The third and final installment of Chris's ridiculously lengthy review of this 80s cartoon classic, in which Chris receives counseling from the dark god Unicron, who helps Chris get past his issues so he can finally review the damn DVDs. If you love watching giant robots kill each other with antimatter missiles and hypersonic space-lasers, click the pic. If not, then you probably didn't understand the situation.

A little warning: this page is going to be graphics intensive. I debated whether or not to put so many pics up, but then I realized that most of you won't be reading this at home, you'll be reading it at work, on the company's dime, through that fine ass T1 connection your employer has seen fit to provide for your surfing pleasure. You don't care how long this page takes to load. You're getting paid to read it. Its all about you, you, YOU, isn't it?! ISN'T IT!?! You selfish bastards!

Aw, who am I kidding? You know I love ya.

Anywho, when last we were on this subject I was just heading home from Target. Still riding the shopping high of purchasing my new Transformers and my DVDs, I thought the thing that would really cap the night off before I went home to watch the movie would be a quick side trip to

Jesus Christ!

What in the hell?! What are you talking about?

Well, I guess I honestly don't know. I find myself trying to get through this stupid review and getting busy with other things. Then when I have some free time, I find myself putting it off. This is probably the hardest article I've ever written for this site, and it should be a breeze. I mean, come on; this is The Transformers, man! I love this movie!

I don't know exactly. I guess I kind of feel like everyone knows the Transformers are a big deal for me, so I should really do this special release justice with an over-the-top, insanely terrific review. I mean, this is the Transformers, man. This is my Thing. You know how every guy has his Thing? Something that they pour a lot of time and love and thought into, no matter how trivial or stupid it may seem to anyone else? Well, the Transformers are my Thing, and I suppose the problem is that I have such high expectations of how fabosuperincredible this article ought to be, that I'm not really sure if I can pull it off.

Yeah, you might be right. I mean, some of my other

Dude, you're a dick.

FINE!

I'm not going to go over too much of the story of the movie with you guys, because if you're interested enough in the movie to read this review, then there's only about a 0.00042% chance you haven't seen it already. If by some miracle from Primus above you are one of the few who are interested in this movie but have not yet partaken of its most holy audiovisual glory, click nice little Blaster/Springer icon to the upper right for Justin's very acceptable and nicely formatted review of The Transformers: The Movie.

I guess first I should give you a little background info, but I'll try to keep it short, 'cause I don't want the gigantic killer planet dickhead crawling up my ass about it if I take too long.

For any of my insane babble to make much sense, you've gotta understand what Transformers was back in the day. By May of 1985, the Transformers was indisputably THE hottest toy property in the world. Transformers were outselling G.I. Joe, Masters Of The Universe, Voltron, Teddy Ruxpin, Cabbage Patch Kids, Pound Puppies, My Buddy, Barbie, Lego, Play-Doh, Slinky, Colorforms, Matchbox, Hot Wheels, everything. Between 1984 (when Transformers hit the shelves) and 1985 (when production on The Transformers: The Movie began), Hasbro's profits tripled, and almost every penny could be attributed to the success of the Transformers. Kids, parents, toy collectors, consumer advocates, educators, EVERYBODY loved these things.

The Transformers television show was phenomenally successful, due mostly to Hasbro's very kid savvy decision to make a legitimately entertaining television show, rather than simply a showcase for new toys. Don't get me wrong, the show existed to sell toys, but Hasbro was wise enough to realize that kids weren't going to watch a 30 minute commercial full of transforming robots going through the motions of your typical Superfriends style non-story. They needed to hook the kids by giving these robots personalities and then amping up the action to 11, and to that end Hasbro stressed interesting storytelling and relatable characters to the writers.

As a syndicated show not produced under the oppresive thumb of network censors, the writers were given a very free hand to tell stories that had never been told in American cartoons before. Because the characters weren't flesh and blood, the writers weren't constrained by the usual G.I. Joe-esque "200 supersonic fragmentation missiles com- pletely destroy the airplane but everyone parachutes to safety in the nick of time" bullshit. Not all of the characters in The Transformers were good or smart, and all of the heroes were not squeaky clean. People got shot and hurt, and some of them didn't live to tell the tale. There was much violence and destruction. Naturally, kids gobbled it up.

So in 1985, when Hasbro was gearing up to introduce an absolute shitload of new Transformers toys for their 1986 line, the decision to tell the new characters' stories in a movie was pretty much a no- brainer. It would seem like a natural thing that the movie would achieve success similar to the show's, and I'm pretty sure everyone involved was just waiting to sit back and rake in the cash by the truckload. How could it have been anything but a complete smash?

