Ah
Here I am in my childhood bedroom...
That's what it is. This is what my childhood bedroom was.
Look, I think all that matters is that I had a normal childhood
and my experiences make for
Because recently, I've been thinking an awful lot about nostalgia.
You're probably wondering why are you filming on a bed with all of these stuffed toys?
Are you trying to rip off Jenny Nicholson so that you can finally catch up to her in terms of subscribers?
And the answer to that question is...
Yeah—but also for another reason.
Okay, we're going to get into some real deep H-Bomb lore here.
But for the first...
Decade? of my channel it was basically just a place where I posted whatever random videos
I thought were funny, and Let's Plays and stuff like that.
But I also used to do like a web series that was making fun of video blogs.
It was just me with a camcorder messing about, it's silly.
In that old video series I used to have a sequence where I would go to my bed to answer viewer emails.
Really it was just a way of using all the jokes that I thought of
that had nothing to do with the rest of the theme of the video.
Basically, it was just a technique used to justify doing something
completely unrelated to what people actually wanted or expected...
and um...
So, I'm using it now, for a different reason,
sitting on these bed...
These bed. Because sitting on this bed with these ancient sheets from
1996? 7? I'm guessing?
Makes me feel nostalgic for an earlier point in my life, and that's what this video is gonna be about.
Speaking of the past, the 1980s were really...
interesting.
I was born in the 90s, so my real love was the stuff I had access to, like Pokemon and Power Rangers.
You know, they beat up cool monsters and...
did fighting and there was explosions and giant robots.
It was—it was a kid's dream.
And the music was so catchy that they've been reusing that same riff in bits of music for
the last like 25... years.
Oh
Wow
I've learned how to feel old!
But a secret fascination of mine was the 80s. To me they were like the dark times.
This period from before I was born and we had all of these ancient
artifacts from it that only I could make sense of.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and He-Man, and the
Transformers weren't really for me. They were for kids from a previous generation.
And luckily for me, thanks to VHS, a format that I've heard someone cool made a video about once,
I could rewatch these ancient stories from the before time
over and over, without ever having to develop a personality.
Transformers in particular was really cool.
But then one day in Blockbusters
—and I only realize now how dated this video is going to be,
I saw a copy of a tape for
The Transformers: The Movie.
And that's weird because I thought movies were for adults,
and not kids who watch their favorite stuff at 5:00 in the morning or
however early I used to be able to wake up.
So I forced my dad to rent it and I spent a weekend watching it over and over...
and storing all of its images in my brain for the rest of time.
There are some powerful images in that film which will never leave me.
I never learned an instrument—
[plays piano incomprehensibly]
But in my adolescent, and then later adult years,
I noticed that a lot of people my age or slightly older
didn't really remember the show in that much detail,
but still remembered a lot of stuff from that movie,
and they might not have even seen it for decades.
And I've been curious for quite a while about how it ended up that way so lately,
I re-watched some of the show and then the movie to try to figure out how to...
Actually, no,
I don't really have a justification for my life choices in such a clear-cut way like that.
To be honest, most of my videos are me hastily writing an introduction and a conclusion
to the bit that I just felt like making for no particular reason...
and
this time I just don't have one.
I'm going to talk about the Transformers Show and the 1986 movie for an amount of time,
and you can watch it if you'd like?
I'm gonna make that the thumbnail
[jingle plays]
Something I didn't really realize as a kid and
probably should have done, is that the Transformers Show is basically just a really explicit toy commercial.
I was really curious how a show could come to be like this.
So I asked my father, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov,
how it came and be and he told me it was all the fault of that capitalist pig-dog
Reagan.
Ronalds McDonald's Reagan, was of course, president of the United States for
most of the 80s and he famously hated regulation
almost as much as he hated South American civilians.
I believe that prior to Reagan
broadcasters weren't allowed to do more than 12 minutes per hour of advertising,
and, you know, a show which is basically selling a toy...
probably would have counted as advertising.
Reagan took office in 1981 and his FCC oversaw a complete overhaul of all these regulations.
Putting the free market in charge of what children could see...
and as we know Reagan's policies are beyond criticism.
My generation grew up being advertised to every waking moment of their entire lives,
and all of us turned out fine.
And that allowed the creation of shows like My Little Pony, GI Joe, He-man...
Mask, which I just remembered now while filming this bit.
And, yes...
Silverhawks.
[singing: partly metal]
[singing: partly real]
I mean the Transformers. These robots fight every episode and then at the end the status quo is usually
restored, and
maybe another robot turns up who can show off their amazing new abilities.
