Over the next 17 days we shall be shall be celebrating the 16 year anniversary of Transformers At The Moon which takes place on the 29th of October.  The celebration will see us taking a look at different toys from the 17 calendar years in which the website has been online (1999-2015) (16 years, 17 calendar years).  We shall also talk a little about what happened in each of the years, both Transformers brand wise and our personal history with Transformers.

Before we do that though let's first unveil our Toy for the Year 1999 - Beast Wars Transmetal II Dinobot!

Click the headline to read this article in full as well as seeing a nice new gallery of the second Beast Wars Toy of this standout character.

Our background with the Transformers Brand

We got our first Transformers toys in the summer of 1986 on a family holiday where our parents bought us Cosmos and Hubcap from Woolworths.  For Christmas that year we received our next Transformers (Brawl and Swindle) and our first Transformers cartoon VHS (Arrival From Cybertron (or More Than Meets the Eye)).  Whilst friends mourned the loss of Optimus Prime in Transformers: The Movie we were still being introduced to the characters that would make such a big impact on our lives.  Over the next few years our whole family would be heavily interested in Transformers, buying toys, comics and videos.  Our family had several, 7 I think, letters published in the Marvel UK Transformers comic as well as having the contents of another mentioned on the inside of the front page.  They were all actually written by our mum though she changed around names depending on the content.  It was through the Transformers Comic that we gained Slog as well as 4 Aerialbots and First Aid (UK Classics releases) though we already had the original releases of those toys.  We still have all of the figures within our collection.

Just past the end of our road was a car boot sale (flea market for our North America readers) at which there was one guy, forever dubbed "The Hasbro Man", who sold boxed / carded Hasbro toys (including Action Force, Visionaries and Transformers).  It was through this man that we purchased our Optimus Prime and Megatron, and other figures released in previous years.  Our local discount store, run by the brother of Bobby Davro, imported the Constructicons from Mexico (yay lead paint), so we were able to pick up a giftset from there.

Our UK comic collection is missing two issues of the series mainly due to working on a comic stall at a school fete where we picked up many of the missing issues for a few pounds, sorry school friends.

When the US G1 Transformers ended we continued to be fans of the toys, throughout the European only years, G2 and years up to Beast Wars.  We picked up some of the G2 toys whilst on holiday and from local discount stores whilst at college (for example we bought Ace Evader, or G2 Dreadwing / Smokescreen for £9.99 who quickly became a favourite of ours).

In the mid 90's we received a letter from America from a former Transmasters US member who contacted our sister by going through an old Transmasters members list.  Who was this person called Tony Preto we thought, and if he is trying to buy toys maybe he has some to sell.  We wrote back but heard nothing back, until several years later when we saw him at BotCon Europe 1999.  Tony runs Tempting Toys and we still see him to this day at shows (and we have his letter somewhere, offering to buy her old collection hahaha).  This letter kick-started our transition from fans to collectors, as we wrote to various members of Transmasters UK buying collections as well we visiting shops like "The Box", from which we were able to buy toys such as Fortress Maximus (boxed, complete for around £300), and were first shown some strange animal transforming figures called "Beast Wars" in 1997, we bought Dinobot as he was a dinosaur and we love dinosaurs.

A little later, whilst reading the Channel 4 video games teletext service, we read about the Playstation Transformers video game for Beast Wars! It confirmed that what we had seen a month earlier was indeed real Transformers were back!  We weren't convinced though by the concept.  Later that year our sister bought us back Optimus Primal, Polar Claw and Scorponok from her holiday to Greece. These were the early Beast Wars toys with the Generation Two logo on the boxes).  We were hooked once again even if we didn't want to like them.
Buying a PC and getting the internet

On October 29th 1999 we put the first version of Transformers at the Moon live via our ISP and webhost Freeola.  The site, and email, was chosen from one of their free domains for their dial-up customers (@themoon.co.uk) as we felt it was the most "sci-fi like" name they had and also reminded us of the tell-a-tale stories such as Autobot's Lightning Strike and Decepticons At The Pole.  It's an unusual, grammatically incorrect name (quite fitting for us, especially me (Dave) as we often misspell words and use poor grammar).

Back then there were far less Transformers related websites than there are now.  There was no Wikipedia, the most used web search engine was Yahoo, AOL was a big ISP provider (*shudders*), there was no eBay, Facebook, Twitter, streaming video, pretty much anything you think of as "The Internet" didn't exist, heck it was still very much called "The World Wide Web".  The Internet was still accessed via dial-up modem.  150 million people around the world used the Internet at the start of 1999, and that number grew to 248 million by the end of the year. Now the figure is around 3 billion!

The Euro had just been introduced, Britney Spears had made her debut single, The Matrix, Sixth Sense and Toy Story 2 had been released at the Cinema.

