trailers I've seen are blustery fun, benefiting from 10 plus years of aggregate CG realism that started with a T-Rex splaying his toes in the mud.I used to watch the cartoon Transformers with my brother Nolan, just as we watched G.I. Joe, He-Man, Thundercats, Voltron and many other archetypal testosterone-fueled 80's cartoons, so I think I understand a little when I talk to guys of my generation about those old TV shows and toys and hear the near-worship in their voices. I watch my son playing with the Transformers toy Nate got him recently and recognize the same captured imagination. He doesn't really know what an Autobot or a Decepticon is, but he knows burly good guys and snarly bad guys when he sees them.
Which gets us to the real reason, of course, that a Transformers movie is debuting right about now. Nate bought Thomas an updated Optimus Prime for his birthday, before Thomas knew who Optimus Prime was. Generation X finally has enough wallet power to make remarketing its nostalgia a worthwhile endeavor. But there's a danger in that, too. Jessica Winter has an excellent article over at slate.com that, on the surface, is about Sony's new "Minisode Network"-- offering old TV shows shrunken down to bite-size--but is ultimately about the inevitable let-down of seeing your old favorites with updated eyes. Now that we have cable and a DVR again, we've been recording reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation, appointment TV with my family when I was growing up (the only show, in fact, we were ever allowed to watch on Sunday). I recognized, I think, the kitschiness of the show back then even (Geordi's visor thingamajig is essentially the banana clip hair accessory that was so ubiquitous when I was kid. I had three or four), but it definitely suffers a lot on repeat viewing. Although Patrick Stewart's booming Picard is still a kick,
the them
es and the outfits and the space monsters --all are painfully cheesy. Hey Deanna Troy, is your hairstylist a time-traveling New Yorker from circa Seinfeld? And check out Wesley Crusher's Y-front pajama uniform (Incidentally, Wil Wheaton does a hilarious column reviewing old Star Trek episodes at tvsquad.com. Being Wesley Crusher may have, har, crushed his onscreen career, but it set him up brilliantly for a future of self-parody).Maybe Star Trek: TNG is too easy a target, but I loved it (and still do, I suppose. After all, I'm DVR'ing the episodes, right?) and the pain isn't just a matter of seeing it age poorly. I have to wonder: was it ever really that great to begin with? I was also a huge fan of a little anime called Robotech (maybe you've heard of it), which was leaps ahead of other cartoons in sophistication--unlike G.I. Joe whose characters always got to parachute free of their burning planes, Robotech people didn't always come home, not to mention the interracial relationships, sexual innuendo, and bad guys who weren't just bent blindly on universal domination. And yet, watching it recently, oy. The voiceover narration is ridiculous and is it too much to ask that writers give Minmei at least one additional song to perform other than the ear-bleeder she sings about fifty times?
I don't know if Transformers will be a good movie. Michael Bay is the director. He got his start in music videos and is best known for Pearl Harbor and Armageddon, not exactly plot-heavy--or even plot-at-all--movies. The characters have had their street cred logically, if a bit presumptuously, updated (Does the name Bumblebee really make sense for a Camaro?) and it can't possibly be worse than the previous Transformers movie. Still, I'm not sure I want my memories muddied. The newest line of My Little Pony toys is also out in force these days and I'm kind of glad I have little boys and not little girls. Some cows are just sacred.
Watch the theme trailer. See the movie. Decide for yourself.
(UPDATE! The little girl in the trailer is holding a My Little Pony plush toy! Not completely random considering that Hasbro is the maker of both MLP and Transformers, but at whom is this particular product placement aimed?)
9 comments:
Your boys are lucky to have you! I, on the other hand, prefer the rainbow-haired, freaky-looking ponies to play with! I wouldn't know what the heck to do with a Transformer- let alone even really know what the heck it is!
I still have my old My Little Ponies--well, at least my mom has them--but other than that, I had trouble with that girly-girl stuff. Didn't help that I had brothers who didn't really like it. One of them banged my cabbage patch kid doll against the wall so hard, it turned her face inside out.
Your post is great, and gets me thinking about all the staples of my own imaginary menagarie. It's always fun/painful to go back and watch (or even read) some of the stuff that was so powerful at a young age, but has "suffered" with time. I'm not sure, actually, that it's the old pieces themselves that have suffered.
Neil Gaiman writes a rambling-and-not-his-best-work blog entry about this. Even at his not-quite-best, it's better than I can express. Check it out at here.
