‘Transformers’: 40th Anniversary Retrospective

After 40 Years, Things Done Changed With no attempts at irony, the media landscape is a very different place from the year 1986. Hell, the world is almost entirely different. In no way, shape, or form do we live in ‘the age of ideas’. The kind of place where a toy becomes a piece of media that becomes a franchise spanning four decades. Nah, these days it goes in reverse. If you don’t already have a franchise, then you don’t have a toy. So yeah, a very different place. Gone are the days of rewarded maverick creativity. As executives take the places of creatives in all arts industries, risk aversion makes the decision about what gets made and what gets bought and then shelved (see Batgirl). So, when I saw an ad on socials for the 40th Anniversary of Transformers: The Movie theatrical showing, I was destined to be sat. 

Nostalgia is, without a doubt, a gigantic and lucrative honey pot for my generation. (I would argue that my generation was the first to truly be preyed on through it, but that’s a piece for a later time.) The way my nervous system was flooded with good vibe chemicals told me everything I needed to know. My memories rushed up to meet my thumbs and before I knew it, I was in the group chat submitting dates and times for the homies to hit the theater. There are very few pieces of media as legendary to me as Transformers ‘86. This Means Something to Me Man A lot of who I am as a Black nerd came from the do…