The Transformers: The Movie premiered in 1986, and despite the high hopes held by everyone involved, it was the very definition of an absolute commercial failure. The brains at Hasbro made a few VERY big mistakes, and as a result The Transformers: The Movie tanked harder than Dana Plato after the Howard Stern interview.

Hasbro's leniency with the writers led to the stellar success of the show, but would ultimately be the undoing of the entire '80s Transformers franchise. Hasbro wanted to introduce all new robots to the film, and the writers asked if instead of just focusing on the new characters, they could kill the characters of the old 1984 toy line off, using their deaths as a plot device to advance the Transformers story. Hasbro agreed, and within the first 20 minutes of the movie, almost every character the kids came to the theatre to see on the silver screen was mercilessly slaughtered. Kids were horrified, parents were pissed, and of which would have created a wonderful ticket-selling controversy surrounding the movie, if only Hasbro had bothered to tell anyone about it.

I don't think I'm alone when I say that I had no idea there was a Transformers movie until months after it left the theatres. Imagine if you can how incredibly pissed I was to find out that not only had I missed my opportunity to see Transformers on the big screen, but I had missed Optimus Prime dying, a Transformer the size of a planet, and cussing in a cartoon TWICE. TWICE, goddamnit. Dear lord in heaven, I can't tell you how pissed I was. Plus, I was rendered speechless by the stories I'd heard from the one kid I knew who saw it. Maybe this is just my experience, but only one kid I knew had heard about the damn thing. It was in theatres so briefly that there was no second chance to go see it again. The next thing we knew, season three of the cartoon takes place 20 years in the future and only a handful of the characters we were familiar with were even in it. It fucked with a lot of us, and by the time the movie hit video stores to fill in the gaps between the second season and the third, the once mighty steamrolling juggernaut of Transformers success had been derailed. Despite the fact that Hasbro was still releasing some pretty spectacular Transformers toys which I begged for like a crackhead every birthday and Christmas, the third season was the show's last. And although I wasn't able to piece all this together at the time, it kind of felt like somehow the magic had been broken. As trivial as it may seem, something very personal and special to me had been lost.

But, oh, god damn, that movie was FUCKING SWEET. I first saw it in what I guesstimate to be the summer of '87, long before the big anime explosion. You know, back when anime was called "Japanimation" and most of us kids had never seen a cartoon with such incredible detail, beautiful back- ground paintings, and techno doohickey eye candy all over the place. The animation in The Transformers: The Movie may have been spotty in places, but compared to what we were used to seeing, it was the fucking Mona Lisa. Have you noticed the increasing frequency of f-bomb drops? That's a sure fire sign that I'm over-excited. Just thinking back about it I get revved up all over again, remembering how I just could not believe that a cartoon about the toys I loved the most could look so fucking sweet. I don't care if you like it or not, I cuss when I'm happy. Fuckitty, fuck fuck, fuck-a-doodle-do.

I can't tell you how many times Ma and Pa Sci-Fi rented The Trans- formers for me at the local video bunker. After seeing it for the first time, every couple of months thereafter I'd ask them to pick it up for me. If they didn't it was no big deal, but when they did I watched it with a bizarre intensity that, looking back, probably caused them more than a little worry concerning my mental state. This went on well into high school, when Ma Sci-Fi finally wised up and just bought me a copy of the damn thing for Christmas. It had never even occurred to me to ask for it, but I guess the $20 she spent on it at the time must've seemed paltry compared to the $450,000 she had shelled out in rental fees over the preceding five or six years.

Roughly 99.44% of the criticisms of The Trans- formers: The Movie that you will ever read will offer the same exact two pieces of evidence that the movie's no good. If you ever read a critique of this movie and come across these two things, you need to realize right then that what your reading is some fucknut's repetition of the same two criticisms he read some other fucknut make. The writer probably hasn't seen the movie in years, if ever, and he or she should be immediately dragged to the nearest cutlery store and/or auto body shop and forcibly sterilized as painfully as possible. So you can more readily identify said dickheads, the reasons they will give will be:

1: The Movie Has No Plot, and
2: The Dance Scene

Allow me to deconstruct these pieces of non-thought right now. I firmly believe that anyone who makes the plot criticism has no fucking clue what a plot is. A plot is not the premise of the movie, a plot is not the dialogue, a plot is not the outcome of the movie, and a plot is not even the story… not exactly. A plot is the storyline, the overall shape a movie's story will take. Its important to distinguish this from the premise of a film, which is often mistaken for the plot. These two are not interchangeable. Because this article is not a dissertation on writing screenplays, I'll give you the quick and dirty version of what premise and plot are to a good movie.

