I've wanted to do this dissection for awhile, but didn't know how to tackle it.
My "so..." series lets me come at it the right way finally.
I've been hanging onto this franchise from a sense of childhood nostalgia....but...why?
I mean, as a kid, the toys where neat, and I gobbled up all its corresponding media cuz I loved the toys.
Then I stuck with the media cuz of childhood love.
....but it's really a fucked up story when you really look at it.
Autobots and Decepticons fight their war for millions of years!!
Immortal beings fighting a war that never ends!?
That's some bleak fatalistic shit!
That's the plot to DS9's "Battle Lines" where prisoners made immortal by nanites keep fighting each other forever and ever.
Or! It's the plot to Classic Trek's "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" where the half-black/half-white aliens fight themselves to universal genocide.
One of those is how Transformers has to end.
Armageddon, or eternal futility.
Star Trek shook its head and clucked its tongue at those gloomy outcomes, and then Hasbro turned right around, and packaged it up, and said "hey kids!!! Buy this!!".
Kinda puts the "Transformers/Star Trek" crossover into perspective, doesn't it?
At some point, Kirk should have said "y'know, you guys remind me of big metal versions of the people of Cheron".
Some Hasbro exec probably said "get that fuckin' pinko shit out of there!! 😡".
I'm gonna pretend Kirk said it in-between panels.
😉😏
I mean, I get it.
The toy is a toy soldier fused with a car, or a plane, or whatever, as a folding puzzle.
Toy soldiers sell better than say...toy Ghandi, or toy MLK, or toy Susan B. Anthony.
Kids (mostly boys, but there are exceptions) like things that go "pew pew!".
BUT! The Marvel writers who sat down to make the backstory, that's where it takes the odd turn.
Star Wars has a winnable war.
Star Trek has various winnable wars.
Battlestar Galactica had a winnable war.
Planet Of The Apes...well, Apes shows the futility of war again.
Apes had toys and everything. How did they get away with that?
MASH was on from before I was born to '83, just before Transformers dropped.
MASH was openly and un-abashedly anti-war.
MASH had toys. MASH had toys...man, that's weird.
There had to be an adult collector's market for toys even back then.
Can you imagine the weird hippie that made their kid watch MASH?
And got them the toys?
Gee...in hindsight, I wish that had been my childhood.
Anyway!! We had all these other franchises that had either winnable wars, and hope for change, even if with violence, or had a flat out anti-war message.
What fit of "fuck everything!!" were those Transformers writers in that made them go "fuck it, war is forever. Children need to learn that they're doomed, and to stop hoping".
Was it cowardly appeasement of Reagan?
Was that it?
Was it really that simple?
Was the eternal Cybertronian War just to help explain the existence of the Dinobots?
But then.....why not have it be there was war...then aeons of peace, then a brand new war erupted, and then the Dinobots get woken up and pick up where they left off?
Nope. Aeons of war for the poor Transformers.
The Decepticon fascists never stop fashing.
The Decepticon fascists never stop fashing.
The Autobots never stop revolutioning.
Is the moral/political statement that in spite of having emotions, and personhoods, the Transformers have core programming that they can't break?
That in the end, they really are just robots, and can't stop running their program forever?
Like a Microsoft upgrade you can't decline?
But if they are ultimately helpless robots, why not inject a peace program into their upgrade modems?
Why can't their war drive be shut down?
Why can't they be put out of their misery?
The practical capitalistic reason is, this would end the story, and the cash flow.
But that sends the very clear message to me that the capitalistic beast feeds on misery.
But...that's if the Transformers story narrative were an unbroken chain like the canon of Star Trek.
The damned thing reboots every 5-10 years.
Why can't every fleeting timeline have a happy ending before the next reboot?
Why always the message of forever-war?
It has to be by choice at this point.
If it wasn't before, it is now.
I happen to think it always was a choice.
So, what point of view is this bleak outlook propaganda for?
Well the sneaky lefty subversive way to look at it would be "they fight forever because they're robots, but you're not a robot".
But if that's in there, it's buried way too fucking deep under the "pew pew!".
"Iron Giant" lays it right out.
The Iron Giant is a weapon that chooses to be pacifist.
There's no tippie-toe-ing.
The world didn't end cuz that movie exists.
The creators didn't get sent to the gulag.
No. There's no wiggle room.
One has to finally inescapably conclude that Hasbro is kinda fucking evil.
Transformers is propaganda for "war is inevitable. Peace-making is for sissies and suckers. Get with the program".
Maybe they thought the very act of a child enjoying the toys confirmed their "war is inevitable" point of view. Maybe they thought the sales figures confirmed it.
But, again, Apes and MASH merch sold too.
Given all the above, I think in those first birthing moments, it was a Reagan appeasement thing.
Reagan legalized shows being toy commercials, so he probably wanted something back for that.
It can't possibly be a mistake that all those toy shows were warlike. Well, save one, but I'll get to that.
Then, that warlike outlook got frozen in amber.
Nostalgia, inertia, both, hard to say.
But it needn't be so.
Reagan is dust.
We don't need to obey his ghost.
The Transformers can broker a peace deal, and the damned thing can end.
Iron Giant can infect his pacifism into their upgrade stream.
A time-warped Hawkeye and BJ (from MASH) can broker the talks.
A time-warped Taylor (from Apes) can tell how the maniacs blew it all up.
We're the dreamers of the dream, we can do goddamned anything.
We don't have to tacitly accept this Cold-Warrior ugliness in our story-world.
We just don't.
And that gets me to the one 80's toy show that gave Reagan the finger.
And the world didn't fucking end.
He-Man had a sword, but he never killed or maimed with it.
Never.
He used it as a tool.
A lock pick, a grapnel, anything but an instrument of death.
He-Man saved his villains!
He pulled Skeletor up from a potential fall off a cliff.
Repug-nicans say they're Christian, but He-Man really practiced "love thy enemy".
I think that put the old Cold-War buzzards in moral checkmate.
They didn't know how to handle that one.
That He-Man co-existed on the timeline with Transformers all the more makes me suspect it was deliberate propaganda for a fatalistic kind of militarism.
And it explains why the Michael Bay movies are so bleak and grim.
Maybe the 80's incarnation never should have made everything all neon colored and jolly and fun.
Maybe Bay ugly-fying the Transformers accidentally did us a favor.
Maybe the Bay movies are accidentally Joker 2 of Transformers.
Then all of this makes me think; imagine a world were Hanna-Barbara or Filmation had gotten a crack at Transformers.
What would that have looked like?
Probably "Iron Giant".
No, the world of Transformers as it is now was a series of choices.
I contend cynical ones at best, wicked ones at worst.
But other stories, like "Iron Giant", Apes, and MASH show it needn't keep being so.
It can be changed, or we can deprive it of our money until it does change.
We can make our dream-worlds what we want.
Our dreams don't need "join the Army!" commercials in it.
Maybe you Millennials, Zennials, and Alphas can do a better job than the Boomers and us X-ers did.
Like, maybe don't necessarily censor Transformers from your kid's diet, but get "Iron Giant" in the mix, and then Trek, Apes, and MASH when they're old enough.
Don't hand-wave it with a "meh, they'll figure it out someday".
Then they grow up, and come back from the middle east with robot legs.
No, let's do better.
Pacifism isn't passivity.
Get off your butts.
Pass along your values.
The damned Repugs sure are.
2 comments:
https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/1gxmri4/i_cant/
Ooof...oooffff.....
Oh, and in Maine too. Lovely. WTF is is with Republicans running predators? Hatred of women has become one of their planks, I guess.
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