You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Guess what Will?
What's that Mango?
So you know that impulse when you pass an electric fan and no one is around and you just want to lean in and say more than meets the eye.
I'm not sure if you know what I was doing for the ten minutes before you got in here, But do you mean like this more than.
Exactly?
That impulse is officially forty years old. Wow, so Transformers might have a new movie out, but they are old, baby like, these toys are elder millennials, meaning we would have been about five when the first ones came out.
That is crazy, which would have given us plenty of time to spend chanting more than meets the eye into household appliances everywhere.
Household applian. It's like a toaster or whatever. You know, Transformers or for everyone these days. But there are about two dozen different product lines and the first movie was directed by Michael Bay that broke the box offices all from these toys that had us like crunching tiny pterodactyls into the shape of cassette tapes.
Wait, is that is that a real transformer or did you just make that up?
Yeah, it's totally real. My aunt, when I was in fourth grade as a birthday president, took me to Toys r US and let me pick out anything, and so I picked out these tiny mini cassette Transformers. And our fact checker, slash researcher and resident Transformers guru Gabe said it was not a pterodactyl. It was a falcon or a condor. So I've already been fact checked, just as his intro.
Yeah, you want to get that wrong with Gabe, but.
It was rad Anyway, Today's episode is a dive back into the world of Transformers. How did these incredible toys come to be? And why is it that kids still can't get nothing them? So let's dive in.
Hey, their podcast listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend mangesh Hot Ticketter and on the other side of that soundproof glass trying and sadly failing to convert a transformer. That's our friend and producer Dylan fag And he's good at a lot of things, but this is something he's not so great at, and I don't know, if you can see it from our angle, mango, But he's sweating and he's playing pump up music to get him through
it all. And I say that with no judgment, by the way, like Dylan showed me the instruction sheet and it takes forty steps to wrestle that thing into a truck. So he's really got his work cut out for him.
Well, I am rooting for him, as I always But well, I know we were both into basketball and the Lakers as kids. We were both into SNL pretty early because of our dads. But was transformer or something you were into?
Oh, it was one hundred percent something I was into. Now, I didn't always know what I was talking about. In fact, to this day, if I were to tell my parents we were doing an episode on the Transformers, they would say more to Measdi. Because I would run around the house pretending to be a Transformer. I had no idea what the theme song said, and in my mind they said more to Measdi, and so I just sang along with it. So it meant something to me, and that's what's most important.
But how about you, Yeah, I mean, I remember when I was like five or six, living in North Carolina. It was the one cartoon that I'd watched religiously in the afternoons. I was not into G I. Joe, which I think was the thing that came on after, but
I was obsessed with Transformers. I love the toys and just the idea that you could get your hands on a robot and not know what it would transform into until you like bent and twisted it into all these different directions and then you'd be like totally delighted by whatever return to you, like, even if it was a van.
You know, you've never been so delighted to play with a van. But just as it adds up, so you mentioned Gabe earlier, and he is really a stickler forgetting the facts right about transformers and all of toys and toy history. And so just to make sure we know you didn't transform your transformers, you converted them. I think we've gone to a new level of nerd here.
But that is the fact.
Why why did I convert them?
Well, one of the weirdest things I learned this week is that Hasbro, the company that makes Transformers, purposely avoids using the verb transform when you know, referring to their products because they don't want to risk genericizing their trademark. It's like how Escalator used to be the registered brand name, but then the term became so common that people started
calling every set of moving stairs and escalator. So it's just really hard to maintain a trademark the protection around that once the public starts treating your brand name generically. So it makes a lot of sense.
Like Xerox. It's funny my my uncle's firm in India actually made a campaign with the slogan was make your Xerox on an HP.
This is pretty great.
Yeah, and I guess it's a problem more when the brand name is a straight up description of what your product does. Like you can't trademark an electric mixing machine as a blender because that's what it does. It blends food together. So the same story with escalators, and it could be argued with transformers too.
So Hasbro wants to make sure that people associate transformers with a specific set of characters and not with like gobots or any other transforming toys in general.
Yeah, that's exactly right, And part of maintaining that tricky legal distinction is never admitting that transformers transform, so we will not get them in trouble by saying that, and I'm sure it is a challenge for the marketing team that is ridiculous.
Anyway, I know you've got the backstory on these converting robots that we refer to as Transformers, so why don't you lay it on us?