And it's in stores now. And by now I mean...
30 years ago. Oh my god.
I think the go-to example from this, of the episodes I watched, is the one called B.O.T.
Okay, there's this one robot called Bruticus who's like a big?
Really powerful robot. He's way bigger than all the others.
Because he's actually made of five smaller Decepticons and they all team up and go
BLAAH
He's the most powerful one. He's just this utter...
destructive killing machine.
Anyway in this episode he gets shot once and completely falls apart.
Destroyed so completely, that four of the five robots are just in bits like...
Dead. And there's only one survivor.
So getting completely obliterated, and literally scrapped for parts,
and the parts get put in other things—they put the personality component
in another robot for a while and like it runs off and
There's this really funny shot of it like diving through a window—
Anyway, so that can happen, but it's fine.
They just get rebuilt, they're totally okay.
There is no real death in this universe, and that's fine,
I'm not asking for a children show in which there's murder...
It's actually a really effective way of writing a show with a limited cast of characters.
It means that you can have people getting beat up,
people get destroyed. There are fights and people lose badly,
but they can be rebuilt, so they can carry on going,
so you don't have to continuously be churning out new characters.
It's also quite similar to how kids play with toys.
You know when you're a kid and one of your toys dies in whatever thing you're playing,
you don't give it like a Viking funeral,
and then you don't bury it in the ground cause you can't use it anymore.
That's my secret strategy for winning in Warhammer,
I insist on giving every character of mine that gets killed a proper funeral with a eulogy.
After like the fifth one, my opponent always surrenders...
They never want to play with me again,
but I like to think it's because I taught them a harsh lesson about the horrors of war.
Basically transformers is the kind of story where no one can really die.
You—you get blown up, and they put you back together at the end of the episode, and then you do it all again.
It's that kind of show.
It's very comfy and easy to get into a rhythm,
and you can watch 100 episodes of it, and it's not particularly challenging,
but it doesn't have to be. It's for kids. And it's actually quite nice and relaxing to live in a universe where,
seemingly, nobody can die. It's quite nice.
Anyway, in the opening of the Transformers movie, a planet gets destroyed and millions of people die.
Yeah, there's a bit of a tone difference in the movie.
[music plays]
Like we see an actual...
civilization full of people going about their everyday business,
there's even like malls and shopping centers.
And then we get to watch them get completely obliterated and devoured by this giant monster.
I don't really remember the movie being that different as a kid,
I remember the show being like really cool and kind of violent. There was lasers and explosions,
but as an adult the difference is like, so clear and shocking.
Something is clearly very different from the previously consequence-free cartoon.
I mean, the episode where the guy gets blown up into tiny pieces and put back together is
the episode before the movie, and it's like you go right from that to this.
Let's take a moment to talk about Unicron as a character, because as a kid
he was the big, bad guy robot of the movie.
But as an adult, I think Unicron represents something,
actually stands in for something.
Um...
Nihilism?
Like, the Transformers Universe has a God according to its Wiki.
He's called Primus, I think, in some continuities...
he's literally Cybertron. And just you know, just hiding, pretending to be a planet.
It's a robot in disguise.
But at least in the philosophical sense, Unicron is the closest thing we see in this universe to, like, a god.
Like it's absolutely gigantic. It's incomprehensibly powerful.
It can destroy entire planets.
But what's interesting about it, not him, it...
is it doesn't do it because it's evil or bad,
maybe they changed this in characterization later,
but in the film, it's very clear that it's... eating.
This is how it feeds to survive.
It's this almost Lovecraftian thing. It's so much bigger than us,
and all it wants to do is eat.
And we just happen to be... food, on the planet it's eating.
and its insides are this bizarre and inscrutable...
seething mass of machines that just crunch, and... and
jitter, and spark.
There was a negative review of the film in the LA Times by Charles Solomon,
which criticized, like all aspects of the movie. He didn't really like it.
But he singles out Unicron, and I actually wrote this down...
Now personally. I think that's a kind of overly
mechanistic way of looking at a film where you break down what the motivation is,
and if the motivation isn't good according to some arbitrary standards then it's bad.
Like it's missing the forest for the trees by assuming
a character has to be written a certain way to count as good.
For me this criticism misses the actual terrifying thing about the character.
Which is, precisely, that Unicron devours entire worlds because it has nothing else to do.
There's just something... inevitable and huge about it.
