The Toys That Made Us

Toy Society

The Toys That Made Us
December 2017 to November 2019
Three Seasons of Four Episodes per Season

Just a quick diversion of a review to give a heads up to a TV series I found by accident, when I needed to kill an hour one day. The Toys That Made Us is, in the words of its brilliantly 1980s cartoonesque theme song over a clever animated title sequence, “An eight part documentary series of the toys that we all know.” And, yeah, if you’re wondering, even if you’re not that good at maths, how an 8 part documentary series could run for three seasons of four episodes... they were obviously not expecting to be so successful with viewers (I’m assuming) and renewed for another season past their initial expectations. For the third series, the lyric changes to an incredibly stretched out “The continuing series... etc”.

That song and title sequence is great, though. With a cartoon boy and girl rushing into a toy shop and grabbing a toy each off the shelves before we see two adults in their own scenarios, still having their toys with them. So a doll in a female manager’s power office and an astronaut retrieving his Luke Skywalker action figure in zero gravity round out the credits... and it’s a perfect visual metaphor for the psychology of modern toy purchasers and collectors.

And the series is just as well put together as those titles. It’s a very humorous but extremely informative look at the background stories behind various successful toy lines and where they had all ended up by the time the series was made a few years ago. Wonderfully witty voice over commentary is pitted against various talking heads of company executives, toy designers and even some celebrity fans (as you’ll see as you read down the page), making for a show which is really entertaining. They also feature, in many cases, little re-enactments of real life events... many shown in a hilarious light.

The first episode covers the Star Wars figures made by Kenner (and Palitoy but they don’t really get a mention here) including the unbelievably lucrative deal they made with Lucasfilm (who weren’t smart on their end of the contract) and it also includes some wonderful knock off toys such as one country’s Dalmation with a Stormtrooper’s head and another showing a character in front of a control panel on the box... except the Death Star technology seems to have metamorphosised into a pocket calculator photograph in a very strange montage.

The second episode is one of my favourites, which surprised me as it’s dedicated to Barbie. Starting off with a re-enactment of the unboxing by the creators of the first Barbie prototypes, the designer hastily files off the painted nipples to make it look more market appropriate for the time. What I didn’t know was that the Barbie doll was a swiped knock off itself, of a German doll based on a newspaper strip about Lilli, a high end call girl and that the doll was given by men to state their intentions to sex workers there. And don’t get me started on the original prototypes for Ken’s sex organs.

The third episode delves into the world of He-Man and the Masters Of The Universe (something after my time in terms of toys, like a fair few of the items explored in the show). But I even found this one incredibly entertaining and it highlighted an issue that seems common among the people who first put a toy design out... a lot of the people who came up with these things at different stages of the process all say they were the inventor of the toy.

The last episode of Series One is dedicated to GI Joe... although mainly from an American perspective. This goes through the years from the first prototypes made behind the bosses back when he was away on a two week vacation, where incredibly authentic weapons were made and built next to artist’s poseable mannequins refitted with clay... which are the versions which are best known to me over here in the UK as the beloved Action Man from my childhood... to the modern, rebooted, smaller GI Joe figures. It demonstrates the huge risks some of the companies involved took and also shows the incredible popularity of the newer figures too.

Season 2 opens with an episode devoted to the toys of Star Trek. This includes those wonderful Mego figures I used to love as a kid (wish I still had mine, they go for a bomb nowadays) and also includes lots of mis-steps along the way such as the infamous Star Trek helmet with flashing light (honestly, Rodenberry would sign off on anything) and shows how, even though it’s a very successful franchise, the various companies trying to launch their action figure lines often failed because of incredibly bad timing.

Next up are the Transformers... another toy I know nothing about other than the live action movies. What I did find fascinating about this one is their origins being from several different Japanese toy lines mixed together and their roots in two of my favourite sets of action figures I used to adore as a kid, the Henshin Cyborg (Cyborg, Muton and Android over here in the UK) and my beloved Micronauts (I think I still have my Pharoid Micronaut in an inaccessible drawer somewhere).

Following this is the amazing tale of Lego, how a successful Danish house builder was hit by the great depression, became a carpenter and started making wooden toys which sold well... and the various stages to get to the full on Lego bricks inspired by the colours of Mondrian’s paintings we know now, including the ‘clutch power’ introduced in 1958, which was a real game changer. It also looks at their decline and almost liquidation before, of all things, their Bionicles sets saved them when, again due to bad timing, their Star Wars and Harry Potter licences wouldn’t sell toys.

