Conventional wisdom in the field of Psychiatry holds that repeating a task over and over, in hopes of getting a different outcome, is a surefire sign of mental illness. And this concerns me, because damned if I don’t pop in the 1986 Transformers miniseries “The Five Faces of Darkness” about once a month, each time hoping that it’s actually a lot better than I remember it being.
But it’s not. Like all episodes of that series, it was lazily written, poorly animated and really only served to introduce the toys we’d all be asking for that Christmas. (I was eleven when “Five Faces” premiered that fall.) Really, I have no excuse for watching it as obsessively as I do — except, I guess, nostalgia. And that could be interpreted as a form of mental illness in itself, that I insist on coming back to a thing that reminds me of a happier and more innocent time in my life.
I think it’s just that I like to watch big robots punching the crap out of each other though. Also, I do enjoy heckling, and after twenty years of viewing, I have a veritable Rocky Horror stockpile of prepared material for a viewing of “Five Faces.” It’s a terrible guilty pleasure, but it’s my terrible guilty pleasure.
I mean, for starters, the thing opens with clips from the vastly superior production that was the Transformers movie. (This is not to say that the movie is anywhere close to good. Just that it’s infinitely better than the series in every measurable way.) To paraphrase the MST3K episode Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, “don’t show a good movie in your crappy movie.” It immediately raises our expectations, which are smashed to tiny bits the second we see the sub-standard animation and realize that the movie’s cast (Orson Welles, Leonard Nimoy, Eric Idle) have long since cashed their paychecks and vacated the premises.
Oh, but the guy who plays Blurr is still here. You know, that really fast talking guy who did the commercials for Federal Express back in the 80s. Only, rather than observing the very sensible tradition of putting the comic relief alongside otherwise serious characters, they pair him up with the only Autobot more annoying than he is: the bright orange “child” robot, Wheelie. How Blaster (also bright orange) can speak mostly in rhymes and manage to sound cool while Wheelie just sounds like a moron (“Wheelie okay, Blurr, what do you say?”) remains unclear. But watching the guy who talks fast and the guy who speaks in bad poetry together on a vitally important mission is comedy gold. Just not in the way the producers probably intended.
Also, there’s a middle eastern country called (I swear this is abslutely true) “Carbombya.” Apparently this offended part-Libyan Casey Kasem (who did the voices of Cliffjumper and Teletran I) so much that he quit the show. Between that and the goddamn death dedication after an uptempo record, it’s a wonder poor Casey didn’t drop dead of an aneurism in the 80s. (And where are the pictures he was supposed to see?)
Other subplots include retrieving the now-batshit-insane Galvatron from the results of his profound ass-kicking in the movie, a large contingent of Autobots getting stuck on the “planet of Goo,” and the secret history of the Transformers race.
And actually, that last bit ends up being pretty cool. Sure, it’s still cheesy and filled with holes, but there are some pretty neat ideas in there. (The Autobots and Decepticons originating as two distinct product lines that gain sentience and rebel against their creators, then turn against each other due to the differences in their programming. While it’s not terribly original, I do rather like the idea that, since they’re robots and all, they’re just doing what they’re programmed to do and aren’t actually “good” or “evil” at all.)
This is a backstory that could seriously benefit from a “reimagining” along the lines of Marvel’s Ultimate line. Except not like the half dozen failed comic book lines that have come out in the last few years, or that almost certainly terrible live action movie that’s coming next summer. I think it’s safe to say that these concepts will never be handled as well as they are here. Which is probably why I keep watching: maybe next time it’ll be better!