It's this reminder that the universe is cold and senseless and will just kill you because it can.
And it's like oh...
I'm more scared of this movie now than when I was a baby.
The character Unicron most directly evokes,
and by evokes, I mean ripped off, they definitely just stole it,
is Galactus from the Marvel Comics continuity... universe... thing.
Look out for him in phase... 12.5, movie 103...
Avengers...
The Return of Jafar.
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby came up with Galactus in 1966, way before Unicron.
Unicron's human form has horns that kind of resemble Galactus' headdress thing.
That might not be intentional, but I hope it was,
because the rest of the character was clearly taken from that as well.
Galactus is an invincible, or almost invincible, whatever,
god-like entity that eats planets to survive.
In an interview Jack Kirby wrote this about Galactus:
And this is kind of what I find interesting about Unicron.
Its life cycle just involves eating... whole planets.
It's not got a moral compunction to do it, it's just trying to survive,
and it will genocide you.
Like...
That's, like, a different kind of horror to the sorts of evil that we normally think about
in morality plays and children's media and stuff like that.
And Stan Lee said this about him:
Now, the phrase "beyond mere good and evil" really sticks out to me here.
Not just because it's the name of a book by Friedrich Nietzsche,
like a work of philosophical aphorisms that are all about
dealing specifically with how we build the morality in the wake of the discovery that our previous assumptions,
like that there was a God who guaranteed good and evil, just didn't exist.
Like boiling it down, it's a book about how to build a philosophy
in the wake of there not being a god.
Like the exact themes that are being presented in this film.
But also because that same phrase is repeated again in the tagline of this movie.
It's even in the trailer.
[trailer narrator: Beyond good, beyond evil,]
[trailer narrator: beyond your wildest imagination.]
[trailer narrator: Transformers: The Movie.]
Unicron, like Galactus, is really compelling, because, in its own cartoonish, for kids-y way,
it's dealing with actual moral and philosophical questions
about how we live in the universe.
Like its very existence—its incursion—into this ideological universe is this statement.
There is no divine plan, You're all going to die,
you are tiny and the universe, it's gonna eat you.
This sort of oh, "Ooo I want Energon to fight a war so I can be in charge" evil of Megatron
is utterly fucking...
dwarfed by the magnificent horror of this awful thing.
I even feel bad calling Unicron awful, it's just—it just is.
Basically Unicron is an absolutely awesome character and... I... really like it.
And this tone shift doesn't just involve the deaths of a bunch of never-before-seen alien robots.
In the beginning, Megatron and co. surprise attack an autobot ship
and all four of the robots on it, who are characters from the show, just get murked.
They get Game of Thrones'd.
They just get killed, they die, and then they take that ship, and they take it to Autobot city,
and there's another big fight... and like a bunch of them die.
The wiki has a special article just for it, it's the Battle of Autobot City.
And there's just like a list of all the characters who... died in the first, like, ten minutes of this movie.
Prowl's death is especially shocking.
Like, you see smoke emerge from his mouth and eyes and face as he goes out.
Hes just dead.
This is a character from a show that you spend two seasons going:
It's okay. They get put back together, it's fine... and he's just dead.
Megatron repeatedly shoots Optimus Prime in the chest,
and Prime haymakers him off the top of a building and he falls like multiple stories to the ground,
and they're both like, fatally wounded, and have to be dragged to safety.
And it's not like the show where they get put back together.
Optimus Prime... dies.
In the next scene he gets this like deathbed goodbye.
And you watch the light fade from his eyes.
It's worth talking about why this was happening. Hasbro were making some changes to the toy line,
and they thought, well, in the movie, get rid of the old characters and introduce the new ones.
And there is something like still, even to me now,
genuinely quite sad about this scene, especially after having just watched the show.
We had two seasons of silly cartoon fights of Megatron, and this time they just murdered each other.
The father figure of the show is just gone, and there isn't really any one left to take his place and, like that's...
really sad.
And this obviously had a massive impact on its audience,
like kids were crying in the theater and had to be dragged out.
There were tons of complaints.
Flint Dille has gone on the record as saying that like,
he didn't really think it would have this kind of impact.
[Flint Dille: I'll get somebody "How come you killed Optimus Prime?"]
[Flint Dille: "I cried when you killed Optimus Prime."]
[Flint Dille: But the real answer is that we, you know,]
[Flint Dille: we didn't know that he was an icon. It was a toy show.]
[Flint Dille: We just thought we were killing off the old product line introducing a new product.]