Premise: once you take away the specifics, all good movies can be boiled down to one sentence that conveys an easily understood, compelling premise in which the hero, the hero's inner struggle, the outer struggle, the hero's ally, and the antagonist (not necessarily an enemy) are all well defined. For example:

A child psychiatrist must overcome his scientific disbelief in the paranormal in order to help a young boy who is being slowly driven mad by the ghosts which haunt him.

That's The Sixth Sense. It breaks down like this: "A child psychiatrist (hero) must overcome his scientific disbelief (inner struggle) in the paranormal in order to help (outer struggle) a young boy (ally) who is being slowly driven mad by the ghosts (antagonist) that haunt him." Try this one:

A prejudiced starship captain must learn to see past his own racism to save his crew and uncover a group of conspirators who are plotting to start an interstellar war.

"They're animals."

"Jim, there is an historic opportunity here."

"Don't believe them! Don't trust them!"

"They're dying."

"Let them die."

Its Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. "A prejudiced starship captain (hero) must learn to see past his own racism (inner struggle) to save his crew (ally) and uncover (outer struggle) a group of conspirators (antagonist) who are plotting to start an interstellar war." All good movies will have such a well-defined premise, and as someone who has studied writing and story construction so as to better understand screenplays, I feel qualified to say that The Transformers: The Movie has a very good premise. Boiled down, its this:

After his army's most crushing defeat, a young soldier must grow past his impulsive recklessness to aid a small band of survivors in battle against a foe more powerful than any they have ever faced.

Like I said, I've studied screenplays, and the premise is solid. It could definitely be improved upon, but it is solid nonetheless. You'll notice its not as short as the first two. That's because the first two are better. The longer it takes to explain the premise, the weaker and more contrived that premise usually is. The Transformers: The Movie didn't have an exceptional premise, but it had a good one. The premise works.

A movie just can't have a good premise, its gotta have a good plot. Like I said before, the plot is the overall shape of the story. If that shape has twists then it becomes more interesting. And if those twists are clever enough and very well thought out, then you have a story that grabs you and shakes your ass like Parkinson’s. For example, in The Sixth Sense, it makes absolutely no difference to the premise or story that Bruce Willis turns out to be a ghost (SPOILER ALERT), just like it doesn't matter to the premise of The Transformers that the young soldier is in fact a gigantic alien robot that transforms into a sports car (SPOILER ALERT). These things just don't matter as far as the premises are concerned, which is why they weren't mentioned. But the fact that Bruce is a ghost is a very clever part of the plot. I can't speak for anyone else… well, that's not true; I can, and I do it all the time… but Bruce being dead was a plot twist that I didn't see coming. It was clever, and turned the movie on its ear by making the hero eerily similar to the antagonists. That's good plot. Its the Circle Of Life, baby, and it moves us all.

The Transformers: The Movie has good plot in spades. In fact, I'd say the plot of this movie is far better than its premise. The plot finds our characters soundly defeated, then scattered. The good guys are essentially done for; you'd need a gen-you-wine Charlie Brown Christmas miracle to pull their asses out of this fire. Then, against all odds, somehow things manage to actually get worse; first the Decepticons crash one of the Autobot ships on that fucked up Sharkticon asteroid/planet thing, then they blow up 3/4 of the only other ship the Autobots have, then the surviving quarter of that ship crashes on a planet full of psychotic robots made out of garbage, then their temporary leader gets blown to hell and they lose the single item that gives them any hope at all of survival. Plot, plot, plot, plot, plot.

Aside from the overall arc of the story which follows the premise, we are introduced to an absolutely HUGE cast of new characters, and somehow none of it ever feels particularly clumsy. That's hard to pull off, especially when one of the new guys is Wheelie, who pretty much appears out of nowhere for the sole purpose of making viewers really get the concept of justifiable homicide. Any of you who know me can testify to the fact that I'm no homophobe, but Wheelie is so annoyingly fucking gay that he actually manages to be more a more horribly irritating character than Daniel and Warpath put together. And Warpath isn't even in this movie, that's my point. Wait, no its not. My point is that there is nothing at all wrong with the plot of this movie. That's my point. Anyway, here's some of my favorite plot twists:

• In the beginning of the movie, the robots Orbilus and Kranix desperately struggle against the meaningless death of being eaten by Unicron. After a narrow escape, Kranix becomes the last survivor of his race, only to be killed in an even more meaningless way later by robots which, you guessed it, eat him.

