More than meets the eye

Transformers are the coolest toys. I still remember getting one for my birthday more than twenty years ago. It was Starscream. I didn't know he was a "bad guy" at the time. In fact, it was a relatively new concept for me to actually like the bad guy, but the Decpeticons were cool too!

Anyway, I just completed my collection of the "Commerative Series" with Astrotrain. He just arrived in the mail from Hasbro Direct (The only way to get them outside of Ebay.) It's rumored that there are only going to be 3000 made.

Most of the other transformers in the series were available at Toys 'Я' Us or Amazon.com (posing as toysrus.com) but alas all good things must come to an end. Astrotrain is the 22nd and currently last in the series. All in all I've managed to score 26 domestically reissued transformers from Generation 1 - those in the commerative series, and the four Autobot Mini-Cars that were re-released as keychains (what's that about?) And yes, I even bought doubles of a couple so I could open and play with them.

When I was a kid I used to have a whole army of the things. I used to play with them in the dirt and in the bathtub - they went everywhere with me. I wore their joints out (but rarely broke them). I never really outgrew them. We moved around a lot when I was a kid and I couldn't take them with me once. I left them with my step-father's mother (step-grandmother?) for safe keeping, and came back to find them all missing. What became of them I'll probably never know.

I started collecting them as an adult because they remind me of the more magical times in my childhood. I don't play with them as much as I used to - in fact most of them I just look at, but I find them strangely comforting.

The Transformers cartoon was every bit as dear to me as the toys were. I spent a lot of money on a crappy VHS copy of the series that someone taped in Toledo, and sat down and watched every single grainy blurry episode. I've got them all on DVD now, and I've watched them again. Sure it was 30-minute daily advertisement for expensive toys, but the people involved - most notably the voice talents like Peter Cullen, Frank Welker, Casey Casem, and Dan Gilvezan tried to make it something more. And in a large part they succeeded.

So much of my vocabulary, and so many of my mannerisms came from that show it was downright frightening. The dialogue actually had a fair amount of high-school level vocabulary. I also learned that my taste in music was largely influenced by the background scores that filled practically every moment of the series.

Any Trans-fan worth his or her salt already knows this, but Steven Spielberg is going to be producing a full-blown live action Transformers movie. I have some mixed feelings about this. It's a story near and dear to my heart, and I have my doubts that it can be done "right" (They absolutely have to get Peter Cullen and Frank Welker for the voices - anything else is negotiable). But on the other hand I have always wanted to see what it would look like if the Transformers were real. We'll just have to wait and see.