I will unapologetically admit that I got goosebumps watching the new Transformers teaser trailer.

A little bit of preface. I used to think that no fan community had as vocal a hater contigent as Star Wars. Believe it or not, Transformers blows that out of the water. Transfan message board chatter has been filled with people ready, almost eager, to hate every aspect of this movie, that it actually manages to eclipse Star Wars hatin'.

Now, with Star Wars, I can sort of see where such vitriole comes from: fear of change and the desire to protect a cherished childhood memory that actually does have unqualified, substantive value to it. You don't have to be a fan or a child to recognize that there is - or was, depending on your opinion -- a lot of good to Star Wars.

Transformers hatin' seems a bit displaced to me, since if anything, the only consistency to the brand has been change, and the brand itself has very little integrity to it.

That is, there's not much good to it if you're not a fan.

And, this is coming from a hardcore Transformers fan.

I've said it before, of all the Transformer experiences that have been out there in the last 20 years, very little of it has been good. There's been great parts to it, but as a whole, there's been a lot of cringe as well as cool.

And that's fine!

It is, after all, a toy vehicle, and it's silly to pretend that it's not. It's not Wagner. It's not Tolkien. The Transformers story is not out to present a warning to the world, nor necessarily to instill a sense of values to a new generation of youngsters. It's first and foremost cool toys.

It's design. It's surface. It's plastic. The depth and heart has only been added after the fact, and is only apparent after two decades worth of very talented writers attempting to add layers beneath the plastic surface. But that depth is very artificial. It's not baked in there from the start.

When I look at the Transformers lining my shelf, I don't look at them and think about the cosmic struggle of good vs. evil. No, I think about the cool designs.

Anyone who claims to be a Transformers fan because of the story foremost is probably being a little dishonest. It's like claiming to like McDonalds because of the taste. No, you actually like McDonalds because of the price and convenience. You can like the taste, but if taste was really what mattered to you most, you can find better fare elsewhere.

So, as a result, I tend to find people vehemently rejecting the Transformers movie because of storyline changes a bit odd. The Transformers storyline is flimsy and malleable. It's changed every few years for every toyline or publisher who takes it on. There's very little integrity there.

You can invest in the characters, though, which, in reality, means investing in the voice acting. When you count Optimus Prime as your favorite, what you tend to be saying is you love Peter Cullen's performance. Which is great. And it's great news that Cullen is part of the cast.

So, that leaves the design. Now, if you reject the movie because of the movie designs, that's valid. It's hard to argue. The movie designs are different than what we've been used to. But there's a reason for that, and it's a good and considered reason.

The cartoon designs are very simplified, in order to allow hand-animators to draw them frame after frame. They often differ greatly from the toy designs.

The toy designs are inhibited by the costs required to produce them as toys. Also, they need to be somewhat simplistic to allow small hands to twist and turn them into vehicles or tape decks. They are not designed at a 60-foot scale.

Here's a simple exercise. Find a Star Wars action figure on your shelf. Now, imagine that figure standing at six feet tall. Would he look real? How odd would it be to talk to someone with only six or 20 points of articulation? With one expression forever molded on his or her face? You'd feel like you're talking to someone out of their scale, for sure. That person also wouldn't really work at 60 feet tall.

Now, your Transformer that looks great at 6, 8 or 12 inches tall would be a hard visual sell at a 60 foot height, especially if you were interesteed in achieving a photo-real movie. Why, for instance, would a complex living machine have such simplistic geometric shapes? I can understand the aesthetic approach the Transformers live-action crew has taken with their cinematic robots. These things get more complex as they get bigger. A car has a lot of moving parts. A car that turns into a robot should logically have more parts, not less. The transformation process involves thousands of moving parts, not a half-dozen.

But anyway, about the trailer. I was happy to see how scary it is. Transformer fans have spent the last 20 years relating not to the humans in the story, but to the robots. That would probably not play to a broad audience, and is ultimately a disservice to the sheer spectacle of the Transformers property. Sixty foot-tall robots fighting in the streets SHOULD be terrifying. These beings are aliens who operate in a scale we don't necessarily understand. For too long have Transformers simply been voice-actors in disguise. I kinda find it refreshing that they're big, alien machines. It brings back the ol' often-forgotten struggle that the 1984 robots first felt: the Autobots brought this war to Earth, and now feel the need to protect the soft, squishy humans from the havoc they unleashed, and they're just as likely, if they're not careful, to stomp their friends into the ground.

So, as someone who has in the past shown great aversion to Michael Bay movies, I admit to really being intrigued by the trailer and hopeful that it'll be a great experience that plays to his strengths: namely, blowing stuff up. I'm not griping and moaning about anything I've seen about the movie yet, because I can understand where it's coming from.

ph