• The Junkions and their spaceship, which would ultimately deliver the salvation of Cybertron, were constructed from the very materials which Cybertron's inhabitants had discarded as useless waste.

• Hot Rod inadvertently caused the death of the Autobot's greatest leader, setting into motion a chain of events that would culminate in the responsibility of leadership being placed upon himself. Since its really not part of the premise (although it certainly should have been), this is a great part of the movie's plot, and its a shame it wasn't explored more thoroughly.

• Unicron devoured Cybertron's moons, which led the Transformers to blow him up, leaving his gigantic severed head to orbit the planet as a brand new moon. A great plot twist, and a great lesson: you do not fuck with Cybertron's moons. Its a moral I think we should all live by.

Okay, so we've established that The Transformers: The Movie not only has an okay premise, but a lot of good plot as well. Its not The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, but it works. Now lets talk about the dance scene. You may hear a lot of Transformers fans take a decidedly apologetic stance when it comes to the dance scene, but I am not one of them. The scene takes place about an hour and five minutes into the film on the Planet Of Junk. Let me set the mood: the first line of Junkion dialogue we hear is "Stop, thief! No welcome wagon 'Hello, stranger,' with that new coffee flavor for you. Offer expires while you wait. Operators are standing by." Thanks to the vocal talents of Monty Python's Eric Idle, this line comes across exactly as it is intended: menacing, with a threat of imminent violence. The tone of the delivery plus the completely wacko dialogue combine in a way that makes it pretty clear to me that the writers are establishing beyond any reasonable doubt that these robots are fucking crazy. Maybe they aren't full blown psychotics, but they're definitely very thoroughly unhinged. When they finally decide to attack they do so en masse like savages, with chains and axes and busted pipes and big pieces of metal, all the while spouting crazy shit like "Don't look behind door number two, Monty! It's time to play 'End of the Line,' my valentine!" If it wasn't for Weird Al's "Dare To Be Stupid" playing in the background letting us know not to take any of this too seriously, this creepy psycho dialogue would have me convinced that Arcee was in for one of those fucked up rape scenes straight out of A Clockwork Orange.

Just in time to prevent Wreck-Gar and his droogs from having a bit of the old ultraviolence with our heroes, the other Autobots arrive and make friends with the Junkions, who immediately begin to dance in celebration. It has been thoroughly established by this point to anyone who does not have Down's Syndrome that the Junkions are insane, and a few seconds afterward we learn that their entire culture is based on intercepted trans- missions of Earth tele- vision. They even show the Junkions channel surfing between a show about ninjas and a musical. A MUSICAL. They dance because its what they see on TV. In context of what we know about these guys, its not out of character. Also, every review I've ever read which uses this scene to attack the movie fails to mention that the entire sequence only lasts for 21 seconds. Even if you hate this scene, its not exactly like the movie turns into Rent. This scene is basically there as a bit of comic relief between a bunch of heavy shit that went down before and a bunch of really heavy shit that goes down next. It was a tension breaker. Had to be done.

Alright, alright, alright… all this blah blah blah and I still haven't really told you about the DVDs yet. So here it is: unless you've somehow missed the tone of this entire article, you've probably guessed that I'm very happy with these DVDs, and highly recommend them. Back in 2000 (I think), Rhino Entertainment released The Transformers: The Movie to DVD. While it was nice to finally have a nice, clean DVD version of the film to replace the worn out VHS copy I had, the video was very dark, and the DVD features were pretty sparse. Don't get me wrong, the Rhino release looks good enough, but you can tell the DVD was put together as quickly as possible and with a minimum of effort. That having been said, what the Rhino DVD has that the Sony DVDs don't is animated scene selection menus. An animated chapter menu is such a nice little feature, and it always gets under my skin when "special" editions of movies don't have them. To me, seeing animated menus shows that a studio is willing to put a little extra effort into the DVD. They're a big deal for me. The Sci-Fi Guys DVDs have them, and we have a budget of $0. Could Sony not afford to spend an extra day and a few hundred bucks to animate these menus? I don't know. How about it, Sony? What the hell is your problem?

