Some Disparate Thoughts On Transformers

I was considering how one might classify just what genre the Transformers franchise is most closely related to. It's kinda hard to pin down.

(This video was entitled "The Best of Transformers" by the person who put it together.)

Among other things, Transformers has been:

1. "Straight" science fiction. (Subsets which emphasize this included Beast Wars and Generation One.)
2. Space opera. (Generation One, the G1 Movie especially, the Unicron Trilogy.)
3. Fantasy. (Some episodes of G1 [G1 was rather inconsistent, eh?], a lot of Japanese Transformers.)
4. Anime fighting series where the fighters just happen to be fifteen to thirty foot tall robots. (Almost any series from Japan.)
5. Battles of cosmic proportion between/against cosmic forces. (Almost any comic written in the last decade by Simon Furman, anything where Unicron shows up for even ten seconds.)
6. War stories. (Touched on, at least, by Beast Wars.)
7. Superhero narrative. (Beast Machines, a lot of Japanese series.)
8. Greek/Norse tragedy. (A few of the later Beast Wars episodes.)

This diversity is can be demonstrated by the main villain of the first Transformers Movie, from way back in the day. Unicron can be summed up with the following equation:

Galactus + Death Star + Satan = Unicron

Yikes, cosmic ultimate villains don't come with better pedigrees than that, do they? As "Galactus," Unicron can serve a cosmic battle or a superhero narrative; as "Death Star," Unicron can serve a space opera or superhero narrative; as "Satan," Unicron can serve almost any of them, but especially tragedy or fantasy.

But it's not really just Unicron who does this. While major characters generally have the capacity for many kinds of storylines, various less important characters can effortlessly mesh into a huge variety of narratives if given the chance. Most of them are pretty specialized by comparison to Unicron, but their sheer numbers make up for this. Nightbeat, for instance, is and has always been a detective; stories that focus on him tend to be mysteries. Dinobot (Beast Wars) is an honorable warrior with a penchant for Shakespeare turned tragic hero, as indicated by his final bow, Code of Hero. There are plenty of others.

This is partly a function of all Transformers writing being heavily driven towards one purpose. The pressure placed on writers to demonstrate how incredibly cool and awesome thirty or so new toys are a year is often too much for many writers, and lazy, inattentive writing may result; but as often, the author comes up with random and bizarre ways to showcase characters. An extreme example of this came in the later days of the Generation One comic, where a brief series of narratives that were all parodies of or riffs on movies and other literature made up the "Matrix Quest." The narratives parodied or imitated The Maltese Falcon, Shane (a western, in case you've never heard of it), Moby Dick, and Alien. Simon Furman, who wrote these stories, also wrote zombie narratives/mad science into the comics, by the way.

And this is just a sampling. (Right now I'm a little short on time and the computer's a bit slow.) I'll probably go more into it in the next few days or so, although I'm planning on another book review tomorrow.

My point, really, is that Transformers, while it is genre fiction (fictional narrative advertisement, to be exact), it doesn't let its genre define it (or perhaps I should say that its owner Hasbro is willing to let its individual authors define it). The recent summer blockbuster Transformers, for instance, emphasized a relatively rarely used portion of Transformers-the horror/monster story. While such narratives have appeared, ironically the franchise's best monsters-the Transformers themselves, relative to a tiny and wretched humanity-have rarely seen that sort of light.