The first half of the movie saw Megatron and his boys go from ill-tempered, but mostly harmless comic relief to the animated equivalent of Tarantino villains finding the most fucked-up ways to slaughter your childhood. From there, many of us watched in horror as pretty much all of our favorite Autobots were unceremoniously massacred in the Battle of Autobot City: Wheeljack, Mirage, Brawn, Prowl, Windcharger, Trailbreaker, Red Alert - pretty much everyone but Bumble Bee and Jazz - all ended up as scrap metal with little-to-no fanfare.Įveryone knew the Deceptions were bad guys, but this was the first time those of us who didn’t rock with the Marvel comics got to see Deceptions as cold-blooded killers.
Within 10 minutes, shell-shocked children across the country watched in horror as Deceptions hopped on the Autobots’ ship and straight-up murked five stalwarts from the animated TV series, including Ironhide and Ratchet.
The opening scene was literally Unicron committing robot genocide on a race of unwitting cyber people. Even when it came to giant talking robots, there were scrapes, there were bumps, and there were bruises, but characters always came back by the end.īut when you need to make room for that second-gen toy line, the hell with convention and childhood sensitivities, amirite? Those 1980s cartoons had always hewed to one immobile rule: no matter how violent things got, no one ever died. The $1.3 billion-and-counting Michael Bay live-action flicks owe a great debt to the piddly $5.8 million the animated film pulled out of piggy banks in the ‘80s.ĥ) Rated PG for Sentient Robot Uber-Violenceįor all of the over-the-top CGI death and destruction of the Michael Bay films, the carnage in the 1986 animated version was truly shocking. And while the line went on a hiatus in the 1990s, the movie helped ensure that the multiple variations of the franchise - toys, TV series, and (unfortunately movies) would continue over the next three decades.
While the original Transformers series was really a way for Hasbro to package an amalgamation of a couple different Japanese toy lines, the full-length movie was the platform that successfully launched a generation of original Transformers characters. The Transformers: The Movie solidified the idea of turning a full-length theatrical into a glorified commercial (weirdly enough, the first Hasbro/Toei Animation collaboration was the Danny DeVito/Rhea Perlman led My Little Pony film). Joe, and the Transformers all got shows based on toys. It’s no secret that many of the great animated TV series of the 1980’s were produced specifically to sell toys. Elmo’s Fire and The Breakfast Club, was a legit A-List star and a huge get as Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime.Ĥ) I’ll See Your Half-Hour Commercial and Raise You Another 60 Minutes Some of the youngsters won’t remember, but Judd Nelson, fresh off of St. Joining original animated series voice actors Peter Cullen, Frank Welker, Casey Kasem, and the legendary Scatman Crothers, the project featured Leonard Nimoy as Galvatron, Robert “Unsolved Mysteries” Stack as Ultra Magnus, Lionel Stander as Kup, Monty Python alum Eric Idle as Wreck-Gar, and the ailing Orson Welles in his final role as world-gobbling planet transformer Unicron.
Obviously the film producers cut some major costs on the animation front, so why not blow some of Hasbro’s money on big name actors? Years before celebrities flocked to voice animated characters for Disney and Pixar, Transformers drew some big (well, big for the time at least) Hollywood names.
It showed a lot of us that mainstream animated feature films could exist outside of Disney-fied musicals in which animals sang and wore hats. It was visually rich, emotionally challenging, tenaciously paced. However, janky-ass artwork notwithstanding, The Transformers was distinctly different than any of the Saturday morning comic book/toy line adaptations. That isn’t to say The Transformers featured the same quality of animation as other ‘80s anime classics like Akira, Heavy Metal, or Vampire Hunter D Toei Animation, who had done the animation for the TV series, has always had a bit of a bad rep for producing cheap-and-it-shows animation. Some of you cool kids had been watching GoShogun and Robotech on the Betamax long before us noobs ever heard the word “anime,” but for many of us, this was our first foray into the darker, much more grown-up style of animation. Come with us as we celebrate six things that made Nelson Shin’s 1986 feature film so epic. Still the reigning, undefeated, and undisputed movie champion of the Transformers franchise (sorry Michael Bay), The Transformers: The Movie blew the little minds of Transformer fans across the country.