Forty years late, Hasbro says sorry | The Rewind Vol. 2

Sunday. Actual Sunday, like I said. I want that noted somewhere in the record, because last week I promised you a Sunday magazine and then handed you a Monday one, and a man's only got so many free passes in his first month on a job.

It's been a strange seven days up here. San Diego Comic-Con ran Thursday through today, which meant the attic was a command center: laptop on the ottoman, lights off, pretzels in the mixing bowl, four days of watching other people stand in lines I will never stand in. I told you last week I'd file a full damage report. Here it is, and it's stranger than I expected, because the biggest story of the week isn't a trailer or a casting reveal. It's a toy company saying sorry.

Not for a defective product. For 1986.

The rest of the issue has a new album that sounds like a whole night in one sitting, a horror documentary score from the label that basically invented the modern scene, a forty year old Stephen King movie I rented out of existence, and the debut of a column I've been promising since day one.

Forty years late, Hasbro says sorry

Friday afternoon in San Diego, Hasbro's Transformers panel announced a year long campaign. They are calling it the Apology Tour. The thing they're apologizing for is killing Optimus Prime in the 1986 animated movie.

Read that again. A publicly traded toy company has built a marketing calendar around saying sorry to a generation of adults for a cartoon death that happened before most of them could do long division.

I was seven. My mother took me and my sister Carol to a matinee in the summer of 1986 because it was a cartoon about robots and cartoons about robots are safe. That was the arrangement. Robots fight, robots win, nobody's mom has to explain anything in the car.

Then Optimus Prime dies in the first act.

He goes gray. The color literally drains out of him while the music swells, and a theater full of first and second graders sits there with their popcorn going cold. I remember the specific texture of the silence. Not crying yet, just processing, the whole room doing math at the same time. He's not getting up. That's a thing that can happen.

Carol handled it better than I did. Carol handles most things better than I do.

So here's Hasbro in 2026, standing on a stage in San Diego, and one of the panel lines about the Apology Tour is that killing Prime "changed the entire trajectory of the Transformers brand." Which is corporate for we have been paying for this since Reagan's second term. Somewhere in a Rhode Island conference room, a slide deck exists that contains the phrase emotional damage and a projected revenue figure, and both of those things are on the same slide, and I hate how well it's working on me.

Because it is working. Stan Bush played the panel. Acoustic. The man who sang "The Touch," the song that plays while the whole thing goes to hell, sitting there with a guitar in a convention hall, doing the number that scored a room full of kids getting their first lesson in mortality. If you'd told my seven year old self that in forty years he'd watch that happen on a laptop in an attic in Cleveland at one in the morning, he would have had questions about the attic.

They didn't apologize because they were wrong. They apologized because we're forty seven now and we have credit cards.

The tour has hardware behind it. A re-recorded version of the soundtrack, the Reformatted Edition, went up on streaming the day of the panel. The 1986 movie is going back into theaters in 4K, and Fathom has it down for September 17, with a wide run through the 21st and tickets on sale August 7. There's a new post credits chapter cut specifically for the theatrical event, and the trailer they showed is the part that got me: Optimus in sleep mode, drifting in open space, one finger twitching, and the words NEW CHAPTER.

It's a cynical piece of work and I've already picked which theater I'm going to.

The panel had the rest of the usual freight too. A Maximals thirtieth anniversary pack, a brand new Studio Series mould for G1 Red Alert instead of the redeco everyone assumed, G1 animation styling officially entering the Studio Series line, a Leader class Megatron they described as a triple changer with an asterisk, and an unnamed HasLab landing before the end of the year. The line I keep chewing on came from Nate on the panel: "Start preparing for your collection to get a lot bigger." Sir, my collection lives in the same room as my job. There is no bigger.

The rest of the damage

Hall H on Friday belonged to Rick Moranis.

Spaceballs: The New One had its panel, and the bit they ran was that cast members went into the audience hunting for people wearing Dark Helmet masks. One of the masked people in the crowd was Moranis. He took it off. The room came apart. It was his first Comic-Con ever, at 73, for a sequel to a 1987 parody of a 1977 movie.

