The Weirdest Thing About Transformers: The Movie Was Its Soundtrack

What I remember most about The Transformers: The Movie isn’t even the robots. It’s the soundtrack. I am a proud owner of the original vinyl record, and when I bought it, there was nothing fancy about it. No fancy artwork, no bells and whistles, no elaborate packaging. It was simply sitting in a plastic wrapper. I wasn’t buying a piece of 1980s pop-culture history. I was buying the Transformers soundtrack, with no idea I’d still be talking about it 40 years later.

Forty years later, the record has come back around. A new The Transformers: The Movie: The Soundtrack: The Reformatted Edition was released July 24, 2026, featuring 10 newly recorded and reimagined tracks from the original film. The movie itself has also returned to theaters for its 40th anniversary in a restored 4K presentation, complete with a new post-credits chapter.

The anniversary gives us a reason to look back, but the soundtrack is where things get interesting. This was a film about transforming toy robots, yet somehow its music included rock, heavy metal, synthesizers, an electronic score and Weird Al Yankovic. That sounds ridiculous on paper, but somehow it sounds exactly like 1986.

Unlike the Saturday-morning television series, The Transformers: The Movie sounded much bigger. Vince DiCola’s electronic score gave the film its futuristic personality, while Stan Bush’s “The Touch” and “Dare,” NRG’s “Instruments of Destruction,” and Lion’s hard-rock version of the Transformers theme gave the movie a musical identity of its own. Canadian hard-rock band Kick Axe also appeared as Spectre General, contributing “Nothin’s Gonna Stand in Our Way” and “Hunger.”

The standout, though, was “The Touch.” Stan Bush and Lenny Macaluso originally wrote the song with Cobra in mind, but it found its way into Transformers instead. Rather than disappearing into the pile of 1980s movie songs, it became one of the tracks most closely associated with the franchise. Sometimes a song finds the right home by accident.

Weird Al showed up with “Dare to Be Stupid.” The song had already appeared on his 1985 album of the same name, but putting it into the Junkion sequence somehow made perfect sense. A Weird Al song in a movie about giant transforming robots should have been completely ridiculous. Somehow, it wasn’t.

The strangest credit of all may belong to Orson Welles, the man behind Citizen Kane and the famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast, now playing the Eater of Worlds. Welles recorded the voice of Unicron just five days before his death, and his description of the job is priceless. Speaking to his biographer Barbara Leaming, he said, “You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that changed from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I’m destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.”

The whole thing has the attitude of a legendary actor saying, So, apparently I’m playing some kind of transforming thingamajig now. And honestly, that may be the funniest possible way for Orson Welles to describe Transformers.

The soundtrack wasn’t simply sitting underneath an animated movie. The songs, electronic score and wildly unexpected performers gave The Transformers: The Movie a musical personality that was completely its own.

I still have that original vinyl, and every time I see it, I think about how strange that whole movie really was. A bunch of toy robots, an electronic score, hard rock, Weird Al and Orson Welles playing a planet-eating Transformer somehow came together and worked. Nobody could have designed that combination today without it sounding ridiculous. In 1986, it just happened. And maybe that’s the real magic of Transformers: The Movie: nobody told the soundtrack it was supposed to make sense.