Why Transformers?

How and why an 80s toyline became a helpless, lifelong obsession

The other day, I tackled one of the questions I’m most regularly asked about my decades-long toy robot obsession - my ‘favourite’ Transformer. Today let’s address the other one: the biggest question of all. Why?

i.e. Why would Transformers be such an enduring interest for a 46-year-old British writer? A question which is itself two-pronged. Prong the first: why Transformers specifically, and not a different toy? Prong the second: why haven’t I shaken all this nonsense off yet? As inferred in, oh, every single one of these things I’ve written, it’s something I’m far from OK with. I like to think I’m ‘better’ than toy-collecting - smarter, more cultured. ‘Normal’. And yet.

Back to that in good time. I already part-explored the first prong in my celebration of the quietly, deliciously warped UK Transformers comic, which is a topic to which I will return in future. But to recap: that comic was how I taught myself to read, then became my foremost private world once my parents unwisely took their eye off the ball.

‘Victory!’, from the 1985 UK Transformers Annual. Art: Geoff Senior. Words: Simon Furman.

In the able and occasionally sadistic hands of near-sole writer Simon Furman and an array of young artists hungry to prove themselves, I was exposed to years-long sci-fi sagas, shocking violence, knotty time-travel and alt-universe plots, and even traumatic tragedy (watch me weep if ever the two deaths of Impactor are mentioned).

My interest in Transformers, the toys, waned sharply in 1987, but I stuck with the comic long past that, seeing it as essentially a separate entity from children’s toys - a vibrant and dangerous universe perpetually alive in my head.

I tried, at some point, almost every other contemporary kid’s comic. Thundercats, the Real Ghostbusters, Zoids, Visionaries, Action Force (the correct name for G.I. Joe) - Marvel UK pumped licensed titles out en masse from 1984-1990 or so. But either I never stayed more than a few issues or the comic was silently axed, as the bubble around its associated toyline suddenly burst.

Transformers UK, however, I just kept coming back to - even long after the highly dubious Pretenders had dealt a fatal blow to my ongoing interest in the actual toys.

Issue 1 of Transformers UK

Foundational fiction, and therefore ensuring a lifelong attachment to the concept and world of Transformers, even during the years when I wasn’t actively buying the things. So deep in my blood was the comic that it didn’t take much to bring me back to the toys too, once I had my first trace elements of disposable income.

I blame my younger sister. Forever an extremely canny giver of gifts, in 2001 she surprised me at Christmas with a ‘Commemorative Edition’ reissue of the original Starscream toy. I had no idea prior to then that the vintage toys had found their way back to toy shops (albeit just a small handful and, as far as I know, bought exclusively by men in their then-early-20s). I’d gotten through university and the few years since having barely thought about Transformers, plunging instead into a world of music, film and booze.

Starscream was supposed to be a joke present. “Hey, remember when you liked these dumb things?” Instead, a sun exploded in my brain: I was reborn in an instant, in perhaps the most embarrassing way possible.

Starscream had been my third-ever Transformer, in 1985 - bought second-hand from a newspaper listing, without box but complete (bar a few withered stickers), due to my father’s resistance to ever paying full-price for anything. I remember entering the hallway of a sumptuous house in Malvern, Worcestershire. My father presumably gazed at its size and decor with grumpily covetous eyes, but all I saw was the four-inch plastic figure stood upon a side table just beyond the front door.

There was a lamp behind it, granting it the golden glow of a holy artefact. And oh lord, yes it was. The holiest of holies. A figure I had only seen in the pages of the comic, a jet plane that turned into an evil robot, and I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life.

These days, Starscream is something of an exhausted character - the perennial right-hand man to the sinister Megatron, but forever traitorous and snide. A joke that sometimes struggles to be funny year after year. Back in 1985 though, he was the biggest personality in all of Transformers, and the thought of actually owning him was beyond my wildest dreams. And I found the toy to be fantastic.

Again, these days we look at it with different eyes - Starscream is little more than a statue, and has to be effectively disassembled to be moved between modes - his giant, blue Marigold gloves even set aside entirely in jet mode. We expect, now, a Transformer to have a dozen lifelike joints and transform seamlessly, with every part hidden or stored away neatly in either form.

But 40 years ago he was a fascinating 3D puzzle. I worried about losing his fists, or his landing gear, or tail fins, because I was a clumsy mess who could not (and cannot) remember where I set something down five seconds ago, but how I adored that jigsaw sense of assembly.

In 2001, I was much more aware of the toy’s limitations, of the copious space where transformable hands and bending knees could have gone if only either technology or ambition had gone a little further.

But it nevertheless took me straight back to that hallway - the wonder, the disbelief. The most magical and tactile of objects - the curious manner in which Starscream’s head/jet nose is folded in on itself and then passed through a gap in his chest, as if tying some intricate naval knot, was a muscle memory that had not faded in the slightest.

Pure magic. An intrinsic part of me abandoned for almost two decades. I knew it. I knew myself.

Transformers Missing Link Optimus, Bumblebee, Cliffjumper and Sunstreaker, plus various hangers-on

I blame my younger sister, because it amuses me to torment with her it, and gives me someone else to offload the sporadic shame of my toy collection onto. Yes, the fact she chose Starscream specifically signed my immediate death warrant in 2001, but given that Transformers has since been locked in a quarter-century doom-loop of self-reference and reissues, it would only have been a matter of time until some other toy turned my fool head instead.

