The classic villain of the Transformers canon is the generically named villain Megatron. In almost forty years of reimagining and endless marketing, we have seen Megatron in a lot of different ways. He’s been an unassailable, all-powerful figure at the top of a hierarchy, a strongman ruler who can oversee an army, a gatekeeper of power, a rebel leader attacking an empire, a damaged soldier, a gladiator and an avatar of oblivion. Across the major histories of Transformers, Megatron’s image of himself has varied, from series to series, writer to writer (and in particular projects, episode to episode), but it is reassuring to see how consistently this character is recognisably himself.

Of course, to know that, you’d have to watch a lot of transformers media, and that’s not how lots of people partake of them. Most people, at least, most of the people who don’t watch the Bay movies and think ‘oh yeah that’s about right,’ bring the same thing to mind when they talk about Megatron.

They think about a gun.

There’s a lot of lore around the gun form of Megatron, sometimes called ‘Uncle Robo’ by the kinds of turbo nerds who like to say ‘did you knowwwwww.’ I’m not invested in making an exhaustive history of this toy, but the toy does bear a special place in the narrative of transformers for a bunch of reasons.

First, there’s the way the gun was originally a tie-in with the 60s TV show ‘The Man From Uncle,‘ which is why it has the fantastic name of ‘Uncle Robo’ from its Japanese version. Second, there’s the true-at-heart story that the toy posed risk for kids, because it looks like a gun, and the fear was police would shoot them, in the country where everyone has guns, in the 1980s. It’s not that the gun was specifically involved in a specific crime, but the fact it looked like a gun meant it got caught in a bunch of legislation designed to make sure fake guns look like fake guns, with the little orange cap over the end of the barrel. This measure, designed to ensure kids got shot less, didn’t work, at least for black kids, but nonetheless was roundly complained about by the community for generations, because anything that treated our toys for children as if they were things children would likely have or use was an imposition on our rights as serious toy collectors.

And that’s kind of the ‘default’ point for Megatron. He’s a dude, gunmetal grey, who turns into a gun, and that gun is … like, a gun. It’s a gun you hold. No matter how silly that is, or how silly that idea is in the universe it’s from. Like, as a gun, he’s usually depicted as having to be wielded by another member of his army, usually either Starscream or Soundwave. Yet, we’ve had other Megatrons, of varying impact!

First after the gun, we got this ‘tank’ in the nebulously named ‘Generation 2’ Transformers. Obviously, we hated this and it was terrible, because it was different, and the internal language of transformers fandom was already set on the ‘they changed it so now it sucks.’ Boy howdy was that muscle going to get a workout next generation.

This violently coloured tank was the ‘next Megatron,’ and because it followed classic Megatron, it served as an example of the first wrong Megatron. We also don’t get a lot of insight into this version of Megatron as a character, but it doesn’t much matter – it’s Megatron, but now he’s a tank. Whatever.

By the way, check out those tiny little tappy toes.

The next major incarnation of Megatron, and the thing that broke my personal ‘they changed it so it sucks,’ boundary – ten years later when I thought back on it – was Beast Wars megatron. He’s a T-rex. He’s a freaking T-rex!

This Megatron was also the first serious break in characterisation than before. Original Megatron oversaw a military, and was kind of an idiot – I mean, he kept Starscream around, and his plans were often silly even to me as a child. But this Megatron was thoughtful, gloating, preening and superior. He made fun of his subordinates, but also endured their strangeness, like how Inferno called him a queen, and he couldn’t get him to stop.

And like, a purist vision of Transformers wouldn’t let us have this Megatron. This Megatron is only available as someone who explicitly rejected the line of continuity, the slavish need to be a gun. And what’s more, he was tailored to his environment – the Beast Wars story is about animals in prehistoric earth. No place for a gun there, nowhere that would make sense.

Armada had this Megatron, who… like I don’t like the way he looks like a stag beetle, but the core idea of him as a tank is now being more thoroughly realised. The actual thing he turns into is a bit of, um, what I think we might just say is ‘crumpled up dude on his face,’ with a big kibbly backpack, but the technology is still evolving.

Narratively, this Megatron is honestly pretty cool. When he encountered Unicron, his response was not fear or supplication, but to instead draw plans on how he could tear Unicron apart and use his power for himself. Impressive stuff.

Also, this was the story arc with antihero bishounen Starscream and the strange little plot spurling of Hot Shot, the reinvention of Hot Rod and Bumblebee that just got turned into Bumblebee later on.

Honourable mention though goes to this design, which is apparently just a toy made of G1 Megatron. I don’t personally see it – like, I think of it as more Skywarp aesthetic than Megatron – but I do like the Stealth Bomber. It could be really cool if he was grey and black and maybe the highlights in red?