[Flint Dille: And, you know, Optimus Prime was one of those guys.]
They didn't think that they created like a cultural icon, and...
in a way,
I don't think they had created such an icon until they killed him.
And what makes it so impactful isn't just that people know the character.
If you had a scene like that for character no one knew about, it wouldn't be that interesting.
It's the specific juxtaposition of this with the kind of immortal
"Everything's fine. Don't worry about it." nature of the show.
It just invented death in a universe where previously that couldn't happen,
and for a kid that's way way more shocking than something you know just dying.
It's that specific contrast.
And I think this specifically is what makes the movie interesting,
and makes the movie and the show by relation,
such a memorable pop cultural artifact.
It's this specific change they made, which they didn't have to, in the movie.
Like in the show, as we explored, the story didn't really matter.
No one blinked an eye when everyone was dead for four million years.
Sometimes Megatron can fly. Doesn't matter. It's fine. Don't worry about it.
All of a sudden you do have to worry about it.
People can die now, and that, to like a kid, is like a giant punch in the face.
It's like oh god, there's a real world out there with consequences, and I have to live in it.
For me, the introduction of Galactus and the death of Optimus Prime are the...
actual beginning of the story of Transformers.
There are actual real big problems and not just these silly cartoony villains that you have to face.
There's this existential dread you have to somehow deal with,
and the people you look up to can...
go. And just be gone. And you might have to take their place
or learn to make do in a world without them,
and how do you deal with that?
And, all of a sudden this silly show about space robots...
has a meaningful story.
And I think that's why I find the Transformers movie so interesting
and why I wanted to go back and think about it.
I didn't get a pet until I was a bit older,
so for me, like the first time something that I knew about, and was kind of close to me died...
was the cartoon robot dad.
And the narrative of the movie actually explores these really interesting questions and ideas
that you wouldn't expect to happen in the Transformers movie.
Questions like: How do you deal with the fact that your existence is
probably meaningless, and everyone you love can and will die.
These are like, really important and difficult questions that we as humans
have been striving to try and answer for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
Like that's basically all Friedrich Nietzsche did until he like, went mad and hugged a horse and died.
So ideally, the film would, in a perhaps kid-friendly way,
explore and maybe try and find some answers to these questions.
I said ideally there, because it doesn't really.
Look I've big'd this movie up a lot and set up all the things about it that I like, and the interesting concepts
that it kind of almost explores, but the movie isn't very good.
Like, for all the bits in it that I like or think are really interesting,
there is a lot of...
bullshit. There's loads of scenes of characters just...
faffing about and saying one-liners that no one ever thought was cool.
Most egregious is the guy who talks really, really fast because his thing is he moves really fast,
and the little one that like, talks in rhymes.
[Blurr speaking quickly: What about me, Magnus, what about me? Huh huh huh?]
[Blurr speaking quickly: I can help I wanna help, what about me??]
[character: You'll find, look behind.]
[character: You go wrong way. You fool I say.]
[Blurr speaking quickly: Absolutely, positively, definitely.]
[Blurr speaking quickly: Nobody can get the job done faster then I can.]
[Blurr speaking quickly: Nobody! Nobody! Nobody!]
I've gone out of my way to not learn their names
because I want their existence to slide from my memory as quickly as possible.
If you think this film is actually good, it's because you've forgot about 75% of it.
But the 25% of stuff that's decent, it actually deals with some really interesting stuff sometimes.
One scene I really quite like is when Unicron eats two of Cybertron's moons,
and Bumblebee sets a bomb to detonate while it's being eaten by Unicron, and they escape and then...
it just...
isn't affected by the explosion at all,
and they get sucked in to Unicron and eaten and they're just gone for the rest of the movie.
And you only found out that they didn't die like right at the end.
[character: It isn't even dented.]
[character: Aw shit, what are we gonna do now?]
They actually said a swear in the children's film.
That's how bad things have got for the main characters.
I actually find this really compelling, even as an adult.
Watching the characters see this horrible thing coming,
and try to formulate a way of attacking it and getting away,
and watching it just fail utterly and watching them get sucked in anyway...
It's like, really cool.
And I think there's an important thematic thing there,
like the characters are coping with the death of a lot of their friends, and even their leader,
like someone tremendously important to them.
And Unicron, if it represents nihilism or this understanding that life is meaningless,
in a really direct, literalized way, the characters are trying to...
deal with, and fail to deal with, this gnawing emptiness that tells them that life... is... pain.
