Anything with Robots.

I don't know why.

Voltron was the first robot cartoon I really got in to. I have a vague recollection of The Mighty Orbots as well. It was a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon about a sentient gestalt team of robots. I didn't see as much of it as I would have liked, since around this time my parents decided I should play soccer and I was dragged out to a field every Saturday, my mind more on the cartoons I was missing than the soccer ball rolling past me while people shouted in vain from the sidelines. There WAS that one time they let me be goalie. I had a loose tooth, my last baby tooth, that had been hanging on by a thread for weeks. A soccer ball to the face remedied that and the game was stopped while everyone helped me locate my tooth in the field. Not long after that I was allowed to finally quit, though by then Orbots had been canceled.

When Transformers came along, it incorporated all the things I loved about the other robot cartoons I had seen. The first toy that caught my attention may have been a Gobot, but THIS was my show. I caught it on Sunday mornings when it premiered, and followed it to weekdays when it was picked up for a second season. In sixth grade I once got a phone call from my elementary school crush, whose parents had sent her to a private school. I was glad to hear from her but was also watching my show, and my end of the conversation dealt a lot with all the cool things I was seeing. Foolishly, since that was the last time I heard from her. That's how bad it was. My parents took me to see the movie in theaters. While they slept through most of it I was moved and blown away, especially by the death of a beloved character. Years later I would own it on VHS, and later DVD. Many scenes I can recite from memory, sadly enough. The live-action movie has a lot of history and nostalgia to live up to, and I'm sure I and many fans are setting expectations high enough to be disappointed. The trailers for I, Robot didn't begin to show the diversity of mechanoids featured in that movie though, and after seeing it I can easily imagine what the TF movie might be like. Maybe I won't be disappointed. Alan Tudyk(”Firefly”; A Knight's Tale; Dodgeball:A True Underdog Story) infused the main robot of the movie with a very rich humanity; hopefully the TF cast will share these qualities.

The list of things with robots I've liked centers around Transformers, but includes other things as well: The Bots Master. Beast Wars. Beast Machines. Robocop. Ghost in the Shell. The Iron Giant. If it has a robot in it, I'm going to think it's cool. As bad as that Lost in Space movie was, I still liked the robots. I'd love to have one of those mechs from The Matrix: Revolutions. I wouldn't go to the extent this guy is going to; I haven't tried to build a working robot since I was 10 or 11. I blamed the limitations of my erector set when I couldn't get the thing to move without having a remote-controlled truck tow it, and never looked back.

I don't know why I like robots so much; maybe some part of me picked up my dad's mechanical inclinations, though not for anything useful. I used to take my TFs apart with a screwdriver and put them back together, just to see how they were made. I think it's just the aesthetics of well-drawn, intricate-looking shiny machines. I don't know why, but robots are an integral part of who I am. I even recognized the cool Decepticon border on this cool blog, something most people would look at and just think “grid.” Speaking of cool blogs, I'm going to be revising my links soon, possibly tonight or tomorrow. It all depends on whether this robo-nostalgia sends me on a quest to my basement to locate my Shogun Warriors colorforms...