Transformers: Even More Than Meets the Eye

John Gruber, writing about the iPhone Duo via Transformers: It always bothered me that, as toys, Transformers were clearly compromised in both states. Folded up, they weren’t good cars / trucks / fighter jets. They had obvious seams and folds. In the cartoons — and the subsequent live action films decades later — the Transformers’ disguised states are seamless. In real life with the actual toys, the disguised states were about as convincing as a pair of Groucho glasses. A regular toy car looked like a real car, and stayed together no matter how hard you played with it. A Transformer car never quite looked like a real car and would come apart when played with. Unfolded, they looked like robots, yes, but they had obvious compromises. And it was kind of a pain folding them back into vehicles. My recollection is that we played with them a lot more as unfolded robots than as folded vehicles. I was all smiles and nods reading this. I too grew up with Transformers, and while we all liked…