From the ASM Archives: The Birth of Online Transformers Fandom

The Rise and Fall of CMTF

So, there we were, two people who liked the Transformers. We had a few people come from CCC, but we posted invitations to CMTF in other parts of the Arts BB and, in fact, other BBs across all of Prodigy. Soon we had more and more people coming to discuss from many different areas of both Prodigy and the nation. We talked about anything Transformers — what our favorite toys were, the cartoon, the new comic rumors, the old comic. After a while, we had enough people posting frequently that it felt comfortable and natural to start a few off-topic threads.

There were the occasional bad times in CMTF, but every family goes through them. Yes, I said family. We had a real sense of togetherness, so much so that after a while, we didn’t think of ourselves as only a club. We were a family. Eventually, both Josh and I dropped “Co-Founder of CMTF” from each of our sign-offs, and the club did just fine without any one person or group in charge.

CMTF went strong for a couple of years. The Generation 2 toys, comics, and cartoon provided ample fodder for new discussion, although more so the toys and comics rather than the cartoon which was a rehash of the original series. When the comic ended, the general discussion, the fanfic, and the crazy off-topic threads kept the club alive, thankfully.

CMTF was thriving. Prodigy, however, was not. The service originally charged a monthly fee for unlimited hours, but it wasn’t making money that way. So, Prodigy changed to a structure where you paid for X amount of hours a week (or month) and if you wanted unlimited hours, you paid more for that. When these plans were announced, many people realized their time on Prodigy was coming to an end. They couldn’t afford to pay the amount of money it would take to keep the same number of hours they used, so they cancelled the service.

The writing was on the wall. Prodigy had set it up that account holders wouldn’t be charged the new prices until their current plan expired, which meant there were many people who still had unlimited accounts for a while. Some people decided to pay the new pricing plans and renewed their Prodigy accounts. But the number of visible members of CMTF started getting smaller and smaller. CMTF continued to exist in some fashion for a while, but it was inevitable. By the mid 1990’s, most people had more cost-effective online services, such as AOL, or they had their own account with an Internet Service Provider, and chose not to use Prodigy. The final days before my own unlimited account expired were filled with me saying my goodbyes to those who were still around. I knew Prodigy had some connections to the Internet, so I told them how to find me and that I hoped we’d meet again on the net, somewhere.

Thankfully, I was right. The Internet and BotCon have brought many of us back together. HooksX is a CMTFer, and several people at Nightwind’s Padded Cell (most notably the fair Nightwind herself and ‘Leta) have CMTF roots.

There are a few others around, though, that I haven’t seen around in quite some time. Josh Ali E-mailed me once, many years ago, saying he had found me after quite an absence away from Prodigy, but communication to him never got returned. Beyond that, there are still dozens of other CMTFers who joined and left during various times. I hope that all of them are doing well, and I hope they drop me a line.

So, the Internet killed my first adventure into online Transfandom. But when I left Prodigy, I thought that this Internet thing could possibly be a place to try to set up shop again.

Little did I know.

Precursor to the List

In my freshman year at college, I typed this command in my VAX account. The command was called “news“. Without knowing what I was doing, I started poking around, being the typical newbie. Thankfully, my account was short on space and I had very little room to download posts or reply to them without filling up my tempspace. So I didn’t do too much damage. (At least I hope not.)

One day I was extremely bored, and I had more space on my account, so I typed “news” once again. I decided to go about the right way, this time, and I read the online help. I found out how to search for groups, and I spent the entire afternoon browsing something called rec.arts.comics and related groups.

I had one thought: this news thing was pretty cool!

Over the next few months I gained more knowledge about Usenet and the newsgroups (a-ha! They weren’t called “bulletin boards”!), and tended to hang out in a Quantum Leap newsgroup, mostly lurking.

But even among all these great topics, there was no group about Transformers. The closest thing we had was rec.arts.animation, and there were some occasional posts about Transformers. While not a great majority of the topics, the fan base was proud of their old series.

The rumors of Generation 2 were getting hotter, and in fact, one day I posted a message asking about G2 (Feb. 13, 1993, see Usenet Message ID 0096806A.9FBAB320@vms.csd.mu.edu ). Over the next few weeks, more and more info about G2 was discovered, including that the cartoon wasn’t new, but, rather, it was the old one with new graphics.

Behind the scenes, though, there was another movement growing….