Geekly Articles each Day
📜 ⬆️ ⬇️

What do we know about transformers?



This year marks exactly 30 years of Transformers. The fourth part of the epic of Michael Bay goes to the cinema, and our exhibition of Ball of Robots is extended until July 20, in order to open the exposition of transformers (+ 50% discount for children!) . What is not a reason to collect in one post, all that we know about them!?

By the mid-twentieth century, all the functions of the human body were studied, there were mere trifles - all kinds of small organs, such as lymphatic vessels or thyroid. But these small and underdeveloped organs were physiological nodes. Understanding their device required a completely different scope of the material and a different level of knowledge.
')

How it all began: Optimus Prime 1984.

In contrast to the study of the functioning of the liver, kidneys or stomach, for the physiology of the time it was not available. Scientists so honestly wrote: “so, they say, and so, there is an organ in such and that area of ​​the human body, called such and such Latin word. The purpose of the organ is not clear. ”


And these are Optimus' parents: Microman Titan 2 series T441 Icarus and Titan Command 3 series T471 Phios 1976.

The same complex object is represented by simple-looking Transformers, so that at least a little of their history will have to be thoroughly buried in international politics and the history of military propaganda. Come under the cat at your own peril and risk - I warned you.

Today in the world there are two centers for the production of cartoons and toys. This is the United States and Japan. America does not really notice it, because the Americans have so much to do. The overhang is small. In Japan, anime and toys are a cult and one of the basic elements of modern national culture.


ALL NIPPON airlines painted nine (!) Liners with Pokémon.

That is why Transformers are interesting - they created a modern anime, as an industry. I think everyone in Habré knows how Americans actually created the transnational corporation SONY, transferring the transistor technology to it in 1955. Similarly, American producers pumped Anime in the 1980s, turning it into an international billion-dollar market. But first things first!


The Sony TR-55 is one of the world's first transistor receivers.

Each country is sharpened by its culture. Russians are masters of literature and cinema (all Hollywood is built by Russians) - because Russian life is artistic, and the language is branchy, like a sophisticated algorithm. The Germans are meticulous pedants - they are given weapons and vehicles. The French are brilliant planners - they have the best philosophy and common culture. The Japanese took the best from China and multiplied it with European technologies.

Japan emerged as a Chinese pirate island, put on its feet by the Portuguese, and then a whole series of other "white devils", suffice it to say that in the second half of the 19th century the Japanese army was headed by one Jules Brunet , then became chief of the French general staff.


The General Staff of the Japanese Republic of Ezo. Bryne second from the left in the first row.

That is, this is the best military specialist in France - rate the degree of managerial assistance to Japan. This is the highest class. And the result of such assistance also came out first-class - it turned out to be an explosive mixture of pedantic Asians who are capable of setting goals, like Europeans. Simply put, the Japanese are Far East Germans. If they have already decided something, they will do it very well, exemplary.


Jules Brunet performed by Tom Cruise exactly 136 years later .

It is this property that is required when creating a pop culture. Take some algorithm and meticulously perform it. For example, for children's toys it is enough to use only two universal artistic methods.

The first is encyclopedic. Have you noticed that any encyclopedia makes an impression? Even if it is an encyclopedia of knives of the world. When all the phenomena of any topic are presented, it has artistic value, as it is a reflection of reality. All collections are based on this - collected all the turbo liners and as if mastered the reality. A real encyclopedia is generally the paper Internet.


The French Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, one of the largest reference books of the 18th century, which is believed to have radically changed the cultural landscape of Europe and set the stage for the Great French Revolution.

To create commercially successful toys, cartoons or books you need a collection. Then buyers will have a clear motivation to watch all the Pokemon series, buy all the toys. But how to make the toys and cartoons themselves so guaranteed to be attractive?

The second is the dialectic. Cool abstruse word that hides under a simple binary scheme. Each toy separately must contain two opposites. Like Spartak and Dynamo, like summer and winter, like physics and lyrics. This is the way the human consciousness is arranged - he likes to combine opposites. In its maximum development, it is humor.



Laughter, unless of course it is not a tickling, it is a reflex spasm of the facial muscles, occurring after the euphoria, which in turn arises after awareness of some kind of life contradiction. It is about solving a logical problem that generates a physiological emotion. This task is always dialectical, like “a little bun hanged himself” or “an ax floats along the river”. So each toy must contain at the same time and the "river" and "ax". And a robot and a typewriter, and a furry animal and a superfighter, and a gum and liner, and an Italian plumber and the rescue of a princess. In general, both the earthly and the heavenly merge into one, so a person is born with a smile on his face.



