Six years after the country was consumed with the death of JR Ewing on the TV drama “Dallas” in 1980, another character’s demise was rattling a different fanbase: Optimus Prime, the altruistic leader of the Autobots in the series “Transformers,” was brutally offed in “The Transformers: The Movie.”
Forty years later, Hasbro, the toy company behind the shape-changing toys, TV series and films, is asking for a do-over with an “apology tour” and the release of “The Transformers: The Movie: The Soundtrack: The Reformatted Edition.”
Each of the songs from the original album are reimagined, including by original vocalist Stan Bush, who sings updated versions of “The Touch” and “Dare!” The “house band” are The Knights Of Unicron (members of the GI Joe-themed metal group Cold Slither, including Ross Sewage, who also plays in the gore metal band Exhumed and the death metal band Impaled).
Brittney Slayes, of the Canadian power metal band Unleash The Archers, was tapped to sing the “Reformatted” take on the movie’s theme song.
“I just roughed it up a bit and added some more harmonies, and I tried to keep it as close as possible to the original,” she says during a recent video interview. “I knew that there was a fan base, but I didn’t know how dedicated until the song came out. So I’m really glad I didn’t do something stupid like turn it into a power metal song or something.”
She surmised the hair metal original was a perfect fit for the 1986 film, “so it was kind of like, let’s do this and give it a bit of an edge.”
The reaction from the online denizens of the Transformers fanbase has “been probably like 50/50,” she says.
“Half of the comments were like, ‘This is amazing,’ and half of the comments were, ‘The original shouldn’t have been touched,’ like, ‘Get out of here with your crappy cover.’”
Noting that the idea for the new version came from the people behind the franchise as something fun for the fans, she adds, “It was pretty funny to read some of the comments, and normally I don’t read comments, especially on YouTube. So I was like, oh yeah, this is why I don’t do this.”
Other guest vocalists on the updated soundtrack include Sebastian Bach, Mark Osegueda of Death Angel and Francesco Cavalieri, who is a member of the Italian power metal band Wind Rose and the synth-rock duo VBO.
Cavalieri sings “Instruments of Destruction.” Like Slayes, he wanted to pay homage to the original.
“Since their version respected the original while making it heavier and more powerful live, I felt that following the spirit of the original vocal performance was the right choice as well,” he says of Knights of Unicrons’ tracking he sung over. “I didn’t want to overcomplicate it. Sometimes the best thing you can do with an iconic song is understand why it works and then deliver it with your own voice and energy.”
VBO: Simone Giusti, left, and Francesco Cavalieri
While one might assume that someone who grew up in Europe wouldn’t be familiar with The Transformers, that was not the case for Cavalieri: “Transformers was definitely known in Italy, and of course I was aware of it growing up. It was one of those franchises that became part of pop culture and was immediately recognizable, even if you weren’t necessarily a hardcore fan or collector. The characters, the toys and the whole concept were very iconic.”
Both singers noted the synergy that fantasy themes and comic-book culture share with metal music.
“A lot of metal is about fantasy,” says Slayes, who wore a Jem T-shirt and a Dungeons & Dragonforce baseball cap during our interview. “A lot of metal is trying to tell a story. It’s trying to take you away. And that’s exactly the same thing that we’re doing with our love of Transformers or our love of Dungeons and Dragons or Magic the Gathering or Game of Thrones, like fun things that are not of this world, and a lot of metal focuses on that as well. I don’t know if it’s nerds that became heavy metal musicians or heavy metal is just appealing to nerds. Whatever it is we just cross over.”
Cavalieri says: “I think Transformers and heavy metal are almost a natural combination. You have giant robots, battles, destruction, heroic characters and this constant feeling of something larger than life. That’s already very metal! And power metal in particular works incredibly well because it has that epic and heroic dimension. It can make everything feel huge, which is exactly what you want in the Transformers universe.”
The performers on the album played a sold-out show at the House of Blues last month as part of San Diego Comic Con. Cavalieri also DJ’d an opening set.
“Oh, it was awesome,” Slayes says. “It was so much fun. There were a lot of happy-to-be-there fans and a lot of positive reinforcement, and the singing along was just awesome. They were loud. And then we all got up together to sing ‘Youth Gone Wild’ with Sebastain at the end.”
Slayes and Cavalieri have common management and knew each other before their foray into the land of the Autobots and Decepticons, but she hadn’t met the other performers. She recalls having a great gang with Bush, the singer from the original soundtrack, and geeked out over meeting Britta Phillips, who served as the singing voice in the ‘80s series “Jem and The Holograms.” Phillips performed with the Jem and The Holograms band at the Comic-Con concert.
“She was super nice. She was great,” says Slayes. “She was just like so cute and sounds exactly the same. I was just brought back to when I was young and I just loved watching that show, and it was fantastic. She nailed it.”
Hyping the vinyl and CD versions of the new album, Slayes also saves a shoutout for the T-shirts. She says she gets a lot of positive comments when she’s out and about wearing hers.
“So definitely get the T-shirt and we will find each other out there just like metalheads when we wear our metal shirts. We all find each other.”
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