Transformers Animated: Transform and Roll Out - out tomorrow. (***3/10)
One of the phenomena from my own childhood, and that of my current family, that I have never fully understood, is Transformers. I kind of got it when my friends would play with their toys, and the thing would turn from a robot into a car, or a helicopter or a motorcycle or whatever it was. That was kind of neat. In a McDonalds toy-of-the-week sort of way. I never figured I could be entertained by something like that for more than a few hours. But then, some of my friends were into Transformers more than just for the toys. Transformers, for them, were a way of life. They watched the TV show, they eagerly anticipated the movie, they had all the characters, they wore “Down With Decepticons” T-Shirts. They ate Transformers breakfast cereal and brought Bumblebee Snack Cakes to school in their Optimus Prime fire-truck-shaped lunch boxes.
OK, I’m making large portions of this up, and many of these products may never have existed. And I have to say that because there are some people out there for whom the childhood of the eighties is not yet over, who are still obsessively excited about the whole Transformers concept, who have become the type of collector who makes an excellent central figure in movies such as 40-Year-Old-Virgin. And if they read this, and thought there really was a line of “Down With Decepticons” T-Shirts, they would spend the next three weeks online trying to find them, lose their jobs because they didn’t go to work, mortgage their houses in order to finance the T-Shirt purchase when they DID manage to find one, and then they would never find it and end up broken and destitute and living in an empty boxcar at the abandoned O-Train yard. And I don’t want that.
Alright, that was a lot of lead-up to this review, which will be far less interesting in substance. Transformers Animated: Transform and Roll Out is the first movie to come out of the Transformers Animated production. This is a TV series that was produced to capitalize on the revitalized market for Transformers watchers in the wake of the 2007 blockbuster movie. It’s produced by the Cartoon Network and involves the characters you would expect, Optimus Prime and Bumblebee chief among them. I think, although I’m not certain, that Transform and Roll Out is the first three episodes of the series crammed together in a 68-minute “movie”. There are three distinct portions to the film, the first being a battle in outer space between the Autobots (good guys) and the Decepticons (bad guys) over the All-Spark, a device that would give the Decepticons the ultimate power over the universe. The second involves the Autobots crashing into Earth, setting up in Detroit, and becoming heroes. And the third involves the Decepticons discovering the Autobots there and turning Detroit into a battle zone.
I am still not sure of a couple of things. The Autobots are the good guys, and they have the All-Spark, and must protect it at all costs against the bad guys, because if the Decepticons get their metallic hands on it they will control the world. So why don’t the Autobots simply use the device to defeat the Decepticons and institute their own benign rule over the universe? And why does Bumblebee have a name taken straight from an Earth creature, when these robots have never been to Earth and don’t even know what humans are? And why does he look vaguely like a cat? Frankly, I still, to this day, don’t understand the appeal of Transformers, to kids or to nerds. The series (and by extension this movie) is obnoxious. They take human expressions and cliches and update them with technological terms, as though that is supposed to be funny. “I’m not ready to go to the Well Of All Sparks yet”. Uuuuhhhh…
Transformers Animated: Transform and Roll Out has a couple of animated shorts in the special features. One is a bizarre scene where Optimus Prime gives a talk to a bunch of schoolchildren. Another is a two-minute scene where the motorcycle transformer crashes, and then punches Bumblebee. Just some bizarre pointless extras to a bizarre, pointless DVD. One thing of note on this volume - the voice of Optimus Prime is done by David Kaye, the same guy who does the Big Voice thing on CHEZ 106. You know that voice that does our promos and says “classic rock…CHEZ 106″? He’s Optimus Prime. And while I wouldn’t suggest that’s a reason to watch this, it isn’t a reason not to watch it…Transformers Animated: Transform and Roll Out comes out June 17th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.