The last episode of Season Two is devoted to something called Hello Kitty which seems to be a phenomenon in itself and includes collections and talking heads of such celebrities as Paris Hilton, as well as introducing us to the Hello Kitty vibrator. The writers use a nice Godzilla analogy in here too.

Series Three kicks off with the creation and development of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles property, taking it right back to the comics and, in a nice on screen moment, reuniting the estranged comic book creators, Eastman and Laird, for the first time in a long time. Writer/director/actor Kevin Smith also turns up in this one.

Next up is the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and the tenacious, eight year attempt to bring the show to the US, which utilises action footage from Japanese TV shows blended with new American footage... and the rise of their toys, which are retooled versions of the Japanese toys. It even owes some of its origins and shows a clip from that wonderfully bizarre Japanese live action Spider-Man TV show that I’ve been wishing some smart Blu Ray label will make available over here some day. Some nice footage of a younger Stan Lee in here too.

A bizarrely entertaining episode on the origins of My Little Pony comes next with a wonderfully poetic continuation of their success story in terms of their current designer (and let’s hear it for those ‘rump designs’... or butt paintings as the current design gal puts it). And then the series rounds off with a look at the various US themed Wrestling action figures over the years. I can’t believe so many of these non-articulated figures sold to kids at all, to be honest but the rivalry between the various Wrestling companies is certainly as fascinating, if not more so, than the successes and misfires of the toys.

And thats that. The Toys That Made Us is a truly great show and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that, at some point, it will be picked up for a fourth season. It’s shot full of humour and the only thing I will say to people who haven’t seen this is... watch them in order because some of the jokes depend on referencing back to earlier episodes. This one’s thoroughly recommended for both the young at heart and, of course, any grown men (who are, by definition, still just kids anyway). As one such specimen, I got a lot out of this show, for sure.

Bumblebee

Bumble Door

Bumblebee
2018 USA
Directed by Travis Knight
UK cinema release print.

Wow... it’s getting really dangerous to see an actual movie at the cinema in the UK again.

I thought the days of Draconian censorship were behind us but, no, first Aquaman (reviewed here) and now Bumblebee have both been pre-cut for the UK market to achieve lower ratings on the advice of the BBFC. So let’s be clear about this... if you go to see Bumblebee at a UK (or Australian, apparently) cinema then you are not actually seeing the film, just a highlights only version because, yep, they cut a full 6 seconds out of this thing. Personally I find one frame of film cut to be appalling vandalism but they’ve cut a whopping 144 frames out of this? Between them the BBFC and the studios should be hanging their heads in shame and refunding our money for making us watch things pretending to be films when they’re not the full version. I don’t think this is acceptable behaviour and I find it damned offensive. I won’t say anything more about it in this review but my hands are tensing up right now from writing about these crimes against filmanity because I’m so enraged. It’s not the only thing which enraged me about the movie.

So, okay... let’s go with the big main positive about this film and say that this prequel is the best follow up to the original Transformers we’ve had. It’s not nearly as good as the very first one but it’s way beyond the follow ups which, to be fair, is not saying too much because Transformers 2 - 5 were all, basically, absolute rubbish which I couldn’t believe were coming from the same creative team as the first one.

Although Michael Bay has stayed on with this one as producer, it’s a bit of a sea change here and the writers and directors have gone for a little change of pace. Sure there’s plenty of action in this one but there’s also lots of small stuff about the way the characters relate to each other and grow... in other words, there’s a lot of heart to this one. Something all the other sequels forgot to throw into the mix while they were similarly busy not allowing themselves to slow down from anaesthetising the audience with non-stop action and forgetting that contrasting action with some less kinetic content is what allows the action sequences to have an actual impact in the first place. This one... more or less... gets the mix between the two right and the result is we have a fairly well balanced film.

That being said, I was almost frothing at the mouth within the first five or ten minutes of what was left of this film after the censors were done with it... so enraged I wanted to yell at the screen and walk out.

Why? Well a complete lack of story logic continuity in the opening sequence which completely kills it.

The film starts off on Cybertron with the Decepticons winning the war against the Autobots (lead by Optimus Prime) and we see Bumblebee escaping to earth to await the coming of the other Transformers. All well and good but when we see Bumblebee on Cybertron he is already in the form of a car. Wait, what? It’s well documented in the Transformers movie universe that the various robots need to scan something before they are able to turn into it... and that’s further backed up in numerous scenes in this movie too. Since a car which is built to carry human passengers would be a completely alien concept to the Transformers at this point, then there’s no way any of the Autobots would be able to change into one. Not unless they’d already been to Earth. Oh, I thought to myself, that means we’ll be finding out that Bumblebee has already visited Earth in his past but... no... a minute or two later Optimus Prime tells him he’s located a planet called Earth they can all go to hide on. So... yeah... it makes absolutely no bloody sense that the first time you see the title character he’s in the shape of an Earth made car when he hasn’t even seen a car or knows what it looks like. This is untenable, people and sloppy writers should really be taken to account for bizarrely poor slip ups like this. Especially since it’s going to pop the average viewer right out of the movie while s/he tries to figure out just what the heck kind of story logic is being followed here. Or in this case... unfollowed.