I would have been happy just owning the Rhino version of The Transformers, but in preparation for the upcoming live action Transformers movie in 2007, Sony pulled out all the stops for a special edition of the 1986 theatrical cartoon. All the stops except animated menus, that is… motherfuckers. As soon as the special edition was announced, I knew the bullshit was about to begin. You see, I make an effort to only stay as barely informed as possible on pretty much anything at all via the internet. Usually half the shit you read online is so thoroughly riddled with miscommunication, assumption, rumor, stupidity, and opinions masquerading as facts, that it barely qualifies as information at all. The other half is outright lies. So if I hear The Transformers DVD will contain a miniature 24-karat gold Matrix Of Leadership and the deleted Arcee striptease scene, I don't take it with a grain of salt. I ignore it altogether. I believe such things only when I see them for myself. In that vein, there's some misinformation concerning these DVDs we need to get out of the way.

Rumors said that the DVDs would include the film's soundtrack on CD – NOT TRUE. To be perfectly honest, I didn't hear this rumor until the DVDs were already released, so this one didn't impact me in the slightest. Since the soundtrack album is owned by Scotti Brothers and the DVDs were released by Sony, this seems like a pretty unlikely thing to have been true in the first place, but whatever. I don't know how this one got started, but it ain't in there, folks.

We are also told that the DVD would contain the long sought after Holy Graal of TransFandom, the original 16:9 widescreen theatrical version of the movie. In fact, the DVD cover itself makes this very claim. I'm not sure I buy this. We have been told for years and years that the widescreen elements from this movie had been lost or destroyed. Its hard to believe that they just happened to be uncovered just in time for Sony to release this pre-Transformers 2007 special DVD set. It seems a bit too convenient.

The original trailers and TV spots make a HUGE deal of the movie being fully animated in widescreen. I'm not kidding at all; the way the announcer says "widescreen animation," you'd think that just seeing such a thing could cure leukemia. It was obviously a big selling point. I reasoned that since they go on about it like it was the first coming, there'd be no way in hell that they'd have anything but a widescreen trailer, and I was right. Much of the trailer is test animation that didn't make it into the final cut, but there is one key piece of footage that lets us see the widescreenedness of the movie as they were selling it back in '86. Keeping in mind that I wasn't able to capture the exact same frame for each version, let's examine the evidence.

Exhibit A for the prosecution: This is Slammer, the little tank that comes with Metroplex. Although not referred to by name in the movie, Slammer is unique in that he is the only Transformer who appears in these four key pieces of footage with the exact same animation cels. This is how he appeared on the 2000(?) Rhino DVD, which we were told was the very best possible version of the film that still existed.

Exhibit B for the prosecution: Slammer again, this time how he looks on Disc 2 of the 20th Anniversary Special Edition. Proving the "Rhino is as good as it gets" propaganda wrong, you can see detail around the edges of the cel which is not present in the Rhino version. The missing detail from the Rhino version can be attributed to overscan, which is a technical term for the amount of visible footage that gets lost around the edges of whatever screen you're watching video on. Having plenty of editing experience with The Sci-Fi Guys, I can testify that overscan is a real bitch, 'cause every TV or monitor overscans differently. Clearly the folks at Sony were able to reduce the loss, which means that a better transfer of the film was possible after all. That lends a lot of weight to my previous assertion that the Rhino version was done on the quick and cheap. Man, just look at the way the guys at Sony cleaned this up and brought the colors out. Jesus, its so pretty. If I could, I'd soul kiss the Sony corporation for making my baby look so good.

Exhibit C: Slammer in the "theatrical widescreen version" from Disc 1 of the 20th Anniversary Special Edition. Despite the color correction, a LOT of the picture is sacrificed in the name of widescreen.

Exhibit D: Slammer in the widescreen theatrical trailer. Notice how the picture is cropped a bit closer in this shot, especially at the bottom of the frame. Its not quite the same cut as the "theatrical widescreen version." That's no big deal; lots of trailers use slightly different croppings of footage from their films. The clincher as I see it is the focus. The lines are much sharper in this cut than in Exhibit C. Look at the riflings inside his cannon barrel; in the widescreen version the lines are fuzzy and blend together, but in the trailer they are in focus and distinct. There shouldn't be any loss of focus if the original widescreen elements were used, and there's no way in hell this unimproved trailer footage should have sharper lines than the cleaned up, color corrected restoration version. Something doesn't add up.

Exhibit E: Our final pieces of evidence against the claim of being the original theatrical widescreen version. My criticisms of the widescreen version would be meaningless if what we were actually watching had additional material on the sides which was lost to the pan and scan conversion to full screen. As you can see from these pictures of my monitor, I have watched both versions of the movie in their entirety, synched for simultaneous play, and I can verify that there is nothing lost to the sides in the full screen version. What is lost is a great deal of the picture from the top and bottom in the widescreen version. I maintain that's because the "theatrical wide screen version" from Disc 1 is really just a close-up of this same set of negatives that they got the full screen version from, which have been letterboxed and digitally stored as anamorphic. I maintain that this has been cropped to widescreen after the fact, and although that was doubtless the very same thing that was done before it hit theaters in 1986, I think this version has been produced much more recently in order to sell the DVD to the anamorphic loving, HD widescreen TV having people who don't know any better.

