A Fascinating Collision in Geek Culture History

It was sometime in the spring of 1985. Steve Gerber sat across the table from me in the conference room at the Sunbow office in Westwood. We’d been there long enough to stop noticing the traffic outside. We both smoked cigarettes and had scripts in front of us. Mine still had the perforation stubs on the side because it was printed on my daisy wheel printer. His was Xeroxed. We were working on the central scene of what would become Transformers: The Movie. Namely, we were trying to figure out how to kill Optimus Prime, mortally wound Megatron, and leave Hot Rod a little bit responsible for the death.

Prime, of course, couldn’t lose. Megatron had to kill him through treachery. The bones of the scene were there and had been since the beginning. This was all about fitting together the nuances, the details.

Steve wasn’t really on Transformers, he was on G.I. Joe, but we all helped out in a pinch. He was arguably the best story editor in the business, and animation writing was his second career. He’d already had an epic comic career, creating Howard the Duck and writing God knows how many comics before coming to LA and getting into animation. He and Joe Ruby had created Thundarr the Barbarian. He didn’t have a lot of time. A friend of his from New York who’d just moved to LA was coming for lunch.

So we were reading the scene, imitating bad actor voices for the characters. I’d sketched the geography of the scene in stick figures because I was the only person in the animation business who couldn’t draw—except for maybe Steve. We were laughing, having fun. Neither of us had any idea that the scene we’d been working on would scar a generation of kids, or that thirty years later I’d be doing an interview for the Blu-Ray disk edition of Transformers: The Movie.

Hildy Mesnik stepped into the room. “Your lunch meeting is here…”

“Send him in,” Steve said. “Flint should meet him.”

A minute later, a guy with an ammo bag came walking in. He had long hair, but he didn’t seem like a hippie. He was something different. Intense. Focused. He reminded me of John Lennon. We told him what we were working on, and it turned out he had a problem too. He was working on a Batman graphic novel. I wasn’t really sure what a graphic novel was. Unlike Steve or Marty Pasko or Buzz Dixon or Roger Slifer, I wasn’t really a comic book guy. I’d read the usual comics when I was a kid and took the DC side of the Marvel vs. DC argument of the late sixties, but I’d stopped reading comics sometime around junior high, and except for occasionally wandering into the comic shop near UC Berkeley, I hadn’t thought about comics again until I met these guys.

His problem was a fight between Batman and Superman. Didn’t seem like much of a problem to me. Unless Batman had some kryptonite, it was game over. It was probably game over even if he did have kryptonite, as Superman could fly really fast and turn back time, or he had freeze breath or heat vision or could punch Batman all the way to Mars if he wanted to. World’s Finest didn’t make any sense to me. Batman was smarter, arguably, but sometimes Superman had a super brain, too, so even that wasn’t certain.

They were patient with me, explaining that Superman was more like the Fleisher Superman (I only vaguely knew what that was) or like George Reeves in the TV show, not like Christopher Reeve in the movies. I could sort of see that, though George Reeves versus Adam West still didn’t seem like much of a fight. But I just listened. After all, I was writing a scene in which a robotic Walther PPK was fighting a semi-trailer truck and they were the same size in the scene, so it wasn’t like I had the logical high ground.

Anyway, we worked out an elaborate scene. Batman had prepped the battlefield. He’d rigged bombs in a building. I didn’t think bombs would hurt Superman, but I was told, “They’ll keep him busy.”

It was a good enough answer.

We moved over to our scene. I said I wanted Optimus’s death to feel like Davy Crockett’s death in the John Wayne version of The Alamo. I’d seen that movie when I was five, and it became the centerpiece of my early childhood. Steve’s friend hadn’t seen The Alamo. Instead, the movie that inspired him the same way when he was a kid was called The 300 Spartans. And by now you’ve probably figured out that the guy was Frank Miller and that the Batman comic book he was talking about was the fourth installment of The Dark Knight Returns.

I’ve told this story a lot of times to a lot of people for a wide variety of reasons. Transformers fans love hearing about how Transformers: The Movie was created. I talk about it in lectures at the USC film school, because that scene is about something a lot bigger than Frank or Steve or I, or even Transformers and Batman. To me, it’s about the incredible burst of creativity that happened in the eighties and in other golden (okay, or silver, or platinum) ages.