What do we know about transformers?

This year marks exactly 30 years of Transformers. The fourth part of Michael Bay’s epic is in the movie, and our Robot Ball exhibition has been extended until July 20 to open the Transformers exposition (+ 50% discount for children!) . What is no reason to collect in one post, all that we know about them !?

By the middle of the twentieth century, all the functions of the human body were studied, there were mere trifles - all kinds of small organs, such as lymphatic vessels or thyroid gland. But these small and palpable organs were physiological nodes. To understand their structure, a completely different scale of material coverage and a different level of knowledge was required.


How it all began: Optimus Prime 1984.

Unlike studying the functioning of the liver, kidneys or stomach, for the physiology of that time it was not available. Scientists so honestly wrote: “so, they say, and so on, there is an organ in such and such area of ​​the human body, called such and such Latin word. The purpose of the organ is not clear. ”


And these are the parents of Optimus: Microman Titan 2 series T441 Icarus and Titan Command 3 series T471 Phios 1976.

Transformers, which are simple in appearance, represent the same complex object. To at least a little idea of ​​their history, they will have to dig deep into international politics and the history of military propaganda. Come under the cut at your own peril and risk - I warned you.

Today in the world there are two centers for the production of cartoons and toys. These are the USA and Japan. America does not really notice this, because the Americans have so much. The appendage is small. In Japan, anime and toys are a cult and one of the basic elements of modern national culture.


ALL NIPPON Airlines painted nine (!) Pokemon liners.

That is why Transformers are interesting - they created a modern anime as an industry. I think everyone on the hub knows how the Americans essentially created the transnational corporation SONY, transferring transistor technology to it in 1955. Similarly, American producers pumped Anime in the 1980s, turning it into an international billion-dollar market. But first things first!


Sony TR-55 is one of the first transistor receivers in the world.

Each country is imprisoned for something by its culture. Russians are masters of literature and cinema (the whole of Hollywood was built by Russians) - because Russian life is artistic, and the language is branchy like a seasoned algorithm. The Germans are meticulous pedants - they are given weapons and cars. The brilliant planners of the French - they have the best philosophy and common culture. The Japanese, on the other hand, took the best from China and multiplied this by European technology.

Japan emerged as a Chinese pirate island, put on its feet by the Portuguese, and then by a whole series of other "white devils", suffice it to say that in the second half of the 19th century a certain army was headed by a certain Jules Brunet , who later became the chief of the French General Staff.


General Staff of the Japanese Republic of Ezo. Brunet second left in the front row.

That is, this is the best military specialist in France - evaluate the degree of managerial assistance to Japan. This is the upper class. And the result of such help also came out first-class - an explosive mixture of pedantic Asians who were able to engage in goal-setting, like Europeans, turned out. Simply put, the Japanese are Far Eastern Germans. If they have already decided something, they will do very well, exemplary.


Jules Brunet performed by Tom Cruise exactly 136 years later .

It is this property that is required when creating pop culture. Take some algorithm and meticulously execute it. For example, for children's toys, it is enough to use only two universal artistic techniques.

The first is encyclopedia. Have you noticed that any encyclopedia makes an impression? Even if it is an encyclopedia of knives of the world. When all the phenomena of any topic are presented, this has artistic value, since it is a reflection of reality. All collections are based on this - collected all turbo inserts and seemed to have mastered reality. And the real encyclopedia is generally the paper Internet.


The French Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, one of the largest reference books of the 18th century, which is believed to have radically changed the cultural landscape of Europe and set the stage for the French Revolution.

To create commercially successful toys, cartoons or books you need a collection. Then buyers will have a clear motivation to watch all the Pokemon series, buy all the toys. But how to make the toys themselves and cartoons the same guaranteed attractive?

The second is dialectics. Cool abstruse word, hiding just a binary scheme. Each toy individually must contain two opposites. Like Spartak and Dynamo, like summer and winter, like physicists and lyrics. This is how human consciousness works - he likes to combine opposites. At its maximum, it is humor.



Laughter, unless of course tickling, is a reflex cramp of the facial muscles that occurs after euphoria, which in turn arises after the realization of any vital contradiction. It is about solving a logical problem that generates a physiological emotion. This task is always dialectical, like "a bun has hanged himself" or "an ax is floating along the river." So, each toy must contain both a "river" and an "ax." And a robot and a typewriter, and a furry animal and a super fighter, and a chewing gum and a liner, and an Italian plumber and the rescue of the princess. In general, both earthly and heavenly merge into one, so a person is born with a smile on his face.



M152 Eric with the Microman Earth Jetter from the 1977 Command Car Series

These toys are much nicer to collect in a collection. It sounds simple, like any speculative scheme. And already on this, neither in Europe nor America can do anything like this - in American comics from far away you can see the schematic. You still didn’t have time to approach the counter, and already you see two hundred comics about superheroes that differ only in details. Because the Americans first take the circuit (hamburger), and then put it on the conveyor belt (McDonald's) - naturally the circuit will stick out like hare ears from a bag.