Okay, now that’s out of my system, when Bumblebee gets to Earth things become more like the early, non-action sequences of the original Transformers, with the friendly autobot stumbling around, breaking things and accidentally bumbling his way through doors etc while covertly befriending the main lead Charlie, played by Hailee Steinfeld who I’d just seen... alright, heard... in another film at the cinema as Gwen Stacey in Spider-Man - Into The Spider-Verse (reviewed here) and also her love interest Memo (played by Jorge Lendeborg Jr, who was so brilliant in Brigsby Bear last year... reviewed here). Meanwhile they have to deal with the military from Sector Seven (from the previous films) plus a couple of Decepticons who have misled the military into helping them locate Bumblebee.

And you know what...?

Considering how angry I was at the start of the film, the rest of the story is so well written and performed that I even had tears in my eyes during one of the more moving sequences. Actually, being a prequel, this fits in pretty well with the previous films... apart from that annoying start with the car thing. It’s also really well acted and feels much more like an overall coherent story, rather than just a basic frame to hang set pieces on. Some of the action sequences felt a bit ‘samey’ and dull but at least they were well paced and you still felt like there was a reason to be having them... which I guess is at least half the battle with films like this.

Dario Marinelli’s score is nicely serviceable but it didn’t really seem to share any of the big themes created by Steve Jablonsky for the other ones. At least as far as I could tell because, during a lot of the action scenes, the noise was turned up way too much over the score for it to be effectively heard anyway. It sounded appropriate to the subject matter of the film, though, so that’s something.

Other than that... if you’re a follower of the Transformers movies and have been waiting for something which comes at least even a little close to capturing the lightning in a bottle of the first live action movie then Bumblebee is definitely the one to go see. It’s fairly heart warming and the director certainly has a good go at it. Kids would probably like this one too... even though it seems to be targeting itself at people who were of a certain age in the 1980s when The Breakfast Club was one of the main ‘go to’ movies for a certain generation. Don’t you forget about... this one.

Transformers - The Last Knight

Melancholy Bay Bee

Transformers - The Last Knight
2017 USA Directed by Michael Bay   
UK cinema release print.

Okay then. Here we are for another slice of well coordinated but ultimately bland Bay-hem. And it’s a bit of a shame because he’s obviously a very competent director and knows how to construct, shoot and edit action scenes that cram a lot into them without, for the most part in this one, losing you in the edit.

I’ve said this before on this blog but I’ll do so again now... I think the very first Transformers movie that he directed, 10 years ago, was absolutely brilliant and I consider it a modern action classic. I had no idea who the Transformers were (they were somewhat ‘after my time’ when I was a kid) and I really didn’t want to see that first one but I was dragged along to a screening by someone who was a lot more invested in the experience than I was and I was totally lost to the movie. It was a blast. It also had an absolutely classic score by Steve Jablonsky. Imagine my surprise and continued disappointment, then, when all of the sequels, often sharing some of the same cast and crew of this first one, were all so hard to watch.

I’m sorry to say that, even with the added experience and gravitas that Sir Anthony Hopkins brings to his role in this fifth (and possibly final) installment, he was not able to save the film or lift it out of the muddy puddle it seems so desperate to be clawing its way out of.

Actually, there are a lot of reasons why this film should work so lets take a look at those first.

I mentioned Anthony Hopkins was in this right? He, of course, adds a certain amount of weight to the film but he can only go as far as the script constraints will allow. Ditto for Mark Wahlberg who, once again, acquits himself very well and proves himself to be one of the more interesting actors out there today. He is also backed up by his new romantic interest Laura Haddock, his new surrogate daughter played by Isabela Moner (Nicola Peltz did not return after playing the character’s actual daughter in Transformers - Age Of Extinction (reviewed here) and Josh Duhamel reprising his role as Lennox from some (I think most) of the other movies. They’re all very good and, for the most part, don’t let themselves get upstaged by the effects.