And the whole movie is really about trying to escape the pull of these feelings,
and do something with your life even though you know that at the end of it
you die and maybe all things don't really matter...
Like... The—the—the ultimate question of the film, basically, is...
Oh shit. What do we do now?
Like even as an adult I was kind of sucked in, like what's gonna happen?
And the answer is... a lot of garbage.
[Blurr speaking quickly: Nice dino, good dino, sweet dino.]
[Blurr speaking quickly: Would you step into the nice spaceship for pretty please, pretty pretty pretty please]
[overlayed audio of Blurr talking fast]
Oh, they're gonna mess about for a bit now. Galvatron will fly past and go...
Ooooo...
I'll get you...
Gaah..
But I think we've established pretty successfully what the questions of the movie are,
and that makes the scenes that are actually about that kind of cool, and interesting, and cute,
and stand out against the... rubbish of the rest of the film.
There's a bit where Kup is telling this, like, old war story
to the Dinobots, and they're all sitting around and listening,
and even Hot Rod's like... "Why are you doing this?"
"What's the point of this? We've got stuff to do."
And I find that scene actually really heartwarming and interesting.
Like in the middle of this emotionally fraught situation where bad stuff is happening and danger is present,
the character with the most knowledge and experience
sits down and says: "Let me tell you about another time it was bad."
And you realize, oh, wow...
When this movie's not just messing about, it's actually just making a point here.
About how like telling stories about other times when things were bad
helps us remember that things aren't actually bad all the time, and there's lots of really
good times where life seems like it's worth living, even if it ultimately isn't.
And you're like oh...
There's like an interesting point here,
and it takes place in a scene where a giant robot soldier is telling a bedtime story to a bunch of... dinosaurs.
Like in the context of the movie, Unicron is really afraid of the Matrix of Leadership for some reason.
Like it's the only thing that poses a threat to it, and it's clear here...
what the Matrix of Leadership actually is.
It's all the stuff that the Autobots are doing to continue carrying on,
even when it seems pointless and like they can't win
It's all the little things that actually constitute a morality.
That stuff is what allows the Autobots to carry on even when all of this bad stuff has happened,
and there's the specific thing that it is called the Matrix of Leadership,
and that begs the question of like: What is leadership?
What was the je ne sais quoi that made Optimus Prime the cool guy?
And that's being explored here, in how the characters deal with this tough situation.
What I find really interesting is that the guy who's picked as Prime's successor is objectively...
really bad at the specific things required of leadership.
Like Ultra Magnus even says in the scene, he's like:
[Ultra Magnus: But Prime... I'm.. Just a soldier.]
[Ultra Magnus: I... I'm not worthy.]
I am not a good successor to you,
I'm just a guy who's good at the thing that he does?
And he's right, like Ultra Magnus makes leadership decisions in the movie,
and they always are basically just concessions to the Decepticons that actually make the situation worse.
Like he pulls this clever trick where he lets most of his ship be blown up
so that like a little bit of it with them on it can escape,
and that buys them, like, five minutes of time in the movie.
And then after that, he creates a diversion so that the rest of his pals can escape,
which gives him and the Matrix to Galvatron.
Basically he just—he just loses. He's just the highest-ranking guy.
He's not a conceptual leader-type figure,
he's not actually good at making the kind of high concept decisions
a leader should make, whatever those may be.
I wonder if there's an answer to that question explored by the end of the story.
So that begs the ultimate questions: What actually is leadership if it's not just being in charge,
and how do we make all of this work?
How do we... make a positive change in a universe where it often seems hopeless,
and this gets explored on the other ship.
Which also crash-lands, but on a different planet.
The one with Hot Rod and Kup and the Dinobots on it.
So they encounter these piranha-like Transformer-ish robots,
and Kup's like "We shouldn't fight them. Let's do the universal greeting."
[Kup: Don't act hostile.]
[Kup: I'll use the universal greeting.]
[Hot Rod, with derision: Universal greeting?]
Oh, we're going with this?
[Kup: Bah-weep-Graaaaagnah wheep ni ni bong]
[Hot Rod, with derision: Bah-weep-Graaaaagnah wheep ni ni bong?]
What I find interesting about this is the—the—the shear friction
between the concept being explored and the way it's being explored,
like the idea of, in this vast universe with multiple different languages and
levels of intellect and consciousness, the idea that there is a universal phrase which, to anyone, means
vaguely... "Hi. I'm your friend." is like super fascinating.
Like the idea of a universe where there is this central, conceptual meaning,
and a way of communicating, like that's a thing, and it's being explored by...
the robot saying...