Josh Gad, Keke Palmer, Lewis Pullman and Daphne Zuniga are all in it, Josh Greenbaum directs, Benji Samit and Dan Hernandez wrote it, and it lands April 23, 2027. Mel Brooks, who turned 100 in June, opened the panel in a pre-recorded video and reprises Yogurt through motion capture. Bill Pullman sent a letter and had his son Lewis read it out loud on stage. Gad's origin story for the whole project is that he cold called Brooks and pitched for forty minutes straight, the argument being that science fiction has changed enough in forty years to deserve a fresh mugging.

They also announced a cinematic universe called the Almighty Schwartz Saga, so that they could refer to it by its initials. I laughed out loud alone in a dark room. That's a review.

Elsewhere: Prime Video ran the first Blade Runner 2099 trailer, with Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer, Silka Luisa showrunning, and the premiere set for November 25. NewRetroWave, who are inside this scene rather than covering it from a distance, reported the reaction as extremely mixed and put the question to their readers straight. I'm withholding until I see more than a trailer. Sequels to that particular movie have a track record of being either the best thing anyone did that decade or a very expensive screensaver.

Guillermo del Toro announced a 3D and HDR pass on Pan's Labyrinth for its twentieth, converted by hand, and then said the quiet part into a microphone: "Absolutely no goddamn AI." The room cheered. He went further, about protecting a lineage of art and what happens if you cut a generation off from learning the craft. That's not an 80s story and I'm running it anyway, because the same argument turned up twice more this week in corners of the retro world that have nothing to do with each other or with him.

Odds and ends from the floor: previously unreleased Lucasfilm animation in the form of Star Wars: Detours, surfacing at the Lucas Museum after years on a shelf. Star Wars turning 50 next year with a shelf of books to match. George Takei on stage for Star Trek's sixtieth. Futurama getting a fourteenth season. And Ryan Gosling as Ghost Rider under Shawn Levy, in 2028, which I have no opinion about yet and refuse to pretend otherwise.

This week in music

Last week I told you the release shelf was empty and to be patient. This week it filled up in a single day. Friday the 24th dropped two records that both belong in this magazine, and one of them is the best fit for what we do here that I've heard all month.

New Arcades put out A Night To Reflect on TimeSlave, ten tracks, and the concept is right there in the running order. Sunset Odyssey. One Last Drive. After Hours. When the City Sleeps. Endless Horizon. Daybreak. It's a night, start to finish, sundown to sunrise, and the sequence does the storytelling. By the time you hit Daybreak you have actually been somewhere.

He wrote it, produced it, and painted the cover himself, which is either admirable or a red flag about delegation, and having done both jobs badly in my life I know which one it is. His own framing is that the record moves from reflection toward hope and renewal over the course of one long summer night, and that's the rare bit of artist copy that survives contact with the actual music.

"When the City Sleeps" is the one I keep restarting. It sits in that pocket where the drums are patient and the pad underneath is doing all the emotional labor, and it's built for the stretch of road between the last exit with a gas station and the next one. I took it out past the airport twice this week, which is my only reliable review methodology and the reason my mileage is what it is.

The same day, NewRetroWave Records put out The Thing Expanded, the score Figure and Destryur wrote for a documentary about Carpenter's 1982 film. Eight tracks. Early Winter, MacReady with STRNGR guesting, Another World, Cold Heat, Who Goes There?, Blood Sample, If Only We Spoke Norwegian, Inferno.

That seventh title is the best joke on any tracklist this year. If you know the movie you know the whole opening is a helicopter full of Norwegians screaming at people who cannot understand a word of it, and everything that follows happens because nobody in that camp spoke Norwegian. Naming a track after the failure of translation that dooms everyone is the work of people who have watched the film more times than is medically advisable. I respect it enormously.

Musically it does the correct thing, which is refuse to compete with the source. Nobody sane tries to out-Carpenter Carpenter. It sits in cold, patient dread and lets the empty space do most of the work. "Cold Heat" is the one that got me.

