When You're 18: Transformers vs. Gobots When you’re 18, you have no idea how difficult it is to contribute to popular culture. You are simply a consumer – that’s all you’ve been your entire life (your summer working at Baskin Robbins notwithstanding). I remember in college mustering healthy amounts of disdain for my writing teachers who had ‘failed to make it’ and who were making their livings by teaching instead of going on book tours and selling book rights to their novels for gobs of money. Oh no. Not me. Not gonna happen to me. I wasn’t going to settle for mediocrity like they had. At the time, my goal was to write a book a year, and I did, more or less, during my college years – I finished my third novel in the winter of 95.

I went to grad school right after college and my disdain for my superiors grew. When they didn’t like my writing they ‘didn’t get it’ and I quickly decided it was difficult being the smartest one in the room. I had heard that geniuses were often misunderstood, but here was proof. I was used to it, sure – I had been a highly successful student, all A’s in my creative writing classes and the fact that I put stock in those grades was proof that I was woefully ill-prepared for a life in the arts.

When you are 18, you are consuming more popular culture than you will ever have time to again. I bought hundreds of CDs with my paychecks working at the golf course, I was reading 50+ books a year, I was watching movies every weekend, every night during the summer, and endlessly I would discuss with my friends what song/band/movie/TV show was cool and what wasn’t. In fact, we were so convinced of our 18 year-old opinions that I wouldn’t even call them discussions, since most them sounded something like this.

ME: Transformers are awesome.
DANNY: Yeah, dude. So are Gobots.
ME: Oh my God. You like Gobots? You’re a fag.

‘You’re a fag,’ or ‘you’re a retard’ were phrases that often ended our artistic conversations.

I think about Transformers vs. Gobots now, in the wake of the release of the Transformers movie. Transformers were then, as now, the superior of the two products – they had better characters, better toys, better cartoons and we happily made fun of anybody (see above) who took the position that Gobots were the superior race of shape-changing automatons. I think about it now, and all I know is that both franchises made lots of money. Gobots weren’t as popular, but they were popular enough to keep thousands of people employed to manufacture, market, produce and sell a line of cheap Hasbro toysand a weekly television show. What I would give to be Executive Producer on one of the shittiest cartoons in the history of Saturday morning.

At least it got made. At least it saw the light of day.  ¶ 9:09 PM