Weekend Top Ten #700
Top 100 Transformers – 700th Special!
We've done it, folks. And by “we” I mean me. You lot didn’t do anything. And by “lot” I mean the random three people who occasionally read this every other week.
I’ve been writing this stupid, maddening, time-consuming list for seven hundred weeks. This is probably the overarching addiction of my life. I should stop! I could stop! I won’t stop! I can’t stop!
I can’t stop.
I sometimes wonder how long will I go on for. Will I still be writing this at fifty? At sixty? Will I get to a thousand weeks? Two thousand? Will I be dead before that? Will we all be engulfed in nuclear fire? Will we experience the heat death of the sun? Will they finally manage to release a new Star Wars film? All important questions.
(Incidentally, one thousand weeks is about nineteen years; two thousand, about thirty-eight years. If I ever make it to my 5000th list, I’ll have been writing these things for 95 years, making me 125 years old. As I’m not the Wolverine, that feels somewhat unrealistic)
Anyway, whichever way you slice it, this is quite a big deal. Writing these things has been both fun and infuriating, and whilst I do genuinely worry that it’s taken me away from writing my actual books, what I want to publish and that, I also think it’s been a fun mental exercise and hobby and it’s better than just sitting around playing Civilization VI. So how best to mark such a momentous occasion? I'll be honest, it was hard; I was bouncing back and forth between a number of different ideas. You’re going to see a few of the possibilities over the coming weeks, actually, as potential 700th lists sort of slid away from the magic number itself as a more iconic option reared its head.
I've always had a soft spot for the number seven – I don’t know why, “lucky number seven” I guess – so I had it in my head to try to do something a mite bit personal and maybe autobiographical. And, as I’ve said before, the “thing” closest to my heart is and probably always will be Transformers. I’ve done tons of lists about Transformers – even a list ranking my lists – so thinking of something both new and suitably titanic was a tall order. But then I thought: top one hundred!
Yes, what follows is a list of my one hundred favourite Transformers. But that’s harder than it sounds, and not just because there are about a million bloody characters so I’ve probably forgotten someone I really like. No, it’s hard because it’s both hard to define what a “Transformer” is, and also because it’s hard to define who you actually mean when you say (for instance) “Optimus Prime”.
Unlike many other long-running franchises, Transformers has no one overriding continuity. Despite many reboots, if you say you’re talking about the DC Comics Superman, chances are people know who you mean. There are adaptations which share many of the same characteristics, but the core fundamentals of Superman are understood from the comics, which can be considered the “foundation text”, so to speak, and which can be recognised and referenced as a sort of baseline for the character. But who is Optimus Prime? Is he the slightly cocky commander of the original animated series? The self-sacrificial noble leader of the Marvel comics? The wise, sage-like, almost Yoda-esque figure of, say, Rescue Bots? Is he the “give me your face” psychopath from the live-action movies? Did he start out as a gladiator, or a cop, or an archivist before becoming Autobot leader? Is he the first Prime, or just the first for a long time, or is he just the latest in a long lineage stretching back millennia? Speaking of which, is Cybertron still around? Is it habitable? Did the Transformers flee for their lives? Did they crash on Earth, or have they been here in hiding, or did they just drop by momentarily? Are they really four million years old? What’s the Matrix? How do they transform? Are we allowed to call it “transforming” or do we have to say “change shape” or something? Who’s Primus? Who’s Unicron? Who are the Quintessons? Is there really, for real, no foolin’, an Autobot called “Erector” and if so who signed off on that and what were they smoking?
The point I’m trying to make is that there isn’t really “a” version of Transformers. Or maybe “the” version. There are so many continuities, and whilst most of them share features (and, arguably, are becoming more streamlined in each subsequent adaptation), there are still huge contradictions and vast differences in lore, history, characterisation and more. I mean, in the most recent comics by Skybound, Bumblebee is killed off in pretty much the first issue; the IDW comics separated Megatron and Galvatron into different characters. These are big swings that change the nature of the series. So nailing who I mean when I say a given character is frought with confusion.
But I decided I didn’t care.
