Director Michael Bay and his Paramount Pictures overlords will trot out Transformers: Age of Extinction late tonight—a quiet period drama wherein Optimus Prime discovers new optimism and hope whilst visiting his wealthy cousin at his Southampton-area estate.
Well, probably not. In truth, I have no idea what Age of Extinction is about, and I won’t until I read Bob Hoose’s review when it’s released later today. But I’m pretty sure it’ll have fewer English teas than, say, Downton Abbey, but more high-action fights and bombastic explosions and, well, gigantic toys.
It’s inescapable, really. Transformers, the movie series, is based on Transformers, the Hasbro line of shape-shifting action figures. The line began way back in 1984—a year in which a 14-year-old version of me might’ve bought one or two if I wasn’t worried my friends would make fun of me.
There have been a number of movies based on toys now. The board game Clue was one of the earliest toy-to-theater creations, with the 1985 film featuring the grisly murder of Mr. Boddy and three different endings. G.I. Joe has (ahem) transformed from a line of action figures (and a horrible but fondly-remembered animated show) into a blustering franchise of its own (2009’s The Rise of Cobra and 2013’s Retaliation). Mattel’s American Girls dolls got their own feature movie in 2008 with Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (and a whole host of direct-to-video releases, too).
There’s nothing inherently wrong with toy-based movies. Some have been pretty great: This year’s The LEGO Movie, I thought, was almost as fun as LEGOs themselves. Others … well, let’s just say I still have nightmares about reviewing Battleship.
But outside the aesthetic qualities of these films, I wonder if sometimes they may have unintended consequences—whether, at times, they can squelch imagination.
Back when I was a kid, I played with toys called Micronauts—a a sort of budget-minded Transformers forerunner. The sets were filled with robots and spacemen and weird ships you could take apart and put together in different ways. They weren’t hinged to any comic or animated television show as far as I knew (though co-reviewer Adam Holz tells me he once owned a Micronaut comic or two), which gave me the freedom to make up all sorts of stories unhinged to any broader, corporate canonic structure. Since I didn’t know what my Micronauts were supposed to be, they could be pretty much anything—and were. Wary settlers on some out-of-the-way moon near Alpha Centauri. Brave galactic warriors beating back the forces of evil. Accountants laboring in some future earth-based bureaucracy. Anything.
Transformers looked really cool, but they’ve always been hinged to a story—a world of someone else’s making. A comic book actually preceded the toy by nearly a decade. A television show came out in 1984, the same year the toys were released. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with any of that, of course, but I wonder: If I had played with Transformers instead of Micronauts, knowing that I was sometimes overly concerned with doing things “right,” would I have insisted on playing with my Transformers the “right” way? Playing within the known Transformer universe rather than drawing up stories of my own? Would Optimus Prime be trapped into reliving episodes of the TV show over and over again, instead of ever having the chance to eat crumpets with his cousin in Southampton?
Don’t get me wrong: I would’ve loved to have seen a Micronauts movie when I was a kid. And frankly, I still would. But maybe it’s all for the best that I didn’t have one.
The LEGO Movie perfectly captured the push-pull of canonical perfection versus gleeful creative abandon that I felt, and sometimes feel, in my still childlike soul. There is a place for both. But I do wonder whether movies based on toys can make a toy’s world a little more confined. Even as the toys themselves become larger-than-life on the big screen, do their potential stories—at least for some—become smaller?
Plugged In musings aside, do you have a favorite toy-based movie? Is there a favorite toy from your childhood that you’d like to see made into a movie?
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