The Transformers: The Movie (1986)

directed by Nelson Shin

Autumn Rain Towne

The 1986 animated film The Transformers opens with a shot of a binary star system and a mysterious ringed object moving between it. As it passes through stellar prominences we begin to perceive its impossible size, and can see that it is made of metal. The score tells us to look on in wonder, but warns us of a doom to come.

The object speeds to Lithone, a world populated by intelligent robots, where we view snippets of routine life. But the peace is shattered. Everything is getting sucked up into the mouth of the great metallic planetoid, who the doomed Lithones know as “Unicron.”

We then witness a genocide. Unicron’s enormous tusks, which surround its mouth, pierce the crust of the planet and all of it—all of the sentient beings, all landmarks and machinery, the entire world—is devoured. Only then do we see the opening title and credits, to tell us we are watching a cartoon intended to sell toys.

One of my most vivid memories of childhood is my first viewing of this film. It was at a sleepover party for Shane’s birthday, where we watched VHS tapes while huddled in sleeping bags. I can remember bits of what we watched, including Madballs: Escape from Orb!, but the real star for all of us was The Transformers.

Its cast was star-studded, including the voices of Leonard Nimoy, Scatman Cruthers, Judd Nelson, and Casey Casem, to name a few. Remarkably, it is also the final film Orson Welles worked on—he recorded his lines on October 5, 1984, and died on October 10.

After the main credits roll, we learn that the film takes place in the same world as the animated series, but we have time-jumped from present day 1986 to (what was once) the future year of 2005. The boy we followed through two seasons of adventures, Spike, has grown up and has a young son named Daniel.

I was, and remain, a Transformers freak. Something about the aesthetics of those characters, and that world, tugged at my heart. My imagination ran wild, thinking of a world bigger than my own filled with adventure. Alien worlds! Giant robots! 

The earliest Christmas gift I remember receiving was Slag, the Dinobot who transforms into a metallic triceratops. He has seen better days but remains one of my most prized possessions. I read and collected the Marvel comics that ran from ‘84 to ‘91. And I loved the toys. I begged and begged my parents to buy them when I saw them in the store.

Recently I looked at a toy collector’s site to see the various figures that were made year-to-year. Many forgotten days of my childhood flooded back to my memory. I could recall bonding over them with my young friends. I drew my own characters in school, conceiving of the ways that their robotic bodies could physically transform. I even located a memory of a time my big brother was young enough to unselfconsciously play with toys with me. I realized the outsized role that the Transformers played in my childhood.

It was therefore quite a shock as a child to see the bodycount that accumulates early in the film. Following the genocide of Lithone, two battles occur where well-liked characters are killed on and off screen. And within the first 30 minutes, the leader of the good guys, Optimus Prime, is mortally wounded and dies in a hospital bed. The writers admitted later they had no idea what they were doing: it was a cartoon about toys and they were killing off the old product line. But children actually wept in the theaters. I know I fought back tears at the sleepover party, watching Optimus Prime’s lifeless body turn black while the young boy Daniel cried beside him.

The stakes were always so low in the animated series, but the movie made the world more memorable with its cruelty and death. That’s probably why it still has such a big place in my heart. Audiences buy into the story more when the writers are sadists, even audiences of children.

In the cartoon, the Transformers were a race of sentient aliens. But they were inorganic, technological life. The third season, which followed the 1986 film, revealed that the multi-faced and tentacled aliens called Quintessons once ruled over the Transformers’ homeworld of Cybertron. The planet was their robot factory and they produced “two product lines: military hardware and consumer goods.” When their robotic servants became self-aware and liberated themselves, the former became the Decepticons and the latter the Autobots.

The very first Transformers toys for sale in the United States loosely followed this rule. The first Autobots transformed from robots into cars or trucks. The first Decepticons transformed from robots into weapons like guns or fighter jets. In this way, the Autobots represented the productive forces within society, while the Decepticons represented society’s destructive tools.

When the robots freed themselves from tyranny, they did not start building a technological utopia. The Decepticons are literal manifestations of weapons, so they view violence as a solution to all things. They ravaged their home planet of Cybertron in pursuit of war, leading to worldwide scarcity. The resulting energy crisis is the reason a group of Autobots and Decepticons headed off-planet. It’s how they encounter Earth and humanity.

