This year marks the 35th anniversary of Transformers: The Movie, the first theatrical venture for the franchise and (sadly) still the best Transformers movie released.

Fathom and Hasbro are releasing the film in theaters nationwide on Sunday Sept. 26 and Tuesday, Sept. 28.

This is one of my favorite animated films of all time, so let’s take a dive into the history and development of this movie and its impact on the franchise and the early Transformers fandom.

This film was produced to promote the then-new 1986 line of toys for Transformers, and Hasbro decided the best way to get kids to buy these new toys was to kill off their old toys. Most of this came from the (cynical, but also true) position that Transformers was just a show to sell toys, and Hasbro had no inkling how important the characters, in particular Autobot Leader Optimus Prime, were to children growing up in the 80s.

But let’s backpedal and talk plot.

The movie is set twenty years after the second season of the cartoon in the futuristic year of…2005. The Decepticons have taken over Cybertron, while the Autobots plan for a counter-offensive from Cybertron’s moons. While on a supply run to Earth, an Autobot shuttle is attacked by the Decepticons and all hands are killed.

The fight spills over to Autobot City on Earth where Optimus Prime and Megatron have one final battle, but the intervention of a young Autobot named Hot Rod results in Prime becoming fatally wounded.

Megatron himself is just as damaged and is jettisoned into space by his treacherous second-in-command Starscream.

Meanwhile, an enormous mechanical planet, Unicron, moves through space devouring planets in its wake and has sights set on Cybertron. Unicron reformats Megatron into a new body christened: Galvatron. Now Galvatron sets out to obtain the Autobot Matrix of Leadership, the one thing that can destroy Unicron, that has been passed from Optimus Prime to the newest leader Ultra Magnus.

You read that right, they killed Optimus Prime, and in the process, scarred a generation of children. For the Hasbro execs, Optimus was a product and that product was no longer on toy shelves, so killing him off seemed to be a reasonable decision. This choice, of course, was challenged by screenwriter Ron Friedman who advised that killing him would probably negatively affect children who looked up to the character.

And Friedman was right. Reportedly some children were crying in the theaters, there were people leaving the movie, and rumor has it one child even locked himself in his bedroom for two weeks.

Eventually, Prime was brought back to the show, but that’s another story.

Now I don’t want you to think that the reception for this movie is all negative, but the Prime story was one of the interesting “real-life” tales that came out of this movie.

As I said up top, this is one of my favorite animated movies. It is a huge step-up from the animated series and utilizes dynamic lighting and detailed mechanical works for the characters in a more anime-esque style than that of the original cartoon.

While the plot ultimately isn’t anything groundbreaking by any means, just merely putting Hot Rod through the motions of the hero’s journey, this movie manages to be far better that it had any business to be.

As much as I love the original cartoon, it is very much a product of the time in regard to quality. The quantum leap that the series takes going into this movie is like night and day; it changes things from a skirmish between good and evil into some grand Star Wars-like space opera.

The soundtrack and score to this movie goes a long way to making it memorable. The soundtrack includes a lot of 80s hair metal and rock tracks that, despite taking place in the future, cements its presence in the era it debuted. The score by Vince DiCola is also pure 80s with its use of synthesizers and keyboards that hit the perfect notes and assist in making the movie feel like an epic.

The new cast of characters introduced in this movie do a great job of endearing themselves to the audience and giving us a sense of their character. Hot Rod is a turbo-reving young punk with potential for greatness; Kup is a grizzled old veteran that doesn’t have patience for Hot Rod or the Dinobots shenanigans; Utlra Magnus is the straight laced by-the-book kind of bot; Springer is basically Han Solo; Blurr is a motormouth and hyperactive; and Arcee is…the girl…okay Arcee doesn’t get to do much and definitely got more character as time went on, but she is one of the most famous female Transformers in the franchise and her very inclusion in this movie was the result of Ron Friedman fighting for her since his daughter was a Transformers fan, and against Hasbro/Sunbow, who were under the impression a female character was unwanted in a “boy’s” movie.

The voice cast sees several returning voices from the cartoon such as Peter Cullen and Frank Welker as Optimus Prime and Megatron respectively, but also saw some celebrity casting. Hot Rod was played by Judd Nelson, Ultra Magnus by Robert Stack, Galvatron by Leonard Nimoy, Eric Idle as Wreck-Gar, and Unicron by Orson Welles (which is a real trippy filmography to go from Citizen Kane as his first film to this as his last).

Normally, I’m not a fan of having regular actors voice animated characters instead of voice actors (something that happens a lot in big animated films and on Marvel’s What If…), but the actors in this one feel more honest and natural in their performances, especially Leonard Nimoy, whom I feel really helps to embody the character of Galvatron as this threatening upgrade to Megatron.

On the whole, Transformers: The Movie may have had some cynical roots in its development as a big toy commercial, but the people involved in the production went out of their way to deliver something entertaining. Something that is still talked about to this day in the fandom, and in circles outside of it, as the best Transformers film to hit the cinema.

While it does have a few animation hiccups in areas, and does require some foreknowledge on the subject, it remains a fun artifact of 80s sci-fi.

Transformers: The Movie get an 8/10.