Product: The Transformers - The Movie (1986)
Rating: 3.0
Not without its faults, but it holds up well
On a whim, I rented the DVD of this recently. I grew up with the Transformers, and at one point could probably remember every name of every cassette Shockwave and Blaster had. I never saw the movie in the theather, but saw it years later. I knew all of the main points: Prime dies, Megatron gets morphed into the insane Galvatron, Hot Rod becomes Rodiums and the leader.It's easy to dismiss the movie (And the TV show as well) as simply a means to sell toys to kids. It was more than that, it was an above average TV show with a million boys around the world in love with it. So, like most cartoon hits, it became a movie at the height of its career. As amimation goes, it was a step above the TV show. It looks a little like Heavy Metal in style. It's certainly not up to Anime or Disney quality, but much better than Saturday morning fare. On the other hand, much of the voice acting was well above average. Beyond the celbrity vocies (Lenoard Nimoy, Orson Wells, Eric Idle), the other cast members put enough life into these robots to make it credible. The writing was actually rather good too, and I forgot how many smart-aleck remarks the Autobots made among themselves that peppered the story. The Wreck-Gar character is especally memorable, as he learned most of his English from American TV.The reason I docked it a little was for the odd way the decided to introduce new characters and dispose of older (read: not selling as well) ones. For years, the Autobots and Decepticons shot at each other and barely got a scratch. In the movie, Megatron blows away 5 Autobots in about 30 seconds just like it was no big deal. Prime's taken worse hits from Megatron and survived, this time it was just a little too much? Also, too much of the attention goes to Autobots that we never saw up until this point: Hot Rod, Arcee, Springer, Kup, Ultra Magnus were never in the TV show until after the movie. So there's less of a connect with them, while we watch the older characters die off or get moved to the background. We're also subjected to the annoying Wheelie and Spike's son Daniel. So in general, we have a movie about characters we didn't really didn't know anything about until now. On the positive, the new characters fir in for the most part. Kup especally is great in his old grump mode, where every battle reminds him of another one.Overall, this is a fun movie for children of the 80s. Trying to show new people the Transformers may leave them confused. But it holds up for the most part and is good for the occasional nostalgia trip.