"Bwee boop boo boo bah"
[characters speaking in unison: Bah-weep-Graaaaagnah wheep ni ni bong]
[Kup: See? The universal greeting works every time.]
Bah wee boo...
I can't even be bothered to remember it.
It's so embarrassing and obnoxious... and it just still makes me cringe, and even as a kid I was like,
"Oh no, I hope no one's watching me watching this..."
I just.. aw, God...
And it doesn't even work either.
They give them the candy, the lazer candy,
and they run out and they just they just capture them anyway.
It doesn't even work.
And this is another like cool way that they juxtaposed
the reality of the story with the kind of silliness of the cartoon.
They're like no this is, this is real. That childish nonsense doesn't work here. You've got to be realistic.
You should have slaughtered...
those other sentient beings.
So they escape, they get on the ship, and they go to pick up the other Autobots, right?
And... then they have a repeat of the last encounter they just had.
Like they meet this new alien species that might be possibly hostile,
and, this time, Kup's like let's just fucking shoot and we got them,
and then, we get the point of the movie.
We get the moral core—the thesis of the film, and it is,
simultaneously,
the silliest thing ever,
the worst, stupidest, most baddest scene ever,
and also...
Amazing.
So Kup's gonna shoot them, right? and Hot Rod goes:
"No, I've discovered the moral core of the movie."
"Let's do the universal greeting again."
[Hot Rod: What was that universal greeting again?]
[Hot Rod: Never mind. I remember.]
[Hot Rod: Bah-weep-Graaaaagnah wheep ni ni bong.]
And they do it...
[character: Bah-weep-Graaaaagnah wheep ni ni bong.]
[Hot Rod: Bah-weep-Graaaaagnah wheep ni ni bong.]
And it works!
[characters in unison: Bah-weep-Graaaaagnah wheep ni ni bong.]
[upbeat music is playing in the movie]
And everyone's happy, and they form like a
circle around them and they do a big dance and everyone's their friend,
and then you're like, oh shit. The movie is actually making a point here...
with this incredibly childish thing. The point is the childishness.
Like, the movie has just positioned...
the naive and childish desire to try to make friends in spite of everything as....
the actual, radical, positive moral choice to save the universe.
Where you try the thing, even though the world has told you it won't work and it'll be bad.
Just in case it might. Just in case you might actually be able to unite with these other people...
and sometimes it works.
Despite appearing on the surface to be a deeply cynical movie,
what it's actually doing is setting up all the really good reasons
that you should be cynical about the world and your place in it,
and then saying no. It's actually really good to be a bit naive sometimes,
and maybe that's the thing.
Maybe that's the miraculous way that we build a morality in this universe.
We, perhaps in a somewhat silly way, assert that this does matter,
and everything can work even if it doesn't seem like it.
And this is the film answering the question of what is leadership.
Hot Rod goes: "No, let's not do the tactically clever thing. Let's be unrealistic."
Let's believe that a peaceful, mutually beneficial outcome is possible,
and we can actually all get on and have this peaceful encounter.
And it seems like an unrealistic and silly thing, but
someone there asserting that they believe it is possible causes it to happen and that is an actual,
philosophical statement about how to live in the world... to...
insist, if not demand that...
better things are possible. Even when it specifically doesn't seem possible at all.
Literally this scene, where all of a sudden, there's an answer to the darkness of the universe....
the song that plays over the scene is Weird Al Yankovic's "Dare to be Stupid"
[Dare To Be Stupid playing]
And that's literally the moral core of the film. You have to dare to be stupid.
You—you have to believe in the incredibly silly idyllic thing.
Ultra Magnus and the other robots immediately get like forlorn,
and they want to be cynical again,
and Hot Rod says "No! Don't think about it in terms of whether or not we have the MacGuffin,
think about in terms of what we can do now to make it work."
You know, there's this old thing that a philosopher guy said once.
"A leader isn't someone who... tells you what to do and you obey because he's in a position of power over you.
A leader is someone who talks and then you realize,
you believe them, and you want that thing to happen as well."
And that great philosophers name...
was Optimus Prime.
And I find this sort of positivity radically reshapes the universe thing...
happening as well with Unicron.
Like Galvatron tries to use the Matrix,
and he doesn't really know how to understand it,
but he does use it in some capacity, because it suddenly causes Unicron to transform, and unfold, and
you actually get the coolest scene in the movie—this really awesome
transformation sequence where he unfolds, and moves, and shifts
and it's got some of the best music ever.