The cartoon is therefore, at its core, a shallow moral fable. It warns us against prioritizing guns over butter, and against militarizing, and reminds us that it’s easier to destroy something than it is to build it. But the 1986 film takes this kernel of wisdom and transforms it into something revolutionary.

After a battle and a coup, the ousted Decepticon leader, Megatron, finds himself adrift in space. He is happened upon by the planet-devourer we have already encountered: Unicron.

Megatron, who is dying, is offered a new body and new forces to defeat the Autobots. He accepts servitude to Unicron, even though it represents total annihilation, because he is promised a return to leadership over the Decepticons and the defeat of his enemies. In other words, he knowingly makes a deal with the force that will destroy his world because it entails temporary power and privilege before the end.

The cartoon series warned us against turning the forces of production into the forces of destruction. But the film warns us that the ruling class will embrace a literal apocalypse to maintain its own position. This is an allegory for too many phenomena in the real world: nuclear weapons, threats of all-consuming world wars, and most obviously, the climate crisis. Even against their own interests as living beings, the powerful continue daily to inch forward toward the world’s end.

In the film, Galvatron (the new name and form of Megatron) doesn’t even consider working with the Autobots to find a solution to the coming catastrophe. He is too busy continuing his vendetta, and consolidating his own power among the villains. Eventually he discovers that the Autobot Matrix of Leadership is the tool that can destroy Unicron. But instead of learning how to stop the monster, he attempts unsuccessfully to enslave Unicron with it.

This move predictably serves to anger Unicron, and we hear the great Orson Welles tell him, “For a time I considered sparing your wretched little planet, Cybertron. But now you shall witness its dismemberment.” Unicron, the massive mechanized planetoid, has transformed into a horrifying giant robot that mashes its fists into the Transformers’ homeworld Cybertron. Galvatron screams as he watches the destruction of the planet he longed to conquer but never lifted a finger to save.

You’ll be happy to know that not all is lost. Hot Rod (played by Judd Nelson, fresh off his success in The Breakfast Club, released the previous year) emerges as our reluctant hero. Throughout the film he shows a childlike adherence to hope in dark times. When a fellow Autobot wonders what can stop Unicron, he “just has a feeling” that the Matrix can do it. When Galvatron tells him not to bother, that the Matrix won’t work, Hot Rod is certain that Galvatron only failed because he’s evil.

At last he fights Galvatron and retrieves the Matrix of Leadership. Hot Rod then hears the voice of his dearly departed leader Optimus Prime, giving him a new name and beknighting him with the mantle of leadership. He opens the Matrix and explodes Unicron from the inside, leaving the monster’s head to orbit Cybertron as a new satellite.

The film is set in 2005, which was supposed to be humanity’s far-flung, spacefaring future. Yet here we are, in the year 2024, with Galvatrons sitting in every critical seat of power. They ally themselves with every form of our species’ annihilation, Unicrons in all directions, and we can’t figure out how to save ourselves.

While the 1986 film ends with a sort of mystical solution, in the macguffin of the Matrix of Leadership, I think we can wring out one additional lesson from this silly cartoon about toys:

In the continuing story of the movie and cartoon universe, leaders use the Matrix to access voices of the past. This is how Hot Rod hears Optimus, and how he eventually learns the secret origin of the Transformers, that they are former slaves who fought for freedom. The Matrix is opened once more in the series, where it is described as the accumulation of all their collective wisdom.

So Hot Rod saved the day because he employed the good guys’ collective wisdom against their greatest threat. And he is our hero because he had an almost naive hopefulness.

Every success and every failure brings us more wisdom. And each piece of wisdom can be wielded as a weapon against annihilation, so long as there’s someone there at the end who holds fast to hope. As Unicron heads toward Earth, let’s remember that.

Autumn Rain Towne is a DC-based painter and comic artist. She's currently working on a trans space opera comic book called Transcendence. View her art on www.autumnrainart.com or @artofautumnrain on ig.