His royal magistrate has reached a verdict: I call BULLSHIT. I do not believe this is the original widescreen version. I do, however, deem it to be a reasonable enough facsimile that Sony is off the hook… mostly. The inclusion of the word "Theatrical" is the real problem I have with this. As small a thing as this may be to most people, it just seems dishonest. Again, I don't know for sure this isn't the theatrical version, and I could be completely wrong about everything I've just written, but I don't believe it. It might be close, but I don't think this is the real McCoy. I don't believe it can be, because I don't think the real McCoy exists anymore. This film was one of the biggest cinema disasters of the 1980s, and I don't think anyone was too interested in preserving it for posterity. I'm the biggest Transformers nut I know, but I won't give in to wishful thinking. I don't think we'll ever see the original widescreen version, because I believe it really is gone. Of course, none of this matters a great deal to me personally. The full screen version on Disc 2 shows more detail than the widescreen, and is also the version where Hot Rod doesn't look pink, so that's the one I'll be watching.

The first thing you'll notice about the DVD is that the outer art work is lenticular. Its okay, I didn't know what it meant either. Here's how old I am: in Cracker Jack boxes we sometimes would get little pictures with a plastic coating on one side. When you held the picture at a certain angle, it was an open eye. If you shifted the angle of the picture just slightly, the eye closed. In reality, the paper has both pictures printed on it, and the plastic coating is a sheet of very small lenses and prisms which only allow you to see a part of the picture at a time, giving the illusion of the whole image changing as you move it. Also, because of all the lenses and prisms and light bending thingies, these pictures can take on an almost 3D quality if printed correctly. Images like this are called lenticular, which is one of those useful little words that people use because it sounds cool and is a hell of a lot more convenient than having to explain all this shit each time they need to describe the concept. Over the years since I was a youngin', Cracker Jack prize technology has definitely improved. Instead of switching between just two pictures, The Transformers DVD has a shifting 3D scene. Its pretty impressive, but why they didn't use it to make some of the robots transform, I'll never know.

Because Sony hates convenience, the lenticular image on this DVD is not part of the packaging, nor will it actually fit in the DVD case itself. As soon as you take the DVD out of the shrink wrap, find someplace flat to store the art, because once you bend lenticular images that's pretty much all she wrote. You know, they should've hired Takara, the Japanese toy designers who created the Transformers, to design this DVD packaging. They would have made that artwork fold neatly into its own protective storage case, then transform into a warrior robot with light up guns and chrome eyes. Buy six DVD and combine them into the awesome robotic warrior DVDstator! The jokes never stop, folks. Never. Oh, by the way, the DVD insert cover is reversible, so instead of having Optimus, Grimlock, Bumblebee, Blaster, and Jazz on the front of your DVD, you can opt to have Hot Rod, Arcee, Kup, Springer, and Daniel. Sony didn't bother to put a logo or much information the Hot Rod side, because they knew nobody would ever do this.

Disc 1 – This DVD has the (16×9) "theatrical" widescreen version. Unless you've been reading this review with images turned off, then you can see how nice the color correction is. At least, I think these are from the color corrected version. I've stolen and screen captured so many images, I can't remember which ones are mine anymore. The point is that the colors in this movie look AMAZING, and I had to watch a few scenes over just because I was focusing so intently on the backgrounds that I had to go back and check out the pretty colors on the foreground images. Since a lot of this movie takes place in the blackness of space, the quality of this color correction isn't always apparent. But check out the colors of the scenes on Earth; I would put the visual beauty of these shots up against anything Disney has ever done. Its just absolutely gorgeous.

You can watch this DVD with a number of different options, the coolest of which is the Autobot Matrix of Knowledge. Its a Pop-Up Video style text commentary, and casual TransFans and newcomers will find it interesting. Psycho fans like myself will already be familiar with much of this information, because we are the ones who submitted it. Sony asked fans to submit info to be placed on this DVD, and although I seem to remember having a problem with the accuracy of some of the info, I can't remember what it was because my PC won't let me play it.

