Yesterday was the 33rd anniversary of the G1 cartoon

[Rodimus_2316]

Was going to make a post about it on the actual anniversary, but I wrote it down for today, when it was really yesterday, but thought I'd still make the post now, anyway. For those who saw the first ep when it was released: What were your original thoughts? Who became your favorite characters, off the bat? Any other comments?



- Rodimus_2316

[New and Improved Zobovor]

I was aware of the existence of a Transformers cartoon before I ever actually saw it. I remember the kids at school and daycare talking about "energon cubes" and having absolutely no clue what they were talking about. It's funny, in retrospect, how quickly kids bought into the fictional mythos.

It must have been early 1985 that I finally saw it, and only in seven-minute clips on the Bozo the Clown show. They would have prize games on the show where kids had to throw a bean bag into a bucket; each bucket was placed farther away, and the farther the bucket, the better the prize the contestants won. Three or four buckets deep, and they started giving away Transformers toys! I was around nine years old and I wanted to be on that show so badly, because I was supremely confident I could make that bucket shot.

So, after the contest they would air one act from the "More Than Meets the Eye" pilot trilogy. It was tantalizingly short. By this point, I already owned Jazz, so I always watched for him in crowd scenes. My main interest in watching the show at this stage was to see Jazz in action.

As an aside, kids had also seen the Challenge of the GoBots pilot, and I really wanted to know what channel these people were watching. One kid named Chris Patillo was insisting that some of the toys like Pathfinder were girl robots, which was patently preposterous, because girls are icky and dumb. Of course, he turned out to be completely right.

So, back to Transformers. My childhood is clearly delineated by the pre-divorce days and the post-divorce days, due in part to the fact that after my parents split up I ended up moving halfway across the country with my mom and sister. So, what's interesting to me is that I remember kids in third grade showing me newer toys like Beachcomber and Seaspray (and I got Powerglide for Easter in 1985), during a point when I was still watching Inspector Gadget and He-Man and had no knowledge of the Transformers show outside of the short clips from the Bozo the Clown show. It wasn't until fourth grade, when we moved from Illinois to Maryland, that I was finally seeing entire Transformers (and GoBots) episodes. I remember being especially jazzed about the GoBots premiere because it was a five-parter that was being heavily advertised in newspapers and the TV schedule guide, and I totally freaked out when the first episode was supposed to be coming on but I couldn't find the remote control for the television!

So, by 1985 I was heavily into both Transformers and GoBots. The Tonka toys were easier to collect (most of the toys were $2.99, and even the larger Super GoBots were only $9.99) so I had more of them, but I liked Transformers better. I'd already bought into the Hasbro propaganda that Transformers were the One True Robot and all others were impostors and imitators. My family knew I loved transformable robots but they weren't very discerning when it came to brand names, so I ended up with a few Convertors and other off-brands. Transformers was a very expensive toy line, and it was difficult to collect when you were a kid working for allowance money. Six dollars for a Constructicon or a pair of mini-cassettes sure doesn't sound like much now, but it was a hell of a lot of money when I was only earning three bucks a month.

There were a lot of different robot toy lines, but what made Transformers special for me was the fiction. The clever code-names and diverse personality types and the exciting cartoon adventures drew me into that fictional world in a way that only Star Wars had managed to previously do. It was such a compelling and powerfully-told story that it still manages to captivate me to this day


Zob (and, of course, I'm still buying the toys 33 years later!)

[Rodimus_2316]

Cool. My story's a little different.

The first time I learned of G1 was around the time it started, when I was at some neighbor's house, and I looked to their TV through a window, and the G1 cartoon. I think I only saw the intro (memory is spotty from back then), then, when I started going to another neighbor's house after school to be picked up by my Mom later on (my parents always worked long hours), I tried watching the show there, and totally fell for it. The characters and story were interesting and out there, and it talked about things like the tragedy and sadness of war, like I wasn't being talked down to, as kids sometimes are. Saw all the episodes in their original order. What sucked though was that the sitter's son, around my age, liked Robotech better, and both were on at the same time on different channels, so we had to alternate every weekday. I was also into Gobots, Thundercats, He-Man, Voltron, She-Ra (some), and Inspector Gadget around that time (started watched Inspector Gadget a year before G1), but like with you, G1 was my favorite. By the time season 3 started, I was at a new sitter's (last one moved away), and wasn't allowed to use their TV, so I think I may have had the VCR record the eps.




- Rodimus_2316

[Travoltron]

I watched a lot of TV, so I saw all the ads/propaganda.
The GoBots came first, so that was my introduction to transforming
robots, I concept that blew my little mind. I remember finally seeing
them in the store, and I bought Spay-C because I loved Space Shuttles. I
was hooked. Somehow, I never saw the 5-part pilot in 1984. It either
never aired here, or it aired on some weird UHF channel I never got.

When Transformers started being advertised (it seemed like a long time
after GoBots' debut, but it was probably only a month or two) I was very
confused. I kind of thought of them as knockoffs and wasn't too
interested. The 3-part pilot aired at a time when I was in school and I
couldn't watch it. My brother was in kindergarten, back in the days when
kindergarten was only half-days, and he watched it and gave me a little
kid's version of a synopsis on each episode. (I remember him telling me,
"And then the truck guy fell down.")

I got Mirage for my birthday and my opinion on Transformers totally
changed forever. The cartoon properly began airing on Saturday mornings,
starting with "Transport to Oblivion". This was probably the coolest
cartoon I had ever seen at the time. (Only StarBlazers was possibly
cooler.)

As for favorite characters, I remember favoring the toys I already had
like Mirage. I also loved Ravage, and Soundwave of course. There were so
many toys/characters that I remember going through those pack-in
"catalogs" over and over trying to memorize all the names.