The Extremely Sloppy verdict, as promised

Last week I made fun of a record I hadn't heard. An LP called ESP, by a project called Extremely Sloppy Productions, and I said if it was good you'd hear about it and if it was bad you'd hear about it louder.

I owe them a correction on a technicality: it isn't a synthwave record. It showed up on the synthwave ledger because tagging is a group hallucination, which is a thing I said last week and had immediately proven at my expense. What it actually is, and the artist is explicit about this, is a frutiger aero record. Chillsynth, ambient, that whole aquatic bubble-and-glass aesthetic that people who were eleven in 2006 feel about the way I feel about a gated snare.

Eight tracks, thirty one minutes. Track one is called beat_i_made_in_30_minutes.mp3, filename extension included, and runs eighty two seconds. Track four is called "2049: Woobified," runs nine minutes forty four, and takes up nearly a third of the record all by itself. There's a track called "Aquatic Ambience," which is a Donkey Kong Country reference, and one called "Whales Are In The Water," which is not a reference to anything and is simply true.

The announcement post reads, in full sincerity: "On the one year anniversary of its completion, my eponymous frutiger aero album is here! It's a relief to get it out after so long (like a fart)." The YouTube channel's tagline is "I make cool garbage."

It's good. Not in the way I usually mean good, there's no chorus to defend at a party, but "2049: Woobified" is a genuinely lovely ten minutes of drift and I put it on while doing the dishes and forgot to be a critic. Name your price, and there are stickers for fifty pence. I paid, because I made fun of a stranger's album in print before hearing it and that's the fine.

Coming, and gone

PYLOT has The Carbon Ghost up for pre-order, out Friday the 31st. Five tracks, and the fifth is the title track again as an instrumental, which is a move I'm neutral on. It's a concept EP set in a place called Solai, following a rider whose legend starts blurring into machinery. One of the tracks is called "Splitlane Echo." I have not heard a note of it.

Boy Harsher signed to Atlantic. Actual Atlantic, the major, with an album called Get Mean due September 18. I have complicated feelings I'm not going to pretend to resolve here. That story has historically gone one of two ways and both of them are worth watching.

Carpenter Brut is going to Australia for the first time, four dates in late January, Brisbane and Sydney and Melbourne and then the Froth & Fury festival in Adelaide, with Sierra Veins supporting. Australia, you have no idea what's about to happen to your ears. Wear the earplugs. I'm serious, wear them, I did not and I have a permanent souvenir.

Two labels I check every week had nothing. Lazerdiscs hasn't put anything out since April. FiXT Neon's most recent is the 3FORCE single from the 15th. That's not a crisis, it's July, and the reason is on the calendar: Bandcamp Friday is August 7, midnight to midnight Pacific, and everybody is holding fire. Build your cart across the week like a reasonable adult and then behave badly for exactly one day. The next one after that is September 4. I've already started a list and I've already lied to myself about its length.

The deep cut

Yesterday was forty years since Maximum Overdrive, and I owe that movie a great deal of money.

July 25, 1986. Stephen King directed it. Stephen King has never directed anything else, and has spent the intervening decades calling it a moron movie and saying he never planned to sit in that chair again. It cost nine million dollars and took about three and a half million back domestically. Rotten Tomatoes has it at fourteen percent. Audiences walked out of the opening weekend and gave it a D plus.

By every professional metric it's a failure, and at Video Vault it was a monster.

A box office asks whether a movie is good. A rental shelf asks whether four teenagers with six dollars and a Friday night want to watch trucks kill people. Those are different questions, and Maximum Overdrive answers the second one loudly, in a Green Goblin mask, on the front of a semi. We replaced that tape twice from wear. I re-shrink-wrapped the box myself both times, badly.

And then there's the soundtrack, which is why it belongs in a music column. The entire score is AC/DC. Not licensed needle drops, not a couple of songs over the credits. Stephen King, who has said he was a fan, got the whole band, and the result came out as the album Who Made Who, which went on to have a life roughly ten thousand times longer than the film it was attached to. There are people who own that record and have never seen a frame of the movie. There are people who own that record and don't know there was a movie.

