How did you become a Transformers Fan

Discussion in 'Transformers General Discussion' started by comicstar100, Sep 25, 2022.

  1. comicstar100

    comicstar100 Active Member

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    How did you become a Transformers fan? What keeps you a fan to this day?

    Myself I was a 90s kid. My brother was 11 years older and a G1 fan. I had very little memories of G1 reruns rebranded as G2. I was watching Beast Wars. We started talking and he was telling me about the original cartoon. I got a few tapes from Blockbuster of a few old episodes and the original movie. It then became one of my favorite things to talk about with him.

    These days the toys keep me as a fan. Have been collecting the Legacy line. As well as going through the Japanese only content from anime to manga.
     
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  2. LiquidAimless

    LiquidAimless Banned

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    When I was 4 my mom’s then booty call worked at Winn-Dixie grocery and managed to smuggle me a Beast Wars Armordillo. I absolutely adored him and have been fortunate enough to keep him as mint as a thoroughly played-with 26 year old basic class figure could possibly be. I started watching the BW cartoon shortly after and have been a degenerate ever since.
     
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  3. JoeSmithy283

    JoeSmithy283 Well-Known Member

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    After getting off my Thomas the train fandom hype (I was three or four I think)

    I would then move on to transformers ( something my parents were more familiar with) jokes on them. I learned far more than their knowledge.

    I grew up with season 1 of animated ( I was an '04 nearly 05 as I was born December 22nd.)

    My parents bought The whole DVD series of transformers G1 ( unfortunately I cannot watch them as they were so scratched up from rewatching those old episodes, I mean consistently rewatching those episodes.

    My parents were grateful that I then got into Star wars as it was far more mainstream ( jokes on them. I know more about the fandom as well again.


    Prime was a damn good series that
    I remember watching the finale deadlock. I also remember watching that episode of arcee and cliffjumper going to the Autobots Bass.


    There have been ebs and flows of my love for the franchise.
     
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  4. imfallenangel

    imfallenangel Well-Known Member

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    Robots... and they transformed... that's about it. :p 

    On a serious note... I was in the science fiction stuff from the moment I could read or understand that light-up box that's called TV, even if at the time it was in black and white. From the original Star Trek, Space 1999, anything that had to do with the rockets and moon landing, everything from Lost in Space, Blake 7, Forbidden Planet, The Green Slime, and so on, including of course Godzilla and the like. Anything that the channels would be able to put on, I'd try and watch.

    Before much was on TV, I'd be reading all the "bandes dessinées" at the local library of just about everything that had science fiction and such as part of it, including Valérian, le Scrameustache, Yoko Tsuno, and lots more. I was blessed that this library had a massive section dedicated to these books. The Marvel and DC comics, and the "Gold Key" from the older times (Lost in Space, Magnus Robot Hunter and such) were also my usual reading.

    Then cartoons that a few were the original anime that made it overseas to be dubbed and could be watched. This lead to Saturday morning cartoons, which Goldorak (Grendizer), Albator, Capitaine Flam, etc. in french, and then eventually Saber Rider and several others, until Transformers began.

    By then I already had some Go-bots (Machine Robo) in hand and was reading Marvel's Shogun Warriors that made me truly love the giant robots stuff. (side note: I always wished that Power Rangers would have been less childish oriented and would have a more mature take on it, as compared to the anime and mange of such giant robots, it was really dumbed as much as possible).

    So by the time TFs was praying, I enjoyed it just fine, a fan to the extent of what it was, but preferred many other things, including Robotech. The simplistic children oriented stories (dumbed down) were what distracted the most, but I did enjoy some of the toys as they were but didn't get that many at first as:

    1) They just weren't affordable to me at the time (life was happening and lots of other priorities), so a lot of the tos I would get was based on how they appealed to me, and few TFs actually did... most of the purchases at the time was usually garage sales and such.

    2) While I really liked how many looked, the lack of articulation turned me away from most... considering that Jetfire was "THE" one I had to get (which in turn a large part to being Macross/Robotech, and actually had great articulation compared to just about everything else). Omega was another find as a flea market and loved it.

