Happy 30th Birthday Transformers

Today is the official 30th birthday for Transformers. For the United States, the line launched 1984 with the cartoon series and first wave of toys that included Optimus Prime, Megatron, Bumblebee, Jazz and a whole lot more. Today was chosen because its the day that Transformers #1 limited series was released by Marvel that introduced all backstory and characters we all grew to love. Shortly after the toys popped on shelves with the TV series premiering in the fall of 1984.

From there, well the rest is literal history as the franchise has become one of the most enduring in all of toy history with multiple different television shows, revisions, and lines while maintaining that near constant of Optimus Prime and his Autobots vs Megatron and his Decepticons for control of Cybertron and Earth with the theme best summarized by Prime as "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings."

To mark the occasion I guess I should do some kind of historical retrospective but the other Transformers sites has already done it. Seibertron has a quick run through of the high points of the franchise's history in comics. Unicron.com has posted their retrospective in pictures. Speaking of pictures the image above is a photograph of one of the orginial slides that were used to create the box and instructions for Optimus Prime. More of the images including those for Grimlock can be found here (and mirroed here.

If you want a truly comprehensive break down of the last 30 years of Transformers history I highly recommended heading over to TFW2005. They spent the last 30 days doing a year by year breakdown of the franchise that will trigger the nostalgia buttons while providing enough information to turn anyone into a Transformers historian.

With the upcoming release of Transformers: Age of Extinction, Hasbro's refocus on younger fans, and a now thriving collector's market, its pretty clear that Transformers is well on its way to another 30 years of success. I still have a few of my now 30 year old Transformers sitting on a shelf. Think its time to dust them off and have a little fun.

What are your favorite memories of Transformers?