Friday, December 25, 2009

25 Years ago in Transfromers CONCLUSION: Sounds like chicken OR: In the dark no one can hear you communicator

So here we are at the end of what some people may know as 2009 but what I more accurately refer to as the 25th anniversary of 1984, the year which officially kicked off the Toy Robots Wars of the 1980s. I celebrated with my appropriately titled "25 years ago in Transfromers" blog postings where I examined the origins of the greatest transforming toy robots toyline Hasbro ever introduced 25 years ago named Transformers as only I could. I knew nobody else on internet could or would dare to (be stupid enough to) write a hard hitting expose of the true origins of probably the most important roboplastic toyline in the history of people who weren't ten year old Japanese boys in 1984. I was thinking, how do I cap off a series of robotarded writing excellence that featured highlights such as a poem dedicated to Tech Spec Decoders, probably the worst audio recording of a Botcon panel ever and an eyewitness account of the origins of the franchise as related by Elmo? Well how about THE 1984 SOUNDWAVE COMMERCIAL! (But before you get excited, it's more like a barbecued version of the 1984 Soundwave commercial.)

THE SOUND AND THE BLURRY

To say I am disappointed with how badly this video came out is an understatement, especially considering the historical significance of the material presented. My fellow Macrocranians, that this is perhaps the only copy of the original 1984 Soundwave commercial on the internet is truly sad but hey it's something. I don't know why this particular ad is so hard to find out there but I've had a copy for a little while so I figured I'd use my grasp of advanced computer technologies such as hypertext transfer protocols and USB ports and the video encoder thingy my wife got me from Bed, Bath and Beyond the other day to save the internet from its lack of Soundwave commercial. Unfortunately my grandiose plans fell victim to my technical ineptitude and my reliance on crappy free video editing software. This resulted in not a super clean transfer of perhaps the rarest Transfromer commercial in existence but instead an experience akin to watching the perhaps the rarest Transfromer commercial in existence on a dying Sega Game Gear with sunglasses on. At night. Underwater. While wearing a welding helmet. And your eyes are made of chocolate pudding.

I'VE KURNIT ALL BEFORE

To say I don't know why this commercial is so hard to find is true but I do have my suspicions. I wrote my in-depth dissertation on the subject over at my second favorite place on the internet, Alt.Tarded.Transformerfans. In a nutshell I believe Hasbro pulled this and the first Transformer commercial under pressure from the National Advertising Division of the Council of
Better Business Bureaus. The NAD's job was to review kid's TV commercials and get ones that didn't meet certain criteria pulled. It is my theory based on newspaper articles and an interview with Paul Kurnit, former executive vice president of Griffin-Bacal during the Transformer launch, that the NAD called Hasbro out on Soundwave and the first Transformer commercial and they both got pulled. They probably aired for such brief periods that nobody had their VCRs on those days and subsequent generations of YouTube viewing Transformer fans have since suffered. Until now! Or maybe they're still suffering because I'm not going to YouTube this unless someone makes available a free video brightener program that my cheap butt can use.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TRANSFROMERS FANS

Christmas of '84 was truly the birth of my love of toy robots and the beginning of the Roboplastic Apocalypse. It was then that all over the U.S. a bunch of kids were getting the mother load of toy robots that would make an entire generation fans for life of Optimus Prime and by extension-Peter Cullen's unwanted children. But most importantly it would make 5 or 6 people twenty five years later readers of my blog about toy robots that's less about toy robots and more about my view of life being on the whole intolerable without my refusal to live in any year that is not 1985. SO MERRY CHRISTAMS FROM HELL and I hope you got whatever Hasbro branded variant of entertainment you needed to be happy and not go on shooting rampages.

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Evil King Macrocranios was voted king by the evil peoples of the Kingdom of Macrocrania. They listen to Iron Maiden all day and try to take pictures of ghosts with their webcams.