There are two audio commentaries; one done by a number of fans, and one done by director Nelson Shin, writer Flint Dille, and Susan Blu, the voice actor who played Arcee. Unless you're looking for an excellent reason to hate Asians, don't watch the cast commentary, ever. Every time Dille or Blu start to say something even remotely engaging, Shin starts talking in his monotonous, glacial, broken English about something completely uninteresting. Granted, he speaks better English than I speak Japanese, but then again I'm not doing a FUCKING JAPANESE AUDIO COMMENTARY. God damn, he is so annoying. Even the simplest of sentences takes what seems like months to complete, and every time he speaks, EVERY FUCKING TIME, he brings up how they made the Decepticon ships purple to match the logo, and the Autobot ships orange to match their logo. We get it, dude. We got it the very first time you said it. Also, the Autobot symbol is red, jackass, not orange. RED. There is a big difference.

The fan commentary features five different fans, only two of whom you need to remember. Paul Hitchens runs SpaceBridge.net. He's from London, so whenever you hear someone with a British accent speaking, listen up. He offers a lot of good information and seems to be a generally positive and intelligent human being. The other is one is Alex Weiner (pronounced "whiner"), and I'm not going to link his website because he spends the entire commentary being an asshole. Paul Hitchens gives us interesting info, like how the U.K. version had a Star Wars-esque scrolling text opening instead of the American credits, and how at the end of the movie there was a voice-over promising that Optimus Prime would return to lead the Autobots again. The appropriately named Weiner brings nothing at all to the table; he just acts like a dick and generally brings the mood down like the shitty little fucknut he apparently is.

You're probably wondering why I'm trash talking someone I've never met or heard of. The answer to that question can be found in Scramble City. Because the Japanese got this movie a year after we did, they had time to make a transition episode, "Scramble City." It was basically made to bridge the gap between the end of season two and the movie, as well as chronicle the creation of Metroplex. Unlike the rest of the Transformers series, it was not produced by Marvel/Sunbow or Hasbro, and was never shown in the States. As a Japanese produced episode, the rights to the voices and music are still owned overseas, so when Sony decided to put this episode on the DVD, all the sound had to go. Instead of redubbing the entire episode, they opted to have a non-optional audio commentary over the entire show, and guess who's on it. That's right; our old buddy Weiner. He and some other guy do a running commentary, and Weiner is a fucking dickhead all through the show. He actually yells at the other dude at one point. This is the kind of fuckwad that people make fun of when they talk about sci-fi fans in general. Guys like this give the rest of us a bad name. I mean, here's your chance to be a permanent part of the Transformers, and you've gotta make an ass of yourself and ruin TWO commentaries. All you had to do was pretend to have social skills and charm for a total of about 3 hours, and you didn't. The other guy on the commentary seemed okay, but I'm not going to look up his name or link his site because he was in the same room with Mr. Weiner and did not punch him in the face. For that oversight, he gets no linkage.

The original theatrical trailer and TV spots are a must see, especially the hype over the widescreen animation that I talked about before. My first reaction to the remastering side-by-side comparison was that it was total bullshit. There was no way they made the movie look that much better; I was convinced that they had fucked with the old footage to make it look worse. But when I pulled out my old Rhino DVD, I was never more glad to be wrong. Sure enough, the movie really looked that bad. Kudos once again to the film restoration crew at Sony; they really knocked this one out of the park.

The Transformers 2007 live action movie trailer and special sneak peek are a big letdown, just like everything else Spielberg has been involved with since Schindler's List. There's absolutely zero robot footage. Its just a bunch of vehicle chase scenes and footage of various humans running, all intercut with Spielberg and Bay giving each other mutual verbal blowjobs and saying how much they just L-O-V-E those Transformers. I really, really want to like this movie, but its getting harder and harder to expect anything good. It appears that they've made a list of every single thing that made the Transformers work back in the '80s, then purposefully removed every shred of that from this film. I so, so, SO hope I'm wrong. As the first live action movie of a very long standing and beloved franchise, Transformers needs to be a Batman Begins, but I'm really afraid we're in for a Batman & Robin.

Disc 2 – This is the DVD that Jesus, Santa, and that guy from Highway To Heaven sat down and designed just for me. The full screen version has the same great look as the widescreen, but the color correction is different. I sat at my PC and watched the Rhino version, the 20th anniversary widescreen, and the 20th anniversary full screen, and I can tell you right now that all three films have different color levels and clarity. The weird thing is that none of them is consistently better than the other two; at some point during the movie, each one of these versions looks way better than the others. What would be really sweet is a scene by scene reconstruction, however, that was not the goal of these new DVDs. They were simply restoring the entire movie to the look of the original 1986 theatrical release, and to that end they have performed admirably. And while the Rhino and widescreen both have their moments, the full screen version on Disc 2 is where its at. None of the loss of picture like the widescreen version, none of the surprising darkness of the Rhino release; the full screen version is my Shangri La. Plus Disc 2 has better bonus features.

