Dinobot Days

Reflections on Grimlock and Swoop in the time before and after time, in 1985 and forty years later.

When I was a kid, the best toy in the world was the Dinobot. It was part of the Transformers line of toys, and it would start as a battle-ready robot, standing about 5-7 inches high - then transform into a dinosaur in 8-20 steps.

There were about five or six different Dinobots - I’m going to write this whole essay, even the parts about the history of science, without googling. You can correct me if you want. Or you can applaud my Evel-Knevel-like leap over the Snake-River-Canyon of my own ignorance.

Among the Dinobots, there was a triceratops, a pterodactyl, a stegosaurus, a brontosaurus, maybe one other one, and then the best one of all - a tyrannosaurus rex, named Grimlock.

The tyrannosaurus rex was named Grimlock. And he was the coolest toy ever. He was like the Faberge Egg, the Antkythera Mechanism and the Laocoon wrapped up in one. I never owned it as a kid.

Awesomeness

Robots are awesome, at least when you’re a kid. Now I’m not so sure. I have a sinking sensation that at some point in my later years I’ll be beaten up by one of those Boston Dynamics numbers, and then have to spend half the day submitting my side of the story through a WorkDay portal with five-factor authentication just so I don’t have to pay for any damage my face inflicted on its steely fists.

But in Central Massachusetts in 1985, robots were cool, and robots that could transform convincingly into something else were the coolest. But just fucking wait one second. What’s even cooler than robots? Dinosaurs, obviously. Well, did they ever have news for us kids.

The lips of the ourobouros

Dinosaurs lived tens of millions of years ago. They ate each other, laid eggs, and stomped about. Robots - at least the kind that could decide to go to the store and buy something, and then do it - remain a figment of our imagination, and a possibility of the future.

A Dinobot is an extreme anachronism, a marvel. It’s a pure object, with no precise use.

As a historical artifact, you could attribute the Dinobot to the fevered imagination of post-war Japan, the stunted acid dreams of the Baby Boomers, the commercial imperative to pander to the second or third generation of affluent children raised largely by the television. But none of that would capture its trajectory or its place.

Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, from Star Wars, was the Dinobots’ hometown. It was a future that already happened in past. It was the future we were already living in, which was hurtling toward something that looked a lot like the past.

During the Cold War, this was the World War Three that would be fought with sticks and stones, as Einstein had quipped. And it’s the feudalism it often seems like we’re backing ourselves into these days. It’s a spaceship with a creaky door. It’s a newborn with a dubious agenda.

The crossroadses of histories

In my daily life, things come at me fast. Sometimes I feel like I live at the edges of a lot of different worlds.

An all-pro defensive tackle dropping into serviceable pass coverage on third down, and the verbal tic of a diner waitress that seem to confirm the Pythagorean notion of reincarnation are both things that can happen within the same hour. Neither one precludes the other, though neither easily accommodates the other. Experience is always larger than our frames for it (see 2024’s “Incompleteness”).

Into one of the many unavoidable moments of disorientation arrives an object like the Dinobot. It’s a dinosaur and a robot. It’s a robot that can look like a dinosaur. It’s a dinosaur with a shocking secret clutched close to its breast. There’s no way to explain it that helps you understand anything else.

It’s outrageous. The world is what it is. But that world made a Dinobot, and that forgives a lot.

When Dinobots were hot

I was not the first kid on my block to get a Dinobot. They came out when I was eight. They came out in a dead zone between my birthday and Christmas, in a dead zone between when I was adorable and when I had my own money.

Dinobots sold out fast. It wasn’t a frenzy on the scale of Cabbage Patch Dolls. Parents were more likely to punch other parents over a toy for their daughters than one for their sons, at least in the 1980s (see 2024’s “Dead or in Jail”).

