"There's a fine line between being a hero and being a memory" - Optimus Prime

There are many things I have to be thankful for, growing up. My family are awesome people, and despite the odd occasional death threat we got along well enough. We lived in a part of the world where people tend not to try to drop bombs on us nightly any longer and where nobody tried to steal you at age 11 and force a Kalashnikov into your hands in the name of the most recent despotic warlord. All in all, not too shabby; can't complain. More importantly than all of that though, I grew up in the Golden Age of Children's Cartoons. Anyone who says otherwise can meet me outside the school gates at 3pm, where we can circle each other awkwardly in amongst a throng of our peers, shoving each other randomly until a teacher breaks us up or we accidentally do hurt one another and we run off to our respective homes in fear of the Police coming round later to arrest us. We all did it.

I consider myself a fairly decent and moral person (stop snickering in the back); I know right from wrong and much of that was gleaned originally from 80s and early 90s cartoons (then later of course from the collected works of Arnold Schwarzenegger where as we all know the righteous man will not only save the day and get the girl, but he will be impervious to high-velocity ammunition and may or may not benefit from lax local police departments and bulletproof shrubberies in his quest to defeat his arch nemesis of the day). Transformers, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Thundercats, Marshall Bravestarr, Galaxy Rangers, Battle of the Planets, Voltron, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Ulysses 31, M.A.S.K., Starfleet (technically not a cartoon, but it's my blog, I'll allow it!) Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles even as far as The Real Ghostbusters; as I recall they were all awesome and no amount of arguing is going to dissuade me from that. Although it might be a slight over-reaction to say the decline of society coincided with the lack of real quality animation for children, I'll say it anyway. Those were the good old days and they're gone; they aren't coming back and we shouldn't try. 


Except we did.


By we, I mean the relentless reboot machine that is Hollywood obviously, but I include myself because I am in no small way responsible. I did two things; the first of which would have been easily avoided had I paid any sort of attention the glut of time travel movies I've 
watched.  


I tried to go back.


Now clearly I don't mean physically attempted to defy the laws of physics, build a machine that can simultaneously disrupt and travel through the space-time continuum whilst somehow leaving me unscathed in the process. I mean I did what we've all done in our time and indulged in a little nostalgia. Sometimes this can be a good thing; it fills us with warm, fluffy feelings and we can forget about the cold, harsh realities of being an adult. Some people do the retro gaming thing, some people do the 80s music thing, some people inexplicably fashion themselves after a decade even their parents weren't alive in and I do cartoons. By which I mean I watch about 3 episodes and realise how mind-numbingly awful they are and go back to doing something more fruitful.

Alright, that isn't exactly fair; some have aged worse than others. He-Man for example, just made it onto Netflix and I thought I'd have a bit of a blast. I lasted about 60 seconds before nostalgia crept up from behind and shanked me good between the ribs. It's horrible. Poorly animated drivel would likely be the most polite way to describe it; a really weird and jarring mix of rotoscoping and guesswork. Battle of the Planets was unwatchable for different reasons; it's just incomprehensible in places, assumedly because of all the cuts that got made from the hyper-violent original Gatchaman anime. I might give it another pop at some point though, because I re-watched ages ago and I've probably lost enough brain cells since then to take me back to around the right mental age to enjoy it. Thundercats has to be the most disappointing though simply because it was my number two all-time favourite cartoon ever and I was gutted when it turned out to be utter bollocks. I can't even put a finger on why; maybe it was the really poor voice acting, maybe it was the basement value animation. Maybe it was the distinct and unfaltering urge to murder Snarf in the face with something blunt and possibly on fire. I don't know. I lasted a couple of episodes before I started weeping uncontrollably though so fair play.


M.A.S.K. held up pretty well I thought and I even remembered some of the exact episodes from the VHS I had back in the day. M.A.S.K. was awesome because it just dropped a Health and Safety warning or anti-bullying message on you right after the main plot had finished (usually with the good guys vibrating oddly because animating a group of adults in brightly coloured jumpsuits and helmets is probably harder than it looks). Scott Trakker and T-Bob would be about to do something ludicrous like jam live electrical cables into their eye sockets or pour jet fuel onto a barbeque to get that extra char on the ribs and his Dad would appear in the nick of time to save him and an entire generation of stupid kids from causing a population crisis through blissful, youthful idiocy. That and quite by chance I grew up looking like Alex Sector*. 


Transformers holds its own for about two seasons and then gets a touch ropey. Those first two seasons are still great though; just the right combination of menacing bad guys, heroic good guys and pesky humans getting in the middle. I don't care who you are, if the death of Optimus Prime in the Movie doesn't still get you welling up then you're even more of a heartless monster than I am. The cynic in me knows it was just an hour and a half long toy commercial for the new figures (which is why the death toll is up there with your average Arnie flick) but to hell with that, I will still throw money at the Transformers franchise. 
Which brings me to my second monumental mistake.


I keep throwing money at the Transformers franchise.


I've said it before, I am the polar opposite of the "OMG you raped my childhood by making a movie out of something I enjoyed when my vocabulary was roughly half that of some of the more intelligent gorillas that learned sign language" crowd. I wanted a Transformers movie. I wanted to see the Turtles on screen again. I would love to see M.A.S.K. or Marshall Bravestarr get big screen adaptations. I would love them to be great movies, created by people who know and care about the material more than the pay check. Sadly, we got Michael Bay, who apparently loves nothing more than random explosions, cars at sundown and the sound of his own ego being massaged to climax. The thing is, I do kind of enjoy the Transformers movies for what they are; big, dumb action movies where things explode and giant robots batter each other’s heads in. I lament them for what they could be and that's so much more. The plot of the animated movie from 1986 was head and shoulders above any of the more recent ones and the More Than Meets The Eye comic is incredible; yet every time a new film comes out, it gets a few less robots and a bunch more humans and I'm still there with my hand in my pocket encouraging them to do it again. Last time I even bought the commemorative popcorn tin with Prime on the side. I'm not saying I regret that, I think it looks great in the kitchen as a utensil holder, but there's only so long I can defend something which just keeps getting worse.


It may be time for that ultimate act of adulting. Time to put away childish things and face up to the fact that cartoons from 30 years ago weren't as good as I remember and should probably not be binge watched during my annual leave at the expense of any number of household chores. On the other hand, I grew up looking like Alex Sector so adulting can suck it.

* There's probably a whole bunch of copyright B.S. surrounding this image, but I aim to do precisely nothing about it.