The featurettes "Death of Optimus Prime," "Cast and Characters," and "Transformers Q&A" are surprisingly interesting. "Cast and Characters" is my favorite because they discuss working with Leonard Nimoy and Orson Welles. I knew Welles died shortly after recording his lines for this movie, but I had no idea what bad shape he was in when he did so; apparently he had to be brought to the studio in a wheelchair, could barely stand up to walk five feet to the microphone, and was wheezing so badly they didn't know if they were going to be able to use any of his lines at all. Its very interesting stuff, and Nelson Shin isn't nearly as irritating as he was in the commentary, partly because we get to see that he looks crazy as hell. Imagine Dr. Emmett Brown, Don King, and General Colin Powell were to get into that teleporter from The Fly and fuse themselves together into BrowndEllKing. If BrowndEllKing were to rape a homeless Korean prostitute, the offspring of that unholy conjunction would grow up to look just like Nelson Shin. Think I'm wrong? See for yourself:

The animated storyboards are pretty sweet, especially the storyboards of Starscream's amputation and the deleted scene where Ultra Magnus, Red Alert, Tracks, and Sideswipe take Devastator down after he rips open Autobot City. I would have loved to have seen that fully animated. The American toy commercials are fun, especially if you haven't seen them in a while. But the Japanese commercials are fucking unbelievable. Takara did an amazing job, lad, stop-motion animating actual Transformers toys. Amazing. They've even got special effects and live explosions in the commercials. Its really impressive, and makes the American "kid makes a Transformer pretend to fly" promos look pretty damn shabby.

The DVD-ROM Autobot City Trivia Game looks great, but its completely weak. It needs to be a LOT harder to be any fun at all. The link to exclusive online content is perhaps the biggest non-bonus of all. I don't like it when companies do this "exclusive link" nonsense, especially when the crap they link would be better presented if they just put it on the damn DVD. I considered downloading the exclusive content and posting it here for our readers to use because FUCK THE MAN, but after checking it out, I can tell you you're not missing much. Anything really worth your while I've stolen and put on this page already. Where, you ask? Well, just as there are Easter eggs on these DVDs which are well worth searching for, the stuff I stole is likewise hidden as Easter eggs right here on this page. Go searching, and enjoy the freebies, my sci-fi peeps. I love you, too.

There are two very important things on Disc 2 I haven't mentioned yet, and I'm not exaggerating at all when I tell you that these DVDs could have been double the price, and these two features would have made it worth every damn penny. I'm talking about the promotional trailer and the test/deleted/alternate footage. OH MY FUCKING LORD IN HEAVEN, ITS SO GOOD. Remember Paul Hitchens, the nice English chap I told you about earlier? Well, he provides more mandatory commentary to go along with pieces of footage that were excised from the film, and an even longer reel of footage that was shipped around to movie studios to promote the movie.

Like "Scramble City," the promotional trailer contains copyrighted material that Sony can't distribute, but this time its got nothing to do with Japan. Being the TransFan I am, I hunted this promotional reel down years ago, long before YouTube came along and made such things convenient. I haven't seen it in years, but the one thing I remember about the reel's audio is that the filmmakers who pieced it together apparently thought copyright violations were just peachy keen; the music they used for the trailer was James Horner's score from Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Kahn. Don't get me wrong, it was cool as hell to watch Unicron do his thing to the same music the Genesis device destroyed the Mutara Nebula to, but I long ago made peace with the fact that this meant I'd never see a decent copy of the reel. Well, I was wrong again. Sony scrapped the audio entirely and, unlike my copy of a copy of a dozen other copies, used a clean piece of film. All four minutes and 24 seconds of this piece of eye candy look so great I just had to keep touching myself while I was watching it. Its hard to maintain an erection while an Englishman drones on about animation sequences and lighting effects, but I really had no other choice. Disc 2 has tongue prints all over it from where I've been French kissing it. I'm gonna show you some pics from the promotional trailer and the test/deleted/alternate footage now so Disc 2 and I can have some us time. See you on the flip side, homeys.

Above, Unicron's left pincer pierces Lithone in the final version of the film. Below we see that the right pincer was also fully animated, but that footage was left out of the theatrical release.