its characters are descended from Mad Max and Luke Skywalker, and "have learned the art of the civil insult". The 1987 VHS release remained on the Billboard Top Kid Video Sales top 25 chart for at least 40 weeks. Later reception The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 62% of the 26 surveyed critics gave The Transformers: The Movie a positive review. The site's critical consensus reads: "A surprisingly dark, emotional, and almost excessively cynical experience for Transformers fans." In 2007, John Swansburg of Slate wrote, "Though a modest film compared with Michael Bay's blockbuster [2007 Transformers], the original Transformers is the better film ... [T]here's nothing even approaching the original's narrative depth." He recalled the film giving him a new curse word and childhood trauma: "only in our scariest nightmares would we have imagined that a mere 20 minutes into the movie, Optimus Prime, the most beloved of Autobots, would be killed ... It just blew me away. Witnessing death on that scale was [...] every bit as shocking as War of the Worlds had been for Grandma and Grandpa". Gabe Toro of CinemaBlend wrote in 2014: "...Transformers: The Movie otherwise provides the sort of chase-heavy thrills that comes from robots that can become cars. Contrast that with Michael Bay's vision, where the robots basically abandon their transforming skills to have endless, violent punch-outs that annihilate cities. Bay's films show the action as a junkyard orgy. The '86 offering slows down to allow for actors like Leonard Nimoy and, yes, even Orson Welles to give actual performances. Fans of Michael Bay's Transformers movies are free to enjoy them. But they'll never top the gravity and excitement of The Transformers: The Movie." Kashann Kilson of Inverse wrote in 2015: "[N]ostalgia is a funny thing: for many of us in the 30-and-over Transformers fan club, that first movie was an integral part of our childhood. To hell with what the reviews said—the O.G. Transformers movie rocked our collective worlds ... We still love the original so much today, part of the fun of watching Bay's explosion-fests is being able to wave our canes at the youngsters and wax poetic about how back in our day, Hollywood knew how to make a real movie about giant, alien robot warriors." In 2017, film historian Leonard Maltin gave the picture the lowest possible rating in his Movie & Video Guide and wrote, "Little more