‘Transformers: The Movie’ Returns Now That We’re Old Enough to Get Why it Was Beautiful

Transformers: The Movie (1986) is the best of the Transformers movies, followed one car-length behind by Bumblebee (2018) and then none of them. The sole reason we don’t proclaim the 1986 animated feature as the only good Transformers movie is because Bumblebee exists. (Transformers One is 100% OK-ish.) The Transformers movies directed by Bay are all terrible. Real ones know (as they know that the Hasbro-verse opus is affectionately known to fandoms as “TFTM86” or “TF’86” or some variant thereof, if you’re into the whole brevity thing).

San Diego Comic-Con just happened this weekend, and amidst its pop-culture onslaught this trailer was released for TFTM86‘s 40th-anniversary re-release in actual movie theaters, plus at the end there’s a cool new bit:

The MCU had The Snap, we can call this The Twitch. Which naturally presages “The Touch.” Which you’ve got.

Cheekily sub-titled “The Apology Tour,” the TFTM86 re-release event offers an apology that no one explicitly asked for, yet one that nerds of a certain age may welcome, specifically addressing the first 15-ish minutes of Transformers: The Movie, which were shockingly brutal and disproportionately traumatizing when compared to the animated Transformers TV show with which many kids were at that point familiar.

It’s well-covered territory, but I’ll just SPOILER-SUMMARIZE real quick with no inviso-text, because it was 40 freaking years ago:

Megatron and the Decepticons attack the Autobot shuttle and slaughter everyone inside, including first-gen stalwarts Prowl, Ratchet, and Ironhide. Then they attack Autobot City on Earth and there’s a huge battle in which other familiar Autobots like Windcharger and Wheeljack are straight killed. Optimus Prime arrives and fights Megatron to the death. As in, they both beat the scrap out of each other and later, on a hospital bed, Optimus Prime succumbs to his body damage and dies.

For its time, it was kind of like that part in Bambi. It was kind of like Hasbro’s Red Wedding. It was the part where the fantasy world unexpectedly showed you that life is cruel, violent, and temporary.

Remember, this was before the Internet, before the zillion TV shows. A kid could just walk into a movie screening and not know what was going to happen. Optimus Prime DIED.

And then the movie got really good.

(Yes, they did revisit the Prime death in the animated TV show a few seasons later and brought him back to life, but by that time a.) many of us had moved on because we were finding new adolescent traumatic experiences to be bothered by and b.) that show fell off pretty hard after the first season in terms of animation quality and storytelling, and didn’t carry the same weight.)

Linked to the unasked-for emotional impact of the Autobot leader expiring on a hospital bed was another unanticipated resonance, which was that TFTM86 turned out to be a very excellent story. Or rather, it was much more excellent than it had to be, for a toy movie marketed to American kids. You may, with reasonable skepticism, scoff. But seriously, compared to the “Bayformers” movies of the 21st century, which were supposedly for adults and marketed for broad summer blockbuster appeal? Those movies are the worst. Garish, stereotypically insulting, hard to look at, did I mention stupid, but most crucially, impossible for the audience to invest in because the story was always incoherent nonsense.

TFTM86, on the other hand, follows the form of both the modern Hollywood blockbuster and the classic Hero’s Journey arc (cf. The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell, three-act structure, alla that) almost to a fault, it’s so well-executed:

• There’s a young flawed hero, in this case Hot Rod.
• There’s an odyssey, as in a long eventful trip, with the goal of taking the Autobots from their adopted home Earth back to their native home Cybertron.
• Shockingly, the wise elders (Optimus Prime, Ironhide, and yeah, Megatron) die early on in the story, leaving the young protagonists to heed the call to ascendance/adventure, or not.
• Hot Rod at first resists the call (from the Matrix of Leadership), partly because he feels the guilt of having rashly jumped into Prime’s fatal fight with Megatron, so even though we know it’s his destiny, he has to do his whole personal journey to get there.
• So if you’ve watched many movies and ingested many mythic stories, I don’t need to tell you that the hero’s return home coincides with both Hot Rod’s decision to engage his destiny (to become a truck) and the arrival of the gigantic existential threat to the homeworld, in this case Unicron, the Awesomely Large Eater of Whole Planets.

Basically I’m saying TFTM86 could be taught in a Classics Lit course, right next to A New Hope and The Matrix.

(Notably, G.I. Joe: The Movie is not nearly as good as TFTM86, altho it tried to follow the formula with the name actor voice talent and the epic scale, it just didn’t do the story part quite as well. I don’t remember what happened in the Gobots movie.)

Speaking of that voice talent, TFTM86 features a cast that was, at the time, astoundingly prestigious: Orson Welles gives his last film performance as the voice of Unicron (and nails it, btw). Eric Idle of Monty Python is perfectly cast as the charmingly-ranting Junkion. Judd Nelson. Robert Stack. Leonard Nimoy as Galvatron almost made us believe that Galvatron toy’s transformation wasn’t annoyingly convoluted.

Oh yeah, and there was a woman! Arcee, the first known lady Transformer debuted in TFTM86. Which, honestly, raised so many questions.

The Transformers’ overarching narrative is sort of a weird one. There are two sides at war, and they basically do nothing but fight, while also changing into cars and dinosaurs. Even less than G.I. Joe, there’s not much side-story involving personal relationships. And up until TFTM86, they were all dudes. Or rather, they were all strongly dude-coded. We don’t really know how gender works on Cybertron, and at eight years old we weren’t thinking about it too hard. We can say definitively that Arcee is pink.

Lastly, a word on the music, which is inextricable from the epic vibe that is TFTM86. You’ve heard Stan Bush’s immortal song in Boogie Nights, perhaps without realizing it, or caring. There are specialized cosplay bands devoted to playing the songs. The score features Vince DiCola, who also crafted the training-montage pump-up music in Rocky IV. Here’s the new version of “The Touch” from the recently-released Transformers: The Movie Soundtrack: Reformatted Edition.

This just to say: It’s all right, fans of TFTM86. You were not hallucinating. It’s an exceptionally good movie. Do you need to see it again in a theater? That question is between you and the exact circumstances of your adulthood.

It would be a rather audacious retcon if, as teased by the new trailer, Optimus Prime regains his paint job. But honestly, Hasbro, there’s no need to apologize. Some of us are stronger for the experience.

Transformers: The Movie returns for a limited theatrical run this September.