And I paid Scholastic Book Fair Catalog Betamax Prices to see that with my baby eyes. I watched a shuttle full of my favorite Autobots get systematically, callously murdered in the first five minutes of The Transformers: The Movie when I was 6. Which is wild, because I should be numb to this by now. Despite generations of being yanked around by contrived narratives, sometimes I still get sad anyway. Image: Jim Salicrup, Frank Springer/Marvel ComicsĪnd yet there were nearly 40 solid friggin’ years of Transformers stories where they repeatedly beg you to get sad about dead robots. Stupid humans! Don’t get sad about dead robots! It’s like getting sad about a busted lawn mower! In response, Optimus Prime thinks to himself that Spider-Man is an idiot who doesn’t know he shouldn’t be sad, because robots can just be repaired. Usually when somebody falls from a great height, that somebody is Dead with a capital “D.” (Spider-Man would know.) And as Spider-Man is mourning his fallen (new) friend, he wonders why all Gears’ Autobot pals are crowding emotionlessly around his shattered corpse. Just three issues into the Marvel run, he watched the Autobot Gears die, or so he thought. Do you know who else shared your frustrations? Spider-Man! Am I being a jerk?ĭavid: No, I get it: Not knowing how exactly we should respond to a Transformer’s death is baked deep into the franchise itself. I just can’t get emotional about a dead robot that just needs a jump-start or a lube job. I know these quasi-deaths are meant to be important and frightening, to show that the stakes are high in the Transformers’ Great War, and that the villain characters are extremely dangerous.īut c’mon, you know when they kill off Bumblebee early in the movie that he’ll be back in action by the final act. Tasha: David, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if Rise of the Beasts didn’t try to wring big-time pathos out of multiple Autobot and Maximal deaths, then quickly reverse some of them, but not others, for reasons that are unclear. Does life or death mean anything to Transformers? Given how Rise of the Beasts plays up some character deaths as big emotional moments while completely glossing over others, is the audience meant to take any of these beats or emotions seriously?Īs a casual longtime Transformers fan, I have no idea how to feel about dead Transformers anymore, so I asked the least-casual longtime Transformers fan I know what we can learn about Transformer life and death from the larger franchise - and how writers have used those elements to manipulate readers and viewers. At other times, the robot characters are so casual about their companions’ destruction that they come across as callous and uncaring. Just to make things more confusing, the Transformers movies sometimes play character deaths for big drama and pathos. Even superhero comics can’t compete with the death-and-revival cycle of Transformers media. That makes it hard to take any apparent character death seriously, especially given the franchise’s long history of killing off beloved characters and then bringing them back later. Most of its primary characters are living machines who can take seemingly fatal damage and then be repaired or revived later in the story. It’s just a stylized “portrait” of one of the robots, painted in two colors: purple and white.Like pretty much every story in the wide-ranging Transformers franchise, the live-action movie Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has an odd relationship with death. None of the Transformers insignia is inscribed, and the Decepticons logo is no exception. But it has perfect symmetry: the right side is the same as the left. The emblem looks like a complex multi-component ornament of geometric shapes. It depicts the face of a robot, although it is difficult to guess because of the sketchiness of the drawing. The Decepticons now have the same symbol they used in the beginning. The rest of the elements, with a few exceptions, were purple and were in or around this triangle. In the center was a large white triangle, pointed upside down. But the shape and arrangement of the geometric shapes were different from what it was before. The second symbol also consisted of polygons and looked like a stylized robot face. They did not know that the same symbol existed for a long time from the Cybertronian Empire but in a different color. In the early 1990s, the G2 Decepticon logo appeared, based on the previous version.
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