How to Kill Nostalgia

Growing up, I was a huge fan of Star Wars. How could you not be? "70's kid and nerd? You're our exact target audience. But wait, we've got more. Now that it's the 80's and you watch too much TV, we have the Transformers too!" The were both very cool concepts, ones that I still kind of dig.

So what the hell is this?

For around $50, you get a Darth Vader robot that transforms into the Death Star. (If you don't understand what I'm talking about, you probably haven't read this far anyway.) These are two concepts, each superbly awesome in its time and on its own, that have been repackaged in an unholy alliance of all that is wrong with both of them. On the transformer side, you have Darth Vader, admittedly a tall guy, but human-sized nonetheless, transforming into the Death Star. ("It's headed for that small moon." "That's no moon. It's a battle station.") Here I'm thinking of Megatron (giant frickin' robot) turning into a pistol (itty bitty little popgun). Even at twelve years old and in love with the concept, I had a problem with the physics. And as far as Darth Vader goes, he was cool because he could choke you to death from a whole other starship. "The ability to destroy a planet pales in comparison to the power of the force." Vader's own words -- probably misquoted, but pretty close. He didn't need to be a giant killer robot; he was already badass. This mirrors the Star Wars action figures changing from the 70's characters, which were shaped much like normal people, to versions which are more along the lines of pro wrestlers. Why did they have to go messing with these things?


Bonus movie review: Transformers

Here I'm talking about the version from this year, not the animated one I missed in the 80's. I'm almost embarrassed to say it's one of only two movies I saw in the theater this year. (To maintain a shred of intellectual dignity, the other one was The Last King of Scotland.) It had to happen. This movie was more or less doomed to look awesome while paying no attention to plot or character development. Of course, I had no choice but to see it. C'mon. It's the Transformers.

It did not fail to deliver. It looked really good. Great actually. The Transformers themselves looked and moved far more realistically than I expected they would. Michael Bay nailed the transforming noise perfectly and he avoided the stupid thing from the cartoon where Optimus Prime had a trailer when he was a truck, but it just disappeared when he was a robot. I always thought that was lame. And, well, they weren't any worse actors than the actual people. The writing and characters in this overpriced toy commercial managed to reach a level of suck that far exceeded what I could have imagined. I would have guessed that the entire thing was written by people my age, but back when they first saw the tv show in 1984. However, a good chunk of the plot twists were ripped straight out of Independence Day, so it must have been more recently. Anyway, this is a classic case of, "we can do this cool looking thing, now we just need a story." In the end, the cool-lookingness was just barely enough to make the theater experience bearable. I would have been sorely disappointed if I had watched this on a two foot wide screen in my living room with the sound turned down so the Mizz could sleep.