Basic knowledge of some important historical events has been lost to history. Which is generally fine - I mean, if it was really important, someone would have remembered it, right? But it bothers me a bit when we're talking about something that happened within my lifetime, and which I was personally deeply interested in. Such as... which Transformers Autobot cars were available in the UK in 1984?
Actually, this has eventually been reconstructed by internet fans in recent years - once they'd overcome the tendency for fan websites to be exclusively written by Americans who'd heard vague rumours about things that happened in other countries, and started getting feedback from British fans who were alive at the time, anyway. And the answer seems to be that there were only six of them released in the first range of toys.
This came as something as a surprise to me. I was seven years old when Transformers first came out, and thought they were really cool. If you'd asked me at the time which Autobot cars were available in the shops, I would have said "Well, all of them, stupid," or some such cutting put-down. If I'd counted the characters who appeared in the comic when it first appeared in September (which I'm fairly certain I never did), I might have said "Eleven full-size Autobots, six mini-Autobots and Optimus Prime, stupid." (At this time, I would most likely have been talking to my younger brother, who needed to be put in his place at every opportunity, whether I knew what I was talking about or not)
But, you see, I lived in the middle of nowhere - the nearest toy shop was ten miles away and a place to be visited only on rare special occasions. We didn't have the internet, or any other reliable source of information, except what we could glean from the TV adverts.
Now, if you pay particular attention to the Autobots the fair-haired, white-shirted boys are playing with, you can see that they've got multiple copies of each, but there are only six distinct models - Sideswipe, Ratchet, Hound, Mirage, Bluestreak and Jazz.
If you were lucky enough to OWN one of these exciting new toys, bought new from the shops, you'd also have got a folded-up catalogue showing all the available toys - and again, just those six in the "Robot Cars" range.
As well as telling us that the Transformers are currently living among us in vehicle mode and will one day transform back into robots and begin their adventures, it gives us a full line-up of the toys you can actually buy in the shops. And unlike the TV advert, it shows Bumblebee in the correct yellow colour, but still has Cliffjumper yellow instead of red.
The Transformers comic made its debut in September 1984, and got its own advert on TV too. It was a must-buy, every fortnight! (We got the Return of the Jedi comic on the weeks Transformers didn't come out, but it was comparatively rubbish.)
The comic never gave a hint that some Autobots weren't available. The other five (Ironhide, Prowl, Sunstreaker, Wheeljack and Trailbreaker) were all featured in the comic stories and implied to be hanging around with the others on the toy shelves, waiting for the day they'd get the call to transform into robots. Prowl is prominent on the animation used in the adverts, but then so is Megatron, and it quickly became well-known that you couldn't get Megatron in this country.
The toy adverts that appeared in the comic started out with this one, just showing one of each type (and a drawing of Bluestreak in the blue colour scheme used in his box art but not on the actual toy, which was silver)
But it was with issue no. 3, which came out on 18 October, just after my eighth birthday, that we got some more concrete information about what could and couldn't be bought in the shops. First a letter on the Openers page on the inside front cover...
(in the early 1980s everyone started sentences with Wot no, and I really had no idea what it was all about)
So yes, it's officially confirmed that Megatron can't be found over here. He turns into a very realistic gun, so although nobody ever confirmed exactly why, we all managed to deduce what was behind his omission. But the comic never said anything about five Autobots not being available either! We did get a new advert, starting from this issue, that showed the six usual suspects...
This one again seems to suggest that the Autobots haven't yet transformed out of their vehicle modes, but are ready to do so any minute now!
But even so, there was still a certain amount of confusion about what we could actually ask our parents to buy for us! With Christmas 1984 fast approaching, the Transformers comic turned to the one person who could help the poor British toy-buying public - Anthony Temple, in charge of Boys' Toys at Hasbro! He got his own regular column, starting in no. 7, released on December 15th!
He let us know that Megaton would be available at Easter! And that by then we'd also be able to use Robot Points for something! But he kept very quiet about those five missing Autobots...
Easter in 1985 was April 7th. A month before that, Transformers issue no. 13 came out on March 9th, and contained a picture of the new and exciting Insecticons (in their Japanese Diaclone colour schemes, not the ones that were used on the toys we got)
And Anthony Temple returned! But all he had to tell us about was the cheap and plastic Jumpstarters, which you could get if you couldn't afford a real Transformer!
He must surely have known by that point that there was a whole new range of desirable Transformers making their debut in British shops! Why couldn't he have mentioned some of them? Didn't he know we all look up to the great oracle that was Anthony Temple for all our Transformer toy information? How could he give us a column about nothing but Jumpstarters and a money-saving Autobot Watch Offer?
Dissatisfaction was obviously rife across the country. In no. 18, published on May 18th, the Transformers comic printed a letter complaining that the toy stores were full of new toys, and Anthony Temple hadn't said a word about it! The editor begged him to write another column, and he grudgingly obliged...
But this time all he wanted to talk about was the Dinobots. And rather than using any of the official storyline behind the characters, he apparently made up off the top of his head a story about how "they were created by the heroic Autobots to help them in their struggle against Evil and to protect the Earth's primeval fringes from attack. The Autobots modelled them on the now extinct Dinosaurs that were in existence many thousands of years ago."
It was around this time that we British Transformer-fans lost our faith in Anthony Temple as the all-knowing voice of wisdom for Transformers toys. We started to rely more on people like Fraser Irving, who obviously lived near a toy shop - he at least gave us the British comic's closest thing to confirmation that Ironhide and Prowl weren't available from the start in 1984.
In fact, we'd grown and matured, and no longer needed Anthony Temple's guidance. Transformers were a big deal, and everybody had at least one or two, or at least had seen the new packed-in catalogue as it passed around the playground. We could compare that with the stories in the comic and see which Transformers were available to us, and which ones (Swoop, Shockwave, Blaster...) would always be the stuff of legend as the "only available in America" ones.
Anthony Temple was able to disappear into obscurity, remembered only by the people who were around in that brief period of 1984-5. We will never see the likes of those days again...
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