All right?
This was a fun origin here, so to start with, it's easy to overlook this if you aren't familiar with the series, But Transformers isn't a purely American invention. The original nineteen eighties toy line was largely made up of pre existing products from several different Japanese toy lines, most notably Diaclone and micro Change.
You know both of these, right, Yeah, I'm a huge Diaclone head. Of course, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Yeah, I didn't either.
It was part of the research, but it was interesting to look into. So Japan was way ahead of the curve when it came to thinking robots were cool. And that's because, unlike the US and other Western nations, Japan had been developing robotic inventions as far back as this seventeenth century, which for reference, was about three hundred years
before the term robot was first coined. So the earliest automatons on record in Japan were these tea serving mechanical dolls that could wheel a cup and saucer back and forth from the kitchen, and they were a huge hit with a few wealthy families who could afford them, and before long, clockwork automatons began popping up in stage productions and other forms of entertainment that were much more accessible
to the masses. So you fast forward to the early twentieth century and Japan was already well acquainted with the idea of robots, far more so than most Western countries at the time. Then, during the Atomic Age, the idea of super robots sparked a cultural craze in Japan, and these colorful robotic warriors began to dominate the manga stories, the anime shows, and eventually the nation's toy ales.
That's really funny, Like you think about that magazine Giant Robot that used to exist. That's all about Japanese culture, So it's kind of that's about their linked. I'd heard that the first couple of decades after World War Two actually were like a golden age of toys in Japan, which is obviously not what you'd expect since the atomic bombings destroyed some to the country.
Yeah, that's true, But the Japanese people were very resourceful, like they realized there was plenty of ten lying around from the Allied soldiers ration cans, and by recycling that metal, they were able to produce inexpensive toys that got the industry up and running pretty quickly, and in fact, the sales of those toys actually helped the Japanese population bounce back much faster than it otherwise would have, because once US soldiers saw the innovative and affordable toys that were
being produced there, they started buying them up and sending them back home to the States, and it was that enthusiasm that eventually led to Japan being authorized to sell toys in the global market, which means that toys were actually the country's first real export following it surrender in nineteen forty five.
Were these metal toys mostly robots then, I.
Mean there were lots of wind up toys, but also a lot of vehicles. And as time went on, production methods improved and more materials became available, but robots and vehicles remained the lifeblood of this industry. Started to pair the two categories together in different ways. Sometimes the robot came with their own vehicles to ride in, and other cases a fleet of non transforming vehicles could be combined
together to form kind of like a giant robot. But it wasn't until the mid nineteen seventies that the Japanese toy companies in Takara, they began to push the marriage even further by making robot figures that could convert into vehicles, and it was the best of both worlds in a single toy, and kids just went nuts for them.
So these early transforming robot toys sound great, but they still weren't technically transformers.
Right, Yeah, they were both toy lines from a company I mentioned earlier called Takara. So back in the nineteen seventies, Takara found success with a series called Microman, which centered on a race of tiny cybernetic spacemen who had come to protect the Earth from an alien invasion. And they came with all these interchangeable accessories that could be put together in all sorts of ways, and you would build
these vehicles and robots for the little guys to pilot. So, after a couple of years of success, the designers at Takara decided to launch a spin offline and that would focus more on transforming robot toys rather than the spacemen, and the resulting series was called Diaclone, which is a combination of the words diamond and cyclone.
Which sounds like those diamond storms where rains diamonds on Neptune or Jupiter, which is just an incredible phenomena.
Yeah it does.
But you know, these toys were small, like. They consisted of tiny little robots that transformed into these futuristic vehicles and sci fi fortresses which the new even smaller micromen could interact with.
Which sounds fun. But it still feels a bit off from the Transformers.
We know, Yeah, we just you know, it's evolution.
It takes a little time. We're working our way there. It wouldn't be as exciting if it just happened over night. And this is still the nineteen seventies, all right. So fast forward nineteen eighty two, just two years before the Transformers first came out to Car release the line called Car Robots, and unlike all the transforming toys that came before it, these ones converted into real life cars and trucks instead of made up sci fi vehicles.
So do you know why they decided to move from sci fi into something that was a little more realistic.