Anyway, this is just a Megatron I thought looked cool, and what I especially like about him is the way that the form itself isn’t a combative form, but it is a war form. The stealth bomber lives above the battlefield, it doesn’t dogfight, but it does represent being able to easily leave the battlefield, and rain down indiscriminately on battlefields. I really like it, especially with some of that cynical gulf war machismo, where his ‘precision’ tools are just immense cluster bombs of nonsense.

I do have a favourite Megatron – this helicopter from Transformers Animated. He’s a flier, which builds on the idea of Decepticons as ‘the air force.’ He’s also a thoughtful, interesting villain who’s used sparingly in the development of the Transformers Animated narrative. In his first appearance, he cleans house on the whole crew, but then circumstances and betrayal leave him injured and unable to leverage his full force on his enemies all at once. It’s a cool plot arc that uses Megatron’s threat properly – he’s individually a match for everyone, even groups of the heroes, until they spend months at a time learning how to fight Decepticons.

Okay, so why this little rundown of Megatrons?

Because Megatron is, traditionally, a gun. And by volume, he is definitely a gun. The majority of toys of Megatron are versions of the Generation 1 character, and of those, lots and lots of them are if not the gun, are meant to look like the gun, or find some excuse to involve the gun. And like…

More and more?

I find I think the gun is dumb?

Like, okay, it was maybe a cool thing at the time. It was novel, sure. But it was weird and dumb and relies on ‘space shifting,’ which is one of those things that doesn’t really hurt the story space, but I don’t like when the story relies on like, jamming it right in your face. And this is the villain, and he keeps putting himself in the hand of his least responsible subordinate, who has betrayed him multiple times. What does being a gun get him?

When you look at a transformer, the form that the character turns into sets tone for what the character’s meant to be, what they’re meant to be seen as. The gun… is uh…

The gun is primal?

But also the gun is really dumb?

It creates this sort of essential helplessness to Megatron, as a device we spend a lot of time asserting doesn’t have its own agency is the form that the leader of the Decepticons takes on. And maybe that could create an interesting dynamic where he has a host of trained subordinates to wield him well and that creates different tactical needs, but he doesn’t do that. He just jumps into Starscream’s hand.

Of all these forms, I think the stealth bomber is honestly one of the coolest as far as ways to tell you what Megatron should be like, or about. Remote, distant, dangerous, but also if he wants to fight, he has to break out of that, he has to turn into his robot form.

So there, there’s your conclusion. Megatron shouldn’t be a gun. Yep, think we’re done here. Whatever.

When we talk about characters in the Transformers franchise – we, I say, like you’re taking part in this conversation. When I, when I bring them up unprompted, when I talk about The Transformers, there’s a sort of corpus of ‘the main characters’ that represent the typical, classic forms. I don’t need to explain who Optimus Prime is, because he’s Optimus fucking Prime. I like talking about the groups and characters that have an idea I find interesting, which the media doesn’t necessarily carry out. It’s stuff like the way that Blades is clearly holding himself together through caring for his found family (which annoyingly has two cops), or the way that the Stunticons can be read as a group of trans girls waiting to escape an abusive father figure.

What’s a rarity, then, is where the character as depicted in the media they’re from is just, like, no, that’s it, that’s the tweet. That’s the thing I like. The character as depicted, in the story, is a good character and I like them.

Such is the case with Beast Wars’ Dinobot.

If you know this character already, you know that there is one specific voice to use when writing about him. You might also know it is exceptionally annoying to write that way, and it’s even more annoying to read. It’s even the voice that the entire article about him is written about on the Transformers Wiki, which is so irritating to read that I have summarily given up on knowing anything true about the character and will not fact check anything I have to say here.

So here is the Generation 1 transformer, Blurrtimus ‘David’ The Jones.

David is a transformer created for the Transformers Movie, back in 198something. There was this push for the movie to serve as this dividing line between old Transformers, which played up the disguise, infiltration, secret angle of the Transformers characters, to the new generation of Transformers, who were going to be more of a ‘weird world space-faring’ story, where every new episode took the characters to a new oddball planet or meeting a new oddball alien. This was in part to open up different kind of transforming robot designs and maybe free up the previous generation’s reliance on wheeled vehicles, and it shows in the way characters like Kuppimus Kup and Miss ‘Sir Not Getting A Toy This Generation’ Arcee have vehicle modes that are kind of not like what you’d consider a vehicle, more ‘sci fi space ship’ than ‘could be parked at a Blockbuster.’

This movie also got a bit of a push where the characters presented for it were created with a bit more whole thought than the TV series? Characters were sort of approached all at once, and given clear affects and styles and character voices for the voice actors to establish. These aren’t complex characters – it’s pretty much just each character had a single gimmick that they could build out later (and never did). So, you have Rodimus Jr, whose gimmick was ‘is young’ and then you had Ultra Magnus whose gimmick was ‘is boring’ and then you had Arcee, whose gimmick was ‘is a girl’ and Springer whose gimmick was ‘probably meant to be Rodimus Jr.’

