This was last updated on 28 August 2007, and is intended as an introduction to "Transformers" as a whole.
Transformers are, ultimately, a line of children's toys that was started in 1984 by the massive US toy manufacturer Hasbro (though calling Hasbro a toy company is like calling Microsoft a spreadsheet software company). But the reason for the toy line's longevity is due to Hasbro's brilliant marketing of the brand.
To properly talk about Transformers, we have to go back in time in the United States some 30-odd years. At that time, television had been around for about 30 years, largely unchanged in its broadcast receiver form (the original television, invented much earlier in the 1920s, was a cable receiver - broadcast came decades later). Broadcast TV had started, naturally enough, with the radio broadcast model, wherein shows had corporate patrons who would sponsor the productions. But TV producers quickly realized the potential for short video commercial advertisements and so TV soon developed the model of producing shows without sponsors, then selling ad time to recoup costs. It worked and advertisers were quite happy with the new arrangement: they could buy ad time on shows after they knew that they were successful, rather than affiliating themselves with shows that might bomb when launched.
But by the 1970s television had reached such market saturation that there was considerable concern about the effect TV and its advertising orientation was having on society in general and children in particular. As an example, the TV show Sesame Street and the Children's Television Workshop that produces it were originally started by people who wanted to take the lessons learned from two decades of constant advertising and apply them to children's educational material. People were very concerned about it, and so the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ordained that children's programming had to have some baseline educational value and could not be a commercial promotion for consumer products.
While all this was happening in the US, in Japan toy manufacturers were going wild with promoting their toys through anime and vice versa. Particularly popular at the time were science fiction anime (such as "Gatchaman", "Space Battleship Yamato", and "Captain Harlock") which had huge lines of best-selling toys, action figures, models and the like.
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Microman Gun Robo, 1983 (remade the next year into Megatron)
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So the US toy manufacturers were feeling the crunch. After the Republicans took office in the 80s and started making widespread policy changes, eventually the FCC rescinded the ban on commercial promotions. What resulted was a huge boom in product-oriented children's TV programming, both for boys and girls, as toy manufacturers scrambled to get their products a show. Virtually every toy that came out in the 1980s had a TV show: Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe...the list goes on and on.
Hasbro and Tonka were closely watching the latest trends in Japanese toy marketing. Giant robots (called 'mecha' in Japan) which had effectively started with Gundam, were getting more and more popular, aided and abetted by the clever toy manufacturers who added a new "cool factor" to the toys: they could convert from a robot into a vehicle! This quickly became huge with shows like "GoLion", "Kikou Kantai Dairugger XV" (later combined and recut in English as "Voltron"), "Super Dimension Fortress Macross", "Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross" and "Genesis Climber Mospeada" (later combined and recut in English as "Robotech"). Hasbro and Tonka, huge US toy manufacturers both, decided to get in on the game. They started the "Transformers" and "Go-bots" toy lines, respectively, and launched production on TV shows in parallel.
Tonka made the decision to make children's toy-oriented cartoons in the Hanna-Barbera mold: "kids will love anything animated" (the thinking goes), "and production can cut corners on quality in animation, art design and story".
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Tonka's Go-Bots
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Hasbro, however, decided to model everything on the successful Japanese toy-oriented shows, up to and including the anime art style (in an ironic twist, Hasbro eventually ended up marketing Transformers toys in Japan, so this was probably also a forward-thinking move on its part). Hasbro even went so far as to license existing Japanese toys for their product launch (the Microman and Diaclone toy lines by Takara). While the toys were largely the same between Go-bots and Transformers, the resulting shows were so different that Tonka's toy line was discontinued relatively quickly and Hasbro's has continued strong for decades. Kids at the time derided Go-bots particularly for the cheesy animation, whereas the "Transformers" cartoon made an effort to animate the conversion from robot to vehicle and back again in a very mechanical way.
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Optimus Prime - Masterpiece Convoy toy
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This formula worked so well for Hasbro that they repeated it again the following year for its G.I. Joe toy line, which then enjoyed a huge renaissance of popularity.
In addition to the appeal of the anime art style which felt fairly new still, the appeal of "Transformers" has been the story. In later years there would be comic books and manga for the Transformers, but in the beginning it was just the TV show, and it created a mythology concerning the battle spanning millions of years between the Autobots and Decepticons, with which likely every fan of this spot is intimately familiar.
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