When you talk about Transformers these days everyone (understandably) assumes you're talking about the blockbuster movies from the last couple years. But before Michael Bay brought us humping dogs, racist ghetto robots, mechanical testicles and - of course - more humping dogs, there was actually a child friendly version of these famous robots in disguise. Premiering in 1984, the Transformers cartoon was an instant hit with children of my generation, and went on to sell millions of dollars worth of toys, comics and other paraphernalia. The show itself was awful of course (like most cartoons of the time), but despite its typically terrible origins the Transformers franchise continues to endure the fickle mistress that is pop culture better than any of its peers.
Growing up, Transformers was one of two shows that consumed the imagination of me and my friends (the other being GI Joe). I watched it every day after school, and probably saw most of - if not all of - the episodes as a kid. Of course, who could blame me? You had giant robots fighting other giant robots, and they could all transform into cars, trucks, airplanes, guns, cassette decks and even a microscope! For whatever reason, this fascination with shape changing mechanical warriors has endured the test of time surprisingly well. Besides the original Transformers cartoon - which lasted 98 episodes - there have been numerous reboots and re-imaginings of the franchise over the last 25 years. From the Michael Bay movies to Transformers Beast Machines to Transformers Armada to Transformers Animated and most recently Transformers Prime, there have been a half-dozen versions of Optimus Prime and pals ready to enlist new fans for parent company Hasbro. Still, it all started with that cartoon in 1984, and that's what I'm here to review. Or at least the first 65 episodes anyway (I'm saving the movie and the final 33 episodes for later).
Given the popularity of this series, I don't feel that an involved synopsis is necessary. Basically there's a planet called Cybertron where two factions of warring robots have been doing battle for millions of years. The good guys are referred to as Autobots and are led by Optimus Primes, the bad guys are Decepticons and their leader is Megatron. Given the enormous amount of natural resources necessary to wage this seemingly endless war, the planet Cybertron finally ran out of energy and groups of both Decepticons and Autobots were forced to leave their home in search of new fuel sources. While battling one another in space, these Transformers crash land on earth where they lay dormant for millions of years. Upon their reawakening, the Decepticons (in typical bully fashion) set out to steal earth's energy from us weak humans. At the same time Optimus Prime and the Autobots set out to protect humanity from Megatron and his evil cohorts.
Conceptually, this is a pretty solid idea for an 80s action-adventure cartoon. The parallels between our own energy crisis and the situation faced by the Transformers is surprisingly relevant for the time, and remains so today. Equally impressive is the fact that the whole premise behind Transformers was written around an existing toy line. For those who don't know, the Transformers started life as Japanese toys with no background story whatsoever. When Hasbro decided that they wanted to repackage these playthings for American consumers, they thought it would be best to create an overriding mythology to get kids interested, thus Transformers was born. Despite this solid premise, however, the overall writing for this series is about what you would expect from the time period, insulting to its audience and merchandise driven. I was especially amazed by the overwhelming number of new characters introduced during the initial 65 episodes in this series. Within just the first 13 installments you not only had a relatively large cast of Autobots and Decepticons to keep track of, but you got Dinobots, Insecticons, Starfire and then more Dinobots almost right away. After that things only got worse with Constructicons, Stunticons, Aerobots, Combaticons, Omega Supreme and plenty of other robots being shoved down your throat. This was - of course - a sales driven decision, and just one more example of how cartoons of this time were ultimately controlled by people whose passion was selling toys, and not telling good stories. Still, the fact that Transformers was probably the worst when it came to introducing new characters for the sake of merchandise (GI Joe would be a close second), this was not an uncommon practice, and I try to only compare properties of the 1980s to one another, and not to the current standard. So, with that said I'll move on and start discussing the writing of Transformers, as related to its peers.
I've reviewed a couple 1980s action-adventure cartoons, and one of the side effects of this (besides the massive loss of brain cells) is that I find myself saying the same things over and over. While this is personally frustrating, it's also unavoidable since most of these shows used the same writers and followed the same formula as their contemporaries. So, like GI Joe, Thundercats and others, the stories from Transformers have very little good, mostly bad and far too much ugly writing.