That's the deep cut this week. A famous novelist's only directing credit, a critical disaster, and a hard rock album that outlived it by four decades. If you're doing something loud in a garage this week, put Who Made Who on. If you're feeling brave, put the movie on after. Manage expectations and keep a hand on the remote.

Pixels and polygons

Arcade1Up used Comic-Con to announce an OutRun cabinet, and I have been thinking about it for two days like a man thinking about a boat.

They're calling it OutRun Supreme. Six hundred and thirty dollars, near enough. Sixty seven inches tall, nineteen inch screen, and five games in the box: OutRun, Turbo OutRun, OutRunners, Power Drift and Rad Rally.

It's those last two that tell you somebody at that company actually cares. Power Drift and Rad Rally are not the obvious picks. The obvious picks are more OutRun. Putting Power Drift in there, with its lunatic rollercoaster tracks and that sprite-scaling engine doing things it had no business doing in 1988, is a choice made by a person, not a spreadsheet.

I put an embarrassing number of quarters into an OutRun cabinet in a Parma arcade. The convertible, the palm trees, the radio you picked before you pulled away, and that fork in the road where you commit or you don't. Most of what this magazine is about traces back through that machine for me. Six hundred and thirty dollars is a lot of money and I do not have room for a sixty seven inch cabinet, and I have already measured the wall by the stairs.

The joke the week wrote for me: three days earlier, a solo developer named Igor Ayello Borges put a game called Arcade 80's Racing on Steam for three dollars and ninety nine cents. Ten cars, sixteen tracks, 2.5D pixel art, championship mode, career mode, one guy. Same week, same idea, two orders of magnitude apart in price. I bought the four dollar one on the spot and I'm still thinking about the six hundred dollar one, which tells you everything about how this hobby actually works.

UrbX, and a promise I have to walk back slightly

Last week I told you I'd have campaign numbers for the 16-bit edition of UrbX Warriors today. I don't, and the reason is that I read a launch date wrong. The Kickstarter goes live this Thursday, July 30, at 3pm UK time. It has not opened yet. There are no numbers because there is no campaign, and the man who spent a paragraph last week describing himself refreshing a page in a grocery store parking lot got the week wrong by seven days. I'll be in the parking lot on Thursday instead. The plan is unchanged, the calendar has been corrected.

What I can tell you is more interesting than a number anyway. Tony Warriner and Stoo Cambridge are building this under a studio called Brazen Gameplay, and the two 16-bit versions are not one build wearing two hats. The Amiga version is disk based and expects a joystick. The Mega Drive version is a cartridge and expects a gamepad. The audio is written separately for each machine, aiming at the Mega Drive's sharp punchy chip sound on one side and the Amiga's sample playback on the other.

That last detail is the one that made me sit up. It would be so much cheaper to write the music once. Writing it twice, for the specific voice of two specific 1980s sound chips, only makes sense if you remember that those machines sounded different and that the difference mattered to the people listening. Their first campaign, for the Spectrum Next and PC, hit its target in under an hour. This one is going to be quick.

Nobody writes the music twice unless they remember why the difference mattered.

Short shifts

Somebody got Sega CD running on an Analogue Pocket. It's an FPGA core by a developer going by obrien654j, and the honest status report from the man himself is that the audio timing is good, boot reliability is not solved, and full motion video stutters here and there. We are talking about a 1991 CD add-on running on a handheld through reprogrammed logic gates, so I'd call that a rounding error.

Somebody else patched original SNES Star Fox to use the Super FX3 chip that Randy Linden built for his SNES Doom port, and it now holds twenty frames a second instead of visiting it occasionally. Linden has spent years teaching a 1990 console to do things it was told it couldn't, and this is a fine addition to the file.

It was also, for no reason anybody planned, Sega Rally week. A developer called Snake is porting the arcade version to the Nintendo 64 and posted footage that is not quite fast enough yet. A French artist named Anaël Seghezzi built the closest thing to Sega Rally the Mega Drive is ever going to get. And a third developer released frameworks that run the 1995 arcade original on PC, Xbox Series X and, for reasons I find deeply funny, Xbox 360, with online play and wheel support. Three separate people woke up this month and decided the same thirty year old rally game needed rescuing. Nobody coordinated this.

