[老外看中国]The History of Transformers in China [复制链接]

Let me give some caveats right now. I am not going to talk about the Chinese transformers fandom of today, because there is now very little difference between what it is like in China and around the world in terms of transformers. I concentrate instead on China's experience with the transformers when I was a little child, in the mid-1980s, when the transformers first made their entry and when transformers fans were still eight or seven-year-olds (not twenty-something adults like now). In other words, I am interested in talking about the "real thing" when it happened almost two decades ago. Also, I am not going to talk about Hong Kong's experience, because I know very little about it, and I know the whole process was very different from mainland China.

I said earlier that transformers entered China following an unusual sequence because it was transformers arts that first came in, then toys, and finally the cartoon! The Chinese economy of the mid-1980s was still not very integrated with the outside world, so the inflow of foreign cartoons and toys was limited. Formally the transformers toys only appeared in China as late as 1989 or 1990, and the first cartoon was aired (at least in my city) in early 1990. So obviously the golden, if not peak, period of the transformers basically had two main pillars missing: few toys and no cartoons. What, then, was there? What was there were hundreds of, if not thousands of, stickers with pirated images of the Japanese children's magazine TV Magazine.

Stickers became popular with Chinese schoolchildren around 1985, first with pictures of TV actors or actresses, then cars, then classic Cartoons like the Mickey Mouse. We used to buy them and stick them all around for fun, or just collect them like stamps. Because of the geographical closeness between China and Japan, those factories making the stickers soon turned to the Japanese market for images. I remember seeing stickers with images of Guadam, Macross, and a few other Japanese concepts, too. As transformers started appearing in TV Magazine around 1985, they also made their first ever presence in China. And until the first appearance of the cartoon and toys around 1989, these pirated images taken from TV magazine were about the only form of transformers Chinese schoolchildren got to see. Of course, by the spring of 1990 most schoolchildren who collected transformers stickers in 1985 were leaving primary school and entering middle school, leaving their childhood behind them, in essence ending the prime era of transformers in mainland China. Nowadays, with China's economy like a dynamo, these Chinese transformers fan could just as easily buy reissues, watch TF DVDs, or buy Dreamwave comics as anyone else. But one crucial difference is that, now, all this action is nostalgic, like paying a homage to an un-recoverable past, and the real thing, back then, was just the thousands of stickers of Studio Ox arts.

These stickers were, in a sense, very interesting. Since they were pirated commodities, their quality was very much a problem. The biggest headache, as you could see in the pictures shown here, was that the factories making these stickers often only arbitrarily take a portion of the original TV magazine images to make a sticker, so that they could make more stickers in total and sell for more money. Therefore most of the studio OX images the Chinese children could seen were half, partial, or even a pathetically small fraction of the original color-spread in the magazine. Insurmountable difficulties make incredible genius: without any help of story lines, some Chinese schoolchildren even managed to manually restore some of these original complete images from those hundreds, if not thousands of, individual partial pictures on the stickers. That kind of feat was probably one of the most remarkable "transformers instincts" I have ever witnessed.

In fact, mainland China had some of the world's most avid transformers fans. Sometimes I think the reason is really not that difficult to understand: when you have scarcity, you learn to cherish it. Back then, schoolchildren like us never knew that a thing called TV magazine existed, and we did not know where these beautiful images of robots with car hoods came from. It is just they mysteriously came out of somewhere, available from the peddlers of stickers on the corners of the street. I have read a lot of accounts of transformers fans from around the world about their childhood fascination with these robots. One thing that almost sometimes struck me about Chinese fans, compared to others, was their emotional attachment when they talked about it.

We have to understand that, since there were no cartoon, few comics, and few toys (no toys or cartoons at all where I lived, and I lived in a pretty large city), the only thing that was available were the thousands of stickers. The Chinese schoolchildren pretty much had to piece together a story of their own about the transformers, about who were the evil ones and who were not. Without the corruption of commercially, if not cheekily, scripted cartoons, these children probably invested some of their most magnificent childhood imaginations into these transformers. That was why they got very attached to these transformers on an emotional level. So, a lot of people asked me: how popular were the transformers in China, overall? They were not very popular with girls, but for boys of that era, it was probably one of the few children's toy concepts that created some kind of unity across the vastness of China. I remember once reading a story from a Chinese fan, who said that when he finally had the chance to watch Transformers the Movie and saw the scene of Optimus Prime dying, he just broke down in tears. The next morning he held a "funeral ceremony" in his own style for OP. And what really sort of moved me was that, he said, even today, when as an adult he faces some crisis or enormous difficulties in his personal life or career, he would always think: "What would Optimus Prime do in this situation if he were me?"-----this might sound silly, but nevertheless he does mean it. And I have nothing but respect for that.