Yeah, I mean sometimes these kinds of things come from the preferences of those who are working on this stuff like this came from the head designer, a guy named kojin Ono, and he thought it would be more fun for kids if they were playing with the kinds of vehicles you might see in real life. Of course, there was a little in fighting among the group there, and other members of the team weren't quite convinced, but when the sales department backed up Ono's ideas, the company decided
to give it a try. But if you're wondering why the sales team felt confident, Ono recently offered an explanation during a twenty twenty four interview with Figure King magazine. The sixty five year old designer, who still works it to Kara, by the way, told the interviewer quote, there was a part conveniently located right in front of our company,
allowing us to easily conduct surveys of children. Of course, nowadays such practices would be an absolute no no from a compliance standpoint, But as I mentioned earlier, there's a certain persuasiveness in directly hearing from children. Their enthusiastic support played a pivotal role in propelling us forward, and that's what led them to making these toys that could transform into real cars.
Okay, so now we've got transforming robots that turn into these realistic looking vehicles. But we've got to be getting close to the capital t transformers.
Right, Yep, we are almost there.
In fact, a lot of figures that were designed for car robots in the early eighties were the same ones that would later be repurposed actually as the original Transformers toys. So, for example, the first one that cojin Ono designed was this red super tuning Lamborghini, which was later released in nineteen eighty four as a yellow autobot sports car named Sunstreaker.
And so what about all the other early transformers that don't turn into cars and trucks, Like I know, there were also mechanical animals and dinabots. And wasn't there even one that turned into like a handgun Megatron?
I think that's exactly right, Megatron.
Good memory, Mango. And so in one of the universes, he turns into a Walter p. Thirty eight pistol, which is really embarrassing that you didn't know that, But actually I only know that because of Gabe once again coming to the rescue here. But no, you're right, they really left no stone unturned when choosing the figures alt modes, which by the way, is the official term for the non primary mode of a Transformer.
I love that we have all the jargon down thanks to Gabe.
Yeah, he insisted. I slipped that in there.
So just to recap here, like, Takara had a bunch of standalone toy lines in Japan which contributed to elements of what would become Transformers, but none of those treated the robots as distinct characters. And then what Hasbro comes in and ditches the spacemen and makes the robots the stars of the show is not what happens.
That's basically right. So Takara struggled to find a foothold in the crowded American market, but then in nineteen eighty three their products caught the eye of a Hasbro representative, and this was at the Tokyo Toy Show. So the rep brought back some sample figures, and before the year was out, Hasbro had signed a contract with Takara to license the figures for the US market, but the next step was figuring out how to rebrand the toys for
an American audience. Hasbro's partner in the task was an advertising agency called Griffin Bacall, who had helped develop Gi Joe, and it was the ad firm's idea to combine Takara's various toy lines under one umbrella and to make the robots the main characters. The company also suggested having the robots be sentient aliens rather than just accessories to the spacemen, and proposed splitting them into two rival factions to create
a bit of built in conflict. Hence the heroic autobots and the evil Dysepticons first time we mentioned them in this episode. I can't believe it took us this long. A git there, but lastly, the all import named Transformers was contributed by j Baccall, the son of the company chairman Joe Bacall.
Okay, so the ad agency comes up with the bones of the story, these two warring factions of alien robots, But who actually ends up filling in the details here?
That job actually fell to the writers and editors at Marvel Comics, who had already helped Hasbro flesh out the world of Gi Joe just a few years earlier. The original story treatment was written by Marvel editor in chief Jim Shooter, and it explained that the Transformers had been locked in a civil war fighting for control of their home planet, Cybertron, for millions of years. Millions of year,
that's a long war. The constant fighting had left the planet in ruins and almost completely devoid of eon, which is the life blood or fuel that powers both the robots and the planet itself. So the two factions left their home world in search of news sources of energy, only to crash land on prehistoric Earth. So they spent
the next four million years than the side of a mountain. Then, after being awakened by a volcanic eruption in nineteen eighty four, they adopted the forms of Earth's machines and resumed their endless war once again.
I mean, it's a great soap opera, but it is interesting that Shooter framed this conflict does a struggle for resources right.
It's also interesting that he drew his inspiration from real life, like specifically the energy crisis of the nineteen seventies, So in his conception, the difference between the two factions was what they planned to do with the energy.
That they collected.
So you have the Autobots that just wanted to restore their home planet and live in peace, but those evil Decepticons, like they wanted to conquer other planets and then create an empire. Of course, it is worth noting, though, that Shooter's treatment left plenty of room for future writers to deepen that mythos.
