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[Fighbird]

(First off: Apologies for the late entry. Real life has a tendency to take away much of my spare time, and this is what happened. "We now return you to our regular programming"... )

It's the year 1988.

I'm 10 years old, the proud owner of Seaspray and Targetmaster Blurr, but was yet to experience the complete TF universe in full. No one I knew at that point was really "collecting" (and I use that term loosely, as it back then was more in the line of "owning more than 1 or 2 toys and buying them semi-regularly"), so I was really surprised to know that a boy in another class had (at least) 3! He brought them along one day: Mirage, Onslaught and Vortex. I'm pretty sure we came to talk about it after I had brought mine to school one day - and that was a real eye-opener for me.

G1 Mirage: Toy, accessories and box are vintage - stickers and box insert, sadly, not.

Not only was this the biggest collection of Transformers toys I had seen outside the toy stores (remember, I "only" had 2 toys at this point in time), but this guy had some of those that I had been oogling at in my European catalog. Mirage - although being one of the classic car molds that originated with Diaclone - was strangely enough not high on my interest list at that time. Don't know why, really. Perhaps it was the fact that his vehicle mode looked weird to me with that long cockpit section in the middle. Robot mode was nice, but the two other toys that this guy had were far more interesting:

A battle convoy in the making? Japanese G1 editions (= crumbe-proof Vortex) with plastic chests and launcher gimmick on Onslaught.

Maybe it was because the kid was just as anthusiastic about these two that I was that I remember looking these over more vividly than Mirage, but either way, the combination element of these guys that he showed med was really impressive, even though Bruticus was a bit... shall we say, lacking in some areas?

WhY mY sHoUlDeR hUrT?

It wasn't untill 2010 or so before I was finally able to put together a G1 Bruticus of my own, but that fateful day of "show and tell" made me realize that it was indeed possible to "collect" these toys - again in the meaning of "getting more and more to build a real army". My mind was made up: From now on I would try and get more Transformers and then hold off a bit on my LEGO purchases.

Meanwhile, perhaps intertwined with the above story as this was also happening at school, a classmate one morning told me that he had seen Transformers as a cartoon on TV! I was flabbergasted! Surely he must have been joking, as I knew everything that was being shown on TV at that time; I was litterally raised by the 4 TV stations my parents had on their set: DR ("Danmarks Radio", danish broadcasting corporation), ARD ("Arbeitsgemeinschaft der öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten der Bundesrepublik Deutschland", consortium of public-law broadcasting institutions of the Federal Republic of Germany), ZDF ("Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen", german channel two) and NDR ("Norddeutscher Rundfunk", nothern german broadcasting).

So that one of these was showing Transformers would and could not be possible, because I knew the programming on each and every channel by heart. If someone was broadcasting Transformers, it was a lie. But it wasn't a lie, because the channel in question showing TF was Super Channel.

Click on image to go to a selection of Super Channel bumpers and logos.

A lot of fans in Europe who grew up watching the G1 cartoon did so (mostly) by watching Sky Channel and their children's shows like Fun Factory and The DJ Cat Show, which showed a lot of the then-current 1980s shows like Thundercats and what have we. But for me any my friends it was Super Channel - a rival channel with pretty much the same format and a similar weekend show for kids, "Super B.O.O.S.".

Direct link
B.O.O.S. intro and show (start at 0:41).

Super B.O.O.S. was hosted by this dutch kid (whom, I later learned, was a young man who's development had halted due to some illness so he retained his teenage appearance) who showed all kinds of great shows like Voltron, Robotech, G.I.Joe, Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony, Filmation's Ghostbusters, Blackstar and many others I don't remember anymore.

Anyway, since I didn't believe my buddy, he invited me over the next weekend to wath a VHS recording he would make for me of it. So when I arrived I was floored by finally seing my beloved toys "alive" on the screen. The episode was - as far as I remember - Five Faces of Darkness part 2. I didn't understand a word of english, I had no idea who this "Rodimus Prime" was, but Grimlock was cool and I saw Constructicons and Soundwave and one of "my guys", Blurr. Now, I was extatic to see Blurr on the screen, but at the same time I was a bit embarassed. It wasn't untill I was an adult that I started to appreciate John Mochitta, Jr.'s skill as a speed-talker, but to my 10-year old self, who maybe hoped to find a role model of sorts in a character that I "owned", Blurr was an embarassement. Talking too fast to comprehend (although granted, I didn't understand much english at the time anyway, but still) and annoyingly always interupting the others for some reason, while also being stuck (during the Five Faces of Darkness series) with this annoying little orange robot I hadn't seen before either just made him pretty unbearable for me as a character.