If you want the long version of weeks like this one, the This Week In Retro crew do it properly every Saturday. Episode 278 went up yesterday, with Christopher Drum on as guest and a long segment on browser emulation that answered a question I've had for a year, which is why nobody had done Dreamcast in a tab yet. Apparently somebody is about to.

And Defender of the Crown: The Legend Returns is now eighteen days out, August 13. Steam still hasn't set a price. Small correction from last week's enthusiasm: the developer is a studio called Black Tower Basement, with Nordcurrent Labs publishing. Credit where it goes.

The art desk

Here it is. I said this column was coming as soon as I found the first artist worth building it around, and that I was taking my time because the first pick sets the bar. The first pick is James White.

He works as Signalnoise. Born 1977, Canadian, and these days he lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, which is a very long way from where the palm trees in his work live. He started doing design in 1998 and Signalnoise began as the thing he did on the side until it stopped being on the side. His site's footer reads 2007 to 2026, which is nineteen years of the same obsession without a rebrand.

You have seen his work, whether or not you know the name. He did the art for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, which is the single most successful act of synthwave-flavored art direction in video game history and a thing this entire scene owes a beer. He did Trials of the Blood Dragon after it. He's done tour posters for Metallica and Muse, work for GUNSHIP, Magic: The Gathering, The Lego Movie 2, Nike, Atari, Twitch, Warner Bros. He designed the Facebook AR and VR logo, which I mention mostly because it's a funny thing to find on the same page as a laser grid.

The work itself is hard edged vector, built in Illustrator and Photoshop, and it's the cleanest version of this aesthetic anybody makes. Chrome type, starfields, gradient suns, magenta running into cyan into orange with black holding it all down. He's straightforward that it's an homage to his own 1980s childhood, and there's no irony anywhere in it, which is the part I care about. Plenty of people paint the 80s with one eyebrow raised. He doesn't.

His recent Neo-Chrome series is more interesting to me than the client work, honestly. It's abstract, no subject, no poster to sell, just chrome as a material studied at length, made for a small show at a Newcastle gallery called Whosit & Whatsit. When a commercial illustrator books a small local gallery to exhibit shapes with no product attached, that's a man scratching an itch rather than filling an invoice.

His day job now is art director at ModRetro, the retro hardware company, which is a good landing spot for a man who spent twenty years drawing an imaginary 1986 and now gets to art direct machines people actually pick up.

One honest note, because this column is going to be honest or it isn't going to be worth reading. The newest thing I could put a date to on his portfolio is the Magic job from December 2023. The 2026 copyright and the ModRetro role say he's working. The portfolio says he's busy enough not to update it. I'd rather tell you what I can actually see than pretend I know more.

One more coincidence I can't leave alone. Up on that wall of his, among the Voltron and the RoboCop and the Blood Dragon, there's a poster for The Thing. Same week a documentary about that movie gets the score I wrote about further up this page. Nobody planned that. It's a smaller world than the follower counts make it look.

Signalnoise is at signalnoise.com. Go look, then come back.

Rewind culture

Tuesday, Stranger Things exists on a shelf for the first time.

The Complete Series lands July 28 in the States, a day earlier in the UK. Forty two episodes, twenty five discs, four different editions, and the deluxe one comes with a hundred and forty eight page artbook of design work and concept sketches. The show ran nine years, ended on New Year's Eve, and until this week you could not own it. You could only be allowed to watch it.

I know how that sounds coming from me. A guy whose whole personality is a video store counter, delighted that a Netflix show got a box. But this is the one that ate 1980s nostalgia and turned it into a global product, and the joke was always that you couldn't hold it. A show built out of the memory of physical media, available only as a stream. Now there's a box with a spine on it, and in twenty years somebody is going to find that box at a yard sale for two dollars and watch the whole thing without asking anyone's permission. Servers get switched off. Plastic in a basement mostly doesn't.

Meanwhile the Lunchmeat crew published a novel on Thursday, and I need a minute.

