Optimus Prime Is Dead
I grew up on cartoons. My favorites from my childhood in the 80’s where shows like G.I. Joe, Thundercats, The Real Ghostbusters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Silverhawks. There were a couple that I wanted to see more of, but for a family living on Long Island without cable television, I could never catch more than an episode or two of shows like Robotech, Voltron and The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers.
These shows laid the early groundwork that would become my love of anime. While parents failed to see it, dismissing these shows as big-budget toy commercials (and they were exactly that) the people who worked on these shows did something no one was expecting. They made stories we cared about.
I think the earliest memory I have of a cartoon’s events actually sticking with me, was an episode of G.I. Joe, The character Shipwreck is captured by the bad guys, drugged, and chased by doppelgangers of his other G.I. Joe friends, which would turn into blobs to capture him to try and find out what he knows. There’s a scene where he fights them in a sewer and the whole time he thinks he’s watching his friends melt, including Scarlett, who also happened to be a cartoon crush for me.
There was nothing funny about that scene that can I recall. They played it straight, as serious as a heart attack. To a kid growing up in a suburban 80’s neighborhood, it was pretty intense.
There was nothing silly about these cartoons. Sure they had the occasional jokes, but the slapstick comedy was usually kept to a minimum. Thundercats had Snarf for that, Ninja Turtles had Michaelangelo. Ghostbusters would let Slimer helm the slapstick wheel since the rest of the Ghostbusters were relegated to snappy one-liners and sarcastic remarks.
I’m not sure when all these shows came out, as I watched them through the 80’s and well into the 90’s. But it was 1986’s Transformers: The Movie that got my attention with its storytelling. They raised the stakes in a way I had never seen done before. They killed a good guy. And not just ANY good guy, they killed Optimus Prime, the leader of the Autobots!
Up until that moment, I didn’t even know that could happen. Optimus Prime was like your dad but in a robotic, cartoon form that didn’t smoke too much. He was always there, a comforting presence. As long as Optimus Prime was around, you knew everything was going to be okay.
In the movie, Prime and Megatron have a long, drawn-out battle, where they brutally beat the crap out of each other. If they weren’t robots in disguise, the film might have had to have been given a PG-13 rating. They even used adult language. For probably the first time, I felt like someone understood that I wanted to see these characters brought to their full potential.
Then the G.I. Joe movie did it again, by graphically killing Duke on-screen (Yes, I know they say he’s in a coma in the film, but the man took a snake spear to the heart. Mofo is dead.) And they drove the stakes up even higher by having half the G.I.Joe cast captured during a failed assault on the enemy fortress, with the promise they and the rest of humanity would be turned into mindless monsters if the remaining Joes (the newest members of the Joe team and, of course, a ragtag group of outcasts) failed to turn the tide and win the day.
It was genius. It was edge-of-your-seat entertainment for preteen me. I didn’t want the usual Scooby Doo, Yogi Bear episodic silliness. The serialized stories pulled me in like no others could.
This would hold true for all the cartoons I enjoyed growing up. The best episodes were the ones it took them an entire week to show. The MASS device for the G.I.Joes, Lion-O’s Birthday trials in Thundercats. Whatever the series of events were that lead to Giant Kraang attacking New York in Ninja Turtles.
If the episodes were continued over the course of the entire week, you knew Friday was going to be an epic showdown for the ages.
I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. That feeling that not only was I enjoying what I was watching or reading, but that I would love it right to the very end.
That’s what I want to create for my readers with the Chloe Stewart novels. I’m not out to change the world. But if Chloe and her friends are the kinds of characters that people think back on, then I’ll be a happy man.
