Pick Up The Pieces

This past weekend my wife caught up on all the Transformers she had been missing when she sat down and watched "Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon." Dutiful mother that she is, she sat still for the entire two and a half hours of the latest chapter of action-figure-inspired mayhem. She winced at director Michael Bay's selection of underwear model Rosie Huntington-Whitely and her skimpy ensembles that might have made Megan Fox blush. She cringed when the space shuttle carrying the Autobots into space exploded in a scene all too reminiscent of space shuttles that have exploded in real life. But that's what you get when you sit down in front of a Michael Bay film: Things blow up.
In this case, both Washington, DC and Chicago got the Bay treatment, as Earth was once again in peril of being overrun by giant robots who double as sports cars and tractor trailer trucks. Somehow, three movies into the franchise, our government is still able to keep their existence a closely guarded secret, in spite of the way they seem to crush and destroy most everything that gets in their way. Such is the conceit of Transformers.
I wandered in and out of the room as the action took place in surround-sound. I wondered how no one had managed to snap a picture of Optimus Prime with their camera phone or grabbed a video of Bumble Bee for uploading to Youtube. Perhaps they were all too busy running for their lives as buildings crashed down around them and machines from another galaxy threatened their very existence. When the smoke cleared, the bad robots had been vanquished and the good robots needed a few parts replaced, and most of downtown Chicago lay in ruins.
That's when I came up with the idea for "Transformers 4: Damage Control," after the limited comic series from Marvel Comics. The good folks at Marvel have been tearing up New York City for fifty-plus years now, and so it makes sense that by now they've figured out that you can only knock down the Empire State Building so many times a month without somebody at least threatening some pretty nasty litigation. I would expect that even transforming robots from another galaxy might end up having to do a little community service after some of the surveillance video has been seen. There could even be a whole line of household appliances that turn into very useful robots who can put things back together just as their more boisterous counterparts tear things up. Once they put the Lincoln Monument back together, they can get to work on reassembling the Pyramid of Cheops. Actually, come to think of it, I think I saw this show back when my son was much younger. It was called "Bob The Builder." I can't wait for Michael Bay to get his hands on that one.