Movie of The Month

Transformers.  The movie.  The 80's CARTOON movie.

That's right.

Suck it Michael Bay.

This movie has the very limited and prestigious privilege of being one of the few pillars of my childhood.  Joking am I?  Sure.  But serious?  100%.  And embarrassed?  Absolutely.  Ashamed?  Never.

This movie was monumental for me, I must have rented it from Blockbuster (remember those?, apparently they still exist) hundreds of times throughout my childhood.  But nostalgia aside, this movie is composed of a truly strange and foreign substance.  Firstly, check out the voices featured as characters: Eric Idle, Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, Casey Kasem, John Moschitta Jr. (the Micro Machines guy with the super fast voice!!), Peter Cullen (voice of Optimus Prime and Eeyore from Whinnie-the-Pooh), and Frank Welker (voice of Megatron and many more Transformers characters, not to mention the former highest grossing actor in Hollywood).  A strange enough cast but then add to that the final movie appearances of Orson Welles and Scatman Crothers.  Just bizarre right?

So, besides the odd cast of voices, the movie itself has a much darker tone than the television series.  The evil Decepticons savagely murder Autobots without any hesitation and the amount of destruction is decidedly more intense.  It was nothing short of terrifying, as a child, to watch certain characters that I loved in the television program deteriorate before my eyes, red smoke pluming from the mouth in appropriately typical 1980's action cartoon movie violence.  Not to mention that a VERY prominent character dies within the first twenty minutes, along with dozens of others.  So many characters meet their demise that it merits a "Character deaths" section on the Wikipedia page.  This movie is no joke, it is full on serious, action-packed drama circa 1986.  And humorously, present day in the movie is established as 2005.

The animation itself is quite good, at least much better quality than the television series provides.  I myself describe it as Japanese anime meets a certain quality of animation found in Pink Floyd's The Wall, if that makes any sense.  Give it a break, it was 1986.  And the soundtrack is absolutely divine.  In appropriate 1980's fashion, the senses are bombarded with Van Halen-esque heavy metal pop tunes amongst the average, predictable, sic-fi, synth film score.  Hilariously awesome.  Almost as entertaining as the classic dialogue which features such lines as, "I'll rip out your optics!" and "Wait, I still function...".  Not to mention the clever use of embellishments such as "When are we gonna bust some Decepti-chops?!" or "Take that Auto-creep!"  As you can tell, this movie scores a 10 in all categories.


Truly, this movie is a gem.  It is not one to be forgotten as surely it will not thanks to legions of dorks like myself that will continue to champion its importance.  And by the way, the best scene involves Eric Idle's character on Planet Junk with Weird Al's "Dare To Be Stupid" playing in the background.  Which is why my brother Stephen bought me this shirt:


Suck it Michael Bay.

Ty

P.S. You shouldn't actual see this movie.