August 13, 1986 | OK, kids, let me see if I have this straight.
In the world of The Transformers: The Movie, the good robots are the blue-eyed Autobots, the bad robots are the red-eyed Decepticons, and the worst robot of all is the voracious, planet-sized Unicron. They’re all Transformers, meaning they can transform themselves turn into nifty sports cars, or walking artillery guns, or jet-propelled locomotives, or heavy-metal pterodactyls. Some Transformers, the Dynobots, can even transform themselves into dinosaurs.
Some Transformers are smarter than others. And some are meaner than others. And while they’re not particularly snobbish about hanging around with human beings, they prefer that humans wear robot suits in their presence.
Have I got it all correct so far?
Good.
Now, let me see if I understand the basic conflict. The Autobots were driven from Cybertron, their home planet, by the dastardly Decepticons. Our heroes want to liberate their occupied planet and to unite all Transformers into one tribe. But Megatron, the Decepticon leader, will have no part of peaceful co-existence. And when Megatron is transformed by Unicron into a new and improved killer robot called Galvatron, the intergalactic conflict really heats up.
That about sums it up, right?
OK, fine.
You have to excuse my ignorance. See, we didn’t have Transformer toys way back when I was a kid. (We didn’t even have videocassette recorders. Or video games. It was practically the Dark Ages.) And we didn’t have a Transformers TV series. Instead, we used to watch late-afternoon cartoon shows like Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw and Yogi Bear. We also watched Rocky and His Friends, with Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle the Moose, but we didn’t really appreciate that one until we grew older.
Anyway, I went to see The Transformers: The Movie without much advance knowledge about the heroes and villains. And, to be completely honest, the only way I could tell the difference between the warring robots was to listen to the human actors who provided their voices. Among the good guys, I could recognize Judd Nelson as the boyish Hot Rod, Robert Stack as the straight-arrow Ultra Magnus, and Lionel Stander as the grizzled old Kup. Leonard Nimoy — you know him, he’s Mr. Spock on Star Trek — is the bad Galvatron. And the late Orson Welles — ask your parents, they’ll tell you who he was — is the monstrous Unicron. Transformers, as it turns out, is Welles’ last movie. I don’t know if he would be proud of that, but he might find it amusing.
For the grown-ups in the audience, there’s Eric Idle of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, who’s quite funny as he does the voice for a robot who learned to speak from watching TV commercials. And there’s a very clever moment when the doltish Dynobot named Grimlock asks Kup to ”tell me about the Petro-Rabbits again.” But it seems clever only if you’ve read a grown-up book, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men.
Did I like The Transformers? Well, some of the animation work is impressive. But a lot of the action sequences seem repetitious. And most of the loud songs on the soundtrack sound alike. Somebody named Stan Bush sings what appears to be the movie’s theme, ”The Touch.” But another song used in the movie, Weird Al Yankovic’s ”Dare to Be Stupid,” strikes me as much more appropriate for what is on the screen.
But, hey, look, I’m 34 years old. So I’m not really part of the target audience for this film, right? If you want to see the robots smash and crash each other, be my guest. But make sure you don’t repeat that naughty word one of the Transformers uses during an early battle scene. Otherwise, your Mom might transform a bar of soap into mouthwash and tell you to gargle.
