All That Meets The Eye

I was never a big fan of the Transformers when I was a kid.  I guess I was a little too old to be interested in them when they came along.

(The blogger, on the eve of his 44th birthday, looks down at the Lego race car on his desk and realizes that his previous sentence may not be entirely accurate.)

Okay, maybe I wasn't too old.  It was more a matter of not having the feeling of intrigue in the whole concept.  On the one hand, I found the idea of the "transforming" quite interesting.  Seeing how you could design a robot to fold up into the shape of a car or plane or something was a fascinating spatial challenge.  Seeing how they did that gave me a joy that I now only get when unpacking Ikea furniture.

It's just after that which I didn't get.  Okay, these cars are now robots.  What do they do? Fight? That's it?  And yes, I know now that they have a big backstory.  But at the time you didn't really get that idea when the commercials just showed kids making up their own flimsy battle scenarios.

Speaking of made up flimsy battle scenarios - the movies.  I haven't seen them either, and once again, there may be a lot more to them, but the ads and the impressions of others seem to indicate that they don't really do anything but fight.  Sure, it's now in excruciating CGI detail instead of eight-year-olds waving their toys at each other, but it still doesn't draw me in.

And this is a bit off-topic, but can we spare a thought for the Go-Bots? The Pepsi to the Transformers' Coke have been ridiculed over the years, and largely left-out of eighties nostalgia. But it's hard to believe that in today's world where they make blockbusters on any pop-culture property, that no studio would take a chance on them.

Anyway, there's yet another Transformers movie coming out. And it seems to be doubling-down on the concept of fights between giant robots that are inexplicably built out of a lot of really tiny, intricate parts.  That leaves me with a question - again, having not seen the movies - do the Transformers, you know, transform?  All they ever show is them in robot form fighting it out.  And since the battles are epic, destroy-everything-in-sight affairs, there doesn't seem to be much point in hiding.  I'm assuming that if you see a the aftermath of a Transformer battle, with a neighbourhood turned into a huge crater of destruction, and then notice a few undamaged cars in the middle, they aren't fooling anyone.