Trade Wars: Tales of a Transformers Tragedy

When I was a kid, there were no toys that reigned supreme like Transformers. I knew a few kids that liked He-Man and the Centurions, but almost every kid in my neighborhood collected Transformers. In the military housing where I lived in San Diego, I had several friends that enjoyed showing off their figures as if I had the smallest collection in the area. I had plenty of Transformers at the time, right after the movie came out and subgroups like the Headmasters and Targetmasters had come out. I had Weirdwolf, Sureshot, Hardhead, Skyhammer, and plenty of others. But there were always more I wanted, and my friends seemed to have every one of them.

Image courtesy of Botch's Transformers Box Art Archives

There was Marlin that lived down the street who professed to having almost the entire collection, though the only one I remember seeing was the Decepticon tank Quake sitting on his garbage can. I almost took it, but chickened out after transforming him once. My two best friends, Chris and Neil, both said they had all the toys, with Chris even saying he had stuff like the big spaceship the Autobots used as their base (later called the Ark and would get its own toy 30 years later), a transforming Teletraan I, Teletraan II, and even Teletraan Jr, whatever that was supposed to be. Every time I’d ask to see any of them, he refused to let me into his house. Now that I think of it, he told me about those toys from his second-story bedroom, like some Cybertronian Romeo and Juliet.

But I was determined to get more figures, and if I couldn’t get my parents to pay for them, I was going to have to do some trading. No matter how many Transformers my friends had, they were willing to trade to get some of mine. Somehow though, I always got screwed in these trades – whether I had to give the toys back, lost them, or something else, I never came out on top. 

Images courtesy of TFWiki

One trade I remember being so excited about because it was right after Transformers the movie came out. I traded Skullcruncher for mother-freaking Hot Rod. I got the Hope of the Autobots…. For all of a few days. My friend Jamal came back and told me trading away Hot Rod got him in trouble with his mom, so I had to give him back. Was I a smart boy and got my Skullcruncher back? Nope! He gave me Scoop, a dumpy-looking bulldozer. Scoop was a Targetmaster, but the second generation that came with two guns, but both of them were tiny and terrible. I traded away a big Headmaster alligator and got an ugly Targetmaster Constructicon wannabe.

The second trade would have been epic if the figure wasn’t a piece of crap. I traded away three racquetballs and got myself none other than Metroplex, the Autobot base! Except this Metroplex was missing every single one of his accessories, including Six-Gun, the robot made up of, well, six guns, and Scamper, a miniature transforming car. The figure was also broken, but I don’t remember exactly what was wrong with it. This is one of the few times I reneged on a trade because I would have preferred playing Butts Up with a racquetball than keeping that janky city-bot.

Images courtesy of TFWiki

The last one included a pair of Blaster’s cassette Transformers. I had Raindance and Grandslam, two cassettes that transformed into a plane and a tank respectively and could combine into a robot name Slam Dance, but I wanted Ramhorn and Steeljaw. A friend of mine had both and was willing to trade, but we only saw each other in school, so it had to be done in class. Even though we had handed off our figures before class started, my teacher saw me – and only me! – with the toys and confiscated them. And you’d better believe I never saw those suckers again, and my friend wouldn’t give me mine back, either.

I moved away from San Diego a year or so after that and my circle of Transformers-loving friends was no more. I continued buying the figures in my new home in Fallon, but no one there seemed to even care about them, so what I bought was all I was going to own. As I grew up and Transformers shifted to Beast Wars in the late 90s, I kept collecting. But the tragedy didn’t stop there, because after getting out of the Air Force in 1999, my entire collection save one figure was stolen during a move. All those figures, including that first bad trade for Scoop, disappeared on that cross-country journey. 

‘Til All Are One? More like ‘Til All Are Gone.