Guest Post: That Thing You Love Doesn’t Always Love You Back by Spencer Ellsworth
‘Til All Are One, Buy All Our Playsets & Toys! I’m just old enough to have been raised on VHS tapes. Every weekend in the 80s, my sisters and I would go to the little video store in our tiny California town, right next to the feed store, to pick something out of the 1$ rental shelf for the weekend. I always picked Transformers: The Animated Movie. This piece of ’80s insanity is a hyper-violent, bonkers-weird, hour-and-a-half toy commercial. Hasbro wanted to clear the 1984-1985 model toys, especially those that weren’t selling well, from toy store shelves and introduce new characters. So the first half-hour of the movie, ahem, transforms the franchise. Unlike the syndicated cartoon, a consequence-free zone of stun guns, the animated movie follows Megatron as he mows down Autobots with gruesome detail, climaxing in the brutal death of Optimus Prime from a gaping stomach wound. Oh sure, these are robots with scratched chassis and cut fuel lines, but they fall and scream and mutilate like the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan.
