Speaker 1: You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
Speaker 1: and iHeartRadio. Guess what Will?
Speaker 2: What's that Mango?
Speaker 1: So you know that impulse when you pass an electric
Speaker 1: fan and no one is around and you just want
Speaker 1: to lean in and say more than meets the eye.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure if you know what I was doing
Speaker 3: for the ten minutes before you got in here, But
Speaker 3: do you mean like this more than.
Speaker 2: Exactly?
Speaker 1: That impulse is officially forty years old. Wow, so Transformers
Speaker 1: might have a new movie out, but they are old,
Speaker 1: baby like, these toys are elder millennials, meaning we would
Speaker 1: have been about five when the first ones came out.
Speaker 3: That is crazy, which would have given us plenty of
Speaker 3: time to spend chanting more than meets the eye into
Speaker 3: household appliances everywhere.
Speaker 1: Household applian. It's like a toaster or whatever. You know,
Speaker 1: Transformers or for everyone these days. But there are about
Speaker 1: two dozen different product lines and the first movie was
Speaker 1: directed by Michael Bay that broke the box offices all
Speaker 1: from these toys that had us like crunching tiny pterodactyls
Speaker 1: into the shape of cassette tapes.
Speaker 3: Wait, is that is that a real transformer or did
Speaker 3: you just make that up?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's totally real. My aunt, when I was in
Speaker 1: fourth grade as a birthday president, took me to Toys r
Speaker 1: US and let me pick out anything, and so I
Speaker 1: picked out these tiny mini cassette Transformers. And our fact checker,
Speaker 1: slash researcher and resident Transformers guru Gabe said it was
Speaker 1: not a pterodactyl. It was a falcon or a condor.
Speaker 1: So I've already been fact checked, just as his intro.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you want to get that wrong with Gabe, but.
Speaker 1: It was rad Anyway, Today's episode is a dive back
Speaker 1: into the world of Transformers. How did these incredible toys
Speaker 1: come to be? And why is it that kids still
Speaker 1: can't get nothing them? So let's dive in.
Speaker 3: Hey, their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm
Speaker 3: Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good
Speaker 3: friend mangesh Hot Ticketter and on the other side of
Speaker 3: that soundproof glass trying and sadly failing to convert a transformer.
Speaker 3: That's our friend and producer Dylan fag And he's good
Speaker 3: at a lot of things, but this is something he's
Speaker 3: not so great at, and I don't know, if you
Speaker 3: can see it from our angle, mango, But he's sweating
Speaker 3: and he's playing pump up music to get him through
Speaker 3: it all. And I say that with no judgment, by
Speaker 3: the way, like Dylan showed me the instruction sheet and
Speaker 3: it takes forty steps to wrestle that thing into a truck.
Speaker 3: So he's really got his work cut out for him.
Speaker 1: Well, I am rooting for him, as I always But well,
Speaker 1: I know we were both into basketball and the Lakers
Speaker 1: as kids. We were both into SNL pretty early because
Speaker 1: of our dads. But was transformer or something you were into?
Speaker 3: Oh, it was one hundred percent something I was into. Now,
Speaker 3: I didn't always know what I was talking about. In fact,
Speaker 3: to this day, if I were to tell my parents
Speaker 3: we were doing an episode on the Transformers, they would
Speaker 3: say more to Measdi. Because I would run around the
Speaker 3: house pretending to be a Transformer. I had no idea
Speaker 3: what the theme song said, and in my mind they
Speaker 3: said more to Measdi, and so I just sang along
Speaker 3: with it. So it meant something to me, and that's
Speaker 3: what's most important.
Speaker 1: But how about you, Yeah, I mean, I remember when
Speaker 1: I was like five or six, living in North Carolina.
Speaker 1: It was the one cartoon that I'd watched religiously in
Speaker 1: the afternoons. I was not into G I. Joe, which
Speaker 1: I think was the thing that came on after, but
Speaker 1: I was obsessed with Transformers. I love the toys and
Speaker 1: just the idea that you could get your hands on
Speaker 1: a robot and not know what it would transform into
Speaker 1: until you like bent and twisted it into all these
Speaker 1: different directions and then you'd be like totally delighted by
Speaker 1: whatever return to you, like, even if it was a van.
Speaker 3: You know, you've never been so delighted to play with
Speaker 3: a van. But just as it adds up, so you
Speaker 3: mentioned Gabe earlier, and he is really a stickler forgetting
Speaker 3: the facts right about transformers and all of toys and
Speaker 3: toy history. And so just to make sure we know
Speaker 3: you didn't transform your transformers, you converted them. I think
Speaker 3: we've gone to a new level of nerd here.
Speaker 2: But that is the fact.
Speaker 1: Why why did I convert them?
