I always took Transformers a bit too seriously. I take a lot of things too seriously, but most of those are things that people think are serious and really aren’t while Transformers is one of the few things I take seriously that no one thinks is serious but that really is. I take Transformers so seriously that if I had to point to one myth in my childhood that shaped me (which is the point of Childhood Mythology Week) I would point to this toy line / cartoon / movie / comic book series. Specifically, I would point to Transformers: the Movie and Issue #74 of the US Transformers comic series, but we can come back to those in a moment. First, some background:
Even if you are in the majority and don’t take the Transformers seriously, almost any self-respecting kid of the 80s will tell you that they were possibly the greatest toy line ever conceived—or at least that they were pretty smart, pretty cool toys. And most would agree that the idea of creating a cartoon series that basically amounted to half-hour commercials for the toy line was pretty clever too. And some (those who were paying close attention in 1986) would agree it was probably sadistically clever to, after the cartoon had lasted two seasons and the toys had sold through two Christmases, release an animated motion picture that killed off nearly all the original Transformers and introduced completely new characters (and thus new toys). And then, as an aside, there was the Marvel comic series which no one remembers (originally intended as a four-part miniseries though actually running for eighty issues here in the US).
It was the movie though that began to transform (sorry) this 80s cartoon-toy fetish into something deeper. If you were a young boy like me who played with the toys and watched the cartoons, then you were probably pretty excited when you realized there was an entire movie about them. However, lots of kids watched the movie (which, by the way, got rather dismal reviews) and were more or less unaffected by it, except perhaps in their toy purchases that year. But I had found something completely new. These were characters that I knew and cared about. They did, after all, live on the shelves in my room. No one knew it except Optimus Prime and me, but there was actually a portal in my living room that opened directly into Autobot City. And then here was this movie where I saw almost all of them die, and then I saw new heroes born.
Now, you have to remember I was about six, maybe eight by the time I finally saw the movie. Transformers: the Movie was to me pure mythology. I didn’t matter that the plot made very little sense. It was about old heroes dying and new heroes being created, and it completely made sense to me. There was this pseudo-metaphysical stuff about the ‘Matrix of Leadership’ and ‘till all are one’, and it just fit—at least to me. Thus, as a very young child I learned that in real life your friends could die at any time (it happened to Brawn, Prowl, Ironhide, and—the humanity!—Ratchet, Autobot medic, not to mention Optimus Prime). I learned that there were monster planets in the night waiting to eat your planet and that sometimes all you had was a magic crystal no one really knew how to use. That was the premise of Transformers: the Movie, but somehow it was okay, because that’s really more or less the premise of any epic.
Stop reading right now if this doesn’t make sense, because I haven’t even touched on the comic yet.
Transformers: the Movie made me see the world as some kind of heroic struggle, but Issue #74 of the US Transformers comic series (to differentiate from the UK series, which is a whole other ball game) made me see the world as a futile and desperate heroic struggle. This is something that I think is true (along the lines of Chesterton’s writings), and I think it colors everything with a sense of poignant urgency. It certainly does in comic books.
I found Issue #74 in an airport magazine stand years after I had seen the movie. The cartoon was cancelled, the toy sales had dwindled and would soon be discontinued, but the comics remained into the early nineties. Issue #75 was slated to be the last issue, but the series actually managed to hang on until issue #80 when they finally axed it. I didn’t know this, and in fact I never read the conclusion of the cliffhanger that #74 ended with until years later. All I had was that one comic, and it became dog-eared and battered and finally disappeared one day at a garage sale where I was very foolish.
In issue #74 we learn that the random monster planet in the movie was actually a dark god call Unicron and that the Transformers were all actually the children of Primus, a god who had been created to protect the universe from Unicron. What’s more, in this issue our hero Optimus Prime (who is not dead yet) is realizing that their god Primus, rather than actually fighting Unicron, has instead parsed out his very life-force in the creation of the Transformers as ‘the last line of defense’ against the Chaos-Bringer. Long story short, they have no god. Or they are their god. Or, their god’s dead flesh is the world upon which they stand (it is), and Unicron will soon be leering above the horizon (he does, in the last panel). And you know he’s just going to kill them all, which he does in issue #75, but don’t worry, the whole crystal thing works out for them again.
There’s this panel, about two pages into the comic, and its one of those dramatic full-sheet spreads that sometimes make comics so great. All the Transformers are there, at least all the important ones, both Autobot and Decepticon, and they’re battered and broken and leaking oil because they’re big robots and have been until very recently trying to kill each other (what with the Autobot/Decepticon Civil War that’s been raging for several million years), and now they’re all just standing there staring at the avatar of their dead god (who isn’t quite dead yet but soon will be) as he tells them who they really are and what they’re supposed to be doing. I love it. It’s one of my most favorite things in the entire world. I’d like to tear it out and tack it to a wall above my computer.
Because, you see, it’s all rather silly. They’re just some robots trying to save the universe. And before that they were just toys. But this writer (whose name was Simon Furman, by the way, and who really had no interest in the toy market and was probably just trying to sell comic books) had the audacity to turn them into a myth. And it worked, because I’m the kid that, when he went to college, insisted his sister sew an Autobot patch on his satchel.
So I guess the Transformers were my childhood myth because they taught me that the universe is something tragic and desperate and heroic, and they taught me this when I was still young enough to believe it. They also taught me (later) that I wanted to be a writer who could capture some of that, which I’m not sure is a good thing because lots of writers today succeed by writing about how crappy everything is and the ones who write about heroics end up publishing campy science fiction or fantasy novels.
(Deep breath.) The End.
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