Child World at White City in Shrewsbury sold out fast. Kay Bee Toys never had a shot. To get a Dinobot, I had to go to the Toys R Us out in Framingham, where we almost never went. The store itself was inside Shoppers’ World - a mostly outdoor concrete hive of stores set around a grim courtyard and fronted by a plaster-domed Jordan Marsh. The complex laid a dubious claim to the dubious honor of being the first shopping mall in America.

I don’t what got me a Dinobot that afternoon. But as a parent now, I bet it had something to do with agreeing to sit in the car for 45 minutes to go to cosmopolitan Framingham for something my mother wanted.

A pterodactyl with gold wings

There was a huge bin of new transformers at the Toys R Us, but very few Dinobots, seemingly none. I remember losing hope before I found mine.

The pterodactyl-bot was one of the only ones left. It wasn’t the worst one. That was probably the stegosaurus-bot. The plus was that it could fly - in my imagination. I think most of the transformers could fly on the TV cartoon, if they wanted to. But this Dinobot had big, fold-out wings - gold, encased in clear plastic, just like its beak. The minus was that, compared with the other dinosaur-slash-battle-bots, it was the most diminutive. But it was my new favorite toy. And on the drive home, I convinced myself that it was the best of all the Dinobots.

When Dinobots roamed

This was third grade, and my class lost a jovial, beloved teacher named Ms. McNamara, to a nervous breakdown after her mother died. In hindsight, something was off that fall. She told us that the manager of the Boston Red Sox at the time, also named McNamara, was her uncle, and said she’d take one of us kids to meet him someday. One day near the end, she had us stand up, one at a time, to sing We Are the World. Each kid sang the entire thing - thirty or so of us. It took most of the school day. Based on our performances, she said she could get some of us on Star Search. I remember not believing her.

After Christmas break, Ms. McNamara was replaced by a bony, mean-spirited shrew named Mrs. Van Atten, who flat-out hated my guts. These things happen. It was mutual. She tried to blame a busted classroom aquarium on me, even after multiple kids said I had nothing to do with it. One Halloween two years later, my mom drove me over to egg her house, along with other houses sporting election signs for a local politician she disliked.

Dinosaurs and heresy

Like most kids, I was fascinated by dinosaurs. They were huge, scary, strange, and they roamed the earth for 300 million years. And back then, no one knew how the dinosaurs died.

I remember being stuck in church during the burst of attendance leading up to my First Communion, bored out of my tender skull, and trying to come up with anything to ask G-d for. So, I prayed to know how the dinosaurs died. I came away from the experience pretty sure that G-d would tell me after I died. Now everyone seems pretty damn sure it was an asteroid.

Later I learned that dinosaurs have never been popular with the church, starting with the first ones found in the fossil record. The church had maintained that the world was 7,000 years old. But then a Scottish guy, digging in the rocks in the 1700s, took a close look and said that the rocks would all have to be a lot older to do the rock things that they were doing (see, no google). And he said the world had to be at least a million years old. This caused a huge ruckus with the church, exacerbating a fight about the particulars of reality that the church has been losing for a few hundred years and counting.

Charles Darwin took the Scottish guy’s geology book along with him on a long and boring boat ride aboard the HMS Beagle, where he got to wondering what else might have happened in a million years. He said that the pelicans and the pterodactyls were our own long-lost relations.

What ex-wife?

Dinosaurs are a problem for the church for other reasons. Three hundred million years ain’t a flirtation. G-d seems to have loved the dinosaurs above all others for a while too. Sound familiar? Maybe we better make double sure it was an asteroid, and watch our asses.

Today, some deeply traditional religious people try to square the circle by saying that the world is 7,000 years old, and the dinosaur bones we find were actually buried for us to find. Why? Well, simple - they were buried by the devil himself, just to undermine our faith. If so, well played, Old Scratch. It’s one thing to dream these things up, but quite another to follow through.

A possibly mistaken history

The narrative of the Dinobots is also pretty far out. The Transformers themselves came to Earth in the present day, after having a hard time back on their home planet of Cybertron. There were only a few dozen of them, half of them hated the other half, and they landed on a planet teeming with potentially dangerous human beings.