Speaker 3: Well, one of the weirdest things I learned this week
Speaker 3: is that Hasbro, the company that makes Transformers, purposely avoids
Speaker 3: using the verb transform when you know, referring to their
Speaker 3: products because they don't want to risk genericizing their trademark.
Speaker 3: It's like how Escalator used to be the registered brand name,
Speaker 3: but then the term became so common that people started
Speaker 3: calling every set of moving stairs and escalator. So it's
Speaker 3: just really hard to maintain a trademark the protection around
Speaker 3: that once the public starts treating your brand name generically.
Speaker 3: So it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: Like Xerox. It's funny my my uncle's firm in India
Speaker 1: actually made a campaign with the slogan was make your
Speaker 1: Xerox on an HP.
Speaker 2: This is pretty great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I guess it's a problem more when the
Speaker 3: brand name is a straight up description of what your
Speaker 3: product does. Like you can't trademark an electric mixing machine
Speaker 3: as a blender because that's what it does. It blends
Speaker 3: food together. So the same story with escalators, and it
Speaker 3: could be argued with transformers too.
Speaker 1: So Hasbro wants to make sure that people associate transformers
Speaker 1: with a specific set of characters and not with like
Speaker 1: gobots or any other transforming toys in general.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly right, And part of maintaining that tricky
Speaker 3: legal distinction is never admitting that transformers transform, so we
Speaker 3: will not get them in trouble by saying that, and
Speaker 3: I'm sure it is a challenge for the marketing team
Speaker 3: that is ridiculous.
Speaker 1: Anyway, I know you've got the backstory on these converting
Speaker 1: robots that we refer to as Transformers, so why don't
Speaker 1: you lay it on us?
Speaker 2: All right?
Speaker 3: This was a fun origin here, so to start with,
Speaker 3: it's easy to overlook this if you aren't familiar with
Speaker 3: the series, But Transformers isn't a purely American invention. The
Speaker 3: original nineteen eighties toy line was largely made up of
Speaker 3: pre existing products from several different Japanese toy lines, most
Speaker 3: notably Diaclone and micro Change.
Speaker 1: You know both of these, right, Yeah, I'm a huge
Speaker 1: Diaclone head. Of course, I have no idea what you're
Speaker 1: talking about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I didn't either.
Speaker 3: It was part of the research, but it was interesting
Speaker 3: to look into. So Japan was way ahead of the
Speaker 3: curve when it came to thinking robots were cool. And
Speaker 3: that's because, unlike the US and other Western nations, Japan
Speaker 3: had been developing robotic inventions as far back as this
Speaker 3: seventeenth century, which for reference, was about three hundred years
Speaker 3: before the term robot was first coined. So the earliest
Speaker 3: automatons on record in Japan were these tea serving mechanical
Speaker 3: dolls that could wheel a cup and saucer back and
Speaker 3: forth from the kitchen, and they were a huge hit
Speaker 3: with a few wealthy families who could afford them, and
Speaker 3: before long, clockwork automatons began popping up in stage productions
Speaker 3: and other forms of entertainment that were much more accessible
Speaker 3: to the masses. So you fast forward to the early
Speaker 3: twentieth century and Japan was already well acquainted with the
Speaker 3: idea of robots, far more so than most Western countries
Speaker 3: at the time. Then, during the Atomic Age, the idea
Speaker 3: of super robots sparked a cultural craze in Japan, and
Speaker 3: these colorful robotic warriors began to dominate the manga stories,
Speaker 3: the anime shows, and eventually the nation's toy ales.
Speaker 1: That's really funny, Like you think about that magazine Giant
Speaker 1: Robot that used to exist. That's all about Japanese culture,
Speaker 1: So it's kind of that's about their linked. I'd heard
Speaker 1: that the first couple of decades after World War Two
Speaker 1: actually were like a golden age of toys in Japan,
Speaker 1: which is obviously not what you'd expect since the atomic
Speaker 1: bombings destroyed some to the country.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's true, But the Japanese people were very resourceful,
Speaker 3: like they realized there was plenty of ten lying around
Speaker 3: from the Allied soldiers ration cans, and by recycling that metal,
Speaker 3: they were able to produce inexpensive toys that got the
Speaker 3: industry up and running pretty quickly, and in fact, the
Speaker 3: sales of those toys actually helped the Japanese population bounce
Speaker 3: back much faster than it otherwise would have, because once
Speaker 3: US soldiers saw the innovative and affordable toys that were
Speaker 3: being produced there, they started buying them up and sending
Speaker 3: them back home to the States, and it was that
Speaker 3: enthusiasm that eventually led to Japan being authorized to sell
Speaker 3: toys in the global market, which means that toys were
Speaker 3: actually the country's first real export following it surrender in
Speaker 3: nineteen forty five.
