And though Megatron has killed you
We'll continue
We'll continue
We the Autobots do thank you
And we will miss you
We will miss you
-Mr. McFeely, "The Death of Optimus Prime"

"I Hate the 80's"
Since I'm a pretty big geek, people often expect me to be the biggest geek of all time. Which is why a lot of my casual acquiantances ask me how pumped I am about Transformers when the truth is I've never cared about them, G.I. Joe, Thundercats, or any of the other 80's cartoon mainstays that engender rampant nostalgia-fueled passion within the hearts of so many of my fellow patrons of America's comic book stores. I remember really liking He-Man as a kid, but when they brought him back for that new cartoon a few years ago, I never considered actually watching it.

(It probably aired the same time as American Dragon: Jake Long or something.)

I was reading through a recent Wizard during another mindnumbing three-hour commute a few days ago, and came across this quote from Tom Desanto, the executive producer of the upcoming Michael Bay masterpiece:

I think for me it was always about Optimus Prime. I think that every boy had his Tonka trucks out and then when "Transformers" came out all of a sudden your Tonka truck was turning inot a Shogun Warrior and a badass robot. Optimus, in a weird way, was the first robot that made me want to become a better person. He was morally a strong character who was about honor and putting others before yourself.

I guess it's telling that we all have these arbitrary lines we draw. I remember once asking Danielle about the Spider-Man movie, and she told me how dumb she thought superhero movies are. She was kind of nasty about it, too. This coming from a girl who at one point seemed psychotically determined to become Buffy Summers. How the hell does she create this wall between vampire slayers and webswingers? I don't know, but I'm fairly certain that I'm employing that same mechanism between superheroes and robots in disguise when I go totally Clerks II on you and ask:

What the fuck is this guy talking about?!

The line that really has me scratching my head is "Optimus, in a weird way, was the first robot that made me want to become a better person," and the word that does it for me is "first". Optimus Prime was the first robot that made him want to be a better man. The first of how many? And who are the others? I hope Data was one of them. Because -- and keep in mind, I haven't given this much thought and am just flying off the cuff (and handle) here -- I think Lieutenant Commander Data of Starfleet was the first robot who made me want to be a better person.

That said and knowing my track record for making foot-in-mouth, crow-eating statements, I will probably end up seeing Transformers on a boring Tuesday night in three or four weeks and completely falling in love with it. Then it'll be three months of me writing blog entries about how much I'm just like Bumblebee.

God. No wonder I hate myself so much.