What I did care about, though, was making a set of rules to govern this list and in doing so have sort of wrestled some of these contradictions into shape. So before we dive into a century of shape-changing big bots, here are my own three laws:
Generally speaking, I've tried to distil this to a sort of pan-multiversal platonic ideal version of a character. I'm not specifying which Starscream or Silverbolt or Scorponok I’m on about; just imagine it incorporating the best and/or most common versions of that character. However, this list does have a distinct “Generation One” bias; if there’s, I dunno, an Energon version of Scorponok that’s notably different, I won’t be talking about them, really. I just mean the big green and purple Headmaster dude, and you can work out which version of that guy I like best. The versions of the characters mentioned here take into account what I’ve loved about them across different adaptations, as well as – in many cases – how much I liked the toys. Oh, but just for a little bit of clarification: the four original Rescue Bots are referenced, and it’s them I mean, not any G1 characters who share their name. So it’s Blades the nervous orange ‘copter, not Blades the angry red ‘copter. However, Whirl is G1 Whirl, not the Whirl from later seasons of Rescue Bots. Does that make sense? No? Good.
Oftentimes characters change name or evolve, and I’ve tried to lump those characters under one banner. So Hot Rod/Rodimus/Rodimus Prime could arguably be at least two if not three characters; but I’ve decided to call him “Rodimus” as a shorthand here. This is because, generally speaking, his core characteristics remain the same. Yes, he ages and develops and stuff, but the brash Hot Rod is not that dissimilar to the overwhelmed Rodimus Prime. The same goes for Orion Pax into Optimus Prime, or even Bumblebee into Goldbug. Sacrilegiously I actually prefer Goldbug as a name and a design, but even though IDW briefly confirmed them to be different people, generally speaking Goldbug is a rebuilt Bumblebee and they have the same personality. The one exception I’ve made here is Megatron and Galvatron. This isn’t really because of them literally being different people in IDW's comics, but because for most of Galvatron’s history I feel like he really has been portrayed as a different character altogether. In the old Marvel comics he travelled back to our present from the far-future (2005) and was to all intents and purposes another antagonist, often in conflict with Megatron. So I’ve made them distinct here, too.
The list is recognising “Transformers”. This means no humans, or nebulons, or whatever. I briefly thought of going very strict and defining it as literally “Cybertronians” but relented, because – especially factoring in multiple continuities once more – it's sometimes hard to say who’s a Transformer from Cybertron and who’s a “transformer” from somewhere else. All this is to say I’ve included “are they technically Transformers?” such as Unicron and Wreck-Gar, and if the list had gone on long enough I would have stretched this definition to include Go-Bots as well. Because they’re owned by Hasbro and have cropped up in cameo appearances, natch! Anyway, this does mean that there’s no Verity Carlo, G.B. Blackrock, or Charlie Watson. Or Death’s Head! More’s the pity.
Now, week 700 was obviously destined to fall when it did because of, well, how time works. And I decided to choose Transformers as a theme because it felt like something personal but also something I could go big on. But it very nearly - so very nearly - fell on exactly the same weekend as the phenomenal TF Nation. TFN is, of course, the annual Transformers fan convention. If everything really had converged on the same weekend, that would have been so galaxy-shattering a coincidence as to serve as proof of divinity, like that big head of Primus that they found in the centre of Cybertron; but as it is, TFN is next weekend, and not quite when you're reading this. Despite this mere quirk of chronology, I want to hold up this significant list in honour of my favourite convention; I can think of no better way to celebrate such a joyous gathering of like-minded robo-lovers than listing the robos I love the most. So if next weekend you find yourself at TFN – browsing aisles of toys as if they were religious icons; listening to revered creators wax lyrical about why they had Overlord do that to Pipes; or bowing down to the ludicrously talented cosplayers and their frankly jaw-dropping wares – and you somehow happen upon this crazy list, then I hope you somehow also enjoy it. Because it’s written with love, not just for a franchise that has sustained me since at least February 1985 (cover date of the first comic I got!), but also the delightful fan community that I am overjoyed to be a part of, and the many weird and wonderful people who make it up. Enjoy TFN, everyone. Sadly, I'm skipping this year's merry-go-round, but I’ll be back next year to celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Transformers: The Movie.
Anyway, that’s that. Here's a great big list of fantastic Transformers. Autobot, Decepticon, and Miscellaneous. And I repeat what I said at the start: I will definitely have forgotten somebody. So if you come to this and go, like, “where’s Cosmos?” then chances are he should have been here but I spent so long mentally going through Stunticons to make sure I didn’t want to include any of them, somehow poor Cosmos fell off the list. Speaking of which, Cosmos genuinely did fall off the list. He’s on there now, though. Unforgotten.
So one more thing – one hundred is way too many to write individual analyses for. But I’ve decided to write just a little bit for the top ten. Hey! It’s still a top ten! Good eh? Ahem.
Roll out.