Speaker 1: Were these metal toys mostly robots then, I.
Speaker 3: Mean there were lots of wind up toys, but also
Speaker 3: a lot of vehicles. And as time went on, production
Speaker 3: methods improved and more materials became available, but robots and
Speaker 3: vehicles remained the lifeblood of this industry. Started to pair
Speaker 3: the two categories together in different ways. Sometimes the robot
Speaker 3: came with their own vehicles to ride in, and other
Speaker 3: cases a fleet of non transforming vehicles could be combined
Speaker 3: together to form kind of like a giant robot. But
Speaker 3: it wasn't until the mid nineteen seventies that the Japanese
Speaker 3: toy companies in Takara, they began to push the marriage
Speaker 3: even further by making robot figures that could convert into vehicles,
Speaker 3: and it was the best of both worlds in a
Speaker 3: single toy, and kids just went nuts for them.
Speaker 1: So these early transforming robot toys sound great, but they
Speaker 1: still weren't technically transformers.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, they were both toy lines from a company
Speaker 3: I mentioned earlier called Takara. So back in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 3: Takara found success with a series called Microman, which centered
Speaker 3: on a race of tiny cybernetic spacemen who had come
Speaker 3: to protect the Earth from an alien invasion. And they
Speaker 3: came with all these interchangeable accessories that could be put
Speaker 3: together in all sorts of ways, and you would build
Speaker 3: these vehicles and robots for the little guys to pilot. So,
Speaker 3: after a couple of years of success, the designers at
Speaker 3: Takara decided to launch a spin offline and that would
Speaker 3: focus more on transforming robot toys rather than the spacemen,
Speaker 3: and the resulting series was called Diaclone, which is a
Speaker 3: combination of the words diamond and cyclone.
Speaker 1: Which sounds like those diamond storms where rains diamonds on
Speaker 1: Neptune or Jupiter, which is just an incredible phenomena.
Speaker 2: Yeah it does.
Speaker 3: But you know, these toys were small, like. They consisted
Speaker 3: of tiny little robots that transformed into these futuristic vehicles
Speaker 3: and sci fi fortresses which the new even smaller micromen
Speaker 3: could interact with.
Speaker 1: Which sounds fun. But it still feels a bit off
Speaker 1: from the Transformers.
Speaker 2: We know, Yeah, we just you know, it's evolution.
Speaker 3: It takes a little time. We're working our way there.
Speaker 3: It wouldn't be as exciting if it just happened over night.
Speaker 3: And this is still the nineteen seventies, all right. So
Speaker 3: fast forward nineteen eighty two, just two years before the
Speaker 3: Transformers first came out to Car release the line called
Speaker 3: Car Robots, and unlike all the transforming toys that came
Speaker 3: before it, these ones converted into real life cars and
Speaker 3: trucks instead of made up sci fi vehicles.
Speaker 1: So do you know why they decided to move from
Speaker 1: sci fi into something that was a little more realistic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean sometimes these kinds of things come from
Speaker 3: the preferences of those who are working on this stuff
Speaker 3: like this came from the head designer, a guy named
Speaker 3: kojin Ono, and he thought it would be more fun
Speaker 3: for kids if they were playing with the kinds of
Speaker 3: vehicles you might see in real life. Of course, there
Speaker 3: was a little in fighting among the group there, and
Speaker 3: other members of the team weren't quite convinced, but when
Speaker 3: the sales department backed up Ono's ideas, the company decided
Speaker 3: to give it a try. But if you're wondering why
Speaker 3: the sales team felt confident, Ono recently offered an explanation
Speaker 3: during a twenty twenty four interview with Figure King magazine.
Speaker 3: The sixty five year old designer, who still works it
Speaker 3: to Kara, by the way, told the interviewer quote, there
Speaker 3: was a part conveniently located right in front of our company,
Speaker 3: allowing us to easily conduct surveys of children. Of course,
Speaker 3: nowadays such practices would be an absolute no no from
Speaker 3: a compliance standpoint, But as I mentioned earlier, there's a
Speaker 3: certain persuasiveness in directly hearing from children. Their enthusiastic support
Speaker 3: played a pivotal role in propelling us forward, and that's
Speaker 3: what led them to making these toys that could transform
Speaker 3: into real cars.
Speaker 1: Okay, so now we've got transforming robots that turn into
Speaker 1: these realistic looking vehicles. But we've got to be getting
Speaker 1: close to the capital t transformers.
Speaker 2: Right, Yep, we are almost there.