Without the help of cartoons, Chinese schoolchildren created their own stories lines surrounding those Studio Ox art images. I have forgotten how we got to learn the names of those transformers characters, most probably by word of mouth or pirated comics, as areas of costal China more accessible to the outside word (such as Guangdong Province) relayed the knowledge about transformers further and further into the depth of inland China. What made it a little chaotic for us was that, with the ad hoc nature of these transformers stickers, everything that existed was thrown at us randomly but simultaneously. TV magazine images of the "Fight! Super Life Robot Form" era and the 2010 era came in stickers together, immediately followed by the Headmasters. So it took us a long while before figuring out that there were basically three phases of the transformers: pre-2010, 2010, and the Headmasters. (The later series such as Masterforce or Vicotry were already too late for us, as we entered middle school, leaving transformers, and our childhood memories, behind). From these stickers, the Chinese schoolchildren tried to peace together how Optimus Prime was replaced by Rodimus Prime, and so on. This was almost a total fan fiction experience with the transformers. One common mistake we made back then was to mistake Chromedome, rather than Fortress Max, as the third generation of leaders, simply because most of the TV magazine images of the headmasters put Chromedome in the most prominent position.

In China, transformers characters were given names very differently from other places of the world. In some sense helped by the sophistication of the Chinese language, these transformers had some of the most romantic and poetic names I have ever known. For some of the important characters, their original awkward names were rejected and completely new, but very traditional, Chinese names were given. Optimus Prime, for example, was known as "The Giant Pillar that Holds the Skies". Megatron was "The Magnificence Which Puts the Skies in Awe." Rodimus Prime was "The Warrior that Heals the Skies". There are a lot more: "The Duke"(Jazz), "The Flying Tigers Squadron" (the Stuticons), "The Leopard that Stirs the Sky" (Bruticus), "The Red Spider" (Starscream), "The Flying Princes" (Superion), "the Hercules" (Devastator), and "the Guardian God" (Defensor). The decepticons, as a whole, were known as "The Tigers that Dominate the Skies". On the other hand, because of the lack of information, a lot of key characters were simply named after their car mode, such as the Crane (Grapple), the Police Car (Prowl), the Fire Engine (Inferno), the Ambulance (Ratchet). Many others had English names which were deemed cool enough and translated straight into Chinese, including Soundwave, Bumblebee, Trailbreaker, Red Alert and so on. Even today, when I talk with my own Chinese friends I will call that red guy Fire Engine-----if I say Inferno they will not feel comfortable or simply do not know what I am talking about.

And, personally, even today I still find "The Tigers that Dominate the Skies" much more appealing than the idiotic word "decepticon".

In late 1989 transformers toys started coming into mainland China. Contrary to people's stereotypical beliefs, these were Chinese-made but officially Hasbro-licensed real transformers toys. Of course by 1989 the rest of the world has already moved on to Victory or even later lines, but in China the transformers toys have just started. The packaging was completely American and everything, including the tech specs, was in English. The only difference was that the name of the individual transformers character was printed in Chinese. In an effort to promote the toys, the TV cartoon also came in around the same time. Initially, unsure of the potential of the mainland Chinese market, Hasbro only released the few mini-cars as a test (The first ever transformers I saw was Beachcomber). The initial release proved hugely popular. Television pictures showed images of superstores being stormed by children longing for the toys, and so more and more toy lines came in. However, just like the way we got our TV magazine pirate images, the toys came in with no particular order: everything pre-Headmaster was pretty much out there. Soon after Beachcombers I saw Blades, and then the Stunticons, Bumblebee, Springer, and so on. The big names, like Optimus Prime or Megatron, because of their high price, had a limited release. Overall these toys, because of foreign copy rights, were extremely expensive, and most children couldn't afford a lot. How widely available these toys became heavily depended on the geographical location of the city: the closer to the coast, the more variety of toys. I was fortunate enough to see Optimus Prime, Megatron, a few Dinobots, but I never saw a real gestalt as a kid. And the elite car lines such as Prowl (the Police Car, haha!)or Wheeljack came out as late as autumn 1990, when I was already in middle school. But at the bottom of my heart I didn't care too much about these toys any way. In some sense, the toys came a bit too late for those kids who really lived with the transformers stories in their childhood. The same with the cartoon-----we watched it, but the experience was somewhat an anti-climax. First of all, there was obviously a conflict between our own "TV magazine fan fiction" interpretation of the story and the cartoon. Secondly, the scripts for the cartoon were not well received any way, for its lack of sophistication and commercialism. Thirdly, by then we were already 13 or 14 years old, ready to face the pressure of middle school and growing up. Many parents simply threw out all those stickers we collected without telling us, and we were sort of swept into an older age before we came to realize it. By the time of early 1992, the stickers more or less stopped appearing, and that period of history quietly ended for us, too.

又是E文`

http://www.tfpulp.com/edit/chinesehist/chinesehist.html

写得不错啦

［此帖子已被 biqi 在 2005-6-9 9:20:24 编辑过］

好不容易才进来~~~我对这篇文章也很感兴趣，给我一天时间，等我明天考试考完，就可以定心坐下来翻了，希望到时候也能够进入网页，这个问题总是比较头大阿~~经常是出错或是打不开。