My mother remarried when I was in college. When she moved in with her new husband, I had to sort through and consolidate what was left of my childhood in her basement. The item I excavated that I cherished most, whose attached memories were most pure, was a huge chest of Transformers from the Eighties, most of which I’d shoplifted. I found that of the toy robots I’d kept, the ones I loved most were the subsets that combined Voltron-like into one master robot. Constructicons, Protectobots, Predacons, Aerialbots, Stunticons, Technobots, Combaticons, Terrorcons—every set of five to six individual pieces, each with its own self-contained personality and story, combined to attain a power and complexity none of the individual parts could attain on their own. These were the only pieces of my childhood I kept.
Just added to The List and the Story: Out of the Nineties