Eric The Microman Earth Jetter from the 1977 Command Car Series

These toys are already much nicer to collect in the collection. It sounds simple, like any speculative scheme. And already for this, neither in Europe nor in America can they do anything of the kind — schematics are visible in the American comics from far away. You didn’t have time to go to the counter, but you already see two hundred comics about superheroes, which differ only in details. Because the Americans first take the scheme (hamburger), and then put it on the conveyor (McDonald's) - naturally the scheme will stick out like hare's ears out of the bag.

Another thing is the Japanese. They go step by step to implementation, from simple to complex. Made a robot figurine - sold. Ok, let's make a robot sitting in a typewriter - it is even more sold. Ok - we make a robot-typewriter! Rotota tape recorder! Rotota-camera! And at each stage, they are laid out to the fullest - maximum design, imagination and meticulousness in detail.


MC-10 Cassette Man 1983

Now imagine that all this magnificence is multiplied by American enterprise. This is how the Transformers brand was born. The Diaclone and MicroChange toys participated in the Tokyo Toy Fair at the Henry Orenstein Hasbro booth in 1983. George Dansei, the head of Hasbro's R & D, saw them there, after which he decided to release them as one single series of toys for his market.

This time, the Americans from Marvel - almost the main propaganda contractor of the US Department of Defense - began to produce the Japanese, the company became famous when it made the first superhero captain America for the military in 1941. They just wanted to raise a call to the army, but a multi-million empire turned out. It is an order for Captain America that turns the tiny studio Timely Comics into the familiar Marvel Empire.


Today, the first issue of the comic book is worth $ 343,000

Hasbro worked with Marvel Comics to promote the next GI Joe: A Real American Hero military order, using a three-pronged marketing scheme. This scheme included: a set of toys, a comic strip from Marvel, and a cartoon series drawn by Marvel Productions and the animation studio Sunbow Productions. This strategy was repeated in 1984 to promote the new Transformers series.


Ji Ai became a cononic character and created a so-called market. Action Figures

Jim Shooter, the editor-in-chief of Marvel, proposed to develop a binary scheme of transformers to two hostile factions of alien robots - heroic autobots and evil decepticons. To explain this idea in more detail, Shooter asked the editor Dennis O'Neal to come up with names and characters, but O'Neill’s work didn’t meet Hasbro’s expectations, and they asked for a redo. After the refusal of O'Neill, the editor Bob Budyansky undertook the project. Quickly doing the work over the weekend, he introduced the new names and characters to the leadership of Hasbro. Soon after, comics were published (four magazines that were published twice a month) and a pilot cartoon consisting of three episodes.



Japanese designer Sohei Kokhara drew the earliest Transformers character models. He strongly humanized toy projects to create more characters for comics and cartoon. His designs were subsequently simplified by Floro Deri, who became the lead designer for the series, creating many more projects later.

Thus was created a critical mass leading to a chain reaction. The fans liked the Transformers Universe so much that the creators simply could not stop - the American producers tried to complete the project and take the cash register each time, but the flames of fanaticism only flared up.



1984-1986 - two seasons in the animated series. At the peak of popularity, the producers decide to release a full-length film, take the cashier and cover up the shop banally killing all the characters - it turns out an amazingly dark picture that the critics didn’t like, but the audience liked.

Despite the fact that The Movie had a PG rating, most of the characters in the series met Optimus Prime, Armored Car, Ratchet, Strongman, Detective, Racer, Discharger and Scandalist. In the third season it becomes known that the Whiner also died.

Then the third season of the series (1986) comes out, popularity falls and already in the fourth season (1987) comes the kirdyk - there are only four episodes in which everyone abruptly reconciles and comes eternal peace.



In 1986, the Japanese are trying to launch their first own series: Transformers: Scramble City, an alternative sequel to Transformers' second season. It was conceived as the beginning of a new, independent cartoon series, but the idea did not receive further development. Nevertheless, some moments from the cartoon were later used to create the third season of the original Transformers (in particular, giant robots transforming into cities - Metroplex and Triptikon).

The end? It was not there. Despite the closure of the project, fans need to continue! And as Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky said “there will be money - there will be girls”:

In 1987-1988 in Japan, the Toei Animation studio as an alternative to the 4th season of "The Transformers" created the 38-episode anime series "Transformers: The Headmasters". In the story, he directly continued the 3rd season of the original animated series, as if the 4th American season did not exist at all.



