So when the planet-eating Unicron attacks the Transformer homeworld of Cybertron in the comics, Brainstorm is singled out as the first casualty. Yet he didn’t catch on like Bumblebee or Grimlock or even The One Voiced By The Fast-Talking Guy From the Micro Machines Commercials. He had a somewhat prominent role in the cartoon (both in America and Japan) when the new Headmaster toys were introduced, and he stood out in the comics just because he was smart enough to fix other Autobots. And the Transformers will never be the same.īrainstorm was never quite an A-lister in the Transformers commercial empire. Ironhide, the amiably Southern gentleman of the group, is clearly dead. They’ll be back on their feet in no time! And now… uh, Megatron just blew off Ironhide’s head at pointblank range. He can be fixed! That happened all the time in the cartoon! And Ironhide and Ratchet went down as well, but let’s not fret. He’s tough! He’ll get better! And now Prowl got shot and is vomiting smoke. OK, so the Decepticons gunned down Brawn.
Some young viewers might’ve even stayed optimistic during the movie’s first big slaughter, when an Autobot shuttle is attacked by Decepticons and ’80s hair metal. After all, no one on that doomed planet was an established Transformers character. Perhaps kids didn’t realize what was in store, though. The film opens with an entire planet of robot-people being eaten by Unicron, a giant mecha-creature voiced by Orson Welles. Transformers: The Movie came as a shock to kids who were used to the milder violence of the TV cartoon, where no one actually died despite all the explosions and laser barrages. And so the Transformers franchise taught children valuable lessons about sacrifice, mortality, and how you shouldn’t get all that attached to characters whose fate depends on what’s on the shelves at Toys “R” Us. More obscure Transformers might simply disappear, but dozens of recognizable and once-important characters met grisly and sudden demises. Yet the Transformers comic series was no slouch when it came to killing off the cast, particularly when writer Simon Furman took over the book. Many kids first learned this lesson with the Transformers movie, which murdered a bunch of old favorites to make way for new characters/products. The Transformers cartoons and comics always had plenty of new action figures to promote, and they couldn’t let a bunch of toyless characters distract children. As characters in a vast and calculated 1980s toy line, the Transformers lived by simple rules and died by an even simpler one: when an Autobot or Decepticon’s toy was cycled out of production and off shelves, he wouldn’t be around much longer.