It's called Video Town, written by Robert Freese, and it's their first original book. The plot: a guy named Beck manages a small town video store. A corporate chain called Showtime Video moves in under a man named Barnaby Winthrop. The whole thing gets settled by a two day rental contest that comes down to Halloween night, 1987.

I have not read it yet. I ordered it inside of a minute. It's a limited first edition of two hundred and fifty copies and it was reportedly close to gone when they announced it, so if that premise did to you what it did to me, move. Somebody wrote a novel about my actual life except with a satisfying ending, and I intend to sit in the attic and find out how it goes for Beck.

Also this week: first look photos landed for a new Herbert West: Reanimator, with Joseph Morgan in the lead and Katie Cassidy alongside him, directed by Michael Grossman. They're pitching it as a fresh run at the Lovecraft story rather than a remake of Stuart Gordon's 1985 version, and they've invented a childhood for West where he watches his father reanimate his mother. I have no strong feeling about this yet, which is itself unusual for me and a horror remake.

Static

• November 14 hurts worse now. Synthrave Live in Sheffield has its full bill: Waveshaper, LeBrock, Wolfclub, New Arcades, Nightstop, Skyracer, Ace Buchannon and 80's Stallone, at Corporation, doors at one in the afternoon, retro arcade machines on site. Same night, Darker Waves puts Morrissey, the Smashing Pumpkins, Simple Minds and about thirty more on a beach in Huntington. Two continents, one Saturday. I'll be in Ohio, complaining.
• Worth knowing about Synthrave: it was founded by Shaun Phillips of LeBrock and grew out of an online DJ series he started during the pandemic as a mental health thing. It's billed Volume 1. That's a man building the room he needed.
• The Video Game History Foundation put out new E3 archive collections, including clean footage of Conker's Quest from 1997, back when Conker was still adorable and had not yet met a beer. Also an Acclaim sizzle reel that is reportedly so bad it becomes good. I know exactly which shelf that footage smells like.
• Atari signed a deal to turn ten of its games into movies. Ten of them. I've been staring at this item for an hour trying to work out what an Asteroids film would even be about, and the best I have is rocks.
• MiSTer can now boot disc based games off any USB optical drive, across PlayStation, Sega CD, TurboGrafx CD, Saturn and CD-i. A developer deliberately reattached a real spinning disc to a machine that had no need of one, which is the most sentimental engineering decision I've read about all month.
• Soft Cell put out the second single from what they say is their last album, and Gene Loves Jezebel are giving Discover a fortieth anniversary pressing with a live LP bolted on. A 1986 cartoon movie, a 1986 Stephen King disaster and a 1986 record all had a birthday inside the same seven days. I did not set out to write another issue about that year and here we are again.

The counter list

Five for the week, in playing order. Same principle as the paperclipped top fives I used to staple to receipts, except nobody can hand this one back to me with a comment.

• New Arcades, "When the City Sleeps." Best thing that came out this week. Drive somewhere.
• Figure x Destryur, "Cold Heat." Cold in the way the movie is cold.
• Stan Bush, "The Touch." Because a man played it acoustic in a convention hall this week and I've been unwell ever since.
• AC/DC, "Who Made Who." Forty years of a soundtrack outrunning its film.
• ESP, "2049: Woobified." Ten minutes of nothing much. I mean that as praise.

That's issue two. Written across four days of Comic-Con streams, one accidental nap in a chair that has never once been comfortable, and a Saturday afternoon spent explaining to my nieces what a rental late fee was. They didn't believe the part where the store keeps charging you. I told them that was the entire business model and they looked at me like I'd confessed to something.

Next week: the UrbX campaign, for real this time, with actual numbers or an explanation of what went wrong. Whatever the Bandcamp Friday pile looks like as August 7 comes into range. The art desk stays, and I'm already taking suggestions on who goes in it second, so if you know somebody making this stuff who deserves a wider room, tell me.

And if you're the kind of person who reads a magazine about synthwave all the way to the bottom, you're my kind of person, and there's a spot at this counter with your name on it.

Be kind. Rewind something.

Marty