What from Transformers is worth watching?
 

I have little to no experience with the Transformers franchise. I've seen the 1986 (?) animated movie, and I watched the Michael Bay 2007 movie, and the recent Bumblebee movie, but none of the other movies. I never watched any of the cartoons.

This franchise has gone on as long as TMNT has and is from the 80's yet I have no real attachment to it. How did it get so big and what keeps it going?

It was big in the 80s and then got big again in the nid/late 2000s so it basically skipped our generation.

I've only ever seen the live action transformers movies and they're fun nothing special but I don't hate them.

I liked beast wars but I don't think that counts as transformers, and it didn't have the big impact either since the 90s had so much competition for kids attention.

Beast Machines.;)

Beast Wars

• A curated list of the original show (maybe like 20 in total) along with the movie.
• Headmasters.
• Masterforce.
• Victory.
• Beast Wars.
• RID 2001.
• Animated.
• Prime.

Although, note that every single Transformers show is first and foremost promotional material for a toyline, meaning they were all created with the idea that promoting the toys was a higher priority than the story or characters. So even the best Transformers cartoons still do weird things like randomly kill off characters with incomplete arcs just so that new ones can take their place or completely shift focus to new concepts without concluding previous storylines.

You probably have seen most of what you should

So basically this franchise isn't really all that good, and people only like it because of the toys? I'm just baffled since I see a lot of 30-40+ year olds love it and I know there's a huge Transformers fandom on forums for decades.

From the sounds of things this franchise is just a worse version of TMNT? At least TMNT has things that can stand on its own and not just used to push toys.

I mean... You know how I pointed out that you ought to watch a curated list of episodes when it comes to the original show? That's because that particular show has some interesting episodes but it's mostly generic or even outright unfitting garbage. There are lots of interesting lore bits and fascinating concepts in the Transformers franchise, the problem is that Hasbro and Tomy largely still treats it like little more than glorified advertisement, as such they tend to force writers to do things that promote the toys regardless of how it affects the story.

I liked the Ghostbusters/Transformers comic IDW did right before they lost the license. It wasn’t canon to anything on the Transformers side though.

G1 beast wars