Robot dinosaur: Grimlock. Red guy: Roddy-who-imus?

Nonetheless: Transformers was on television! I quickly set my parents' TV to pick up Super Channel as well (turned out that we had access to larger packet of broadcasters than what the dials were set for - perhaps even Sky Channel, but I only searched for and found Super Channel) and religiously saw that Saturday morning show. Now, they had a kind of odd broadcast system: Every weekend the show would start at 7 or 8 in the morning (I forget which it was), with the Sunday show being the new episode which was then re-run the following Saturday.

Going to church every Sunday meant that I missed out on the initial broadcast and therefore the new episodes, so I had to wait untill the following Saturday before I could get my Transformers fix. My parent's didn't own a VCR, so I was hopelessly behind on all the new episodes all the time. It took a few years before I had saved up enough money to buy a VCR, but by that time Super B.O.O.S. was long defunct, and so was Super Channel.

But I had ab "in" to understading the Transformers universe now, and I revelled in it. I don't think I specifically thought of the show as one giant commercial (which it - to some extend - was produced to be, really), 'cause I didn't really want any of the guys on the show and couldn't get them if I wanted to, as they were long gone for toy shelves.

But my new-found TF universe was about to be shaken up drastically come December 1988...

[Protek]

Huh, didn't realize that Bart de Graaff was actually an adult, when he did B.O.O.S. It also turned out that he died in 2002 due to kidney failure.

I really like your blog, Martin. It always stops me to think of my adolescence. Those were the days. For me it was also a gestalt figure that got me into actually collecting Transformers. When I got the Technobot Afterburner, I came to realize that he was a part of a combiner team and I just had to have the rest. Then I had to have a Decepticon combiner team and the rest is history.

[Fighbird]

Thank you for your kind words, Tero.

Yeah, those were the days... I think it must be real hard to imagine a world pre-internet, where information had to come through "the old medias" like television, publications or even word-of-mouth - heck, I'm having a hard time remembering what that was like even now! If the internet was available to consumers back in the 80s, I would have jumped on there - probably with my mom or dad helping me with the english - and then looked into all that was Transformers. OTOH, in retrospect, I really liked the process of discovering every little thing piece by piece, and I also think it kept me more interested in the brand as much of it was speculation on my side untill I could verify it (i.e. who was that Rodimus Prime guy REALLY?).

Looking through that clip of a B.O.O.S. episode, I don't seem to remember all those other kids present and the dancing and outside-the-studio events. As I remember it, it was just Bart sitting at his desk and talking to the camera, and specifically naming the next show coming up. Whether he was speaking dutch or english, I can't remember but I remember his dutch accent when saying familiar words like "Transformers". I've read somewhere that the B.O.O.S. show was taped in both dutch, english and german; I'd definitely remember if he was talking german on Super Channel.

[Protek]

Bart was speaking English with a rather heavy accent but he had a "Dutch twin", who spoke only Dutch.

[Tetsuro]

I didn't even know there was a Transformers cartoon, not until like the 2000's! I grew up reading only the comic book version, that was the only Transformers I knew.

I do often wonder how I would have reacted if I had known there was, in fact, a Transformers cartoon back in the day. Knowing about it probably would've had me ecstatic - not being able to see it, considerably less so.

And it is, indeed, difficult to imagine those pre-internet days when everything had to be learned the hard way. And it is difficult to learn about something when you don't even know it exists!

[Fighbird]

True that (and excuse my very late reply on this ).

Information - especially on non-mainstream stuff like a toyline universe - was very very scant if your local importers decided not to get all the media associated with it. In those early years, my only TF universe was that shown in that Euro catalog, and my little brain had a pretty hard time trying to get those toys I knew about that didn't feature in that catalog to make sense in said universe! Alas, poor TM Blurr...