Normally when I write here about a Transformers character, it’s a character who has some significance to me as – well, honestly, as an example of a kind of person I could be, growing up. Blades gave me a lesson about quelling the want for violence inside me and also how defensive violent bf /softboy medic bf was a top tier pairing, and Dinobot gave me lessons about dying well in the face of oblivion, a lesson that I thought I needed really soon when I got it. There are Transformers I love because of jokes, Transformers I love because of association with toys and there are some Transformers that I love because they are, through no fault of their own, completely useless doofuses.

Let’s talk about Wheeljack

Wait wait wait no this is about Transformers.

Transformers, in the 1980s, was a toy commercial. It was a toy commercial in the purest sense; every component that made it up was made in service of its purpose as a commercial material that was meant to frame commercials around it. It was, in the way that modern creators are struggling to avoid mentioning, hash-tag-content. There’s a standard opening, a standard ending, and three bumpers for just before The Commercials (Transformers Will Be Back, After These Messages) but those messages weren’t important. Those messages were other people paying Transformers money for making Transformers, but Transformers was double dipping. They were getting paid money to sell the space for these advertisements in their advertisement, for their toys. These bumpers were so important that in some episodes, the third bumper would appear, then an ad break and you’d wait through the ad break to come back to just watch the ending credits of the show. Got me again, there!

These toys imposed a material demand on Transformers as a cartoon. Episodes wanted to focus on the toys that you could buy, and this meant that people got attached to toys with certain trends. For example, while there was Fortress Maximus, that toy had an original price tag of around $99 United States Eaglebucks, and as a result, there were maybe four or five episodes of the show that bothered to show you anything to do with Fortress Maximus despite him being basically a city they lived in.

There are a bunch of episodes, across the entirety of Transformers media that care about being the fastest. Most series have at some point a race episode, and Transformers Animated – the best Transformers series – has two. Sometimes it’s outracing a train, sometimes it’s racing a virus, sometimes it’s just a race for a race’s sake, and sometimes it’s got an extra dose of time travel.

Presented with the question of it, though, I wondered: Who’s the fastest Transformer?

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.

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.

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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