn’t ask for the time back that it took to sort it all out, I did decide I wanted to do my wife and daughter the favor of not burdening them with all my shit when I die. I'm not necessarily looking to get rid of it all now, or go full minimalist, but I look at those boxes of joy that mostly take up garage space, and can't help but think their time with me should be limited.

Which is y'know, typical human hypocrisy, because I just bought another couple of Transformers for my birthday.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, Transformers are awesome. Love ‘em, can’t live without ‘em, treasure them more than my wife and child, etc. etc. Glad we got that all straight, and today I've learned nothing.