Transformers were a cool toy. Car, robot, and Rubik’s Cube, all rolled into one. They were great.

They had lots of really long television ads. I’m sorry, I mean they had their own cartoon show. It was eighties animation, so the look wasn’t bad and they stayed true to the toys. It was aimed at kids, and it showed. It wasn’t “Ren and Stimpy” or “SpongeBob SquarePants,” where there was enough there to cross-over into the teen and twenties markets.

The show was about alien robots from two groups who crashed on Earth. Rather than reveal themselves to the humans, they decide to hide themselves. Which is fine: aliens hiding among us is a classic science fiction bit. Except they decide to keep up their fight, which makes them kind of hard to hide. And the need to get the energy they to get off the Earth also would make it kind of hard to hide. So the writers have to go through all sorts of contortions to keep the robots secret, just to have a reason to maintain their transformation abilities. Okay, so this eventually falls to the wayside and we get robots that turn into dinosaurs, but this completely fails to hide the fact that any story in which robots turn into vehicles is going to be stupid.

And that was fine. We were kids. It was fun. Who cared if the premise would still be reasonable when we became adults?

Why the hell are we getting a second Transformer movie aimed at teens, twenties, and thirties who are smart enough to recognize that the story-engine makes no sense? Yes, yes, turn off your brain and enjoy Truckasaurus breath fire and chomp on wrecked cars, only in CGI instead of down at the track. But for Transformers to keep up my suspension of disbelief, I’d have to be brain dead.

Robots in disguise!

Oh, well. At least it will be better than Land of the Lost.