Hasbro: Bringing Our Childhood Memories to Life...Or Not...

One summer, when I was about ten years old, I watched the animated feature length film, Transformers: The Movie on Betamax. About a year later I watched G.I. Joe: The Movie on Betamax too. I have no doubt I'd probably find them quite trashy if I were to watch them again today (especially the G.I. Joe movie, which I already found kind of silly a year or two after I first watched it) but back then they were pretty much the cat's pajamas.

I'm pretty certain that people like me, who grew up watching those cartoons and who "oohed" and "aahed" at the films of Michael Bay and Stephen Sommers in the mid-to-late nineties and the early part of this millenium, were the target audience for 2007's Transformers and the upcoming Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.

Now, I liked Bay's The Rock and Sommers' The Mummy. I grew up with both Transformers and G.I. Joe in terms of the toys and the animated TV shows. But for some reason the thought of these properties being adapted to the big screen didn't push the buttons for me that I might have thought they would when I was younger. Whereas my reaction to the title-sequence of Spider-Man was akin to a nerdgasm, the best reaction these movies merited was a "hmmm, that looks cool." I even understand why.

Spider-Man and the rest of the comic book characters whose adaptations I eagerly patronized were derived from mythologies that were shaped over several decades. While the main directive of the writers, artists and editors responsible for these characters was basically to sell comics, there were a considerable number of them who, out of a real love for them, were, over the years, able to tell some very compelling stories which have gone into the characters' mythologies and have made them astonishingly rich.

As for the Hasbro properties, well, the fact that they first appeared as toys kind of says everything. All of the media built around them, in the form of Saturday morning cartoons, comic books, novelizations, video games, was designed to sell toys. Not much mythology there.

Even Transformers: the Movie, which I watched a total of TWENTY-SIX times in that fateful summer, was aimed at launching the new line of robot toys, which was why Optimus Prime was offed. Guess who had a toy of Rodimus Prime, the hero of that cartoon, by Christmas that very year? The idea of all of these media was to SELL toys. That's why they've been rebooted ad nauseam for the last quarter of a century; they had to be constantly reshaped and retooled with new continuities and supporting characters and sensibilities, because apart from Optimus Prime, and very few other characters, none of the robots are charismatic or compelling enough to survive the number of different iterations that the product line has gone through.

G.I. Joe is, while also primarily about selling toys, nonetheless a different can of worms. It's older than Transformers by a few years and has a rather well-developed history courtesy of writer Larry Hama's loooooooong tenure on the Marvel Comics series (spanning easily over ten years) among others as opposed to the Transformers comics which had several different writers swapping duties. The thing is, hope of translating any of that mythology intelligently has considerably dimmed with Stephen Sommers coming on board, as anyone who has seen the second Mummy film and 2004's Van Helsing can surely attest. The latter of those two movies is probably one of the worst films I've seen this decade. The rubber muscle suits that have been showcased in the G.I. Joe's promotional stills, which presumably serve as the characters' body armor, are anything but confidence-inspiring. When one thinks about it, though, how else does one translate the look of these toys onto the big screen? Those of them that aren't dressed in generic U.S. military uniforms look downright garish, like Scarlett in her blue and tan tights. And exactly how will the fights between G.I. Joe and Cobra look in real life, with everyone parachuting out of his or her airplane in time and nobody ever dying from the hail of gunfire that is exchanged?

And that, in a nutshell, encapsulates the main problem facing these movies; they adapt properties that may or may not translate very well on the screen. It's a good thing in a way because it reduces expectations, but then, is it really a good thing when filmmakers are excused from making movies that make any sense? I found the first Transformers movie quite juvenile especially with lines that just made me cringe like "whatever happens, I'm glad I got in that car with you." And although it seems that in the entertainment world, a particular property is deemed to have hit its zenith when it has a live-action, Hollywood movie made based on it, I remain in the minority that believes that maybe some things shouldn't be translated.

I'm not narrow-minded though; as little as I enjoyed the first Transformers, I'll probably go see the second, scathingly bad reviews (so far) notwithstanding and G.I. Joe. If I don't like them, then I'll know I was right.

Say what one will about Mattel, but at least they've held off on making a live-action Barbie movie, though they came this close to making one based on the Hot Wheels line. Maybe, just maybe, they recognize that by making live-action films they will attempt a translation that just isn't really possible.