so many things went into this movie which were uncommon at the time and really, seriously made the impact that much more heavy
disclaimer, I saw the movie at a local small theatre when I was little; my friend took me to go see it with her family because her older brother wanted to see it in theatres again lol, and this was in about 1996.
so now that you have context, let’s go:
1) Animation Quality Bump
You didn’t usually get super high quality animation bumps in cartoons back then, but from the second the movie starts, it was mind-boggling how detailed and beautiful everything was.
Like, a lot of kids had actually never seen animation this good.
Seriously, compare even just the backgrounds real quick; The cartoon had some genuinely great backgrounds, but the movie just pushed everything up to a new level of quality and it looked incredible.
Below is Autobot City, in G1 in the aspect ratio for TV viewing, and underneath is the same angle on Autobot City in the movie, with wide theatre aspect ratio:
Autobot City itself looks nearly identical, but you see what I’m talking about in terms of the visual impact? The animation bump was phenomenal.
Famously, they say the word “shit” in this movie.
Hasbro did this to make sure the rating went up from G to PG-13 in the USA, meaning parents would have to accompany those under 13 (you had to take a parent, not your older sibling, to get into the theatre) so that parents would watch the movie and know what toys were for which character and increasing brand recognisability with those who had purchasing power-- Thus increasing sales and hopefully batting down knock-off toy sales at the same time.
In reality, the only thing it did was shock children. Like, we had never heard anything more severe than “buckethead” in the original show, and hearing a curse word in the movie made it feel way more real and serious.
3) Rock music and high fidelity audio!!!
The soundtrack for the movie is so awesome that it is still awesome to this day.
Compare the original TV theme to the movie theme by Lion. I know you all know this, but I’m serious. This genuinely rocked.
From the very instant the logo appears and the guitar riff kicks in, kids knew this was going to be amazing.
The high fidelity is also something to note:
TVs up until the mid-90s didn’t really have very good audio capabilities, and broadcast audio was a little different for a lot of reasons: Different recording equipment in use at different studios, technical standards could vary somewhat between networks, and there was severely limited at-home speaker quality for most people.
So hearing this in a movie theatre, with high quality produced and clear audio, instead of on my mom’s 1991 Edition Magnavox TV built-in speakers? That was incredible.
Here’s a TV of the same year and model, so you know what we were all working with as kids back then. See the grill on the side of the TV? Yeah, that’s where the speakers are.
So I never see it mentioned, but the actual audio quality versus TV audio quality was really engaging, too-- And played into how well that movie held our attention, no matter what happened on screen.
4) Context for the shock of Optimus Prime’s death
Back then, you didn’t get really serious shock deaths in kid’s shows.
This was because of the 70s and 80s “soccer mom brigade”, who actively petitioned the government for stricter media guidelines for children’s entertainment, and that made networks nervous.
It wouldn’t be financially viable if a show got a reputation as being hyper-violent. (Despite the fact that most 80s kids shows were, in fact, hyper-violent.)
So everyone erred on the side of caution when writing and producing episodes, even though most of the complaints that were filed were either bunk or never made any real broadcast legislation changes until later in the 90s, which is also interesting but a story for another post.
And that’s the thing: A lot of 80s kids shows did have a lot of violence, especially GI Joe, another Hasbro series! The “soccer mom brigade” had a pretty fair point, in regard to violence complaints.
In contrast to GI Joe, Transformers had a lot of cheesy or light hearted violence, with the occasional actually violent scene here and there.
But for the most part, the violence never had real consequences, and was buffered by very light-hearted scenes. Episodes ended on a happy note more often than not, and when they ended badly, there was always a note of hope.
A lot of kid’s shows just to be safe never even alluded to death, or if they did, it was in shows like The Real Ghostbusters, where the concept was key to certain episode plots but handled very carefully and with an incredible amount of build-up and in-universe discussion and logic (as well as pointedly lighter moments) for the benefit of younger kids watching at home. The Real Ghostbusters had a couple episodes that were legitimately powerful and effective, but still appropriate for the target audience. (JMS did a great job as a main writer for the series.)
None of the main characters ever died, or if they did, there was always a fix before the end of the episode that restored status quo. Or it was fixed at the start of the next episode. When any characters died, it was always a villain, and it was handled with a discussion amongst the heroes afterwards, and it ended on a high sombre but positive note. Nearly always. Very few exceptions.
Plus, obviously, a lot of 80s shows were made to sell toys, and so was Transformers. Could you imagine if they killed off Lion-O in Thundercats, or if they killed off He-Man, or She-Ra, or GI Joe?
Naturally, not a single kid (or their parents, which is critical to point out) ever imagined that Optimus Prime even could die, let alone that there might be a chance that he would.
Right away though, we see a lot of the original G1 bots get killed. And characters keep dying. Violently, rapidly, and somewhat realistically in that there is no real further discussion-- They’re dead, we have to go. Evil is here, and it’s winning. Keep moving.
And all of that set the tone right away; I remember the audience got serious. This was new, and fast, and real, and actually almost scary, in a way, although I was a very sensitive kid.
And Unicron, absolutely, was scary. Devourer of worlds. Our Autobots are all dead, the Decepticons are winning, we’re outnumbered and the stakes are heavy. One planet down, how many left to go? How many people will Unicron consume? Where does his power end?
This was scary as hell. It looked real, it sounded real, it felt real. Totally amazing and terrifying. Captivating.
It’s easy to get caught up in how cheesy G1 seems to modern audiences now, and how the character designs might seem too bright and blocky to inspire any real deep seriousness, but I’m telling you, at least up until 1996 when I saw it in a theatre myself, this movie was a raw experience.
Especially if you saw it as a child with little to no wider awareness of other Transformers media, just G1 and maybe the Marvel comics, which was common for kids like me with no cable TV who mostly watched home recorded tapes of G1 while visiting friends houses.
So we’re all set up, shit is very much scary and serious, but we have Optimus, our faithful and kind leader who carries the Matrix, that’s the thread of hope here--
And then, Optimus Prime dies.
The father figure of the show goes grey, and does not get back up again.
The shock of that scene was unbelievable.
The animation here really sells it:
Look at the dents in his grill/ribcage, and how his hands are laid palm down and flat (which is what is done sometimes in hospitals for patients who need to be sedated for short term procedures or if they need to be sedated for a prolonged MRI scan) instead of being rested on their sides.
And the colour of the berth here looks identical to the weird plush tan hospital beds with the wood end panels that were common from the 70s well into the 90s in some areas, so that definitely rang a bell for us in terms of visually recognising this as a literal death bed.
It looks like how a lot of actual real world hospital beds looked back then, where the head of the bed could be cranked up to create an upright angle.
This felt final and real in a way that cartoon deaths just never did before this scene right here. The reactions of the other characters sold it 100%.
5) The Theatre Experience: Optimus Death Scene
Even in the screening I went to, at our tiny local movie theatre in 1996 (which was mostly an audience of older kids and their younger siblings and their friends), I remember how quiet everyone was.
We all stopped eating popcorn and stopped slurping our ICEE drinks. Total silence. Quiet sniffles. Some jackets rustling as some kids hugged each other across the seats. Sighs as the older kids tried to hold back tears.
Nobody shouted, or even cried loudly. The older kids tried to be stoic, especially as most of them had seen it before, but us younger kids were seeing it for the first time and there was real, palpable sadness and shock in the room.
I can’t even imagine the impact of that scene when it was originally in theatres.
My friend was legit upset, and while I was crying myself, I whispered across the seats, “Are you okay?”
And she whispered back, “Elita One isn’t there. She wasn’t there when he died.”