In 1988, someone decides to make a face a brick and take the cashier, once again simply reprinting the entire series in a new format (then it was still a novelty!). The 5th season of the animated series was released, consisting of 20 episodes. However, among them there was not one original (!!!) - it included 15 episodes selected from different seasons of the series, as well as the full-length cartoon “Transformers: The Movie”, divided into five episodes - “days”. A distinctive feature of this season was the renewal of headpieces and endings of each series, giving the narration greater coherence and consistency, as well as the first appearance of the "Space Cuba" - Ollspark.



After that, everyone understands that the transformers have become an inexhaustible oil well, and the series are coming like a horn of plenty every year. The series produce, as the Japanese and the Americans - no one follows the plot, all the TV shows are not connected with each other, but they try to prove that they are the legal continuation of the world of trasformers, called sequels, prequels, epilogues and additions. But in reality, almost all of them were “alternative continuations”. It is ridiculous - on Wikipedia you can often find definitions like “The final part of a trilogy (This series has no relation to the previous parts of the trilogy).”

There are so many serials that, in principle, some transformers are a whole industry, comparable to the animation of a country like France or Canada. (Canadians, by the way, made one third of all the transformers, which financially pumped their multi-industry financially)



Now take a deep breath and appreciate the overall scale:


Not weak, yes? But apart should be feature films of Michael Bay. The fact is that here history makes a full circle and returns to the starting point. Money for the shooting again gave the US military.



The situation developed as follows. In 2002, the US Department of Defense decides to release a patriotic film about the upcoming war in Iraq in a year. The order goes to HASBRO as the official owner of the official toy of the American soldier GI Joe. The idea was also supported by Sony Corporation, but the producers decided that this would be too obvious propaganda - American hero soldiers and soldiers in Iraq, and all this as a children's cartoon ?! Propaganda must still be unobtrusive, and the director of films at Hasbro, - Karel Monroe, offered to take the dusty brand of transformers.



The generals at the Pentagon were so pleased with this decision that they provided unprecedented support to the project. Filming began on April 22, 200b, at the US military air base - Holloman. The Army supplied the crew with aircraft and machines for alternative forms of Decepticons, in particular, the F-117, C-130, C-17 and two CV-22 Osprey of the three available at that time (it looks like and purchased only for propaganda purposes). Thanks to cooperation with the military, Transformers was the first film made at the Pentagon after the September 11 terrorist attack. All this assistance in financial terms was a couple of times higher than the entire budget issued in cash.



Thus was born one of the most expensive, spectacular, controversial and box-office films in history. But did you wonder where so many remakes from Hollywood came from in recent years? Almost all superheroes forgotten in the 90s were restarted: betman, spiderman, captain america, superman, hulk, tor, iron man, avengers, x-men, fantastic four. And some of the films were unexpected hits like the X-Men, and some - barely beat off the budget - but it is clear that they are being removed as if according to one program. Of course, we can say that the cinema has come to a decline and now there will only be remakes, but there is another reason.

The fact is that the American government finances the so-called "cultural bridge of generations" between generation X (19b5-82) and generation Y (1985-01). In America, there is a well-known social problem in the generation gap, the “children of flowers” ​​and “MTV generations” have very different cultural codes, they almost do not overlap.



Imagine a classic American beer picnic and barbecue by the pool. What can young guys talk to older men about? We need a typical conversation at the “friend or foe” level, and for America it is politics, football and ... superheroes. They can always discuss the new remake of the spiderman movie and scold it for differences from the conic comic. Imagine what kind of gap would not have known the young people of spiderman and betman on which their parents grew up? Yes, it's all exactly what to quote jokes from old Soviet films that no one has seen.


Remember "back to the future" and understand what I mean.

And so, once a generation, Hollywood reissues its heroes and all of America is woven over with a network of a single culture for all. In the United States, a kind of “bridge” in the realization of a certain affinity of tastes and preferences, cultural continuity of the X and Y generations took place: the generation of “playmates” also loves films about Spiderman (1962, comics) and Star Wars (1976, promotion book) as once (in the 1970s) “X's” loved comics and movies about these characters (about idols lucky who came out of a layer so close and familiar to them for the “non-heroic” life).



New transformers in the cinema is already on June 26 - do not miss your opportunity to get in touch with the culture of the American military propaganda. And come to the ball of robots , of course!

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/227797/

More articles:


All Articles