And so, straight to eBay. A reissue Optimus Prime in my hands within the week, the most iconic of all Transformers summarily sealing my fate. And on and on it went. Trying to chase that first high but never quite achieving it.

But a fraction of my Optimii

After that, everywhere I went with my then-partner would be defined by which toyshops I could visit. A sickness, an obsession, for which they at least had the patience of a saint. The specifics of that sickness can come later: here I want to stay focused on the why.

For all the defining role Transformers had played in my childhood, ultimately I owned fewer than a dozen of the toys whilst I was still in short trousers. But, naturally, I had wanted all of them. All Of Transformers. (Well, not Pretenders).

All those years of wanting Transformers I could not have, while other boys did - their families were richer, or more indulgent, or they succeeded at sports or academic pursuits I struggled with and were thusly rewarded. The reason doesn’t matter - the perceived lack is why I am what I am.

Superion, combined form of the five Aerialbots

Some of my delightful dozen were truly spectacular, enduring legends of the line - Optimus, Superion, Galvatron, Scorponok - but the innately cynical nature of Transformers, like any toyline since, is that there was always something more desirable. The original gotta catch ‘em all. The kids with Metroplex or Megatron, Jetfire or Shockwave (n.b. only available as a bootleg in the UK): I would have stolen their identities in a heartbeat if I could.

In 2001, I could have toast for dinner a few times, or skip a pub night, and I could buy myself a Transformer I was never ‘allowed’. Either a reissue or junky and incomplete, due to the steep financial limitations of my second decade, but a fix was a fix.

Surprising exactly no-one, I have ADHD. I’m not an acute case, but insufficient stimulation leads to crisis - my executive function dissipating into panicked paralysis. It seems I need reward in order to get through too many of my days - and too easily, too often, that reward became a postman bearing a plastic robot.

The magnificent Shockwave

Part of this was the deadly nostalgic appeal of cheap plastic memories from my childhood, yes - and part of it is being hooked on the anticipation of the next arrival. If nothing’s currently in the post, my week feels bleaker. How I wish that wasn’t so - but this is, I believe, something that extends beyond neurodivergence: anticipation lends colour to a day.

But there is something specific to Transformers too - something I felt in 1985, when I first pulled apart that Starscream into a mosaic of wings and hands and tailfins. The tactile puzzle, the sensory stimulation of parts clicking into place, or a curious robotic head emerging from the plastic darkness if manipulated just so.

Cybertron Excellion

I vividly remember being in the pub with some friends, circa 2006. I’d brought my latest purchase with me (sometimes having had them delivered to work, for overwhelming fear of missing the postman). It was Excellion, a homage to 1986’s Hot Rod from the Cybertron line of twenty years hence - simply but effectively transforming into a otherworldly race-car.

A particularly dear friend (who, to my great shame and regret, I have now failed to speak to in years) regarded it suspiciously, having generally considered me to be a man of relative taste, but now struggling to reconcile that with the spiky orange and grey plastic lump on the slatted table before her. “Do you really find that thing pleasing?”, she offered, dubiously. A wonderful person, but with a propensity towards bluntness - sometimes refreshing, sometimes annihilating.

I stammered and blushed, muttering something about enjoying how they were a puzzle I enjoyed solving, it wasn’t because it was a Transformer, it’s because it was impressive Japanese engineering, or some such bullshit. But something presumably made sense through my panic. “Oh. So you enjoy manipulating it,” she replied after my shame-faced mumbling was done.

This thought seemed to satisfy her, so we moved onto other topics, and she never again mentioned my weird hobby critically.

She’d cut through to the heart of the matter, the heart of me, in a strange mirror of my sister buying me that Starscream half a decade previously and having complete certainty that I’d enjoy it, joke or no. I enjoy manipulating Transformers. Between modes, combining multi-part figures into one, posing them artfully or absurdly… They were and are the ultimate toy for manipulating. And that stimulates my brain. Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine.

Comic recreations are thing, God help me

I don’t collect He-Man or Action Force/G.I. Joe or Thundercats or Star Wars or any other vintage toyline that might have a stranglehold upon so many others of my generation. Oh, other toys played their role in my childhood, and there is a part of me that enjoys seeing them to this day - but I simply have no clue what I’d do with them if I owned them. I’d stand them on a shelf and admire them for a few days, then the interest would wane and they’d go into a storage tub or back onto eBay.

Plenty of my Transformers have been resold too, for reasons of space, money or remorse, but of those many I own now there is not a single one that I do not sometimes take out and manipulate. The clicks and clunks, the complete shift to another form factor entirely - it is indeed pleasing.

Any other toy - with the critical but similar exception of Zoids - just does not achieve that for me. To move an arm or turn a head or bend a knee: it is not enough. It is recreating something from a screen or page and nothing more. I don’t derive joy from simply seeing rows of little homunculi arranged neatly on a shelf. That is not, for me, an experience - tactile and sensory and pleasing.

Or perhaps the fault is me, and not those other toys. I am, after all, an adult. My hardened, desiccated imagination allows me access only to the memory of play: I can no longer play make-believe with a little plastic superhero or Sith Lord. So I think only of something I can manipulate. One toy, two modes. A robot in disguise.

How very pleasing.