Thursday 2 May 2013

Day 2: Something I know a lot about?


There are quite literally too many choices.

Well, I’ve just finished a twenty thousand word (not including preliminaries or appendices) dissertation for my Masters’ degree in Education. I chose something no-one had ever written about before, and there really is no existing material anywhere about integrating mixed classes of pupils with autism and Social Emotional and Behavioural Disorders in special needs schools. I suppose that kind of makes me the world’s leading expert.


Which is why I’m going to talk today about Transformers.


I love Transformers. I absolutely fucking love it. I could talk about it all day and not get bored. Not the films you understand. The recent Michael Bay travesties are best forgotten; I can enjoy them on a superficial level – as could any fan of giant transforming robots I suppose – but they are not Transformers.  My particular brand of fixation is the first incarnation of the franchise. What we now call Generation 1.



I know everything about Transformers Generation 1. I read and reread the comics as a child and kept reading them through my teens, and now I own them all as an adult, bound neatly in slightly more grown-up looking editions. I also loved the cartoons, but not to the same extent. I’ve seen them all hundreds of times and can quote Transformers: The Movie by heart, but I would consider this a bit of a sideline.

No- it’s comics for me. The alarming thing is, I remember everything. Even down to issue numbers and covers and which artist and which letterer worked on specific stories.  Useful, I’m sure you’ll agree, that I’ve forgotten everything I learned during my undergrad degree but I can tell you that issue 102 featured a story called Fallen Angel, scripted by Simon Furman (who else?  He’s a GOD to me), drawn by Jeff Anderson and lettered by Annie Halfacree about the Dinobots finally battling it out with Galvatron. The fact that I could probably redraw it panel for panel and write out two thirds of the script for you doubtless comes as no surprise.

I love them. I still read them now. Part nostalgia, yes- but partly just for the raw excitement of watching giant transforming robots from outer space go mental at each other in glorious technicolour. It was probably the writing that helped- they were actually awfully good. Simon Furman (who writes most of the newly resurgent chronologies that have sprung up with the advent of Bay’s Horrorshow Movies) wrote quite dark material for children. The baddies often won, people died, people went insane and killed themselves. For a comic they had quite well-developed characters and personalities. And the stories?  Just so brave and exciting- they really were awesome. No wonder I remember every single minute detail.

But that’s not even the saddest thing.

The saddest thing is, that when I see a little Autobot or Decepticon badge on someone’s T-shirt or belt-buckle or on a sticker, or when I see a Transformer product in a supermarket or happy meal or something, I get this insane little spurt of absolute megafuck euphoria.

Consequently, I have to conclude that, in my formative years, Transformers did something to my brain that just stuck. And everything to do with Transformers that I’ve ever seen, heard or to which I was otherwise exposed since is encoded in some special little obsessive memory engrams never to be deleted.

How can you look at this and *not* be excited?

So yes. I know just about everything about Transformers Generation 1. Most people don't realise that the Megatron running around for the latter half of the 1980s wasn't Megatron at all, but Straxus' weird clone/mind-swap accident, which was discovered beneath London by Action Force and took the place of Megatron on Earth until the two finally confronted one another in a short-lived battle on Cybertron, where the original Megatron had resided semi-functional until his reappearance in the toy-driven Pretender Classics storyline (penned in the US, therefore inferior, sorry). And this was due to the fact that Marvel US had killed off Megatron and not used him for so long that Marvel UK had already resurrected him for use in their stories which integrated into the US ones, causing all manner of chaos for the UK writers who had to retcon stories to explain why there were now two.

See?  Useless, but it's all there.  Ask me.  Ask me anything...

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