But, why bother, you ask. Isn’t Transmasters dead and gone? Well, yes and no. It’s true that Transmasters hasn’t been that popular in the last decade or so but everything’s relative. I read over some early TransAction issues from 1992 and noticed even back then that people were decrying the lack of member involvement and forewarning of the club’s doom. Since the whole membership dues fiasco in 1992-93, many have considered the club dead. But Tony Buchanan preserved through the nineties, carrying on the name through his activities as best he could. In the past five years Peter Phelps helped keep the name alive with his website, TM Blog and fan efforts (like the magazine and comic). If Transmasters died tomorrow, would the fandom at large care? I don’t know. And why do another Transformers based website when there’s so many already? But we can also take that logic and turn it around–would it matter if Seibertron.com, Tformers.com or whatever died tomorrow? After all, there’s so many other TF websites around who would really care?

Having said that, I do believe we need to evolve faster into the electronic realm. If we could’ve kept the club better organized back in the early nineties we could’ve had the premiere TF website now instead of trying to play catch-up. Or perhaps the fracturing of the fandom was inevitable considering it’s sheer size.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter. The club’s always been what people want it to be–either dying or thriving. I choose to believe the latter and at least try to keep things moving along into the twenty-teens.