Our July cover story on the place Optimus Prime holds in the hearts of geeks of a certain age drew fire for a line stating that Transformers fans in the the 80s were all male:
In response, our own Angela Watercutter describes being picked on as a wee lass for preferring bots to Barbie.
As the editor of the piece, I'm going to make what I hope is a crucial clarification. We here in the edit dungeon talked about the wording of that line for quite some time: Scott Brown wasn't saying that there are no female Transformers fans. The current movie is going to have a sizeable female audience, and there are certainly lots of women out there for whom Transformers evokes I-Heart-the-80's warm fuzzies. But the toys, the show, the early movies were marketed to boys and boys alone. Brown's story was about the orchestrated seed-planting of rabid fandom in boys. Girls, quite by design, were excluded. That's toy marketing for you.
Obviously, some girls watched, even loved, Optimus Prime, and splitters of hairs could make a good case for throwing a "mostly" in there (though we're not sure that having a crush on Bumblebee is quite the rabid fandom we were talking about.) Girls growing up in the 80's who watched the show, collected the figures, and shared a singular obsession for Autobots, more power to you. You were unique in the Transformer phenomenon and have gone unrecognized. Even by us.
So show us what you got: Did you play Transformers with other girls? Other boys? Did you have to fight your mom to get the action figures? How many different cassette tapes did Soundwave have, and what did they turn into? Which Transformer toy was rebranded from Macross/Robotech? And, while we're at it, name the other famed CG series produced by the people who made Transformers Beast Wars and Beast Machines, Mainframe? You tell me, ladies.