Now, David here, aka Blurr, is a Transformer whose bit is that he’s fast.

The way they handled Blurr in the movie was to have him talk very quickly, with a voice artist renowned for talking fast. That’s John Moschitta Jr. aka ‘Motormouth John,’ whose wikipedia page is easy to read, Telatraan-1, who has been responsible for a lot of voice acting in other roles. If you saw an ad for Micro Machines, or something like FedEx that had a super fast voiceover? That was this guy.

Blurr is meant to be fast, but if you look at him in the movie and subsequent series, they never do anything with that. Because, the most interesting thing about this is how we represent the affect of being fast, compared to the practical reality of being fast.

Like, the fastest way to answer the question ‘are you ready’ is ‘yes.’ And instead, Blurr would answer a question with dozens and dozens of words, and he would be shown moving at the same speed as other characters with a blurring outline. And that was good enough for me, as a kid, to look at Blurr and think ‘oh hey, I guess he’s really fast.’

But what does really fast mean?

Blurr showed up again, voiced again by Motormouth John, in Transformers Animated

Which is the best Transformers,

Where he once again was verbose, but also he had things to say. Original Blurr was a character who had nothing to say, but said it a lot; but then in a later iteration he had the same affect, doing very clear, very quick, descriptions of the entire plot up until now. It’s interesting, too, because the character was also treated as if he was very fast, and him being fast was treated this way to both update late viewers on the plot, and to convey extremely complicated scenarios and solutions.

If you have a fast character, consider why you need them to be fast, and ways to use that fastness.

Okay, there, now, how do you end an article like this?

Quickly.

I like the Transformers, but they are absolutely a universe where a lot of give and take had be done between what the toys could make happen and what the character designers could make work, and boy is that obvious when you talk about the Seacons.

For those of you not already familiar, the Seacons are from that twilight-of-G1-not-quite-G2 era when dayglo purple and cyan were the thing, where gold plastic that turned to dust got produced in high volume, and where all the good, easy concepts and moulds from Takara’s stockpile had been used up. The transformers had run through their first wave of designs that could be cobbled together and it was time to start expanding into the less obvious, less easy model kit things to turn into transformers. The toy with a gimmick of transforming robot aliens already had the idea of transforming robot aliens that could slot together to form bigger robot aliens, and that meant new designs had to make new groups that could combine.

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In The Transformers, the very serious advertising campaign about alien robots that transform into cars, planes, dinosaurs, two boomboxes (ask your parents), a vending machine and an enormous twelve-meter tall microscope, there are collections of toy robots that can be stuck together into single bigger toy robots. We’ve talked about them in the past, when I talked about the Protectobots and the Stunticons, where you could collect a set that was a squad which had its own internal dynamic, leaders and friends and followers. It was a really neat marketing gimmick, where you could Consume Products in a way with both a targeted list, and a reward for achieving all parts of that list.

These squads also tended to be written to have a bit of personality, based on the cards that they had on the back of the boxes, or the guidebooks you could buy and the maybe-sometimes-eventually-expressed-in-a-comic way that the show did to express character. The fact is in the TV Show, most Transformers were as much an accent and a hand to hold one of a number of blue-or-red lasers, with very few of them having a chance to really put forwards their characterisation compared to just filling space in battle scenes. Oh, there were single episodes that focused on single transformers from time to time, but they rarely got to build a large amount of context. I don’t remember any episode where Trailbreaker’s fear of being overconsumptive of Energon paralysed him, nor any instance of Windcharger magnetically tearing things apart.

But that doesn’t matter because Transformers is a canon made up of a shotgun blast of ideas, and what sticks tends to be what any given writer could put together. When dealing with our girls the Stunticons, it was picking any given list of personal neuroses and jamming them onto the toys they had to work with.

And that same policy got to be used on the beta model gestalt, the first step mistake that was Devastator.

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Talking about Transformers continuity is fraught because to say there’s a ‘canon’ or a ‘character’ is nonsense. Thanks to the neverending maw of capitalism and a loose vision of what matters to the people who engage with a brand that very much just started to sell toys thirty years ago, it’s not like there’s any kind of sensible core to anything. Talking about character and continuity of a story that isn’t just interrupted by commercial breaks but is basically constructed out of those commercial breaks is a fool’s errand. Anything I have to say about a Transformers character is going to be either contained within a specific bubble of continuity (like Animated), or sort of formed out of a general collusion of shadows shining on many similar objects, to see where they overlap.

With that in mind, have I told you about Blades?

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