Like I've listened to the Unicron theme medley, like...
[Unicron theme medley plays]
1,500 times in my life over the last decade. It's just incredible.
Just Unicron's theme in general is just this is this epic thing where it's a mix of synthesizers, and drums, and
this like, this industrial hissing.
It's just...
I realized that almost all of my musical interests
spring forth in some fashion from the soundscape of the various iterations of the Unicron theme in the movie.
It's also like really, really, cool that the best scene in the movie is literally just a scene of something transforming.
It's just... This is literally the film... and it's... it's really cool. I love it.
But this scene is also a continuation of the themes of the story.
Like, we've just seen that the assertion that things can be made better allows the impossible to happen.
People who would have been your enemies if you'd approach them differently are suddenly your friends...
and, with the mere application of the belief that something can be done about Unicron,
all of a sudden, Unicron becomes a comprehensible threat.
Unicron becomes mortal in response to Galvatron trying to use the Matrix against him,
and I find that super interesting.
Like that's, literally the themes of the film if you believe something can be done,
all of a sudden maybe it actually can be.
So Hot Rod crashes his ship right through Unicron's eye, and like all of a sudden this,
this basically godlike creature that eats planets and
can't be harmed by massive moon-sized explosions and can suck people in even when they're trying to escape.
All of a sudden he's like, gasping in pain.
GBARGHARGH
In his eye, because it's been smashed apart.
And the crash is timed with the first line of Stan Bush's song "Dare"
[Dare plays]
We get this thing about daring again, it's like daring is by definition...
believing in something which it's not realistic to believe.
And this isn't just a ridiculous 80s rock anthem about generic positivity playing over a toy commercial film.
I mean it is that...
but in addition, it's a really interesting declaration that doing the the the supposedly clever thing,
the realistic thing, isn't really enough
Sometimes you have to demand the impossible.
One last scene that I really, really like is the bit between Galvatron and Hot Rod
when they're fighting, and Galvatron's like:
You should probably just come out and be killed by me,
I mean, we're all gonna die, right?
[Galvatron: Come out, Autobot.]
[Galvatron: We all must die sometime.]
And Hot Rod goes, "No", and punches him.
[Hot Rod: Not today, Galvatron.]
And that exchange sums up the whole movie,
you know, the universe is dark and scary and maybe your life is meaningless,
and maybe we're all just sitting around waiting to die,
we're all just running out the biological clock.
But we're not gonna die today.
And things can be made better, and this approach is what causes the Matrix to finally activate and
get all glowy and stuff and he's like "I have the power!"
That's a different show. I know it's a different show,
I was I was doing it was making a reference.
Stan Bush's "The Touch" starts playing, and he gets all glowy, and he transforms.
He evolves, and he doesn't hit B, so it's permanent.
And he transforms into...
Rodimus Prime...
[character: Arise, Rodimus Prime.]
[character: Optimus...]
Come on you, you almost let me use you to make a really interesting point, movie,
and then, the... main character's apotheosis is to transform into someone called...
Rodimus Prime.
It's—Ah...
There's a reason that no one has taken this movie seriously for thirty years.
Ahh....
And then he holds up the Matrix and Unicron explodes.
The power of leadership, and hope, and unwarranted positivity in a dark universe has successfully vanquished
the pessimistic nihilism that encroaches upon us all when bad things happen in our lives.
Rodimus Prime discovered the magic of...
Xanax.
Rodimus Prime makes a speech about how like, now we're going to live in the world of peace.
Where everyone can be a part of this beautiful new world.
Just this ridiculously optimistic speech.
[Hot Rod: We march forward to a new age of peace and happiness.]
[Hot Rod: Till all are one!]
It's like yeah! And then Unicron's head flies past and that's the end.
It just ends on that speech with the music playing just like that.
We beat you, let's all live in peace and happiness forever. Done! Credits go! Just...
Have a nice day everyone! I love it.
So yeah, it's not really that great a movie and the scenes that stand out,
especially to the kids who remember it from the time they first saw it,
they stand out usually because...
it was busy killing a character that was well-known and important to you.
Like, it wasn't impactful because it was good. It was impactful because it was horrifying in
like, a really terrible way for a kid.
It didn't really stand out because of its quality.
Like, I find that I keep every couple of years coming back to this movie in some form.
This movie is unmistakably a kind of standard hero's journey transition into adulthood thing for Hot Rod.