So did Shooter's treatment delve into all the character names and backstories because I actually, like separately, was looking up the earlier trends and they were like thirty different characters released in just the first year of the toy line. Like that is so many bios to write.
Yeah, I mean, I think it would be a pretty tall order for just one person, And that's probably why Jim Shooter decided to hand the job off to somebody else. It was a Marvel writer named Danny O'Neill who came up with the name Optimus Prime, but the rest of the original cast was developed by an editor named Bob Budianski, and he was just given a few days to come up with the names. Personalities, powers, weaknesses, and even personal
mottos of dozens of different robots. That's a ton of pressure and nothing to go on except the toys themselves. And to make the assignment that much harder, his deadline was set for the Monday after Thanksgiving. I mean, how cruel is that? It just seems like the way that it works, I guess. But Bob rose to the challenge, and the work he did over that long, long weekend became the basis for the four issue comic mini series that launched the franchise later that year, and he came
up with some real heavy hitters. He had Bumblebee, Starscream, Megatron. Also, his work didn't go unnoticed. Bob is only one of four human inductees into the Transformers Hall of Fame.
I was not familiar with the fact that they have their own Hall of Fame.
Yah. Pretty amazing.
Well, I want to switch gears and talk a little bit more about the lore of Transformers, but first let's take a quick break.
Welcome back to Part time Genius.
Okay, Mango, So we're in the weird wide world of Transformers, and I'm curious where do you want to go next?
Since you gave us the real life history of Transformers. I thought i'd share a little bit about the origin story in the Transformers universe because it's actually pretty strange and like surprisingly spiritual, because transformers have souls.
You know.
I took I think two philosophy courses in college, and neither of those covered this, and so I'm curious to learn about it.
Yeah, I mean, for the amount of money we paid, it shouldn't have. But in the transformer's lore, they all have something called sparks, like the spark of life, and unlike most conceptions of a human soul, a transformer spark is a tangible object, so it's kind of like an organ. It is a weird idea, but Gabe pointed me to a nice explainer from tfwiki dot net, which he assured me is the foremost Transformers wiki on the internet.
No, I'm definitely familiar. I forgot to put my phone on do not Disturb the other night, and I just kept getting text with these links to the information on that on Gabe. So let's go ahead and share what you've learned here.
Okay, So tf wiki rights quote, the spark is the core of Transformer life and electrically charged massive positrons formed from the supernatural absence known as rarefied energy. On like a heart, a spark pulses at a certain frequency to animate a mechanical body frame like a soul. A spark is generally accepted to contain some part of a Transformer's immaterial being, which persists after death by transcending into the afterlife.
So you're saying in Transformers, there's a robot heaven too, like, is there a robot god who made them all?
I am so glad that my kids never asked me that, because I would not have been prepared. But just like in the real world, the answer kind of depends on who you ask. So if you go back to the first Transformer story ever published, that Marvel comic that uh Boudianski worked on, the origin story is completely secular, right, Like, so life on Cybertron springs up through the naturally occurring interaction of gears, levers, and pulleys, which you know is kind of a silly idea, but I also love it.
But then in later comic books and the cartoon series, and now actually with the latest movie, the creation of the Transformers is credited to a deity and fittingly, his name is Primus, which is just a Latin word for first and as the story goes, he started out as this ancient ethereal entity, kind of like a cosmic ghost. But then Primus decided to lay down some roots by joining his essence to a barren, metal rich planet, as you do, and then by imbuing each Transformer with a piece of his essence.
And I'm guessing that's what a spark is, right.
Yeah, They're all little pieces of Primus, which, by the way, is also why they have the power to transform. It's a reflection of his ability to change form, like how he became their planet. And when a Transformer dies, it's spark is set to rejoin with Primus's life force, which they call the all Spark.
This is bizarrely fascinating, but it's also starting to feel a little bit like I'm being inducted into a cult, So I want to be a little careful here, but do keep going.
It's fascinating, Yeah, I mean, I do think The lower highlights one of the most unique things about the Transformers, which is that these aren't machines built by humans or aliens. Instead, they are the aliens, with their own unique culture and background. Which you know, is fertile ground for sci fi storytelling.
It's a good point, and with the deep dive we took this week, it does seem like Transformers comics and cartoons have been mining that potential for a while now. It's just interesting that the same can't be said for all of the live action movies, which are probably the version of the franchise that most people are familiar with.
