Optimus Prime seizes up

It was harder to find good transforming-robot cartoons in 1985. Nowadays, you can find them all over the internet or on DVD in every household, but unfortunate children of the eighties were starved of that kind of entertainment beyond five-minute segments on the Wide Awake Club. But if you were patient, you could watch Optimus Prime transforming a little bit every week on the cover box of the Transformers comic!

The cover box is that little rectangle in the top left corner there --------->

The Transformers comic had a different cover format (and everything-else format too) for the first 26 issues, but when it went full-colour, weekly, and down to twenty-four pages, the cover box became an ever-present thing, all the way to the end in 1992.

The first two, numbers 27 and 28, both used the same picture in the cover box - a rather hard to decipher at such small size clip from the very first cartoon animation created for the first Transformers toy commercials. It's the planet Cybertron, a spaceship and some lasers. But after that, we launch into a series of cover box pictures from the Optimus Prime commercial footage - used in Britain for an Optimus and Soundwave advert, but originally intended for Optimus versus Megatron. The Megatron toy wasn't released over here at first, because of the way it transforms into a very realistic gun...

Here's the full series of cover boxes! Optimus drives along a cliff path, trailing carefully-drawn smoke from his stacks. You can put more effort into animation when you only have to do a couple of seconds' worth! All these pictures are flipped from the original - in the adverts, Optimus enters from stage right like all heroes should, but that looks a little funny on a cover box in the top left...

... he detaches his trailer and drives straight off the cliff edge...

... and flies through the air...

... his arms start to emerge from his sides...

... then he goes back to the picture from two weeks ago because presumably someone made a mistake...

... but now his arms are out, his gun has magically appeared and his head's starting to pop up...

... legs swinging down into position...

... body straightening up...

... spreads his legs (something the toy can't do) as he comes in for a landing...

... lands and fires his gun...

... pauses...

... pauses...

And I could go on. After that, Optimus never moves again. He remains in that pose all the way up to number 74! People started to write into the letters page to ask what happened to him, but that's the end of the animation, unfortunately, so that's where we're stuck. I tell you, this was riveting to follow in late 1985! 

The early adverts, both British and American, can be found aplenty on YouTube - this one is the most interesting:  

I'm pretty sure whoever posted it is right to say it's the first ever Transformers advert on UK TV (but wrong to say it was 1985 rather than 1984). I distinctly remember the advert briefly leaving me under the impression that there were characters called "Heroic Autobot" and "Mini Autobot", before I learned some more about these fascinating new toys and their accompanying comic - it launched in late September 1984, and I must have seen this advert very shortly before that, probably after school had already started. I have an idea that I talked about it on the playground using those inaccurate names.

From a historical point of view, it's fun to see that they made this advert using a red Bumblebee and a yellow Cliffjumper - they were meant to be the other way around, but opposite-colour ones were widely available when the toys first launched. It's no wonder people got confused about names and things!