Young Saunders is Traumatised by Robotic Genocide
The above picture shows a still from the 1986 animated film Transformers: The Movie. The dead bodies of two major early-season characters, Wheeljack and Windcharger, lie amidst the wreckage of their home, Autobot City. And that’s not all. The good guys, the Autobots, also lose Brawn, Prowl, Ratchet, Ironhide and Huffer from their ranks, not to menion their leader Optimus Prime. Ironhide, in particular, dies in a particularly brutal fashion. He is shot in the chest by the evil Decepticon leader, Megatron. Still alive, he overhears Megatron’s plans to destoy Autobot city, and grabs his foot in a futile attempt to stop him. Megatron utters the immortal line ’such heroic nonsense’ and shoots him, point blank, in the face.
And the massacre of original characters wasn’t limited to fatalities: Other main Autobot characters were captured early on and didn’t play any further part until the very end of the film. The original Decepticon characters didn’t get off lightly either. Some main Decepticons, such as Megatron, Shrapnel and Skywarp, are converted into new characters following a brush with an omnipotent planet (voiced by Orson Welles in his final screen role), whilst others, such as Starscream, are killed early on in the film.
Watching Transformers: The Movie as a four year old child I was struck by the brutality of it all (and, indeed, the film’s high death count was criticised by reviewers upon release as being potentially traumatic for young fans). The visceral impact was not lost when I recently revisited it on DVD. And it’s worth mentioning that the casualties were not simply peripheral characters - they were almost all central to the storyline of the first two series of cartoons. So what was the thinking behind this robotic genocide of the main characters from the early episodes? Bold story-telling device, perhaps… or cynical marketing ploy?
The answer lies in the new characters introduced in the course of the movie. Autobots such as Hot Rod, Ultra Magnus, Kup, Arcee and Blur, combined with the new Decepticons like Galvatron, Cyclonus and Scourge. So many replica toys to sell!
Transformers: The Movie story consultant Flint Dillie explains, with disarming honesty:
In the next season (3), we were going to have all these new characters, and people are going to be wondering what happened to the old characters that they liked so much. What we knew, in a business sense, is that they had been discontinued, because they were the 1984/1985 (toy)line – but, we needed to tie them off. So, we had this one scene where the Autobots basically had to run through a gauntlet of Decepticons. Which basically wiped out the entire ‘84 product line in one massive “charge of the light brigade”. So, whoever wasn’t discontinued, stumbled to the end. That scene didn’t make it into the finished movie. But if you think kids were locking themselves in the bedroom over Optimus Prime, basically in that scene they would’ve seen their entire toy collection wiped out.
I have never before found the word ‘discontinued’ to be so menacing…
April 24th, 2007 at 12:50 pm
You lie Saunders! According to imdb Well’s last film was the Hitchhiker where he played Ronald Adams (voice). He also featured in 2 other films after Transformers.
Admitedly all of them (including Transformers) are listed as being completed after his death but thats beside the point.
April 25th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Not so fast. Of the most recent two, The Hitchhiker is merely an animated adaptation of Welles on “The Mercury Theater on the Air” (from a circa 1930s recording) and Moby Dick was actually shot in 1971, but never edited. Transformers clearly represents later work than either of those.
That leaves Someone to Love, with a release date in 1987, and an IMDb trivia page that claims it features “[t]he last film appearance of Orson Welles.” Note that word appearance — it neatly eliminates voiceover work.
Contrast with the Transformers Wikipedia page: “This was Orson Welles’ last film. … (This was not, however, Welles’ last film in order of release; Henry Jaglom’s Someone to Love was released a year later.)”
So he probably appeared in Someone, then did voiceover work for Transformers, and since movies are further along in the voiceover stage, Transformers happened to be released first, though it was (likely) the last film he actually worked on.