For The Love Of Minibots (Pt 1)

The dream was Optimus Prime, or Galvatron, or Metroplex, or Scorponok. The reality was Minibots.

For most of us, a big-ticket Transformer was the sole preserve of Christmas or birthday presents, if at all. A mid-size one - an Autobot car or Decepticon plane - might arrive as an occasional reward for good behaviour, but none of that was enough to keep the plastic crack addiction going. That’s where Minibots came in - matchbox-sized car-robots with pocket money prices. A few weeks of saving up, or sufficient pleading and begging to an exhausted parent desperate to be left alone for a couple of hours, and you could have yourself a new Transformer right there and then.

Runner-up prizes, lacking the complexity, accessories and fancy painted metal parts of their shelf-hogging larger brethren. And yet they never felt like that - because Minibots were the heart and soul of Transformers.

It only took a couple of years until the toyline’s overall aesthetic settled into the Basically A Colourful Bloke look it maintains to this day. Yes, 80s toy-tech meant the bots continued to be oddly-proportioned and stiff as statues, but a fairly homogenous, relatively human-like concept of ‘robot’ quickly emerged. By contrast, Minibots weren’t afraid to be weird.

Their origins were as part of a Japanese line called Microchange, which wasn’t originally intended to be paired with the vehicular ‘Diaclone’ range that gave us the likes of Optimus, Starscream and Jazz, but did include the toys that became Megatron and Soundwave.

This had an entirely different idea of ‘cool’ to what became the Western vision of sci-fi robots, operating more on a principle of what weird and wonderful mechanical beings could emerge from familiar objects - in this case, toy cars, in the penny racer mould.

You know Bumblebee, of course. That yellow shmuck who was everywhere in the late noughties and early teens, thanks to being front and centre in Michael Bay’s five-film rebellion against sense, reason and taste. He’s a brave, sporty hero wherever he crops up these days - but back in 1984, he looked like this:

I’m sick to the back teeth of that yellow bastard by now, and yet I love his original toy. It’s ungainly, it barely has hands, its head barely reaches into the third dimension and it only takes about six seconds to transform. It’s the polar opposite of what has become the accepted norm for a ‘good’ Transformer. But it also drills right to the core of why these things appealed in the first place.

‘Robot’ did, does and should mean so much more than ‘metal man.’ It was the most exciting word in the world to me in 84-86 or so, because it could mean anything - strange metallic entities beyond all imagining, inhuman and mysterious. The original Bumblebee, and his Minibot brethren, are far from the weirdest of old-school Transformers - hello, Whirl and Sky Lynx - but they’re unashamedly robotic. It’s both easier and far more satisfying to picture the family car standing up straight and reconfiguring itself into this awkwardly-proportioned clanking weirdo than it is basically a superhero with a bonnet on its tits.

And the transformation supported this. My 6-year-old recently asked me, while wielding her bent and broken Arcee at me after a devastatingly unsuccessful attempt to turn it into a car, why it takes several minutes to change a toy Transformer, but in cartoons it’s just a couple of seconds. It’s a fair point. Even the relatively simple original toys involved a fair bit of fiddling and finagling to get things just right - especially when a kid, it was something you’d have to sit down and dedicate yourself to, not just make click-clack-clunk noises and have yourself a robot.

Optimus was a major exception there, just one of many reasons why Captain Americar is so beloved - apart from those fiendish detachable fists, it was the work of a moment to flip between Dadbot and big red lorry. But the Minibots were where it was really at, in terms of realising the fantasy of Transformers in the school playground.

Pull out legs, pull out arms, flip up head: boom, your yellow VW Beetle knock-off is already, and indisputably a robot. Like a first teenage fumble, it takes seconds, but it’s so much fun. It’s a Transformer being a Transformer like on the TV.

Bumblebee’s pint-size peers were similarly near-instant fun, and if anything even weirder than our stick-limbed beetle-boy.

Huffer, with his head hidden inside a bucket and his gloriously useless shovel hands. A perfect freak, and, given he turned into a tiny truck, a regular consolation prize for kids denied an Optimus Prime.

Dumpy little Gears, one of two Cyclon-faced entrants in the original 1984 Minibot range. And which parts of him are his face anyway? What’s the deal with those little silver cheeks? Why is his head locked behind a gate? (Gears is arguably the least impressive of the set, yet bizarrely was chosen for a high-profile team-up with Spider-Man in the third issue of the comic).

Windcharger, whose featureless face aside is probably the most conventionally-proportioned of this crew, with a very cool car mode to boot.

Cliffjumper was really just Bumblebee with a different (and much more humanoid) face, but he was red, and therefore beloved. Fun fact: for a while, you could also pickup a red Bumblebee and a yellow Cliffjumper. While never something acknowledged by any Transformers story, the pick’n’mix quality of these colour variants cements the idea that these were more throwaway pocket-money toys than capital-C Characters.

And then the cream of the crop, my darling Brawn. He was my second-ever Transformer as a kid (I’ve already documented the first and third), and the first one I chose with my eyes wide-open. This was thanks to his brutal starring role in my first experience of the surprisingly transgressive UK Transformers comic, in which an electrical accident temporarily turned the diminutive Autobot into an unrepentant killer whose pure, unbridled rage enabled him to go toe-to-toe with the Decepticons’ finest.

Brawn is ridiculous: look at those clamps hands, single slit for an eye, chicken legs and total absence of anything resembling a neck. But as soon as I read about him absolutely Fucking Shit Up, my heart was his forever.

And to this day, I love his original look. He’s more of a 50s or 60s vision of a robot than an 80s one, like a clanking horror built in a mad inventor’s basement. I can imagine it stomping ponderously but menacingly down the street on those elongated legs, tracking fleeing humans with a dull light in that single eye, flexing those skull-cracking clamps in and out. Kill — Kill — Kill. Yet, in a moment, it could compress itself down into a Jeep and disappear unnoticed down the road.

This tiny monstrosity encapsulates the appeal Transformers originally had for me, before characters and canon had really established themselves. Goddamn weird robots from space: straight into my veins, please.

One of the highlights of my own Transformers collection is an original Brawn, still sealed within his plastic bubble (though sadly half the backing card is missing). Entombed for 41 years and counting: the one Transformer I’ll never open.

Such a wonderful and strange design - but the Transformers cartoon, with its perennial goals of relatability and ease of art, instead reimagined Brawn as a wide-headed wrestler with a conventionally humanoid face and hands, and tragically that’s the look any subsequent toy of him has opted for.

The paradigm of how much of the toyline’s original appeal was lost when robots weren’t allowed to be robots. Yes, Transformers endures to this day probably in part because its toys’ gonzo sci-fi origins gave way to more relatable character designs - but how I wish we’d had more Brawns.

In part two, I’ll look at the 1985 Minibots - Seaspray, Cosmos et al, the ones that really were everywhere.

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