Speaker 3: In fact, a lot of figures that were designed for
Speaker 3: car robots in the early eighties were the same ones
Speaker 3: that would later be repurposed actually as the original Transformers toys. So,
Speaker 3: for example, the first one that cojin Ono designed was
Speaker 3: this red super tuning Lamborghini, which was later released in
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty four as a yellow autobot sports car named Sunstreaker.
Speaker 1: And so what about all the other early transformers that
Speaker 1: don't turn into cars and trucks, Like I know, there
Speaker 1: were also mechanical animals and dinabots. And wasn't there even
Speaker 1: one that turned into like a handgun Megatron?
Speaker 2: I think that's exactly right, Megatron.
Speaker 3: Good memory, Mango. And so in one of the universes,
Speaker 3: he turns into a Walter p. Thirty eight pistol, which
Speaker 3: is really embarrassing that you didn't know that, But actually
Speaker 3: I only know that because of Gabe once again coming
Speaker 3: to the rescue here. But no, you're right, they really
Speaker 3: left no stone unturned when choosing the figures alt modes,
Speaker 3: which by the way, is the official term for the
Speaker 3: non primary mode of a Transformer.
Speaker 1: I love that we have all the jargon down thanks
Speaker 1: to Gabe.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he insisted. I slipped that in there.
Speaker 1: So just to recap here, like, Takara had a bunch
Speaker 1: of standalone toy lines in Japan which contributed to elements
Speaker 1: of what would become Transformers, but none of those treated
Speaker 1: the robots as distinct characters. And then what Hasbro comes
Speaker 1: in and ditches the spacemen and makes the robots the
Speaker 1: stars of the show is not what happens.
Speaker 3: That's basically right. So Takara struggled to find a foothold
Speaker 3: in the crowded American market, but then in nineteen eighty
Speaker 3: three their products caught the eye of a Hasbro representative,
Speaker 3: and this was at the Tokyo Toy Show. So the
Speaker 3: rep brought back some sample figures, and before the year
Speaker 3: was out, Hasbro had signed a contract with Takara to
Speaker 3: license the figures for the US market, but the next
Speaker 3: step was figuring out how to rebrand the toys for
Speaker 3: an American audience. Hasbro's partner in the task was an
Speaker 3: advertising agency called Griffin Bacall, who had helped develop Gi Joe,
Speaker 3: and it was the ad firm's idea to combine Takara's
Speaker 3: various toy lines under one umbrella and to make the
Speaker 3: robots the main characters. The company also suggested having the
Speaker 3: robots be sentient aliens rather than just accessories to the spacemen,
Speaker 3: and proposed splitting them into two rival factions to create
Speaker 3: a bit of built in conflict. Hence the heroic autobots
Speaker 3: and the evil Dysepticons first time we mentioned them in
Speaker 3: this episode. I can't believe it took us this long.
Speaker 3: A git there, but lastly, the all import named Transformers
Speaker 3: was contributed by j Baccall, the son of the company
Speaker 3: chairman Joe Bacall.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the ad agency comes up with the bones
Speaker 1: of the story, these two warring factions of alien robots,
Speaker 1: But who actually ends up filling in the details here?
Speaker 3: That job actually fell to the writers and editors at
Speaker 3: Marvel Comics, who had already helped Hasbro flesh out the
Speaker 3: world of Gi Joe just a few years earlier. The
Speaker 3: original story treatment was written by Marvel editor in chief
Speaker 3: Jim Shooter, and it explained that the Transformers had been
Speaker 3: locked in a civil war fighting for control of their
Speaker 3: home planet, Cybertron, for millions of years. Millions of year,
Speaker 3: that's a long war. The constant fighting had left the
Speaker 3: planet in ruins and almost completely devoid of eon, which
Speaker 3: is the life blood or fuel that powers both the
Speaker 3: robots and the planet itself. So the two factions left
Speaker 3: their home world in search of news sources of energy,
Speaker 3: only to crash land on prehistoric Earth. So they spent
Speaker 3: the next four million years than the side of a mountain. Then,
Speaker 3: after being awakened by a volcanic eruption in nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 3: they adopted the forms of Earth's machines and resumed their
Speaker 3: endless war once again.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a great soap opera, but it is
Speaker 1: interesting that Shooter framed this conflict does a struggle for
Speaker 1: resources right.
Speaker 3: It's also interesting that he drew his inspiration from real life,
Speaker 3: like specifically the energy crisis of the nineteen seventies, So
Speaker 3: in his conception, the difference between the two factions was
Speaker 3: what they planned to do with the energy.
Speaker 2: That they collected.
Speaker 3: So you have the Autobots that just wanted to restore
Speaker 3: their home planet and live in peace, but those evil Decepticons,
Speaker 3: like they wanted to conquer other planets and then create
Speaker 3: an empire. Of course, it is worth noting, though, that
Speaker 3: Shooter's treatment left plenty of room for future writers to
Speaker 3: deepen that mythos.