Let's start things off with the ugly. One obvious problem with Transformers is continuity. Early in the series all of the robots (Autobot and Decepticon) were able to fly, regardless of what vehicle/object they could transform into. As the show progressed, however, it was revealed that Autobots could fly, but not very well. Finally, by the time season two got going none of the Autobots could apparently fly unless they were capable of transforming into an airplane or spaceship. Basically, the writers just couldn't seem to collectively make up their minds about when Autobots could, and could not take to the air until they were half way through the series. Another example of bad continuity can be found in the building of the Dinobots. During season one Optimus Prime okays the creation of Dinobots, Transformers whose physical appearance and strength stems from the dinosaurs who roamed earth millions of years ago. Later, during season two, Megatron decides to create Stunticons, Decepticons who could transform into cars and thus challenge the Autobots domination of the roads. When it came time for Megatron to give the Stunticons life, however, he had to travel to Cybertron and petition Vector Sigma, a long dormant piece of mysterious technology to give his creations personalities (or souls I suppose). The reason for this is that all Transformers were given life by Vector Sigma, and without its help the Stunticons would never be anything except mindless automatons. Unfortunately, this little bit of mythology completely ignores the fact that the aforementioned Dinobots somehow received unique personalities without the aid of Vector Sigma. Like I said, inconsistent continuity.
Equally ugly were the episodes that just should've never been made (even by 1980s standards). Like GI Joe and Thundercats, Transformers has a handful of stories that are just so bad it's insulting to audiences of all ages. The worst offenders were City of Steel (a story were Optimus Prime is cut into pieces, and his body parts turned into weapons against the Autobots), Attack of the Autobots (which features the insanely overused plot device of mind control) and Kremzeek (an episode so surreal, I can't even describe it). I'll spare you any further details concerning the plots of these animated abominations, but take my word for it, these are some of the worst cartoons of the 1980s.
As for the "good" episodes of Transformers, I found that almost all of them had the same thing in common, they didn’t take place on earth. Though a little strange given the strength of the energy crisis premise, I found episodes like "The Search for Alpha Trion", and "The Secret Of Omega Supreme" far more enjoyable than any of the stories based around earth and the show's central themes. I can't say for sure, but I think that the writers of this series enjoyed doing stories set on alien worlds and plots delving into the history of the Transformers more than they liked the show's primary mythology. Of course, this could just be my own personal bias as well. Either way, I think this show was better suited for fantastical outer space science fiction than urban street gangs and worldwide car races.
Another positive thing about the writing of Transformers is that the violence - though hideously tame - did have more intensity than most of its contemporaries. This was apparently the result of the main characters being robots. For whatever reason, the idea of robots punching, kicking and shooting one another didn't bother censors - or parent watchdog groups - back in the 1980s, so the writers of Transformers were able to take things a little further than other cartoons of the time. Speaking of parent watchdog groups, I'm shocked (in a good way) that the episode Microbots slipped by these ever diligent and overprotective outfits. I say this because the second act of Microbots featured a group of Decepticons getting drunk on Energon Cubes (Energon is the fuel used by Transformers) and clearly stumbling around intoxicated before passing out! Though showing inebriated individuals was done in other 1980s action-adventure cartoons, the act was primarily reserved to show the negative consequences of drinking underage, or drinking and driving. Such was not the case here, so I guess the writers slipped one by, good for them.
At the end of the day though, the writing of Transformers was - more often than not - mediocre (which would be considered bad by today's standards). The stories had tons of bad science and logic gaps (how do the Autobots manage to drive almost anywhere in the world within a matter of minutes?), plenty of preachy PSAs (don't steal, be nice to others etc.) and a plethora of awful one-liners. I wish I could get excited - or even angry - about the work done by the writers of this show. The first 65 episodes are just so typical, however, I'm stuck with the meek acknowledgement that Transformers is simply "par for the course". It's kind of like the Ben 10 of the 1980s, haphazardly written, shamelessly geared at merchandising and lacking substance, yet somehow not completely evil.
Visually speaking, Transformers - once again - has some good points, bad points and a whole lot of in-between. On the positive side, a handful of episodes in this series looked really good. Notables include, Atlantis Arise, Microbots and Megatron's Master Plan. Each of these stories had some really impressive and ambitious animation, the kind I wish we saw more of during this time.
Another excellent aspect of Transformers would be the design work. I really liked how Cybertron was built entirely out of metal, with seemingly endless corridors and buildings stretching clear down into the bowels of the planet. Also impressive were the general Autobot and Decepticon designs done for the show. Though based on the Japanese toys, the actual animated versions of all the Transformers were changed a lot for the cartoon. True, they still resembled the toys themselves, but anyone who actually owned Megatron or Optimus Prime knows that the cartoon renditions of these characters looked a lot better than the toys themselves (to be fair the cartoons didn't actually have to transform in three-dimensions though). The thing I liked most about the design of Transformers, however, were the "classic" Cybertron Transformer designs. Characters like Alpha Trion, Aleta-1 and Devcon all had cylindrical styling and rounded corners that were fantastically alien and nothing like the boxy designs of the earth based Transformers. It was just so different looking (probably Japanese) and original I would have personally liked to seen more. Fortunately the remaining 33 episodes of Transformers - along with the movie - use this style a lot, so I have that to look forward to at least.