    3) While I really did like many, and while I would watch BW and BM as it would play, being able to catch all the episodes was a chore as channels didn't care much... in the following years, the following series came but by then I was busy with life, including eventually, my children.

    4) During this time, I still would read some of the comics (Marvel mostly) and stayed "informed" about the TFs in general, and would pick up a figure every once in a while when I could afford to and the figure appealed to me. G2 Hooligan was always always in my hand to fiddle with from the day I got it as it was my mini Macross VF fighter that was and still is one of the greatest molds even made.

    Fast forward a few decades and as my collection grew slowly, and the internet provided so many more options, the Combiner Wars arrived and I saw so many of my older figures that had been redone with a crapload of articulation, and I kinda jumped at those as I could... and while I really liked some of the combiners (Devastator, Superion and Bruticus being my top ones) I hesitated as I still wasn't financial able to commit to going "overboard".. it was the Dinobots that broke everything... I loved the G1 figures, but never managed to ever get a set, as they were in the better articulation figures at the time, but I simply loved them... so POTP announced them and I was "in". The Volcanicus idea was weird to me, but grew in time (and no love the concept).

    Even some of the movie figures have ended up being absolutely in my favorites, while the movies are brain fodder... I leave my brain in a jar and enjoy them quite fine for what they are.

    From there, things went crazy for a bit, and I caught up on a LOT of figures (and have continued doing so since but hitting the wall of having gotten so much that my collection is quite saturated now). Siege was the big one for me, and I ended up getting almost all of the figures, but ER, Kingdom slowed down very fast as I wasn't as impressed by the lines, and Legacy has been the worst, with barely a few figures (and just in the last month) appealing to me... and now I see barely more than 3-5 announced/leaked figures that I'm interested to see before I make my choice to get them or not.

    So, in the end, I've been there from way before the start, have enjoyed them greatly, seen their evolution, the changes, their ups and downs, the pros and cons of the figures, and now, within the last 3-4 years, they have absolutely taken over my collection in numbers.
     
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  5. Primeultra

    Primeultra Well-Known Member

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    Ditto
     
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  6. Confused Millennial

    Confused Millennial Well-Known Member

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    Watching movies on planes just as robots and Transformer-style AI started taking off. Perfect timing as I didn’t know who Bumblebee was till I was 30 (which probably dates me within months).
     
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  7. Transform4Christ

    Transform4Christ Well-Known Member

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    Got into Transformers when the 2007 movie hit theaters (didn’t see it until I was 13).
     
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  8. SPLIT LIP

    SPLIT LIP Be strong enough to be gentle

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    Saw the BW episode "Chain of Command" while on a trip to my grandparents' beach house. It rained all day so we stayed inside and I watched TV. The rest is history.
     
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  9. G1Prowl

    G1Prowl Prick, apparently

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    I became a Transformers fan when MTMTE Episode 1 premiered. I stay because it fed my imagination, and because they are finally making toys that I always wanted to own.
     
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  10. Necromaster

    Necromaster FEAR ME MORTALS

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    My earliest TF memory was getting RID01 Heavy Load and Mega-Octane for my sixth birthday. I watched episodes of it on and off on our family's old TV we had set up in the dining room, but it wouldn't be until Armada rolled around that I really got hooked.

    I watched Animated back when it was still airing, and in late middle school I would eventually start finding episodes of Beast Wars broken up into chunks on Ye Olde Youtube, cementing both of them as my favorite shows, though I'd personally put BW at the top (no disrespect to Animated though, it's a very close matchup.) By the time I was sixteen I had already accrued a decent collection with one proper shelving unit and once I had gotten a job it was off to the races. In the intervening years I've really zeroed in on the Beast Era and Cybertron lines in particular, the latter being a toy engineering height that we'll never be able to reach again.