Speaker 1: So did Shooter's treatment delve into all the character names
Speaker 1: and backstories because I actually, like separately, was looking up
Speaker 1: the earlier trends and they were like thirty different characters
Speaker 1: released in just the first year of the toy line.
Speaker 1: Like that is so many bios to write.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think it would be a pretty
Speaker 3: tall order for just one person, And that's probably why
Speaker 3: Jim Shooter decided to hand the job off to somebody else.
Speaker 3: It was a Marvel writer named Danny O'Neill who came
Speaker 3: up with the name Optimus Prime, but the rest of
Speaker 3: the original cast was developed by an editor named Bob Budianski,
Speaker 3: and he was just given a few days to come
Speaker 3: up with the names. Personalities, powers, weaknesses, and even personal
Speaker 3: mottos of dozens of different robots. That's a ton of
Speaker 3: pressure and nothing to go on except the toys themselves.
Speaker 3: And to make the assignment that much harder, his deadline
Speaker 3: was set for the Monday after Thanksgiving. I mean, how
Speaker 3: cruel is that? It just seems like the way that
Speaker 3: it works, I guess. But Bob rose to the challenge,
Speaker 3: and the work he did over that long, long weekend
Speaker 3: became the basis for the four issue comic mini series
Speaker 3: that launched the franchise later that year, and he came
Speaker 3: up with some real heavy hitters. He had Bumblebee, Starscream, Megatron. Also,
Speaker 3: his work didn't go unnoticed. Bob is only one of
Speaker 3: four human inductees into the Transformers Hall of Fame.
Speaker 1: I was not familiar with the fact that they have
Speaker 1: their own Hall of Fame.
Speaker 2: Yah. Pretty amazing.
Speaker 1: Well, I want to switch gears and talk a little
Speaker 1: bit more about the lore of Transformers, but first let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to Part time Genius.
Speaker 3: Okay, Mango, So we're in the weird wide world of Transformers,
Speaker 3: and I'm curious where do you want to go next?
Speaker 1: Since you gave us the real life history of Transformers.
Speaker 1: I thought i'd share a little bit about the origin
Speaker 1: story in the Transformers universe because it's actually pretty strange
Speaker 1: and like surprisingly spiritual, because transformers have souls.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I took I think two philosophy courses in college, and
Speaker 3: neither of those covered this, and so I'm curious to
Speaker 3: learn about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, for the amount of money we paid,
Speaker 1: it shouldn't have. But in the transformer's lore, they all
Speaker 1: have something called sparks, like the spark of life, and
Speaker 1: unlike most conceptions of a human soul, a transformer spark
Speaker 1: is a tangible object, so it's kind of like an organ.
Speaker 1: It is a weird idea, but Gabe pointed me to
Speaker 1: a nice explainer from tfwiki dot net, which he assured
Speaker 1: me is the foremost Transformers wiki on the internet.
Speaker 3: No, I'm definitely familiar. I forgot to put my phone
Speaker 3: on do not Disturb the other night, and I just
Speaker 3: kept getting text with these links to the information on
Speaker 3: that on Gabe. So let's go ahead and share what
Speaker 3: you've learned here.
Speaker 1: Okay, So tf wiki rights quote, the spark is the
Speaker 1: core of Transformer life and electrically charged massive positrons formed
Speaker 1: from the supernatural absence known as rarefied energy. On like
Speaker 1: a heart, a spark pulses at a certain frequency to
Speaker 1: animate a mechanical body frame like a soul. A spark
Speaker 1: is generally accepted to contain some part of a Transformer's
Speaker 1: immaterial being, which persists after death by transcending into the afterlife.
Speaker 3: So you're saying in Transformers, there's a robot heaven too, like,
Speaker 3: is there a robot god who made them all?
Speaker 1: I am so glad that my kids never asked me that,
Speaker 1: because I would not have been prepared. But just like
Speaker 1: in the real world, the answer kind of depends on
Speaker 1: who you ask. So if you go back to the
Speaker 1: first Transformer story ever published, that Marvel comic that uh
Speaker 1: Boudianski worked on, the origin story is completely secular, right, Like,
Speaker 1: so life on Cybertron springs up through the naturally occurring
Speaker 1: interaction of gears, levers, and pulleys, which you know is
Speaker 1: kind of a silly idea, but I also love it.
Speaker 1: But then in later comic books and the cartoon series,
Speaker 1: and now actually with the latest movie, the creation of
Speaker 1: the Transformers is credited to a deity and fittingly, his
Speaker 1: name is Primus, which is just a Latin word for
Speaker 1: first and as the story goes, he started out as
Speaker 1: this ancient ethereal entity, kind of like a cosmic ghost.
