More junk treasures that inhabit my attic (see Notes from my attic #1-4). Mogwai, Christmas 1984. Gator, M.A.S.K., summer 1986. I remember everything. Silent witnesses of joyful, relatively carefree times.
Transformers hog up most of the space in my attic it seems. My first Transformer was Tracks. This was in 1984. Tracks came in two colors: red, and blue. Initially I wanted the red one; it seemed cool, funky. And very red. But my brother picked the blue variant, so, having been drilled to do what others do and think what others think, I did the same. Of course, the red Tracks is extremely rare and worth roughly $1,000 now.
I liked Tracks though. He looked nifty. But I quickly discovered he wasn’t one of the main players in the cartoon. It was a cameo here, a bit part there, and sometimes you’d think it was him in the background but oh wait, it’s just Sideswipe with Tracks’ colors because the cartoon studios have outsourced the animation to some small Asian country in an effort to cut costs. Oh well.
Anyway–soon after, I started making my own Transformers comics:
“Fire de laser.” I remember sitting in front of the TV, pausing the VCR and trying to get those models right. I was quite pleased with the fruits of my labor actually, especially Soundwave’s dynamic attack pose. Of course, I never finished the comic. I didn’t have a story to tell, I just wanted to learn how to draw explosions and how to suggest glossy, metal surfaces and glass windows. That always was my main interest in cartoons like He-Man, Transformers, et cetera anyway–I was always absorbing styles, learning tricks, trying to hone my skills.
Many years later, and here are the Transformers I did for my YouTube channel, Tales from Weirdland. That was a fun video to do really. I hadn’t drawn any Transformers since, well, since that comic probably. The character on the right is Crack. He’s rusty, dusty, his colors are faded. He coughs. The left one is called Knockoff, and the idea is that he looks like a bootleg Transformer. I owned a few of those: they were dull, cheap, their color schemes were off, and they transformed into a clock or something equally lame. I’ve always been fascinated with the jumbled world of art forgery: knockoffs, bootlegs, fakes. Glimpses into an alternate universe.
The one thing that always struck me about those old Transformers cartoons, were the mountainous backgrounds: they were hand-painted, and quite atmospheric. They looked pretty good actually; even as a kid I attempted to mimic that style, as you can tell from the comic. The image above is from the Converters video–I just had to include mountains, or else it wouldn’t feel like a 1980s Transformers cartoon to me.
This is Crack’s transformation process. I based it on Bluestreak or Smokescreen, or one of those busty Transformers anyway, but still it was very tricky to get this right. Obviously you have to cheat a little. The car is an old Chevy. Initially, I tried to have him clap his hands one time right before his wheels hit the ground, cool breakdancer style, but it looked not so much cool breakdancer style as “Look, this animator obviously doesn’t know what he’s doing”.
This is how Knockoff transforms. It’s more of an optical illusion really, but that’s OK–ever seen Megatron change into a gun in the cartoon?
For the video I didn’t want to just use the existing Autobot and Decepticon symbols, so I designed my own. They are warped, yet still recognizable.
Original pencil drawing of Optimus Prime clone Principus Alpha. I draw everything with pencil on paper, then scan the result and tweak it a little in Photoshop. Transformers aren’t rigidly mechanical, they are kind of robust, organic: they consist of curvy lines and plump spaces.
It’s glimpsed in the first scene of the video: the power plant that the “Disrupticons” are heading for. This was a simple, compact drawing, as it had to register quite quickly.
The video’s end title is also done in the style of Transformers: I could easily have left it and spend those few hours on a new video, but I always want to do something extra, add some special element where nobody expects it. There are a zillion Transformers parodies on YouTube, but they’re all kind of jokey jokey and lazy. What I like in parodies, is earnestness, veracity. The best Transformers parodies are those 1980s bootleg toys.
Lastly, one thing that always intrigued me as a kid was that many of the characters in the cartoons looked nothing like their toy counterparts. At the toy store, they formed a ghoulish parade of mutilated freaks and misfits, merchandise from another reality:
I toyed (hehe) with the idea of having one of my Converters look like one of those complex monstrosities, but couldn’t find a way to make it work. And anyway, Transformers just don’t transform in a believable way. You have to cheat, or you end up with complicated, lumbering, ungraceful creatures, like the Transformers in the Michael Bay films.
Here is the video:
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