    What keeps me in it nowadays is actually mostly vintage stuff. I'll buy the newer toys if they interest me (just scored myself Legacy Tarantulas and Skids) but as far as I'm concerned a good toy is a good toy and I'll happily grab any given toy from a previous lineup if it's got a good reputation, even if it's some non-show rando. Hell, especially if it's some non-show rando. Nobody talks about the Beast Era mutants and I've got three out of four of those little oddities, Soundwave exempted due to GPS. Also I really hope Earthspark is good, but I'm a little apprehensive about the fact that it's a streaming service exclusive... which certainly hasn't been helped by the fact that streaming services are making awful decisions all over the place right now.
     
    Last edited: Sep 26, 2022
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  11. TLK Barricade

    TLK Barricade Keep calm and Hail Megatron.

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    I first got into Transformers at the age of five when Armada was airing on Cartoon Network. I remember watching on TV every now and then, receiving a few toys from my mother and former stepfather as Christmas and birthday gifts (most notably Armada "Super Pants" Optimus Prime, which sadly lost an arm after one of my younger brothers threw it down the stairs while I was at school, but I continued to play with it until I was given the original Masterpiece Prime to replace it), and sitting down with my stepdad to watch the 1986 movie after he bought the 20th Anniversary DVD, an experience that was as enjoyable as it was strange to me (I had only seen Armada and a bit of Energon at the time, so I had no idea who most of those characters were or why the familiar ones looked and sounded different).

    I started to lose interest after Animated finished its second season (didn't even know there was a third season until it was already over), only to fall in love with the franchise all over again in 2010, when my biological father let me play War for Cybertron (the REAL War for Cybertron) while visiting his house. After that, I was obsessed. I started watching every cartoon and movie I knew about at the time but hadn't already seen, stopped asking for Pokémon and WWE toys to focus entirely on Transformers, and even started writing fan fiction. Admittedly, the first few drafts made Energon look like a work of art, but I think I've improved a lot over the years. I'd be happy to post the current iteration here, but writer's block is a bitch. Don't want to begin telling the story until I know how to conclude it.
     
    Last edited: Sep 26, 2022
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  12. Tetratron

    Tetratron AEColyte

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    Cybertron and re-runs of Armada.
     
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  13. Bass X0

    Bass X0 Captain Commando

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    My next door neighbour had some toys, I rented Arrival From Cybertron and really enjoyed it; and that was it.

    My parents brought me Bugbite and told me it was Bumblebee but even at four years I knew it wasn’t.
     
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  14. KrazyKraang

    KrazyKraang Krazed Kraang

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    I feel the same way. I grew up in the 2000's and me and my brothers watched G1. We always wanted G1 styled toys, and while many did exist the quality and screen accuracy wasn't as good as we would have liked and I always wanted a G1 wreck-Gar and a G1 Quintesson toy. Nowdays the posability of, screen accuracy of and so many of the characters Hasbro are choosing making toys of (like G1 Wreck-Gar) are literally the things I could only have dreamed of owning as a child.

    And if it wasn't already obvious, I own Studio series Wreck-Gar lol.
     
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  15. skywarpD26

    skywarpD26 Well-Known Member

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    I was about 2 years old when the original series first aired and at the time I live on a street that had quite a bit of Semi-Truck traffic and I enjoyed watching them go by. My Mom thought the show would be something I would enjoy with Optimus alt-mode being a Semi-Truck and well the rest is history.
     
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  16. sevenlima

    sevenlima Well-Known Member

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    Watching Beast Wars.
     
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  17. Zentropy

    Zentropy Toys > Fiction

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    While shopping with my mother at the local Ben Franklin store, I talked her into letting me buy a yellow Cliffjumper toy I saw on an end-case display. I went back the next day for a Windcharger, burning the last of my saved allowance. That was the summer of ‘84, and my first exposure to the franchise (prior to the cartoon debut).
     
  18. sopclod

    sopclod Well-Known Member

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    I'm an OG fan. It's hard to overstate how freaking awesome the original toys seemed in 1984. We didn't really have a lot of robot toys back then. I was also into Go-Bots and Transformers were just better in every way. Was a fan of Voltron also.
     