Speaker 1: But then Primus decided to lay down some roots by
Speaker 1: joining his essence to a barren, metal rich planet, as
Speaker 1: you do, and then by imbuing each Transformer with a
Speaker 1: piece of his essence.
Speaker 3: And I'm guessing that's what a spark is, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, They're all little pieces of Primus, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: is also why they have the power to transform. It's
Speaker 1: a reflection of his ability to change form, like how
Speaker 1: he became their planet. And when a Transformer dies, it's
Speaker 1: spark is set to rejoin with Primus's life force, which
Speaker 1: they call the all Spark.
Speaker 3: This is bizarrely fascinating, but it's also starting to feel
Speaker 3: a little bit like I'm being inducted into a cult,
Speaker 3: So I want to be a little careful here, but
Speaker 3: do keep going.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating, Yeah, I mean, I do think The lower
Speaker 1: highlights one of the most unique things about the Transformers,
Speaker 1: which is that these aren't machines built by humans or aliens. Instead,
Speaker 1: they are the aliens, with their own unique culture and background.
Speaker 1: Which you know, is fertile ground for sci fi storytelling.
Speaker 3: It's a good point, and with the deep dive we
Speaker 3: took this week, it does seem like Transformers comics and
Speaker 3: cartoons have been mining that potential for a while now.
Speaker 3: It's just interesting that the same can't be said for
Speaker 3: all of the live action movies, which are probably the
Speaker 3: version of the franchise that most people are familiar with.
Speaker 1: Now, yeah, seven live action movies. There are five directed
Speaker 1: by Michael Bay. In particular, these movies are a huge
Speaker 1: outlier from everything else we've been talking about, Like for fans,
Speaker 1: the robots in the series are mostly interchangeable, with no
Speaker 1: real time spent on developing them as unique characters or
Speaker 1: even giving them much agency in the story. Instead, it's
Speaker 1: the human characters who get most of the screen time,
Speaker 1: with the Transformers mostly just suiting up when it's time
Speaker 1: for one of those big, messy action sequences.
Speaker 3: Well, and if you talk to fans of Transformers, and
Speaker 3: I was asking a few of their thoughts on the
Speaker 3: movies themselves, they would say, you know, to make matters worse,
Speaker 3: the stuff with the human characters is at best completely uninteresting,
Speaker 3: and it worst painfully dumb. Not exactly a great review there,
Speaker 3: and there isn't much in these movies that they would
Speaker 3: actually consider suitable for children. So, for example, the absolute
Speaker 3: low point they would say has to be in the
Speaker 3: fourth movie, Transformer's Age of Extinction. It's got this whole
Speaker 3: scene dedicated to a twenty year old human character explaining
Speaker 3: why it's legal for him to date a seventeen year
Speaker 3: old girl due to Texas's Romeo and Juliette law. So
Speaker 3: we started to get a little weird here. I know,
Speaker 3: he even pulls out a laminated card to prove that
Speaker 3: his relationship is approved by the state.
Speaker 2: It's just weird that it goes in that direction.
Speaker 1: That is insane. Kay was actually telling me that the
Speaker 1: whole thing is kind of ironic because Transformers comics have
Speaker 1: all these big philosophical ideas baked into their storytelling and
Speaker 1: they wrestle with like concepts of God or evolution or whatever.
Speaker 1: But to make the movie more appealing to adults, fans
Speaker 1: think that they dumbed down the adaptations, which is kind
Speaker 1: of amazing actually yea, also for super fans, the live
Speaker 1: action stuff never looked right apparently, and I didn't realize this.
Speaker 1: Producer said the traditional BLOCKI designs of the Transformers in
Speaker 1: their robot moods would look silly for the two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven live action movie that Michael Bay did, so
Speaker 1: they were redesigned to be much more visually complicated, with
Speaker 1: lots of like shifting panels and tiny moving details, which
Speaker 1: is obviously visually interesting, but that makes the characters look
Speaker 1: virtually unrecognizable, which obviously didn't please fans. Also, their robots
Speaker 1: were dumbed down. In the comics, Optimus Prime's motto is
Speaker 1: freedom is the right of all sentient beings and he
Speaker 1: only turns to violence as a last resort, right, like
Speaker 1: that's his whole ethos. But in these movies he's a
Speaker 1: bloodthirsty robot shouting out lines like we will kill them
Speaker 1: all and give me your face, which is a real.
Speaker 3: You don't think that's a sophisticated and tenidating line. That's
Speaker 3: not quite the same vibe.
Speaker 1: It's sort of paraphrasing mlkay.
Speaker 3: Definitely, yes, yeah, yeah, I remember that one, but you know,
Speaker 3: it's not quite the same vibe as the old motto.
