When I was a kid my parents watched a lot of cartoons with me, but there were some shows that drove them out of the room. One of those cartoons was Transformers. I was an observant kid, and I noticed the correlation. I always wondered why, and found my answer in college.
My college roommate was (and probably still is) a huge Transformers fan. He read the comics, had the toys (the Unicron figure was so damn big I wanted to charge it rent), and watched that cartoon a whole lot.
One of the many things I learned in college was that the Transformers are fucking stupid.
The animation is crap, the dialog is shit, and I’ve seen porn with a more compelling plot.
I’ll admit Peter Cullen owns Optimus Prime, but that’s where my praise of Transformers media ends.
Transformer toys are great. When you’re a kid there’s nothing cooler than a robot and a truck/ airplane in one. I got more mileage out of the few Transformer toys my parents gave me than just about anything else in my toy-chest.
In this instance, great toys don’t translate into great media.
Convince me that I’m wrong… Or just let your fanboy rage loose on my comment section.
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The Geek Whisperer 
I guess I can’t really argue with you as all your points are valid and could be said about a lot of cartoons in the 80s, but there’s just something about the show for me. Even after all these years I can still sit down and watch it.
He-Man on the other hand, I don’t know how I sat down and watched that crap.
If I’d read this post before the animated series got its re-release and I’d had a chance to revisit some of those old episodes, you and I would have words, sir.
However…
You’re right. It’s crap. It’s absolute, unmitigated garbage. It was essentially a string of toy commercials, and being a child of the 80s, I loved every second of it. I never thought about how stupid any of it was until I watched it again, as an adult. I still love Transformers, and always will… but now, it’s not about watching robots fight one another, it’s about remembering that specific time in my life. Those carefree afternoons… coming home from school to grab a snack and watch cartoons… that’s what I think of when I think about Transformers, not a crappy TV show.
The toys were pretty bad-ass, though.
@rtik13 “It was essentially a string of toy commercials…”
That’s spot-on. I really enjoyed them at the time. I just don’t understand the adult fan culture that has emerged.
@Rob I never got into He-Man. I can’t even remember watching it.
I think that the adult fan culture has a lot to do with a great many of us wanting to reconnect to our childhood, since everything seemed so much simpler then. Also, many of us are parents now, and the stuff they’re shoveling out for kids these days makes Transformers seem like Shakespeare.
I’m officially old now… I’m resorting to the “back in my day” card!
I get nostalgia, but parents looking to entertain their kids with something they enjoyed at that age isn’t really the same thing as adults buying piles of comics, going to conventions, and watching the cartoon in your dorm without being high.
There are great cartoons out there. Batman the Animated Series, Justice League, Batman Beyond, The Tick, Animaniacs, Loony Toons, I just struggle to understand adult Transformers obsession.
I love the pun about getting mileage out of Transformers toys
My adult fascination with Transformers is the implication of otherness. For a moment, consider an alien machine-sentience. Having the ability to subsume and restructure matter to a mindblowing degree of technical expertise …possibly nanotech, or even femtotechnology. All the while, maintaining a dispersed sentience throughout all the molecules of its structure! And these machine-supercultures are also possessed of free-will and strongly polarized principles, whether good or ill? What’s not to love? Just my two allsparks’ worth.
I can see that. Is that more the direction that the comics have gone?