Another thing is the Japanese. They step by step towards implementation, from simple to complex. They made a robot figurine - it was for sale. Ok, let's make a robot sitting in a typewriter - sold even more. Ok - make a robot car! Po6ota recorder! Po6ota camera! And at every stage they give all the best - maximum design, imagination and pedantry in detail.


MC-10 Cassette Man 1983

Now imagine that all this splendor is multiplied by American enterprise. That is how the brand of transformers was born. Toys “Diaclone” and “MicroChange” participated in the “Toy Tokyo Fair” at the stand of Henry Orenstein Hasbro in 1983. There George Dunsey saw them - the head of Hasbro's R&D, after which he decided to release them as one single series of toys for his market.

This time, the Americans from Marvel , almost the main propaganda contractor of the US Department of Defense, began to produce the Japanese ; the company became famous when it made the first superhero for the military in 1941 - captain America. They just wanted to raise the draft in the army, but the result was a multi-million empire. It is the order for Captain America that turns the tiny Studio Timely Comics into the familiar Marvel Empire.


Today's first comic book release costs $ 343,000

Hasbro worked with Marvel Comics to promote another military order, GI Joe: A Real American Hero, using a three-pronged marketing scheme. This scheme included: a set of toys, a set of comics from "Marvel", and an animated series drawn by "Marvel Productions" and animation studio "Sunbow Productions". This strategy was repeated in 1984 to promote the new Transformers series.


Ji Ai became a conical character and created the so-called market Action figures

Marvel’s editor-in-chief, Jim Shooter, proposed developing a binary transformer circuit to two warring factions of alien robots - heroic autobots and evil decepticons. To explain this idea in more detail, Shooter asked the editor Dennis O'Neill to come up with names and characters, but O'Neill's work did not live up to Hasbro's expectation, and they asked to redo everything. After O'Neill's refusal to rework, editor Bob Budyansky took on the project. Quickly completing work over the weekend, he introduced new names and characters to Hasbro management. Shortly afterwards, comics were released (four magazines that came out twice a month) and a pilot cartoon consisting of three episodes.



Japanese designer Sohei Kokhara painted the earliest Transformer character models. He heavily humanized toy designs to create more characters for the comic book and cartoon. His projects were subsequently simplified by Floro Deri, who became the lead designer for the series, creating many more projects later.

So a critical mass was created leading to a chain reaction. Fans liked the Transformers universe so much that the creators simply could not stop - American producers tried every time to complete the project and take the box office, but from this the flame of fanaticism only flared up more.



1984-1986 - two seasons appear in the animated series. At the peak of popularity, the producers decide to release a full-length film, take the box office and cover the shop by trite killing all the heroes - it turns out a surprisingly gloomy picture that did not appeal to critics, but attracted the audience.

Despite the fact that “The Movie” had a PG rating, most of the characters in the series met their death in it: Optimus Prime, Armored Car, Ratchet, Strongman, Detective, Racer, Discharger and Skandalist. In the third season, it becomes known that Nytik also died.

Then comes the third season of the series (1986), popularity drops and already in the fourth season (1987) comes kirdyk - there are only four episodes in which everyone abruptly reconciles and eternal peace sets in.



In 1986, the Japanese tried to launch their first own series: Transformers: Scramble City, an alternative continuation of the second season of Transformers. It was conceived as the beginning of a new, independent animated series, but the plan did not receive further development. Nevertheless, some moments from the cartoon were later used to create the third season of the original Transformers (in particular, giant robots transforming into cities - Metropleks and Triptikon).

The end? There it was. Despite the closure of the project, fans need to continue! And as Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky said, “there will be money - there will be girls”:

In 1987-1988 In Japan, the Toei Animation studio, as an alternative to The Transformers season 4, created the 38-episode anime series Transformers: The Headmasters. According to the plot, he directly continued the 3rd season of the original animated series, as if the 4th American season did not exist at all.



In 1988, someone decided to make the face brick and take the box office, once again just reissuing the entire series in a new format (then it was still new!). The 5th season of the animated series, consisting of 20 episodes, was released. However, there was not a single original among them (!!!) - it included 15 episodes selected from different seasons of the series, as well as the full-length cartoon Transformers: The Movie, divided into five episodes - “days”. A distinctive feature of this season was the update of the screensavers and endings of each series, which gave the narrative more coherence and consistency, as well as the first appearance of the “Space Cube” - Ollspark.



After that, everyone understands that the transformers have already become an inexhaustible oil well and the series are coming out of the cornucopia every year. The series are released, both by the Japanese and the Americans, no one follows the plot, all the series are not connected with each other, but try to prove that they are the legal continuation of the world of transformers, called sequels, prequels, epilogues and additions. But in reality, almost all of them were “alternative sequels”. It comes to the ridiculous - on Wikipedia you can often find definitions like “The final part of the trilogy (This series has nothing to do with the previous parts of the trilogy).”