Another thing which is good about this one is that it really does try to make as much sense out of the speeding juggernaut that the franchise has become as possible and tries hard to construct a story that makes sense with all the previous installments, tying them up into a perfect bundle. At the end of the last movie we had main Transformer good guy Optimus Prime leaving Earth to seek his creator and they pretty much pick up the story from there. Admittedly, they also add in some kind of weird war between Transformers in his absence and Wahlberg’s character is in nowhere like the happy place which was seemingly in his near future after the previous installment... choosing, instead, a fugitive's life on the run from new ‘misguided good turned accidentally evil because he’s playing for the wrong team’ Lennox and his squad of Transformer destroyers.

The film also, kinda, ties up where those medieval Transformers from the last movie came from and also mentions the Witwikky’s part in the history of Transformers' on Earth... going so far as to show a truly stupid photo of Shia La Beouf when he was in ‘crazy’ mode from an earlier film. I guess that’s Michael Bay’s not so subtle way of getting a little  bit of revenge after La Beouf quit the series... or maybe it’s just a cute in-joke, I don’t know.

So we have a plot filled with the secret legacy of Transformers and a script involving Mark Wahlberg being chosen by a bit of alien tech to be 'the last knight'. We also have a nice little prologue with King Arthur, Lancelot and Merlin defeating their enemies when Merlin strikes a deal with some Transformers to make a huge dragon machine. Actually, that sequence is a bit confusing/problematic because only a descendent of Merlin can wield a certain object in modern day to help defeat the Decepticon’s evil plot and Merlin is played here by Stanley Tucci, who had a prominent role in the last movie as a completely different character in modern times. So all the way through you are waiting for that character to show up and reveal they are the descendent of Merlin but... no, they don’t. Merlin’s descendent turns out to be another character but... I won’t reveal which one because, you never know, you may actually want to go see this movie.

Okay, that’s the good stuff mostly out of the way.

The bad stuff?

Well the script might be okay in terms of tying everything together but the dialogue is pretty awful, it has to be said. I couldn’t believe these great actors were being asked to speak some of these terrible lines and, especially in the case of the great Anthony Hopkins, I was embarrassed at some of the stuff they were getting him to do. Truly cringeworthy and somehow beneath him is the take away I got here. Special mention to the also great Wahlberg, though, for managing to get some of those lines sounding pretty natural and for injecting his scenes with a certain amount of credibility, for sure.

One thing which could have been great is the return of John Turturro to the series (after his strange absence in the last film). The performance is quite literally phoned in, however, as he doesn’t share any of his very brief scenes with any of the other human characters, instead spending his entire time on the phone to Anthony Hopkins. It looked almost like these were added scenes after part of the cut maybe wasn’t working but I’m just guessing there and that may not have been the case.

I think the bad dialogue combined with the excesses of the action scenes kinda drag the movie down quite a bit, to be honest. The special effects are all fantastic and the action scenes quite rollicking but they all just kinda squash together with no highs or lows in between sequences and I honestly found myself almost drifting off to sleep at one point while the movie was being at its most noisy.

Steve Jablonsky’s score is kinda okay but, from what I could hear of it, joins his sequel scores as being nowhere near the classic that his first Transformers score was (which still gets a heck of a lot of spins per year on my turntable to this day). However, as might be expected, a lot of it is buried under the sound effects so I won’t be able to apprise the score properly until the CD comes out next month and that’s far too late for this review.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about Tranformers - The Last Night, to be honest. It’s big and noisy and there’s lots of movement on screen and if you like seeing heavy metal behemoths bashing each other up with as little emotional context as possible, well... there’s certainly room in this world for that kind of cinema and I wouldn’t blame you for indulging in that kinda large slice of escapism one bit. As for me, it’s nowhere near the classic that the first movie was and it’s not something I’d revisit anytime soon, truth be told. Unlike the first movie, this one shares the same qualities as the other sequels in that they're really not ‘more than meets the eye.’

Transformers - Age Of Extinction

Basic Extinct

Transformers - Age Of Extinction
2014 USA/China
Directed by Michael Bay
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Transformers weren’t even invented yet when I was a kid... so I missed out on the whole toys and comics thing with them. However, after being grudgingly dragged along to the first movie in this series, I was more than delighted that the original was such a great film. Pretty much a modern classic.

It’s been painful and frustrating, therefore, to have to watch movie after movie of, frankly, badly written and badly paced sequels to that original bright light of an opening shot. Considering it’s the same director all the way through the series, I find it difficult to believe that these sequels can be so atrocious. And, I am very sad to report, that I believe that extends to this latest venture, Transformers: Age Of Extinction when, in direct opposition to my hopes and well wishes for the movie (which it doesn’t need anyway, it’s made a ton of money ensuring further dire exploits in our collective near future), I found myself constantly looking at the time and wishing the damn thing would be over soon.

