Toy Bender

Way back in the long, long ago, otherwise known as 1990, the once enormously successful Transformers line had become an empty shell of it’s former self. In fact it was dead. The line had lost all it’s momentum and the Transformers era known as Generation One was over. Not content to let a good, money making property stay dead, Hasbro let Transformers rest for a couple of years and reintroduced them in 1992. What’s the best way to bring back beloved toys? With commercials featuring terrible, terrible rap songs. But first, here’s a straight commercial featuring some two beloved Transformers characters:

This commercial features the return of Optimus Prime and it had been a long time for those kids (like me) who had wanted the original but never could get their hands on it. Megatron came back too, but as you can see he was a tank. Somehow that never sat right with me. I realize a tank makes a little more sense than a pistol that can shrink to fit into the hands of another Transformer, but having been raised seeing him as either a gun or cannon (as Galvatron), it’s a bit odd for a impressionable mind to handle.

Now for the advertisement you’ve been waiting for. A Transformers G2 commercial with rapping:

Dizzam, those Transformers is off da HOOK! You know, it’s hard to believe that white corporate culture has co-opted rap for so long now and somehow rap has been able to “transform” in order for it to remain relevant to black culture. And by the way, if any of you bastards use that as your doctoral thesis I better get some credit.

If you didn’t get enough rap with your Transformers, check out this video. Is that Tracy Morgan laying down the rhymes?

Generation 2 was full of retreads of bots with crazy color schemes. Here’s two famous combing robots fighting it out with yet another rap song describing how awesome they are:

I can only imagine the studio musicians who were doing this while their contemporaries were rapping about the numerous problems facing disillusioned urban youth. But hey, I expect everyone has to make a paycheck somehow.

toy, toy collecting, action figure, Hasbro, Transformers, YouTube, video, rap, funny