Welcome To A Million Robots

A newsletter about Transformers (and adjacent toylines) - and the strange joys and occasional burning shame of collecting the damn things.

Hello there. My name’s Alec, I’m a writer by trade, I’m from the UK, I’m Too Many years old, and since 1984* I’ve been helplessly fixated on the 40-year-old line of robot toys known as Transformers.

I consider myself to be a relatively cultured and self-aware individual. I enjoy interesting music, alternative cinema and fiction, art, and cats. I am passingly successful in my field and am not, to the best of my knowledge, socially unacceptable. I have even, on occasion, been accused of being Funny and/or Interesting. And yet.

I have this terrible weakness. This primarily takes the form of a large cupboard stuffed to explosion point with vintage (and indeed modern) plastic, and my thoughts turn to the next potential acquisition many times each day.

Polite company understandably takes a step back whenever I mention this great shame. Friends and family roll their eyes. I conceal the full extent of my spending on toy robots from my partner. I regularly have sleepless nights, self-recriminating myself for a fixation I often feel is ridiculous and struggle to understand, let alone justify.

It’s true that I’m far from alone in this. It’s even true that Transformers collecting, and the attendant wheezing shelves full of plastic in adult homes, is more prevalent than ever before, as more and more members of my withered generation topple helplessly into mid-life crisis, and the deadly combination of nostalgia and disposable income this so often entails. But does that make it OK? I wish I knew.

So call this catharsis. Or purgation. I want to delve deep into the toys that both made and unmade me, and in doing so either finally understand why they have the hold on me that they do, or - perhaps the better outcome - come to terms with it. Self-acceptance, via the medium of writing an excessive amount of words about cheap plastic memories.

This is the plan: there will be photos of toys, there will be jokes, there will be deep-cut facts about Transformers characters and history, there will be wry autobiography and there will be equal-parts self-loathing and celebration.

Coming up in the next post: Megatron.

*bar a decade of relative sanity in the 1990s. I was almost cool for a hot minute - but then I fell.