ANI-MOVIES, *Transformers: The Movie (40th Anniversary Celebration)

"Beyond your wildest imagination," was what this bad boy boasted in 1986, and it didn't disappoint. Coming out two months after Hasbro's first franchise theatrical release for My Little Pony, they went even bigger with Transformers: The Movie, however this was an extension of an animation show whereas MLP only had a pair of TV specials prior to its motion picture, so Transformers had a big leg up continuing an existing series. The film came out after Season 2 of the original Transformers series but shot the story two decades into the future skipping over a whole bunch of history which have never been covered in the Transformers lore, plus quite a few of the characters that were introduced duirng the latter part of Season 2 were completely left out of the movie since the movie started production sometime at the beginning of that season. The film was written by Ron Friedman who also created the GI Joe series, and it had a gaggle of diverse celebrities voicing the new characters including Judd Nelson, Leonard Nimoy, Eric Idle, Robert Stack, and Orson Welles in his last movie roll appearance, plus the first theatrical appearance of John Moschitta who up until then was the fast-talking guy from Fed-Ex commercials and later became the Micro Machine Man. The other huge selling point was the rocking soundtrack by Vince DiCola featuring songs by Weird Al Yankovic and King Kobra. Since Transformers was a melting pot of different Japanese toy lines put together in a single narrative, the idea for the movie was to introduce an entirely new roster of characters to the same lineup that G1 fans had already become familiar with, so this caused most of the characters to either get brutally murdered or reformed as a totally new one. The effect of this apparently traumatized many younger viewers seeing their favorite Autobot leader die which was retconned in Season 3 taking place after the movie. The movie had a huge effect on the toy industry when the film just swept away the first line of products to show bright shiny new ones, a strategy that caused many toy franchises to eventually collapse such as He-Man and TMNT. However, the film had such lush animation by Toei and Sunbow along with brilliant performances by celebrity and veteran voice actors that the movie became a sleeper hit.

Shooting from 1986 to the year 2005, we find that the Decepticons eventually regained control of Cybertron leaving the Autobots with the task of defeating them with their limited sources, one of which is a full Autobot city on Earth. Megatron leads an assault on Autobot City with fresh-faced soldiers like Hot Rod, Kupp, Arcee, and Blurr to defend it until Optimus Prime arrives with the calvary. Prime and Megatron have an epic duel to the death resulting in Optimus' demise, while Megatron is cast out by the retreating Decpticons along with other damaged warriors. They all just happen to come across the gigantic planet-eating monster known as Unicron reformatting Megatron into his herald Galvatron, plus remodeling the other survivors. Starscream is finally killed by the newly born Megatron, who has to take the Autobot Matrix away from its new owner, Ultra Magnus which is the only thing that could destroy Unicron. The new Autobots along with most of the Dinobots leave Earth to keep the Matrix out of Galvatron's grasp, but are all separated, some of which crash on a huge junkyard planet inhabited by the TV-obsessed Junkions. They all reconvene and head out to kick Unicron's colossal butt from destroying Cybertron, and Hot Rod uses the Matrix to destroy him and become the new Autobot leader, Rodimus Prime.

Transformers: The Movie completely changed the game as far as animated entertainment intended to promote a franchise as after this other toy line-based films like GI Joe: The Movie had to contend with not having any of their characters meet a violent ending. Toei Animation along with Sunbow Productions and Marvel crafter together an eye-popping theatrical experience that was way better than it ever intended to be. Even people who hadn't watched the Transformers G1 series up until then still got a kick out of it, especially since it had one the greatest soundtrack albums of the entire decade. If you're local theater is having a special screening of this, then get your tickets and ride the nostalgia Astrotrain!