Now, yeah, seven live action movies. There are five directed by Michael Bay. In particular, these movies are a huge outlier from everything else we've been talking about, Like for fans, the robots in the series are mostly interchangeable, with no real time spent on developing them as unique characters or
even giving them much agency in the story. Instead, it's the human characters who get most of the screen time, with the Transformers mostly just suiting up when it's time for one of those big, messy action sequences.
Well, and if you talk to fans of Transformers, and I was asking a few of their thoughts on the movies themselves, they would say, you know, to make matters worse, the stuff with the human characters is at best completely uninteresting, and it worst painfully dumb. Not exactly a great review there, and there isn't much in these movies that they would actually consider suitable for children. So, for example, the absolute low point they would say has to be in the
fourth movie, Transformer's Age of Extinction. It's got this whole scene dedicated to a twenty year old human character explaining why it's legal for him to date a seventeen year old girl due to Texas's Romeo and Juliette law. So we started to get a little weird here. I know, he even pulls out a laminated card to prove that his relationship is approved by the state.
It's just weird that it goes in that direction.
That is insane. Kay was actually telling me that the whole thing is kind of ironic because Transformers comics have all these big philosophical ideas baked into their storytelling and they wrestle with like concepts of God or evolution or whatever. But to make the movie more appealing to adults, fans think that they dumbed down the adaptations, which is kind of amazing actually yea, also for super fans, the live action stuff never looked right apparently, and I didn't realize this.
Producer said the traditional BLOCKI designs of the Transformers in their robot moods would look silly for the two thousand and seven live action movie that Michael Bay did, so they were redesigned to be much more visually complicated, with lots of like shifting panels and tiny moving details, which is obviously visually interesting, but that makes the characters look virtually unrecognizable, which obviously didn't please fans. Also, their robots
were dumbed down. In the comics, Optimus Prime's motto is freedom is the right of all sentient beings and he only turns to violence as a last resort, right, like that's his whole ethos. But in these movies he's a bloodthirsty robot shouting out lines like we will kill them all and give me your face, which is a real.
You don't think that's a sophisticated and tenidating line. That's not quite the same vibe.
It's sort of paraphrasing mlkay.
Definitely, yes, yeah, yeah, I remember that one, but you know, it's not quite the same vibe as the old motto. And I'm curious, though, did you get a sense of how the Transformers fandom responded to those kinds of changes.
Yeah, it's deeply polarizing. A lot of fans were unhappy to see the characters treated as these one note killing machines, and all of them suddenly were clarifying online that there were fans of Transformers but not the live action movies. There's actually a joke that referenced a lot about how bad these movies are within the community. And it's from
the good place. You know that sitcom course, love that show and Ted Danson's character tries out a new scent of Acts deodorant, which supposedly makes you feel the way that Transformers movies make you feel loud and confusing.
I love that they threw that line on there, But clearly somebody liked these movies though, right, Like they seem to be super successful and they keep making them.
Oh man, they were massive, like the Bay movies made so much money, and they made the Transformers culturally relevant again, like in a way it hadn't been since the nineteen eighties. Also, they serve as an entry point for a whole new generation of fans, both kids and adults. You know, some of the people in the community say, even if you don't like the movies, it's a great way to get
people into Transformers, and they're okay with that. Just to show you the difference though, like between the high minded concepts versus the gory action. The comics that came out at the same time as the Bay movies were dealing with questions about the nature of war, societal expectations, PTSD, and gender dysphoria like all while positioning it in this
like fun sci fi romp. So for fans of the comics, the new animated movie is more akin to what they like, since there are no annoying humans to steal the spotlight.
All right, Well, for the sake of all the Gabes of the world, I hope we got all of the lore and myths right because otherwise our moms are going to get some angry letters, and they're always good at responding very calmly to those. But let's hope they only get positive notes this week.
I'm sure they can handle it. But before we say anything even more inflammatory or get our moms in trouble, let's start the BacT off. Okay, So here's a weird one to start us off. It turns out that Transformers has an odd connection to the nineteen eighty eruption of the Mount Saint Helen's volcano in Washington State. Namely, it helped inspire the story of how the robots first came
to Earth. So in the Marvel comic that you mentioned, the Transformers spaceship crashes into the side of a dormant volcano called Mount Saint Hilary, which is a made up peak that was said to reside in Oregon, just outside of Portland, and the real world inspiration is easy enough to spot, but it's even more explicit in the original story treatment. And that's because the volcano was actually called
Mount Saint Helen's. The change was likely made out of respect for the victims and because you know, they're trying to market toy robots to children.
