And some of them were shows that you loved.

But even then, you actually weren't being cynical enough. A lot of these shows weren't so much "made" as "shoddily slapped together from some older bullshit (usually from Japan)."

When you were a kid, you didn't question where cartoons came from. The Ninja Turtles were just there , having wacky adventures even as you turned off the screen, possibly watching you as you slept. Of course, as you grew up you realized that a lot of these shows were made to do nothing but sell toys.

6 Transformers Was a Bunch of Toys From Different Toy Lines

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The Classic Show You Loved:

What makes Transformers so well-loved and iconic is that, even though they're robots, you can immediately tell who's good and who's bad just by looking at them: Megatron looks like the soul of a rapist possessed by a tank, whereas Optimus has an aura of righteousness. If America were a truck, it's name would be Optimus Prime.



"I get 32 gallons to the mile."

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But Actually ...

Optimus and Megatron were never supposed to be enemies -- in fact, they didn't even belong to the same toy line. Basically, Hasbro grabbed two different sets of toys from Japan and paid the Marvel Comics staff to come up with new names for all the robots. The result was Transformers. The same characters already had origins and personalities in Japan: For example, "Megatron" was meant to be a good guy.

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Because there's nothing more heroic than morphing into a Nazi handgun, apparently.

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Megatron, Soundwave and others came from a toy line called Microman, where the premise was that these little space robots came to Earth and disguised themselves as household items to protect kids. This explains why Megatron (a supposedly giant robot) turned into a regular-sized pistol, but it does not explain why they expected children to have said pistols lying around in their drawers, like in this early commercial:

Meanwhile, Optimus came from a different toy line called Diaclone, which was actually supposed to be battle mechas -- they even included a little metallic figure called "Inch-Man," which represented the pilot. Yes, the horrifying implication here is that Optimus (or "Battle Convoy," as he's still known in Japan) had as much of a personality as, well, a truck. In fact, if you look at him carefully, it's easy to tell that he was always meant to be just another mindless giant robot, like Voltron.