The problem is not necessarily the story, I think... it is what it is.

Neither is all of the dialogue that ropey either and, even if it wasn’t quite up to scratch, you have a bunch of actors like Mark Wahlburg and Sophia Myles (the original Girl In The Fireplace... wasted in this but shining briefly) giving it their all and so it never sounds too bad. I think what we have here that screws things up a little is break neck direction and action choreography that is practically wall to wall, once it starts... and, in the odd moment when it does give you time to breath, which is barely, doesn’t give enough of a space in the onslaught to actually allow you to invest in the characters and the stakes enough to care about what happens next... and that’s really a shame because the director is more than capable of giving us a well put together, heartfelt film when he wants to.

When a movie written by the likes of Akira Kurosawa or Sergio Leone is made, it becomes clear that the pauses and, really quite long stretches of character establishment, character build up and dramatic tension, are all a very important part of a movie. You need it there so when you contrast it with a well placed action sequence, that sequence becomes more vibrant and dynamic in contrast to anything else that directly surrounds it. Tension and release. It’s all part of the game.

Or... put it another way.

My daytime job is as a graphic designer. Occasionally you’ll get a really clueless client who insists on one or both of the following classic design mistakes.

Number one is they’ll try to fill every gap or piece of negative (or white) space with some kind of textual or design element. Absolutely the wrong thing to do with a design, people. You need the space there to help lead the eye in to where you want it to focus. If you fill the page the eye will just take it’s natural (and standard to all human beings as far as I know) journey across the page/screen without being particularly caught by anything in particular.

Secondly, another thing they’ll do is try to make three or more bits of information stand out and be more important from everything else by asking for this, that and the other to be in bold type, usually quite close to each other. Of course, all that achieves is all the emboldened words dilute each other’s strength and basically cancel each other out. Instead of one clear message you're scatter-shotting a plethora of them and they all fight against each other causing chaos to the eye. Most people, unless they already have a specific agenda that they have to wade through the content of the design for, will not bother to read something like this. The client has just lost the potential customer by ignoring the key message and bombarding the eye with fighting headers.

And I think that’s why Transformers: Age Of Extinction kind of loses it’s way in much the same way as the previous two sequels did. Instead of highlighting things with the occasional action scene, it’s just non-stop action. The kinetic equivalent of overcrowding the page with too many headers and not allowing any white space to lead you to where you need to be. Relentless and pounding set pieces are the order of the day in this movie and, while there are admittedly rest room breaks to ease the monotony, they needed to have a lot more of an emotional hook to them (and they do try, the scripting isn’t completely terrible... clichéd but not terrible) and be a lot longer so the action scenes felt like something when they kick back in gear here. There’s no real sense of that tension and release I was talking about in this one... just noisy motion and explosions. Which personally I find pretty dull, to be honest.

One of the tings that gets me coming back for these disappointments time and time again is that Steve Jablonsky’s score for the first movie is one of the great movie scores of all time. At least, it is to me. Unfortunately, although all the films have been scored by this composer, the sequels never really come close to recapturing the genius of that first score and, sad to say, that I include the score to this movie in that statement. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some nice music in it, what I could hear of it above the explosions, and it all seems appropriate but, again, it’s not got nearly the “hairs raising on the arms” beauty of the original score and that’s a bit of a pity. It does it’s job but, for the most part, you aren’t tapping your toes in time to the music as you are watching this one.

A big change with this one is that none of the human characters from the previous films are back in this one. That’s understandable given some of the politics and comments that have been made around the previous films in the series, but there were one or two I missed. The real loss in all that, though, is that of John Turturro, who always seems to traditionally turn up in the movies when you least expect him to. Alas... he’s not here.

The actors who are in this one, as I said, do a fine job but another reason they’re hampered is that of the regular characters that do make an appearance in this one, and I’m talking about the autobots themselves. They’re really not that sympathetic this time around. Bumblebee is underused, Optimus Prime is a lot more judgemental of humans than we’re used to and as for the other transformers... I just didn’t like them, period. These are not the robots I was looking for... and I really wanted to move on out of the cinema very quickly.

So that’s all I’ve got for you on that one. Special effects are all spectacular but somebody on the payroll really needs to realise that the biggest special effect is when you slow the pacing down and let the spell of the characters overtake you. That’s when you have a film. Transformers: Age Of Extinction is more of a big budget, travelling carny show. Alright as a curiosity but not somewhere you’d want to explore very often. It seems to have made a lot of cash already in the USA though, so “Yay!” and “good for them” to the people reaping those rewards. However, the downside for me to that is that this probably means there’ll be another sequel at some point. I really don’t want one.