TFWorld2005, Seibertron, TFormers and The Allspark did not exit, nor did fellow UK Transformers site The Transformers.net.  Beast Wars was onto its third series and there had just been two UK Transformers conventions, Transforce 1999 in Croydon (where Beast Machines was being hyped) and BotCon Europe 1999, which took place in a church.  There is one dealer from those shows which most people remember, as he had all the cool things, The Spacebridge.  Paul is of course very much still trading today and had already been trading for a long time by then and was a veteran of several US Botcons.

On a personal level Dave had been working for 2 years for a freight company and had been purchasing Transformers online via email orders, paying using International Money Orders (IMOs) from the bank, whilst Steve worked for a Travel Insurance company.  Neither of us had internet access until 6 months prior to launching the site. 

A year before also saw us reacquainted with an old school friend Gareth "The Great Destroyer" Doe via a football kick-about with friends.  A random talk about Transformers saw us realise we all still liked toys, and we went to Transforce and BotCon Europe together.  16 years later we still go to Roll Out Roll Call and are planning on going to TFNation next year.

Our main Transformers source at the time was US site "Digital Toys" by Bantha Trading as well as a local second-hand toy store called "The Box". We bought 119 Transformers that year, we have a list :p. Our transactions with American sellers are a story in itself. Whilst at college we printed off a webpage which contained an email address of what we thought was a shop, it wasn't it turned out to be the mother of a fan who lived in Maryland.  Dave got chatting with them via email after we contacted them regarding Transformers and, after the mis-understanding was cleared up,  they helped us collect information on Transformers and G.I-Joe using Robert Jung's toy list, which we had also printed when at college, as a base.  Robert's list opened a whole new world to us of not only the full American list of toys but also the Japanese characters and series of whom we knew nothing.

With Digital Toys feeding our Transformers needs throughout 1997 and into the early 2000's supplying us with Beast Wars 2, Beast Wars Neo and Car Robots.  They also supplied us with a few G1 Transformers that we did not already have and most of our Japanese Transformers collection.  I remember purchasing Deathsaurus from Mike on his description alone.  Mike described him as "he transformers into a chrome dragon, he's really cool".  Upon arrival we initially thought Deathsaurus was some sort of weird Soundwave remould (from the breastmasters on the back), until we got the toy out.  We knew nothing of Victory or the Japanese Transformers, what a gamble that was.  After that we bought some Japanese toy leaflets from Mike, which he kindly translated the names for us, so we actually had an idea of what some of the toys looked like.

Why did we start the site?

Our first encounter with the Internet was in 1997, a week before completing our A Levels (including Computer Science) at college (High School for US readers).  This was a brief introduction which comprised of "open the search engine program (it was separate), search for something and look you get information".  Being Transformers fans still we decided to search on Transformers, to see if anyone else in the world still remembered the toys we were still fond off, and still buying whenever we found them for sale.  We stumbled across The Junkion Exchange, what would become TFormers, and Robert Jung’s toy list.  Our 15 mins was up but we knew what we wanted to do.  After taking our exam we quickly returned to the class and re-loaded Robert’s list, printing it out (so much paper) and left.  Our biggest achievement was to print this complete list of G1 / G1 and Beast Wars toys (to that time) out.

Over the next two years Dave's conversations via email with Mike from Digital toys, the kind lady from Maryland who's name I can't remember but to whom I owe so much, and a random purchase of a BotCon 97 t-shirt from John Hartman (ah the memories) kept us going until we could save up the £1300 needed to buy our first computer.  Before we had the PC our other form of "TF communication" was with Transmasters buying the continued Generation 2 comic and, more frequently, with Ken Flatt and his fanzines where some of Steve's stories were published as well as our sisters artwork.

Anyway I digress, once we had the internet we searched on everything Transformers related that we could, trying to find pictures of these toys on Robert's list that we did not know who they were.  Who were these US released and Japanese releases?  After a while we realised that there wasn't a good reference of images online, and those pictures which were online were of toys on people's tables, floors and chairs.  We decided something needed to change, and as we had over 300 Transformers by the end of G1, and over 500 by this time, we flet it was a decent sized collection and that we could, perhaps, provide this resource for other people.  It was also a good excuse to look into how you made a website as computing interested us even if our only experience with programing was very simple BASIC in the mid 80s.

At first we used stills from an old camcorder plugged into a TV card before moving onto a digital camera.  We bought white photo card to use as a backdrop, something very few people were doing at the time.  By the time 2000 / 2001 came about, we could then use this technique of the white card background to find who was reusing our photographs but we will cover those years later this week.

Anyway back in 1999 and the end of the year was approaching, we had a nice little website going, mainly green text, black background and images, all made in FrontPage Express and then Frontpage 2000.  Our goal was to have a few visitors a month, and by the end of the year we had over 300 (if I can find out old stats I’ll look to add them on).
Anyway we'll continue to memories tomorrow, for now sit back and enjoy Transformers Beast Wars Transmetal II Dinobot.

Side note for anyone who is still reading, our first transforming figures were the large Baron Von Joy and BugBite which were from a mail-in cereal offer in the UK.