Speaker 3: And I'm curious, though, did you get a sense of
Speaker 3: how the Transformers fandom responded to those kinds of changes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's deeply polarizing. A lot of fans were unhappy
Speaker 1: to see the characters treated as these one note killing machines,
Speaker 1: and all of them suddenly were clarifying online that there
Speaker 1: were fans of Transformers but not the live action movies.
Speaker 1: There's actually a joke that referenced a lot about how
Speaker 1: bad these movies are within the community. And it's from
Speaker 1: the good place. You know that sitcom course, love that
Speaker 1: show and Ted Danson's character tries out a new scent
Speaker 1: of Acts deodorant, which supposedly makes you feel the way
Speaker 1: that Transformers movies make you feel loud and confusing.
Speaker 3: I love that they threw that line on there, But
Speaker 3: clearly somebody liked these movies though, right, Like they seem
Speaker 3: to be super successful and they keep making them.
Speaker 1: Oh man, they were massive, like the Bay movies made
Speaker 1: so much money, and they made the Transformers culturally relevant again,
Speaker 1: like in a way it hadn't been since the nineteen eighties. Also,
Speaker 1: they serve as an entry point for a whole new
Speaker 1: generation of fans, both kids and adults. You know, some
Speaker 1: of the people in the community say, even if you
Speaker 1: don't like the movies, it's a great way to get
Speaker 1: people into Transformers, and they're okay with that. Just to
Speaker 1: show you the difference though, like between the high minded
Speaker 1: concepts versus the gory action. The comics that came out
Speaker 1: at the same time as the Bay movies were dealing
Speaker 1: with questions about the nature of war, societal expectations, PTSD,
Speaker 1: and gender dysphoria like all while positioning it in this
Speaker 1: like fun sci fi romp. So for fans of the comics,
Speaker 1: the new animated movie is more akin to what they like,
Speaker 1: since there are no annoying humans to steal the spotlight.
Speaker 3: All right, Well, for the sake of all the Gabes
Speaker 3: of the world, I hope we got all of the
Speaker 3: lore and myths right because otherwise our moms are going
Speaker 3: to get some angry letters, and they're always good at
Speaker 3: responding very calmly to those. But let's hope they only
Speaker 3: get positive notes this week.
Speaker 1: I'm sure they can handle it. But before we say
Speaker 1: anything even more inflammatory or get our moms in trouble,
Speaker 1: let's start the BacT off. Okay, So here's a weird
Speaker 1: one to start us off. It turns out that Transformers
Speaker 1: has an odd connection to the nineteen eighty eruption of
Speaker 1: the Mount Saint Helen's volcano in Washington State. Namely, it
Speaker 1: helped inspire the story of how the robots first came
Speaker 1: to Earth. So in the Marvel comic that you mentioned,
Speaker 1: the Transformers spaceship crashes into the side of a dormant
Speaker 1: volcano called Mount Saint Hilary, which is a made up
Speaker 1: peak that was said to reside in Oregon, just outside
Speaker 1: of Portland, and the real world inspiration is easy enough
Speaker 1: to spot, but it's even more explicit in the original
Speaker 1: story treatment. And that's because the volcano was actually called
Speaker 1: Mount Saint Helen's. The change was likely made out of
Speaker 1: respect for the victims and because you know, they're trying
Speaker 1: to market toy robots to children.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it's good call, all right.
Speaker 3: So we talked about how the original Transformers toy line
Speaker 3: was cobbled together from existing to car products. But something
Speaker 3: cool I found this week is that TAKR is still
Speaker 3: very much involved in the brand. Once the series took
Speaker 3: off in the US, TAKR actually imported it back to Japan,
Speaker 3: essentially re releasing their old toys in new packaging. The
Speaker 3: line became such a big hit there that once Hasbro
Speaker 3: ran out of existing toys to release his Transformers, the
Speaker 3: two companies began working together to produce new ones. The
Speaker 3: result is one of the toy industry's most unique and
Speaker 3: long lasting partnerships, because even though they're on opposite sides
Speaker 3: of the world, the two companies now collaborate on every
Speaker 3: aspect of figure design development, with the Hasbro team handling
Speaker 3: the character selection and the concept design and the Kara
Speaker 3: doing the heavy lifting on figuring out the engineering and
Speaker 3: how the toy will actually transform or actually, excuse me, convert.
