By: Brinn Smith
News Editor
Recently I forced two of my friends to sit in a Discord call and watch a movie from my childhood. Well, it’s from my dad’s childhood, but it was shown to me as a child, so I think it counts. That movie was “The Transformers: The Movie” from 1986. While not necessarily a great movie – my friends even referred to it as a fever dream of a movie in the days that followed – it is a movie that is ingrained in my memory forever, along with the TV show that preceded and followed it (The Transformers, 1984).
The story of the movie is not perfect, far from it in fact. It splits itself into three parts: the fight at Autobot City on Earth and the death of Optimus Prime, the splitting of the main cast into two groups and the final battle with Galvatron on Unicron. The first and last parts carry the movie hard. The middle section feels frantic and a bit disconnected, mostly serving as a way to get our heroes from Earth to the middle of nowhere space and serve some character moments to highlight the new Prime before he gets that title.
The main bot that we follow throughout the movie is Hot Rod, a young, heroic Autobot who has traits of a leader but not the confidence to follow through. Hot Rod’s enemy, Galvatron, is the villain Megatron remade by the monster planet Unicron, after being fatally wounded in his final battle with Optimus Prime, and dumped into space by the treacherous Starscream. The supporting cast of the movie includes Ultra Magnus, the successor to Optimus Prime, a bot who only views himself as a soldier and is very reluctant in Optimus Prime’s choosing of him to wield the “Matrix of Leadership,” despite not being worthy. Kup is an older Autobot who tells stories of his old war days. Springer is a triple changing Autobot who serves more of a typical “action hero” role. Arcee, the first femme Autobot to be consistently part of the main cast, is a caring bot who is still quite capable of putting up a fight. Finally, Daniel Witwickey, is the still child son of the human protagonist Spike Witwickey from the first two seasons of the Transformers cartoon.
This is all to say that, while I find these characters and their story in this movie interesting, the purpose that they serve is not. The company that has owned Transformers from the very beginning, Hasbro, had this movie made to kill off all of the old toy line (with a few exceptions) and make room for the new toy line based on this movie. Optimus Prime? Dead, replaced with Ultra Magnus and Hot Rod, who eventually becomes Rodimus Prime. The older character Ironhide? Dead, replaced with Kup. Bumblebee? Alive actually, but still replaced with new human friendly Autobots like Arcee and Wheelie.
While I don’t hate these decisions (heck, Hot Rod/ Rodimus Prime is one of my favorite Transformers of all time), you can definitely tell that this is the purpose that they are meant to serve. The movie has a 20 year timeskip from the second season of the show, but even then, none of these characters had been seen in the cartoon beforehand, including characters that Optimus specifically calls “old friends” like Ultra Magnus and Kup. The Decepticons are acting like normal though, and I would say that their transition into the new cast was made effectively, with characters from the first two seasons staying around, despite the new toys. Only seven of them are “killed” and six of those are transformations into new characters happening on screen, with the last one being the demise of Starscream, who exists as a ghost in a few episodes going forward.
The addition of the transforming monster planet, Unicron, was huge. Literally. The opening scene of the movie features it destroying a planet, along with all of its inhabitants, save for one robot. It is such a cool concept, and one that has lasted in Transformers media, with the homeworld of the Transformers, Cybertron, being revealed to be a giant robot in future media, likely because of the groundwork laid by Unicron in this movie.
Everything in this article is to say that I will forever cherish “The Transformers: The Movie.” Is it perfect? Gods no, but it has such an interesting vibe, as well as being the main reason I cherish so many fictional characters into my adulthood. It has a killer soundtrack, and many, many animation errors, but that makes it feel so human, ironically enough.