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  19. SuperSunnyDee

    SuperSunnyDee Sense is like cheesecake.

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    My dad got Revenge of the Fallen for our family to watch the summer it came out. I watched the first live action film with him and liked it, but I forgot about it right after.

    But ROTF was different. Maybe I was just in the right mindset to appreciate Transformers. Everything about the movie and the Transformers franchise just clicked for me. I’ve been a fan since, being super obsessed with all the toys, games, cartoons, and scrambling over any media I could get my hands on in a pre-internet household.

    I only started veering off in Freshman year of high school when I started my anime phase. I kept an eye on the franchise and got a toy now and then. Needless to say I’m not as obsessed as when I was a 12 year old kid but I’m getting back into it more now regularly.
     
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  20. UndeadScottsman

    UndeadScottsman Ain't afraid of no Bad Spark.

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    I was born the year before Transformers came out, so they've pretty been around since before I can remember. One of my earliest memories is watching the Abominus vs Computron fight from "Return of Optimus Prime." Transformers always seemed like a great toy; three toys in one! An action figure, a vehicle or object and to change it, it's like a small puzzle. Bumblebee was also a big part of my love of Transformers. Being a small, even for a child, I loved that Bumblee was basically the smallest Autobot, but nobody ever treated him different or as a kid because of it. He and Wheeljack (the smart one, I always love "the smart one") were my favorites as a kid. Growing up I had quite a few Transformers (especially Micromasters, I love micro transformers), but I stopped collecting oh, somewhere during G2 as I just aged out at time. I indulged in a bit of nostalgia in my teen years, playing on a MUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucinations; basically a roleplaying chat service) and ogling all of the G1 toys I missed. (I used to have dreams of finding long-lost boxes at the local store), even tracking down pirated copies of the G1 comic. Beast Wars never quite did it for me at the time. I'm sure if I had watched the show I'd change my mind, but my only exposure was looking at toy pics online and wanting the two combiner figures, and the poor demo of the videogame. I came to appreciate it later as it became my #2 favorite TF show.

    It wasn't until 2001 when I was flipping channels and saw a commercial for Robots in Disguise (specifically Optimus Prime with a pair of giant missile batteries on his shoulders) that I got back in. Bought pretty much all of RiD, even tracked down a Brave Maximus (Which I still have ) and since I loved micromasters, I was the primary target for Armada, though the show wasn't great, I grabbed every toy I could for it, even the repaints. It was around this time that I grabbed G1, Beast Wars and Beast Machines and watched all of those start to finish. (IIRC, I watched Beast Machines in RealMedia, yuck) The poor Energon show coupled with being severely disappointed in the few Energon toys I picked up kind of killed that for me, so I dropped out of the hobby for a few years.

    Then the movie hype started, and I wound up getting every movie figure (It wasn't that hard, actually; my first movie collection takes up less room than my Armada collection), and then classics happened. I grabbed thse figures and enjoyed them, and even briefly went back and grabbed any old UT figure that I could sub in for a classic G1 character. I watched Animated and loved it, becoming my #1 favorite TF show, but weirdly I never got the toys. The piss-poor Revenge of the Fallen killed the movie toylines for me, aside from one here or there, I never collected movie figures again until the Bumblebee movie, even then it's only a handful of toys. I loved the initial IDW pitch, but All Hail Megatron killed that or me until MTMTE/RID, at which point I went back and collected ever trade I had missed. Likewise I only grabbed one or two universe toys, having fallen out of the fandom again. (Had to get my boy Octane, of course, who being a crappy loser Decepticon, had became my favorite character.)

    Skip ahead to around Titan's Return and I start getting back into Transformers a bit, getting a few figures here and there, and then War for Cybertron happens and it's just a barrage of extremely high quality interpretations of classic G1 characters as well as others from across the franchise, and my shelves exploded by this point, and I've been collecting regularly ever since.
     
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