ThisFilmIsOn

……………and he’s not leaving until your piggy bank is empty and you’re crying in the corner repressing every moment of your childhood.

"Sexy Cats"

Like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the 80’s happened and we have all had to learn to deal with it. Unlike those fated Japanese cities however, the way to survive the horrible mutilating physical and mental scars was not a lead lined bunker but something much more organic, being a child.

Being an 80’s child, meant you didn’t have to acknowledge the world dying of heroin induced AIDS in a grey ditch, while foreigners pointed nukes at us to the sound of Bros. For us the world was an amazing place, full of brightly coloured super heroes knocking the hell out of bad guys, of archaeologists being chased through jungles, of Jedi and Sith, Autobot and Decepticon, good was good, evil was evil and they were going to laser gun and punch each other in the face until good was victorious.

It was a simpler, happier time, I often wonder what moral guidelines today’s children are extracting from the amorphous asexual neon aliens, gangbanging each other to death with hugs and happiness in a lush pasture. A very exciting or a very disturbing future beckons.  But a very disturbing and upsetting present is already here. Uncle Hollywood has realised that there’s an easy buck to be made by feeding us our own regurgitated childhood memories by sucking out the goodness in the center and presenting an empty computer generated husk. So after cutting a swathe through the happy recollections of Star Wars and Indiana Jones (The Lucas giveth and the Lucas taketh away) they seem to be firmly affixing their eye on the animated areas of naive bliss that so many of us shared.

Of course the biggest of these so far has been Transformers (2007). If you love 80’s cartoons then you can’t do much better than 50ft robots pummeling each other in the face over and over and over again, but hang on wasn’t there already a Transformers film? Wasn’t The Transformers: The Movie (1986) one of the greatest 84 minutes ever committed to celluloid? Wasn’t it a story based around a prophetic futuristic energy crisis and the impending destruction of Earth by a planet sized god bot, starring Eric Idle, Leonard Nimoy and Orson Welles, ORSON FUCKING WELLES!  Here’s a little pointer for Bay and Bruckheimer and all those other film makers who spend their times blowing things up and computer generating their own kneecaps to make up for their diminutive under-parts and even more diminutive imaginations: Replacing Orson Welles as a planet sized robot god capable of destroying earth with carpet headed cock box, Shia LaBeef, and a pair of tits on legs is not conducive to creating a good film.

It resembles one of those ideas you find written on a piece of paper the morning after you and your friends decided to take an heroic dose of whatever mind bending hallucinogen it was you scored from that guy downstairs who wears a dressing gown and talks to his budgies. So after setting about our memories of The Transformers like a Portsmouth nursery worker with a camera phone they now seem intent on advancing through the rest of our childhood with all the gusto of a barmy scoutmaster freshly released from Broadmoor fueled by pissed in tea and a lust for hurt.

If Transformers has a contender for best 80’s cartoon crown it would be ThunderCats and it would seem this is the next franchise to be groomed. On reflection this should be a good move for the imagination vacuum that is 21^st century Hollywood. To start with there’s no need to crowbar in minge it’s already there in the form of Cheetara and she was hot, no question. Maybe it was in a slightly disconcerting cat fetish, domineering, ‘stamp on my nuts and call me Brenda’ way but hot neverthenevertheless.

There is also Snarf, an androgynous pointless talentless pathetic joke of a creature, causing trouble and rarely contributing anything like a Jar Jar Binks understudy, if  there was ever a justifiable role for  Shit Thebeef then this be it. So, as long as Uncle Hollywood; fails to cast Gary Coleman as Liono, acknowledges that Tigra was really the cool one and makes Cheetara the new Catwoman this should be a relatively easy play for him and his clumsy sticky fingers, but I wouldn’t come out from under the duvet just yet.