autobottrixter

On this day, 25 years ago, the first issue of the Transformers comic book, the first piece of Transformers fiction, was published. For a long time I've been facinated with the idea that something like Transformers could have such an impression on so many people, that something with such base origins - a toy commercial! - could have such a massive cultural impact. But as Hasbro discovered when they tried to get rid of Optimus Prime to make way for a newer, shinier leader for their Autobot protagonists, the creative minds they had enlisted to create a story and characters for their repackaged Japanese robot toys had hit on some magical formula of sci-fi fantasy that elevated it to a level they could only have dreamed of. Full of characters alien enough to be captivating and human enough to be relatable, Transformers became a cultural phenomenon.

It's incredible, too, as someone who got involved in the fandom during the darker days of the 1990s that so many people have rediscovered something in that childhood obsession worth embracing today. At that time I reached out to fellow fans spread across distant states because, while everyone remembered that little yellow Volkswagon or that tape player with the awesome voice, actual fans were few and far between. Nowadays Transformers fandom encompasses most of geek culture to some degree or another, not to mention pop culture as a whole. Whatever community I'm in, whether playing MMOs or working tech support, I find people who may not share my obsessiveness, but who share an interest. Transformers have become a major part of the common language of our generation.

Part of the longevity may be that, because of its origin as a throwaway fiction to sell toys, Transformers never took itself super-seriously. Today marks the publication of the first of what would turn out to be only one - though to many like myself, the preferred one - of a number of seperate canons. Other similar worlds have had trouble reinventing themselves for a newer audience because they've been so set in stone - This is how everything happened! - that every new story is more and more bogged down in backstory, making it harder to bring in more of an audience. Both Marvel and DC Comics have famously struggled with this problem, not to mention the light shone on the matter by the recent Star Trek reboot.

And now that I've gotten trying to sound intellectual out of my system, Transformers has been a huge part of my life. I watched the show religiously as a kid, at one point getting up at 5:30 in the morning to catch Tommy Kennedy-hosted reruns. I inherited an interest in science fiction from my father, and it was just soft enough for my young mind to really dig into. I "grew out of it" and moved on with the rest of my generation, but when I started getting into comic books during my freshman year of high school I rediscovered them through old issues of the Marvel comic and reruns on the Sci-Fi Channel. What started as nostalgia grew into an obsession in its own right when I found Simon Furman's run on the original comic and realized that Transformers stories could be serious space epics with some real meat on them. The rest is history: I edited and published a fanzine for a few years, I started going to BotCon in '95, I got involved in the online fandom as soon as I was able. And I watched the fandom grow as people caught on to what I had already discovered, that Transformers was more than a cheaply-made cartoon intended to sell toys. Through the creators at Hasbro and those tasked by them to create interesting characters and a compelling world, they had created something much, much bigger.

Had you asked me in high school back in the mid-90s what I thought Transformers would be like in another 15 years, I never would have guessed this. I never would have guessed that there would be more cartoons, a renewed appreciation for the originals, several comic book titles (some of them still by Simon!) a month, or a ridiculously Hollywood blockbuster movie franchise. I never would have predicted the BBQ Double Stackticon. But while I may be a curmudgeon about it sometimes, I really couldn't be happier that 25 years later, not only our generation but our entire culture is still in love with Transformers.