They had to lay low while they figured shit out, so they transformed into things that people wouldn’t notice - cars and planes, boom boxes and handguns. Scale didn’t seem to matter much, as long as they turned into something mechanical. Sometimes the Boom Box would turn back into a robot that was way bigger than a boom box and take the Gun, who was way smaller than a robot (and who was the Boom Box’ boss), and shoot someone.

You can play fast and loose when you’re having fun. And I guess that’s where the Dinobots come in. If you’re trying to hide on a human-dominated planet, a dinosaur would be the worst thing you could choose to transform into. So the story was that the Dinobots came to Earth from Cybertron back when it was dominated by dinosaurs, and they transformed to dinosaurs to fit in while they got their shit together. I’m not sure why it would be important to fit in among dinosaurs, but sure, fine.

At some point, the Dinobots got buried in a cave, only to be freed tens of millions of years later by other robots from the same planet. Luckily for everyone, it was the good guys who found them.

Early mornings

My son Walter is five, and resourceful. He likes to get up before the rest of us. No one is sure when. My wife, who gets up early to run, will find him with an iPad and a snack on the kitchen counter. She asks when he woke up, and he lies, “just a minute ago.”

The morning is his time. He has the run of the house, and doesn’t seem any worse for wear. I used to do the same thing, and I remember stepping softly down the stairs in the pale, pre-dawn light to eat crackers and watch the test pattern until programming sprang to life on WLVI Channel 56.

Swoop was his name

Only now, at the end of this essay, I’m going to google the name of the pterodactyl Dinobot that I had. It was was named Swoop. Not sure that was worth breaking my strident stance, but it’s done now. Anyway, I had Swoop for a few weeks. I want to say three, but I think it might have been closer to two.

One sweaty afternoon in the den, in the course of play, Swoop’s beak broke off, maybe not off completely, but irreparably.

This was an earthquake, a tragedy. It was my favorite toy. It was entirely my fault. Things with my parents were in a place where asking for another one wasn’t even a consideration. Mrs. Van Atten wasn’t pulling any punches at those parent-teacher conferences.

So the next day, I woke especially early. It was a cold, and dark, with heavy dew on the grass. I set Swoop on a rock by the hedges that separated our yard from the neighbors. Lifting another rock over my head, I smashed Swoop to pieces, until he was no good as either a pterodactyl or a robot. He was just plastic junk. I threw the pieces in the woods.

Not long after that, Transformers stopped being the coolest toy ever. Toys as a category lost interest. Then it was baseball, baseball cards, and into adolescence.

This Christmas

My little boy has an attitude I try to live up to every day. He’s excited about nearly everything - school, no school, broccoli, a trip to the deli, you name it. This winter, I asked him what he wanted for Christmas.

“Santa knows,” he said.

“Okay, but is there anything in particular that you really want? Just in case Santa asks.”

“No, I like everything.”

And that was that. So when it came time to email my dad the links for what he should get the kids, I sent him a link to Walmart to get Walter the best Grimlock that a 20-minute web search could unearth for under a hundred bucks.

Christmas Lessons

Last year, when my in-laws asked what to get Walter for Hanukkah, I sent my wife an Amazon link to send to them for a simple tyrannosaurs-bot, designed for little kids, which transformed in 2-3 changes.

It kept Walter occupied through almost all of a pretty long lunch at a restaurant. It was a staple of playtime for a while.

This year’s model is much more complicated to transform, requiring closer to 20 changes. It’s suggested for kids 8+. Walter hasn’t figured out how to do it, and keeps bringing it to me every time he wants the tyrannosaurus to be a robot or the robot to be a tyrannosaurus.

It’s black, red and gold like the original, with moveable jaws and a swiveling head. It’s freakin awesome.

Selected bibliography

Dead or in Jail

Incompleteness