80 Years of Robots in Hollywood

Release Date: July 4
Director: Michael Bay
Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Megan Fox, Josh Duhamel

I can remember back when kids' toys — a jump-rope or hula hoop, a Frisbee or dreidel — weren't automatically turned into movies. But Transformers, the collection of shape-shifting robot aliens introduced by Hasbro in 1984, had already become a comic book, a video game, several TV series and a mid-80s animated feature, so shouldn't the illegal immigrants from planet Cybertron get their very own summer blockbuster? In the excerpts I saw, the 'bots are either menacing a desert Army base or tagging after star Shia LaBeouf like the clumsiest and most trouble-prone pet St. Bernards. We'll see if director Michael Bay (Pearl Harbor) and exec producer Steven Spielberg can please the very proprietary fans of the toys, who have already shown the avid suspicions of, say, Mitt Romney on being told there's a new bio-pic of Joseph Smith.