Keep 'em coming!
heymara
loved your thoughts here. we've been watching some deepspacenine episodes from blockbuster and i'm still hip with them. love how thoughtful and political they all were. great writing and the acting is not cheesy. . . not yet anyway.
livelong&prosper
heather
Hey Dan--thanks for the link. The Dr. Who guys should be able to put that on their anniversary DVD or something "You have us to thank for Neil Gaiman!" I love that he is still so captured by his eight-year-old Dr. Who watching self. I know that that is what this is about, this craving and fever, why Nate and so many guys want to see this movie so badly. And why I stayed up late last night watching more ST:TNG despite my own criticisms. There was a time around middle school when my brothers got to leave me alone for a bit, when I had female friends, and I started reading, GASP, Sweet Valley High. Maybe this is a more embarrassing admission than that I used to watch Star Trek. I read those books obsessively, had crushes on characters, and formulated hypotheses about the nature of social interaction from the trite plotlines (the book where the fat girl up and gets thin and then stays thin throughout the rest of the series was perhaps the most permanent, and maybe most damaging, of what I thought was possible). That craving is gone now, unlike Neil's Dr. Who, but it started me onto this writing path. I wrote my first "book"--40 pages on a typerwriter about a dance contest--set in SVH. That was the moment in my life when I knew I wanted to tell stories.
I feel a little embarrassed now if something--a television show, a book--captures me as thoroughly as these things did when I was little. You're supposed to know by now what the world is really like, right? It's okay to dabble in the fantasy, but not to absorb, or spend too much time obsessing on it. So I keep those new obsessions to myself and entertain the inner world, well, only INNER. I think, though, that that's why I need friends like you--so I can let the crazy obsessiveness out now and again and not get judged for it.
I think you're right, too. Maybe the old things haven't suffered, but our own media cynicism makes it impossible to fully enjoy them as we did in the era they existed. Is it fair for me to make fun of Troi's hair when I used to wear my hair like that back then too? There was another article on slate that I can't find at the moment, but in which the author said something to the effect of that it must be hard being a kid today when all shows must be winkingly parodic of themselves, recognizing their own conventions and the conventions of story-telling in general and making constant sly references and jokes about it. Too much savviness loses its soul, you know? I think I'd rather feel silly and love something.
Heather--I never did watch too much DS9. Maybe I should start recording that, too. My ST needs a bit of a shake-up. Thanks for the suggestion!
mara said:
> I feel a little embarrassed now if
> something--a television show, a
> book--captures me as thoroughly as
> these things did when I was little.
> You're supposed to know by now what
> the world is really like, right?
OK, I'll bite: what is it really like? ;-)
Just kidding. I know exactly what you mean. In 8th-grade I raved about a fantasy series I was reading to a guy in my geometry class. He wore a faded denim jacket with safety pins all up and down the back, uncombed hair, and actually had stubble. I don't think I ever saw his eyes all they way open; they rested always at half-mast, mourning for everyone else's gullibility. He used the word "cliche" five times to describe a book that, 60 seconds earlier, I had been foolish enough to like.
Excuse me, I have to go to the library now. I have some silly books to read.
:-)
I so wish you (or my brother) were around - I'm so excited to see Transformers, I had the biggest crush on Optimus Prime! Chris just doesn't understand, being just enough older than me to have thought that Transformers were stupid (much the way I think the Power Rangers were stupid).
I understand what you mean about revisiting your childhood passions, but I firmly believe that it's important to remember what it's like to view the world without those stupid adult cynical goggles. I still adore Star Trek:TNG, I unabashedly read young adult fantasy and science fiction, and really don't care that Robotech is cheesy. I am rewatching all 6 Star Wars movies, and I don't care that Jar Jar is silly. I enjoy silly. I love suspending my disbelief.
However, there is very little that does capture me the way it once did....maybe World of Warcraft is my substitute for Colten Wood.
> OK, I'll bite: what is it really
> like? ;-)
>
It is and it isn't. :)
>He used the word "cliche" five
>times to describe a book that, 60
>seconds earlier, I had been
>foolish enough to like.
>
There's always someone ready to wither and eviscerate anything you're unfortunate enough to express interest in. I also think these are the people most likely to pop up on youtube dueling with lightsabers wearing only their star wars underoos.
>I had the biggest crush on
>Optimus Prime!
>
I wasn't going to admit it in my post, but I had a pretty big crush on Optimus Prime, too. I mean, it's a little awkward admitting feelings for this, uh, robot, who, uh, is also a, uh, truck, but there's just something about that guy...
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