20th Anniversary of Transformers

For some reason the time passed (20 years apparently) and I didn't even notice. It doesn't seem all that long ago that as a kid I was very much into transformers. So, I bought the the new anniversary edition of the Transformers movie. I took it home and watched it, and seeing the animation, which I swore looked soooooo much cooler when I was kid. (Admittedly that was still 20 years ago). Amazingly there is a lot of music in that movie, mostly music that is a bit more metal than it is frolicking looney toon music.

I nearly bought the DVD a few days before at Barnes & Noble. Before I got out the door though the casher remembered that the voice of Unicron was Orson Wells, the last thing that he did before he died. Robert Stack, and Judd Nelson happen to be 2 other voices. I was also reminded that back when this movie cam out I wasn't allowed to go see it because of the violence and the cussing. And as far as I can tell there are 2 profane words: "shit" and "damn," but yes the Transformers are at war and end up killing each other. This was a semi-serious piece of animation right in the midst of a culture that did not see animation as a legitimate peice of film. This pre-pixar, and pre-lion king, and basically pre-academy-award-for-animation (Shrek won the first award).

The movie may not be much compared to today's standards, but the effort, and the story, and the content were well ahead of its time, because not even today does the american public expect animation deal with death, warfare, destruction, and passing on torches.