Robot wars: There's no stopping the Transformers franchise

There was considerable scepticism when Paramount Pictures announced a film based around the Transformers range of toys. Even Michael Bay was less than enthused when he received a phone call from Steven Spielberg, asking if he'd direct the first Transformers movie.

"I hung up and said, 'Thank you. I'm not doing that stupid silly toy movie'," he told reporters before the first film's release back in 2007.

You can understand his reluctance. Toys rarely inspire good movies - unless we're talking about the nostalgia-inducing Mr Potato Head and Slinky Dog in Pixar's animated Toy Story films. Usually, the things we played with in our childhoods should remain fond memories from the past. Look at 2012's Battleship, Peter Berg's attempt to take the strategy board game and turn it into a blockbuster resulted in a soulless affair with little connection to the pleasures of the game itself.

Yet this month sees the release of Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth in a series that just seems to be getting bigger (and louder) with each passing movie. The franchise's first three films have collectively taken more than US$2.6 billion around the globe; the third outing, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, was by far the most successful, grossing US$1.12 billion - making it the second most lucrative film of 2011 after the final Harry Potter instalment.

If there's an appeal to Transformers, it goes deeper than cinemagoers wanting to watch metal-mashing mayhem and alien robots at war. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the birth of the Transformers, a toy success story that's spawned a veritable multimedia universe of spin-off comics, cartoons, films and merchandise.

Launched in the US in 1984 by the American toy manufacturer Hasbro, these two-in-one playthings that change between robots and vehicles, weapons and other items were ideally placed for a generation of kids already reared on Star Wars figures. Yet the origins came not from the US, but Japan. Back in 1970, toy company Takara (now Takara-Tomy) licensed Hasbro's popular G.I. Joe figure for the Japanese market, calling it Combat Joe. A spin-off, Henshin Cyborg, led to a line called Microman, which by the 1980s had been rebooted more times than a Spider-Man movie.

By this point there was New Microman, and further spin-offs Diaclone and Micro Change - the blueprints for the Transformers. Takara failed to crack the US market but their old friends from Hasbro went wild when they saw Diaclone and Micro Change at the Tokyo Toy Show in 1983. Licensing both toy lines to sell in the US, the Transformers were born - a series so successful, it was soon repackaged for Japan, obliterating Takara's original lines.