Transformers

Anyone who knows me well knows that I have plenty of toys in my house. Some of them even belong to my children. The majority, sadly, are mine.

I've got the old G.I. Joe. Vintage He-man. Star Wars of all kinds. Various action figures representing characters from movies, TV shows, and video games. And if video games count as toys, then whoa, Nelly.

The only thing missing that hasn't been repurchased or simply hoarded since youth is the Transformers. Unfortunately for my wife, who for some reason is bothered that we don't have enough storage space because our closets are overflowing with toys, that's been changing lately.

Now, I never really played with transformers as a kid. I owned some, transformed them into whatever they were supposed to be and back again. But I never set them up and had them fight it out, never made up a story for them, never gave them voices. I watched the cartoon, but it was never on my must-see radar the way others were. In fact I never got into the "big robot" thing the way other kids did. I couldn't care less about Voltron, which makes me a heretic as far as some 80's enthusiasts are concerned.

And yet the very nature of transformers is what made me want them. I may not have loved the Big Robot genre, but transformers in robot form certainly looked cool. They also looked pretty convincing, at least in the early days, as vehicles. You could only transform Optimus Prime so much before every mack truck on the road




suddenly looked ready to pop open . . .

. . . and hand you an energon cube.

I've always enjoyed toys with realistic detail and great color. Transformers added to that the sense that they were intricate, and therefore not meant for kids. They may have broken easily if you were the typical ham-handed youngster (a reason why the vintage ones are now generally more expensive than other vintage toys), but they weren't poorly made. Rather, they felt like they were made for adults, and lucky was the child deemed responsible enough to have such a finely-crafted thing.

Eventually I sold all my transformers to an adult collector (when I was 11, no less). Although I regretted letting them go I knew I would rather own more toys that I would actually play with, and for that I needed money to buy them. I raked in roughly $100 for my collection (a sizeable fortune for a kid in the 80's), a small fraction of what I'd make for it today.

Much later in life I began to regret that decision. I'd always planned to keep certain toys for as long as I could, telling myself I'd sell them when I was older, and they would be worth more. I tried to enact that plan last year by selling off my He-man collection, but alas, He-man isn't Transformers; they just weren't worth what my nostalgia was demanding. So, I figured my kids might enjoy my toys as much as I did, and I gave them the He-man collection. And they loved it. Consequently, I now find myself on ebay periodically looking for deals on old He-man toys I can pick up.

And I still play with them, usually with my kids. I don't get a lot of time, but at least I'm realistic about that. But my 10 year old self still pops up from time to time, and far more than one might expect in a supposedly well-adjusted adult. In fact, kids have been a great excuse to indulge my toy-buying fanaticism. So while most of the toys in the house belong to "all of us", they really belong to me. Adults who spend a decent amount of time playing with toys and games eventually turn into (or already were) Nerds, whom other non-Nerds look at askance, and avoid if at all possible.

But the Nerd doesn't really care. My house, my nerdy compulsions. There's an AT-AT on my piano. Another one on the floor. A melange of figures set up next to my computer. A wicker chest full of plastic pirate ships, sitting atop a wooden shelf full of starships. And now the final frontier of 80's toydom (for me, anyway) is joining them -- transformers.

I found a cheap one on ebay, in pretty good condition. It arrived in the mail. I transformed it into a robot. Back into a corvette. Back into a robot. I showed my daughter. She wanted it to be a car. Then my son wanted it to be a robot. By then, the magic of transforming had done it again. Soon I was back on ebay, looking for the ones I used to have, trying to find a toy that cost my parents less than $10 in 1984 for less than $50 in 2007.

But then the one I bought broke. My kids were playing with it, and the arm fell off. I managed to fix it, mostly, but it reminded me of the fragility that vexed so many other kids twenty years ago. It was the only existing deterrent to quell my imminent online buying craze -- even the best-made old school transformers could break out of the box if an over-zealous 6 year old didn't want to finesse that wheel-arm out from under the hood just so. The problem wasn't spending money on a frivolity, it was wasting money on a frivolity.

But then I got to thinking . . . what about the new transformers? I saw them in stores, but had largely ignored them -- they didn't look like real things anymore, and that seemed to ruin the whole point. But I figured I'd look anyway, just in case they'd made any improvements.

And boy have they. For one thing, perhaps because of the upcoming movie, there are quite a few realistic ones out there. They're just as complex as the old ones, but generally bigger, more flexible, and perhaps best of all, designed to break and easily reassemble. That way if you accidentally stress a transforming point too much, it'll snap off before it breaks, and you can just snap if back on. They've accomplished this by making all the tougher movable spots hinged on metal rather than plastic, or reinforced with metal parts. That's not to say they couldn't break; I'm sure they could. But my wife "accidentally" knocked one off a high shelf yesterday, and only a single reattachable piece came off.

In fact, it seems like for all the many serious faults with modern culture, we've at least managed to improve on toys, even if the best ones are still just upgrades of older ones (modern culture still isn't very good at original ideas). But I'm not complaining -- it's a great way to combine my good old days with my grown-up days, and tie them to what will one day be my kid's "good old days."

Plus, it annoys my wife.