Speaker 1: That is so cool that they're like still working together,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 3: It really is, you think of It is like such
Speaker 3: a competitive space and the fact that they're collaborating is awesome.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, as strange as the franchise is sometimes, it
Speaker 1: has attracted so much celebrity talent over the years, and
Speaker 1: the list of actors who lent their voices to Transformers
Speaker 1: includes everyone from Weird al Yankovitch, Steve Sheemi, Angela Bassett,
Speaker 1: Leonard Nimoy, and Lawrence Fishburn. But the biggest talent to
Speaker 1: ever voice a Transformer is, of course, the late great
Speaker 1: Orson Wells and This was back in nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 1: when the first animated Transformers movie was coming out and
Speaker 1: Wells was cast as the movies big bad transformer named Unicorn.
Speaker 1: Wells's career had been in a downturn for many years
Speaker 1: by that point, which is obviously why he agreed to
Speaker 1: the role. But Unicron turned out to be his final
Speaker 1: film performance, which he hadn't been expecting before he passed
Speaker 1: away just one week after recording his lines. He spoke
Speaker 1: out about the role, making it clear how much contempt
Speaker 1: he had for the whole production. So this is his
Speaker 1: quote and what he told the press. You know what
Speaker 1: I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy,
Speaker 1: some terrible robot toys from Japan that change from one
Speaker 1: thing to another. Japanese have funded a full length animated
Speaker 1: cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all
Speaker 1: bad outer space stuff. I play a planet I menace,
Speaker 1: somebody calls something or other, then I'm destroyed. My plan
Speaker 1: is to destroy whoever it is is thwarted and I
Speaker 1: tear myself apart on the screen.
Speaker 2: Is so great.
Speaker 3: I've never heard that before, but I love that, so
Speaker 3: I agree. I know it really is, and I love it.
Speaker 3: I love every word of it, all right. So there
Speaker 3: are thousands of different transformers at this point. Most of
Speaker 3: them have their own unique names, and let me tell you,
Speaker 3: they get so much weirder than Bumblebee. So here are
Speaker 3: a few of my favorites. You've got Power Hug, who
Speaker 3: turns into an organic pill bug. You've got Cup with
Speaker 3: a K who turns into a pickup truck. You get
Speaker 3: it where that comes from. And Tarantulus, who, despite having
Speaker 3: the word tarantulas and his name, actually transforms into a
Speaker 3: generic spider and not a tarantula.
Speaker 2: I don't know why. It's kind of confusing.
Speaker 3: And there's also a cross section of transformers with oddly
Speaker 3: inappropriate sounding names. You've got Randy the Wild Boar, You've
Speaker 3: got Big Daddy, who's actually a tiny hot rod, a
Speaker 3: pair of trucks called Huffer and Puffer. And then, last,
Speaker 3: but not least, you've got Master Dominus, who transforms into
Speaker 3: the bones of a mastodon or wooly mammoth.
Speaker 1: That's so reirdly he transforms just as the bones, but
Speaker 1: just the bones. I am surprised you didn't include my
Speaker 1: favorite weird transformer name, Steve from Accounting.
Speaker 2: So there's a character called Steve from Accounting Yeah and.
Speaker 1: Fly he transforms into a stapler. Is that amazing?
Speaker 2: That is fantastic.
Speaker 3: Got a same ango between the Steve from Accounting fact
Speaker 3: and the orson Wells one. I just can't stop thinking
Speaker 3: about that quote. I'm gonna have to give you today's
Speaker 3: fact off.
Speaker 1: So congrats, well, thank you. No, obviously I watched Transformers
Speaker 1: as a kid. You watch them. We love the toys.
Speaker 1: We were vaguely aware of some of the stuff before
Speaker 1: the show, but Gabe is obviously the powerhouse span here
Speaker 1: who applied us with all the research. And also, Gabe
Speaker 1: maybe promise to mention this if anyone is interested in
Speaker 1: really falling down the Transformers rabbit hole with him. Tfwiki
Speaker 1: dot net is a great place to start. And he
Speaker 1: says that there is a YouTube series by an Irish
Speaker 1: fan named Chris mcpheeley. It's called Transformers the Basics and
Speaker 1: Gabe highly recommends it.
Speaker 3: That is pretty awesome. I love it when our team
Speaker 3: members just get to dig in on things that they're
Speaker 3: passionate about and prepare for episodes like this. It's what
Speaker 3: it's all about, that celebration of knowledge and all the
Speaker 3: fun stuff that's out there.
Speaker 1: Too, weirdness and weirdness.
Speaker 3: We love that part too, but I think that covers it.
Speaker 3: For today's Part Time Genius from Mango Gay, Mary, Dylan
Speaker 3: and Me, Thanks as always for listening. We'll see you
Speaker 3: next week with a brand new episode.
Speaker 1: Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: This show is hosted by Will Pearson and Me Mongagetikler
Speaker 1: and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan
Speaker 1: with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced
Speaker 1: for iHeart by Katrina Norbel and Ali Perry, with social
Speaker 1: media support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and Vinie Shoy.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.