Bah weep gra na weep ninny bong!

If you understood that, you’d better keep on reading.

Billed as the “rock and roll adventure of a lifetime,” Transformers: The Movie (1986) was an integral part of my childhood. Not because I actually saw it in 1986 (probably a couple of years later), but because it was the highpoint of one of the first TV shows allowed to be explicitly linked to a line of toys. I’m serious; in the United States prior to this you couldn’t have promotional content within children’s television programming.

Honestly though, I just loved the idea of watching giant robots beat each other up. I also rooted for the Decepticons who were cooler because they were able to fly. Megatron also had a big cannon mounted on his arm and transformed into a pistol. He was my first Transformer toy and I still mourn his passing in a climactic battle with my older brother’s Optimus Prime toy.

Anyway, reminiscing aside, as you can imagine when I saw a poster promoting @Tweet_Film’s showing of Transformers: The Movie, I was naturally interested.

Run by Owen Vandenberg, TweetFilm sees people gather in Melbourne and in front of their own TVs around the country, to watch the same film at the same time and share their thoughts about it on Twitter. It’s a concept I’ve seen done in the United States successfully, so the combination of this and the fact it was Transformers saw me head along.

At our location in Melbourne, shortly before 7:30pm Owen introduced himself, thanked various people and companies that made the night possible and shared the hashtag for the evening. On the screen behind him were the movie and a Tweetdeck column picking up all mentions of the night’s hashtag. On the dot of 7:30 we started watching, as did people in front of their TVs around the country, and started tweeting.

My time was split between typing on my phone, watching the movie and seeing other people’s comments appear on the screen. There were some beauties that had our little cinema giggling away such as “This soundtrack just needs puffy hair and leather pants,” and “One of the few kids’ movies to start with a quick bit of genocide.” (They weren’t kidding either, Unicron eats an entire planet and its inhabitants in the first five minutes. It’s rather violent compared to TV nowadays.)

TweetFilm was a great experience, not only because I got to visit an old friend again in the Transformers franchise, but it was also due to the fact I shared it with a big group of like minded people, who each shared their own perspective on the onscreen action. If you ever get a chance to try something similar, I’d highly recommend it. You get to meet new people, watch fantastically cheesy movies and tweet all at the same time.

And if you’re interested, “Bah weep gra na weep ninny bong!” is the universal greeting that Kup uses in the film. Maybe it’s something to lobby the United Nations to implement…