Entangled Again
Aug. 28th, 2024 06:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerPosting twice about Transformers this year, even if it’s an anniversary year for them, was already unusual for me. I have to admit that even the casual awareness I maintain of them can sharpen uneasy thoughts about “light entertainment” now amounting to selling “established properties” to people hooked on them quite early in their lives. If there’s a risk to stretching them too far one way or another, there could be even more of a risk of just getting caught up with “bad faith actors.” Even so, one recent bit of news about Transformers reached not me not through the usual conduits I keep ready to hand but as a piece of “anime news,” and that had me thinking of a bit more than the very familiar characters that help sell the toys and other products.
I’ve known about “collaborations” between Transformers and other commercial properties, but one new linkup among several all announced at once in Japan managed to bring a fragment of the past closer to mind. A good number of people must be aware of how the Transformers toy Jetfire was a redecorated toy Valkyrie from the original Macross. It took me rather a while longer to learn how Hasbro had bought up the rights to several transforming robot toys outside the two major lines from Takara they’d started with to keep them from becoming the core of some significant competitor. Even back then, though, I suppose the entanglement between Transformers and Robotech, and between certain pictures on Battletech product covers and some discount-store transforming robot toys named Convertors, stuck in my mind.
This time around the collaboration that really got my attention was with Macross 7, approaching its own thirtieth anniversary. I was nudged towards thoughts of how long it’s been since I got around to watching that particular instalment in its franchise, and how my reactions fell somewhere in between the outright negative ones of certain Robotech fans in my first days aware of online discussions and the pointedly enthusiastic ones of at least certain English-speaking Macross fans ever since. Whether the show’s distinctive melding of “mecha and music” would in fact align with my developed taste for “straight-faced absurdity” in anime if I could only look at it the right way might be a question. In trying to articulate my reactions, though, I do have to admit to an enduring aesthetic judgment of having thought most of its costume and mechanical designs unappealing. That the announcement just “teased” the collaboration toy in silhouette might have done more for my interest than a full revelation of how it’ll look. I suppose I also wound up thinking a bit of the casual intersection between “piloted mecha” and “robots who are the characters themselves” and how that first concept might not have been introduced over here early enough to qualify for casual suspension of disbelief from dedicated science fiction fans, but then I recalled there have been previous collaborations between mecha anime and Transformers in Japan.
I’ve known about “collaborations” between Transformers and other commercial properties, but one new linkup among several all announced at once in Japan managed to bring a fragment of the past closer to mind. A good number of people must be aware of how the Transformers toy Jetfire was a redecorated toy Valkyrie from the original Macross. It took me rather a while longer to learn how Hasbro had bought up the rights to several transforming robot toys outside the two major lines from Takara they’d started with to keep them from becoming the core of some significant competitor. Even back then, though, I suppose the entanglement between Transformers and Robotech, and between certain pictures on Battletech product covers and some discount-store transforming robot toys named Convertors, stuck in my mind.
This time around the collaboration that really got my attention was with Macross 7, approaching its own thirtieth anniversary. I was nudged towards thoughts of how long it’s been since I got around to watching that particular instalment in its franchise, and how my reactions fell somewhere in between the outright negative ones of certain Robotech fans in my first days aware of online discussions and the pointedly enthusiastic ones of at least certain English-speaking Macross fans ever since. Whether the show’s distinctive melding of “mecha and music” would in fact align with my developed taste for “straight-faced absurdity” in anime if I could only look at it the right way might be a question. In trying to articulate my reactions, though, I do have to admit to an enduring aesthetic judgment of having thought most of its costume and mechanical designs unappealing. That the announcement just “teased” the collaboration toy in silhouette might have done more for my interest than a full revelation of how it’ll look. I suppose I also wound up thinking a bit of the casual intersection between “piloted mecha” and “robots who are the characters themselves” and how that first concept might not have been introduced over here early enough to qualify for casual suspension of disbelief from dedicated science fiction fans, but then I recalled there have been previous collaborations between mecha anime and Transformers in Japan.