After a phenomenal week of box-office sacking not only does it look like Michael Bay's Transformers will be the biggest money-maker of the year but it also stands poised to mark the beginning of what will certainly become a treasured franchise for a new generation of ten-year-old boys. While the film manages some impressive action and has enough character development to sustain a viewing, one can't help but feel a little overwhelmed by the action, by the superfluous explosions, and by the expected Michael Bay pomposity. The film tacks on a message about "the good in humanity" but it feels empty and insincere. There is a deeper element to the film that is lackingand one that, ironically, was present in the original film. For many fans, 1986's animated Transformers: The Movie still stands as a touching and exciting film that marks the absolute pinnacle of what is considered by most former-adolescents as the greatest cartoon series in Saturday morning history. When the film was first released it was trashed by reviewers, made very little money at the box office and horrified millions of children through its thoughtless killing of Optimus Prime. But ever since that summer twenty years ago it has gained a bigger and bigger followingas that original audience of ten-year-olds grew up. There is something beneath the surface of that film that touches one more deeply than just the prospect of battling robots, and that becomes more and more apparent as one agesthere is, and I say this with a straight face, a very real mythic dimension. The film's commercial existence is no secret. Transformers the series was designed to sell toys; it was the ultimate form of corporate propaganda, a half-hour toy advertisement masquerading as a cartoon series. But, inevitably, an imaginative storyline and likeable characters led it to become a legitimate television program. After two years the line of toys that were being sold in that television seriesOptimus Prime, Megatron, Ironhide, Starscream, etc.were not selling like they used to, and so it became necessary to introduce a new line of characters for kids' parents to buy. As such, the old toyline was deemed obsolete and a new line manufactured in its placein terms of the screen, this translated to literally killing off the old characters and thus introducing a new batch as the new heroes of the series. Enter Transformers: The Movie. Dramatic arcs can best be seen as transitions. Things begin in one form, undergo a change through a series of actions and at the end of the film are irrevocably different. Luke Skywalker leaves his farm and saves the galaxy; Rocky Balboa steps out of the divey Philly gym to become a heavyweight contender; Thomas Anderson leaves his office world to become cyber-superhero Neo; Ellen Ripley survives her space-trucker friends to become a soldier. Naturally then, Transformers: The Movie was set-up as a transitionary piece that moved one group of characters into another, at the same time facilitating some kind of final resolution to the conflict instigated in the original cartoonthe post-movie series still had autobots and decepticons, who transform from humanoid soldiers into cars and planes of various sorts, but aside from that it shared little in common with the pre-movie series; the film would make the daring move of providing finality to the original series, at the same time unintentionally infusing the story with crushing gravity and a moving arc. In the series, nothing was ever solved; the battle was always a draw so that viewers could tune in next week as the fight continued, and characters never died, they simply limped away and shook their fists at each other. With the movie effectively ending this storyline to begin a new one, this irresolution was starkly undone, in a move that no corporation would ever have even contemplated were it not for the removed perspective that they were merely selling toys and not characters that viewers had emotional investment in. In the first half hour the battle between good and evil was decided in a massive firefight, the scale of which had never been known in American animation before, one that took on Biblical overtones by the time Optimus Prime intoned "One shall stand, one shall fall"; the stronghold of the good guys was torn apart and left a smoldering ruin; characters died when they were shot, being killed off left and right, often with a sadistic sort of malevolent glee; Optimus Prime and Megatron finally faced each other in a fight with real consequencesand Optimus Prime died. By the end of this thirty-minute autobot bloodbath, the heads of kids across the country were spinninghere was a vision of the Apocalypse for children. Out of this almost Biblical conflict was introduced a new story pointan object that symbolised leadership of the good guys called The Matrix, which also held the key to their power, given to the newly appointed leader, Ultra Magnus, by Prime as he lay on his deathbed. With this, the film ultimately became an archetypal tale about the transition of power, about the transfer of leadership, and about how a young solider that no one, not even Prime, thought of finally becoming the unlikely leader of these autobots. With the heroes perpetually on the run and being beaten, a brooding atmosphere of menace hung over the picture, and with the Apocalyptic notion of Unicron, an almost Jung-ian being that destroys entire worlds with frightening detachment (and given god-like legitimacy by Orson Wells less than a week before he died), the film became a great myth about rebirth, about new life growing out of the destruction of the old. When those ten-year-old boys finally recovered from the shock of Prime dying and grew up they came to see that there was more to the film than simply robot-fighting-action and merchandise-movingthis was more than just a simple children's film. Of course, that is not to say that the film should be considered amongst the ranks of Star Wars or Lawrence of Arabia. It is enjoyed firstly because it has lots of action scenes, lots of spaceships crashing, lots of robots shooting each other, at least three planets destroyed on-screen, eye-catching Japanese animation, and a heavy metal soundtrack. But when Hasbro demanded that these elements be mixed in first and foremost amongst a storyline transitioning one toyline into another, the writers, unintentionally, were forced into a direction that resulted in a thrilling, violent, and ultimately moving story about rebirth and the transition of power. And thats why Michael Bay's film will always play second-fiddle; the mythic dimension, violent gravitas and enduring appeal of 1986's Transformers: The Movie was a mistake, a fluke that was not repeated when Hasbro went back to the drawing board for its $200 million live-action counterpart. Well see what its sequel has in store.