Here is a cool video of Soundwave breakdancing — this is what you call doing the robot.  🙂  (If you don’t know, Soundwave was one of the Decepticons of Transformers lore; his Earth disguise mode was a jambox / cassette player.)

Supposedly this was initially put on YouTube in 2005, before YouTube was big, and it got to 15 million hits and crashed their servers.  I saw it back in 2004 on another site.  Think about that — at least 15 million hits, before YouTube was so popular.  That’s a lot of Transformers fans, even before Michael Bay’s “re-imagined”* the franchise for his movies.  Someone said it was made in 2002, and if so, that makes it even more impressive, because CGI was more difficult back then.

* Hey, I just found a soapbox!  I won’t go into the full rant, because I’ve done that before (and I’ve revisited it with video examples of how Transformers could’ve been better), but I will say this — the Transformers universe was very established through hundreds of cartoons and many comic books, and it was a good story with lots of backstory, many great plots, extensive character development — everything you need for a great movie.  Instead of using that, Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg (yes, it’s partly his fault, too) made the movie about “a boy and his car”.  In doing so, they made Transformers be more about how a teenage boy has to save the world instead of the huge civil war going on between robots that are more intelligent than we are.  Instead of making what could’ve been one of the greatest sci-fi stories ever, with characters you admire for their principles and a philosophical side that gets you to thinking — while keeping the great action scenes, we ended up with just the action scenes and lots of explosions.  I’m not saying the movies weren’t entertaining at all, but I keep thinking what could’ve been…