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it's good call, all right. So we talked about how the original Transformers toy line was cobbled together from existing to car products. But something cool I found this week is that TAKR is still very much involved in the brand. Once the series took off in the US, TAKR actually imported it back to Japan,
essentially re releasing their old toys in new packaging. The line became such a big hit there that once Hasbro ran out of existing toys to release his Transformers, the
two companies began working together to produce new ones. The result is one of the toy industry's most unique and long lasting partnerships, because even though they're on opposite sides of the world, the two companies now collaborate on every aspect of figure design development, with the Hasbro team handling the character selection and the concept design and the Kara doing the heavy lifting on figuring out the engineering and how the toy will actually transform or actually, excuse me, convert.
That is so cool that they're like still working together, you know.
It really is, you think of It is like such a competitive space and the fact that they're collaborating is awesome.
Yeah. So, as strange as the franchise is sometimes, it has attracted so much celebrity talent over the years, and the list of actors who lent their voices to Transformers includes everyone from Weird al Yankovitch, Steve Sheemi, Angela Bassett,
Leonard Nimoy, and Lawrence Fishburn. But the biggest talent to ever voice a Transformer is, of course, the late great Orson Wells and This was back in nineteen eighty six, when the first animated Transformers movie was coming out and Wells was cast as the movies big bad transformer named Unicorn. Wells's career had been in a downturn for many years by that point, which is obviously why he agreed to
the role. But Unicron turned out to be his final film performance, which he hadn't been expecting before he passed away just one week after recording his lines. He spoke out about the role, making it clear how much contempt he had for the whole production. So this is his quote and what he told the press. You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy, some terrible robot toys from Japan that change from one
thing to another. Japanese have funded a full length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer space stuff. I play a planet I menace, somebody calls something or other, then I'm destroyed. My plan is to destroy whoever it is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.
Is so great.
I've never heard that before, but I love that, so I agree. I know it really is, and I love it. I love every word of it, all right. So there are thousands of different transformers at this point. Most of them have their own unique names, and let me tell you, they get so much weirder than Bumblebee. So here are a few of my favorites. You've got Power Hug, who turns into an organic pill bug. You've got Cup with a K who turns into a pickup truck. You get
it where that comes from. And Tarantulus, who, despite having the word tarantulas and his name, actually transforms into a generic spider and not a tarantula.
I don't know why. It's kind of confusing.
And there's also a cross section of transformers with oddly inappropriate sounding names. You've got Randy the Wild Boar, You've got Big Daddy, who's actually a tiny hot rod, a pair of trucks called Huffer and Puffer. And then, last, but not least, you've got Master Dominus, who transforms into the bones of a mastodon or wooly mammoth.
That's so reirdly he transforms just as the bones, but just the bones. I am surprised you didn't include my favorite weird transformer name, Steve from Accounting.
So there's a character called Steve from Accounting Yeah and.
Fly he transforms into a stapler. Is that amazing?
That is fantastic.
Got a same ango between the Steve from Accounting fact and the orson Wells one. I just can't stop thinking about that quote. I'm gonna have to give you today's fact off.
So congrats, well, thank you. No, obviously I watched Transformers as a kid. You watch them. We love the toys. We were vaguely aware of some of the stuff before the show, but Gabe is obviously the powerhouse span here who applied us with all the research. And also, Gabe maybe promise to mention this if anyone is interested in really falling down the Transformers rabbit hole with him. Tfwiki dot net is a great place to start. And he says that there is a YouTube series by an Irish
fan named Chris mcpheeley. It's called Transformers the Basics and Gabe highly recommends it.
That is pretty awesome. I love it when our team members just get to dig in on things that they're passionate about and prepare for episodes like this. It's what it's all about, that celebration of knowledge and all the fun stuff that's out there.
Too, weirdness and weirdness.
We love that part too, but I think that covers it. For today's Part Time Genius from Mango Gay, Mary, Dylan and Me, Thanks as always for listening. We'll see you next week with a brand new episode.
Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and Me Mongagetikler and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produced by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norbel and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, trustee Dara Potts and Vinie Shoy.
For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.