Negatively speaking, Transformers has more animation glitches than any action-adventure show I've ever seen. Things like the wrong character talking, or a character that wasn't supposed to be in a scene showing up in the background are omnipresent throughout the first 65 episodes. This usually happened with Transformers that were near identical in appearance to other robots in the show. For example, Starscream looks just like Thundercracker, the only real difference is the accent colors for each character. Given this similarity, it's very common to find scenes where the individual being shown was supposed to be Starscream, but the studio accidently used the color scheme for Thundercracker. Though I imagine it must have been very difficult for the producers and directors of these cartoons to keep track of this sort of thing - especially given the demanding schedule of the show - one cannot ignore the fact that Transformers has far too many of these animation mistakes.
Another issue I had with the visuals from this series was the background looping. Anybody who's ever watched the old Hanna-Barbera cartoons has probably noticed the way HB looped backgrounds while characters were walking, running or driving. This technique is used to save money and it involves having the same background go by over and over again. As you can probably imagine, this cost cutting trick was also popular in many of the action-adventure cartoon of the 1980's as well. Its effectiveness, however, varied depending on the execution. Sadly, the use of looping backgrounds in Transformers was not good. The biggest problem was that the beginning and end of the loop just didn't match up very often, thus the film appeared to "jump" every time the background began a new cycle. Though other shows of the time may have had the same problem, this issue was only exacerbated by the fact that a large percentage of the cast was made up of cars that spent a lot of time - shockingly enough - driving around in settings were backgrounds could easily be looped.
Poorly looped animation wasn't the only problem stemming from the Transformers general nature though. Radical shifts in scaling were also commonplace thanks to the Transformers ability to ... well, transform. I'll give you an example, Megatron (the leader of the Decepticons) is one of the larger robots in the show. He stands several stories tall, and very few of his minions can equal his stature. Yet, when Megatron transforms into a handgun, anyone of his soldiers could hold and fire him like a normal weapon. Now I'm no expert in physics, but even I know that a machine as large as Megatron can't just shirk himself down to an object 1/100th of his original size, not unless there's magic in those Energon Cubes they drink. This same problem shows up with characters like Astrotrain as well. Despite being the same general size as other Decepticons, Astrotrain could transform into a space shuttle and easily transport a number of his evil comrades with room to spare. Now, to be fair the producers of Transformers really didn't have many options outside of "magically" scaling robots. Since the characters in Transformers could change into such a wide variety of objects, making those objects exist in the same space with one another required a "leap of faith" by the audience. Unfortunately, this unusual variance in proportion - coupled with poorly executed cost cutting techniques and constant animation mistakes - take away greatly from anything Transformers did right visually.
When it's all said and done, the visuals from Transformers standup okay for the time period in which they were created. The show had a couple of standout episodes (though very few), and some of the styling and character design was pretty good. Sadly, the overall presentation of the series does suffer greatly thanks to the very nature of the show itself. I suppose it's a little ironic that the thing that has helped keep this franchise popular the last 25 years (transforming robots) is the same thing that made the execution of the original cartoon so frustrating and distracting.
In terms of Audio, Transformers has very solid voice acting. The show was recorded with an ensemble cast (which is a good thing), and veterans like Peter Cullen and Frank Welker gave distinct personalities to the characters they voiced. Cullen in particular was so iconic as Optimus Prime that Michael Bay was forced to cast the actor for the same role in his live action movies.
Musically speaking, Transformers was - at best - average. The opening theme was pretty weak, and the in show music was typically redundant and overused. The show also shared some music with its "cousin" program GI Joe (both shows were produced by the same outfits for Hasbro), so originality wasn't a strong point either. Interestingly enough, the considerable amount of "sharing" that took place between Transformers and GI Joe led to a pretty funny mistake in the Transformers episode "The Autobot Run". Every time this story went to commercial, the bumpers (that's the lead out and lead in sequences) used the GI Joe music with the Transformers animation. At first I was confused and had to rerun the commercial bumper, but upon further review this was indeed a production mistake, funny stuff.
If it sounds like I was disinterested when writing this review, that's because I was ... and for that I apologize. The truth is I've gotten a little burned out on the 1980s action-adventure shows, and I need to recharge my batteries with something a little less ... well, crappy. So for the foreseeable future I'm going to be watching cartoons that came before, or after 1980 (I'm actually watching some classic Popeye and Looney Tunes right now). As for Transformers, it's a decent 1980s action-adventure show. Though mostly average in execution, the show did have a couple bright spots, and the premise is one that continues to find new fans, even today. Still, the negative aspects of this cartoon are glaring, especially when viewed with older eyes. If you're a big fan of this show, pickup one of the slim pack sets and give it a watch. They’re pretty cheap and have some fun extras including: original commercials, PSAs and interviews. People who have never seen this show - or don't have a strong sense of nostalgia for it - should stay away, nothing about this show has aged well.
