Wasting time with Jet

...Now reduced to 48 hours and waiting...

You cannot imagine...

Being 9 years old, waking up by a wet washcloth to the face, taking short-cuts in washing up in the bathroom, not even eating breakfast, but come 7:30am on channel 11 WPIX New York, there was no where else in the apartment I'd be but the living room glued to the television.

If you would have told me, that by the time I was 31 going on 32...that there would be a Live-Action Transformers Movie, I'd laugh in your face for hours.

It could never happen...

Shouldn't have...

Not in a million years...

But it has happened.

And years from now, when I'm old, feeble and senile...I'll still be able to remember one thing...

That for the first time...Hollywood made the impossible happen.

I have jus purchased my ticket for the 2:20AM screening of "Transformers" on Monday night (Tuesday Morning, actually), July 2nd, 2007.

Yes, 2:20 in the morning...AFTER MIDNIGHT, yes...

I mean, WHY the hell be THE EXACT first bunch of people to see it at 8pm that evening...?

Do you have ANY idea how insane that crowd is going to be?

Forget Ninja Turtles...

Or Harry Potter...

...Or even Spider-Man...

THIS IS TRANSFORMERS!!!!!

This is bigger than friggin STAR WARS, man!!!!

Showtimes for Transformers start July 2nd at 8pm, and will run ALL NIGHT!

When I selected July 3rd (for the helluva it!)...the first showtime that popped up was 5:15am, that's FIVE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING!!!...GEEEEZZZUSSS!!! ARE YOU KIDDIN' ME!?!?!?

And I almost thought about it, too..."hmmm 5am, sure, no one else should be up..."

But then I said, why settle for that?!?!?

So I went back a day and noticed the schedule...

INSANE. By 2:20am The crazies should have subsided a bit...I Hope!

But let's got back to the 9 year old boy in front of the TV...

For me, Transformers was what Pokemon is (or was) to 7 or 8 year old boy a few years back.

The toys, the cartoon, the comic book...it was the most influential thing in my life at the time.

It taught you about Good and Evil...

Every kid, black, white, hispanic...WORSHIPED Optimus Prime.

He was the most respected male role-model next to your dad...

Everyone in the world knows...HE WAS THE TRUCK.

He was the leader of the AUTOBOTS, the good guys...

And on the other side...MEGATRON, the ultimate evil.

The only symbol that could justify the leader of the DECEPTICONS is that of HATRED, of WAR, of STRIFE...is that of a GUN.

He's no Darth Vader, but he's pretty damn close...

Episode after episode, I watched...memorized and even acted out episodes to classmates while waiting outside the school for classes to start.

It got me into reading...

Transformers was the first Comic Book tittle I started collected, way before I got into X-men, Spider-Man, Spawn, and all the others...

Issue #27 which introduced the Giant Decepticon City, Trypticon (In his only appearance of the comic book series) is actually framed in a picture frame, waiting to be hung up somewhere where it can be remembered one day.

The cartoon, the comic, now...the toys.

When it came to toys, I had to use my imagination more usual rather than playing with physical toys, but one of the two only Transformer toys I had was "Mirage", the Race Car, and of course Optimus Prime, himself. The whole drama with the toys is that I wanted the truck to bad to the point of actually crying for it as a Christmas Present in 1985, so MOM finally got it and one of his legs broke off (Those toys were NOT built to last!), but the worst part was the summer of '86 when "The Movie" (Animated, of course...) came out and the big guy, well...ya'll know...I'm not gonna get into it.

You couldn't imagine how pissed MOM was when the "New" season started the fall that year with all those new characters...

Man, if I still had those two now...even Optimus with the broken leg would be worth some money!

This movie...is something I never really thought I would see...and it tells me that, if they can bring to life a fantasy that I watched as a boy...almost anything can happen, and that inspires me to keep trying to put my dream together...

So one day I could actually see "Call Numbers" the Movie.

someday.

we'll see.

Come, this first week of July...something...something unbelievable just might happen.