Growing up, I appreciate that far more, because like I and a lot of the kids who watch this movie
have had to mature into adults and encounter some of the emotions
that were first brought up for some kids in this film.
A lot of people have had to deal with the death of a parent, or someone really close to them
and learn to cope with that.
And it's hard not to, in that process, look back on a movie that is kind of about dealing with those things.
Like in a way, the Transformers movie is more meaningful to adults now
than it ever could have been for kids then.
I think I find myself coming back to this movie because...
I never feel like I'm quite done thinking about it, because it's meaning keeps changing for me,
as I keep changing as a person.
I as a person have grown up and changed a lot in the last...
10, 15, 20 years of my life.
A lot of things in the world have changed, and...
in a way one of the ways that you learn to deal with it,
and fully appreciate those things, is you go back to something that you felt you knew...
and look at it with the benefit of the new...
sight that you have.
I find that I keep doing this with the Transformers movie in particular.
Like five years ago when I was just really into how clever I thought I was,
I used to write for this website called smugfilm.com.
Like that was supposed to be a joke like, haha,
we know how silly this looks, but really, no, everyone on that site was pretty smug especially me.
And five years ago now, in 2014...
I wrote a piece about how the Transformers movie is actually about the Nietzschean ideal.
How it's this like radical rebuttal to philosophical nihilism.
Like, that was incredibly silly, but there was a time in my life where I genuinely felt that way about the film,
and felt that way about how to think about the world.
And one of the ways that I allowed myself to develop was by
re-investigating what I had previously thought of as just this fun movie that I thought was cool when I was a kid.
Like in a way,
it's only through nostalgia that we understand the present
by fully accepting how we used to see something.
Don't read that article by the way, it's really not that great.
In fact, I still have some beef with the guy who ran the site.
He would edit the articles to be what he thought sounded better
and he would cut a bunch of the words out—
like I remember my original article being like, twice as long.
And he'd like cut out all my favorite bits, and reworded some of it, and it just...
I don't know, it just kind of annoyed me.
Don't read the old article anyway. It was bad before—it was bad before it was edited.
We are all in a very specific sense undergoing this..
eternal and never truly finished...
transformation.
We're always becoming something else, and...
this is one of the ways that we come to understand who we are now, is by looking at the things from our past
with the new lens that we have.
And, like...
That, I think, is the value of nostalgia.
You have the ability to look back not just on something
from the past, but on how you were in the past.
I think a lot of people are nostalgic for movies, not because there's something
particularly great about living in the 80s or something.
But because being a kid in the 80s when the worst thing that could possibly happen to you that day was
the cartoon dad robot died.
Like, that is a really nice time to be alive that we all kind of...
on some level do appreciate more now that we don't have it.
We're coming up on, like in a couple of months, the 10-year anniversary of
Lindsay Ellis' video about the Transformers movie.
She hates it. She thinks it's terrible.
Like... 10 years. I wasn't joking earlier in the video where I talked about how old I felt, like...
In a way this video is like a very brief midlife crisis for me,
where I look back on how I used to think about some stuff and...
my old YouTube videos, and the things I used to do,
and try and figure out where I've changed and where I'm going and what I'm supposed to do,
and... I think the reason why I turned back to Transformers is because it
shouts the loudest and clearest, the most valuable message for someone in that state,
which is...
Demand the impossible. Believe that it can be better. Even if it doesn't seem that way.
And that's how finding the way out becomes possible,
and I guess I never really stopped believing in the silly cartoon.
I just find better and better ways to intellectualize it.
For the first time in my life, I feel old.
I felt like I was 19...
until I was 26, and now I feel like an old person.
And its made me go...
well...
Who am I?
and looking back on all my old videos it makes me think,
wow, I thought this was funny.
And maybe I miss having that much future ahead of me,
but,
It makes me happy to be who I am now.
It's fun realizing that, while the past had its benefits, the present and the future...
are pretty cool, too.
This movie is a part of my process of thinking about life and the world,
so it's been fun using it as an excuse to talk about these ideas now, so...
Yeah, thanks for tuning in to my midlife crisis.
It's over now. I feel good again.
Thank you very much to the people who support me doing this,
because I literally, literally, couldn't be here doing this without you.
So for me now,
The Transformers movie is unavoidably
about dealing with having to mature into a world where no one really knows what's going on,
and you have to somehow figure it out for yourself.
And that makes the movie interesting to me even now.
Even though it's measurably bad.
I guess the movie was more than meets the eye.
Oh my god.
[music plays]