There are so many series that, in principle, transformers alone are an entire industry, comparable to the animation of a country such as France or Canada. (Canadians, by the way, made a third of all transformers, which greatly pumped their mult-industry financially)



Now, take a deep breath and estimate the overall scale:

• The War of the Gobots (English Challenge of the GoBots) (1984)
• “The Robots: The Battle of the Stone Lords” (English GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords) (198б)
• Wars of Great Power (Transformers: Super-God Masterforce) (1988)
• Victory (born Transformers: Victory) (1989)
• Zone (English Transformers: Zone) (1991)
• Transformers: Generation 2 (1992)
• Battle of the Beasts (born Transformers: Beast Wars) (199b)
• Beastmen (Transformers: Beast Machines) (1999)
• Battle of the Beasts 2 (born Transformers: Beast Wars II) (1998)
• Battle of the Beasts 2: Movie (Eng. Transformers: Beast Wars II - The Movie) (1998)
• Battle of the Beasts of Neo (born Transformers: Beast Wars Neo) (1999)
• Transformers: Robots in Disguise (2000)
• Go-Bots (English Transformers: Go-Bots) (2003)
• Armada (born Transformers: Armada) (2003)
• Energon (born Transformers: Energon) (2004)
• Cybertron (born Transformers: Cybertron) (2005)
• Origins (English Transformers: Beginnings) (2007)
• Optimus Prime vs. Megatron - The Final Battle (Transformers: Optimus Prime vs. Galvatron - The Ultimate Battle) (2007)
• Transformers: Animated (2007)
• Gladiformers: Robots Gladiators (English Gladiformers: Robots Gladiators) (2007)
• Transformers: The Battle of the Gladiators (English Gladiformers: Robots Gladiators 2) (2008)
• Cyber ​​Missions (Transformers: Cyber ​​Missions) (2010)
• Prime Transformers: Prime (2010)
• Transformers Rescue Bots (2011)
• “Super Speedy Transformer Gyrozetter” (English Speedy Gyrozetter) (2012)
• GOU! (English Transformers: Go!) (2012)
• Transformers: Prime - Rise of the Predacons (born Transformers: Prime - Beast Hunters - Predacons Rising) (2013)

Not weak, right? But apart from the feature films of Michael Bay. The fact is that here history makes a full circle and returns to the starting point. Money for the shooting again gave the US military.

• Transformers (2007)
• Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)
• Transformers 3: The Dark Side of the Moon (2011)
• Transformers 4: Age of Extinction (2014)

The situation has evolved like this. In 2002, the US Department of Defense decides to release a patriotic film about the upcoming Iraq war in a year. The order goes to HASBRO as the official owner of the official toy of the American soldier GI Joe. The idea was also supported by Sony, but the producers decided that it would be too obvious propaganda - the American heroes-soldiers in Iraq and all this as a children's cartoon ?! Advocacy should still be unobtrusive, and Hasbro's director of films, Carel Monroe, suggested taking a dusty brand of transformers.



The Pentagon generals were so pleased with this decision that they provided unprecedented support for the project. Filming began on April 22, 200b at the US Air Force Base - Holloman. The army supplied the film crew with aircraft and machines for alternative forms of Decepticons, in particular, F-117, C-130, C-17 and two CV-22 Osprey aircraft of the three available at that time (they seem to be and purchased for propaganda purposes only). Thanks to cooperation with the military, Transformers was the first film shot in the Pentagon after the September 11th terrorist attack. All this assistance in financial terms was a couple of times higher than the entire budget issued by money.



Thus was born one of the most expensive, spectacular, controversial and box office films in history. But have you ever wondered where so many remakes from Hollywood come from in recent years? almost all the superheroes forgotten in the 90s were restarted: betman, spiderman, captain america, superman, hulk, torus, iron man, avengers, x-men, fantastic four. Moreover, some of the films became unexpected hits like the X-men, and some - barely hit the budget - but it is clear that they are being shot as if according to one program. Of course, we can say that the sunset of the movie has come and now there will be only remakes, but there is another reason.

The fact is that the American government finances the so-called “cultural bridge of generations” between generation X (19b5-82) and generation Y (1985-01). In America, there is a well-known social problem in the generation gap, “flower children” and “MTV generations” have too different cultural codes, they hardly overlap.



Imagine a classic American picnic with beer and a poolside barbecue. What can young guys talk about with older men? We need a typical conversation at the level of "friend or foe", but for America it’s politics, football and ... superheroes. They can always discuss the new remake of the movie about the spiderman and scold him for his differences from the conic comic book. Imagine what a gap would be if the youth of the spiderman and the betman their parents grew up on would not have known? Yes, it's all exactly what to quote jokes from old Soviet films that no one saw.


Remember "back to the future" and understand what I mean.

And so, once a generation, Hollywood reissues its heroes and the whole of America is entwined with a network of a culture uniform for all. In the USA, a kind of "bridge" in the recognition of a certain relationship of tastes and preferences, culturalthe succession of generations X and Y took place: the igrek generation also loves films about Spider-Man (1962, comics) and Star Wars (1976, the promotion book), as the X's once loved in the 1970s comics and movies about these characters (about the idols-lucky ones who emerged from the layer of their close and familiar “non-heroic” life).



New transformers to the cinema on June 26 - do not miss your opportunity to get in touch with the culture of the American military propaganda campaign. And come to the ball of robots , of course!