The Transformers: Communist Space Aliens unleashed by Ronald Reagan?

The golden age of action figures was arguably in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan deregulated the advertising industry and lifted certain restrictions on advertising to children. This led to a proliferation of TV cartoons, such as The Transformers, that were geared towards selling toys. One of the mottos of that particular series was "Till All Are One." I don't know about you, but that sounds a little bit communist to me. The Autobot faction were the good guys, and their ethics centered around selfless devotion to protecting humanity. They were not financially driven. They weren't concerned about making it big on the stock market or becoming billionaires, though their alt forms were often of sports cars and the like. But their core moral message was selflessness (I'm not getting into a debate here about what counts as "real communism", whether the USSR was "actually communist", whether Reagan was justified in his anticommunist stance, etc etc. I'm just saying that the Autobot's ethos was something that many self-avowed communists would claim to in line with their own ideological affinities). That's interesting in itself, but another potentially interesting overlap is that The Transformers was about extraterrestrials, and the UFO mythos had already imbued American culture with certain motifs and expectations about what ET might be like. One of the most powerful and recurring images is that ET is a Celestial Savior (see the writings of theologian Ted Peters for more on this), here to rescue humanity or to set it on the correct course, especially in the face of its wars and aggressive geopolitical posturings and, increasingly in the public awareness, its assault on the natural environment. ET is taken to be more technologically advanced than humanity (and the Transformers were certainly that, able to render our most advanced weapons useless, for example), but also more morally advanced (to be sure, another faction in the cartoon was the Decepticons, whose ethos was to destroy and dominate. In a way, they were the most "capitalist" ones, appealing to the selfishness of humans when they tried to recruit them in their various schemes, though admittedly they did tend to treat their own much worse than the Autobots, who valued the worth of the individual whereas the Decepticons were ruled by the tyranny of Megatron and Galvatron, who saw their minions as expendable units in a greater goal. In any case, they were often seen by children, especially boys, including myself at the time, as "cooler" than the Autobots, with sleeker and sportier designers. Notably, it was actually the Autobots who were more "deceptive", tending to skulk around in their al forms to avoid revealing themselves to too many humans, whereas the Decepticons tended to be unabashed in their appearances. Was this itself a psychological tell, and an unconscious half warning, about the communist nature of the Autobots? That their ethos was a good thing but that they were sneaky Reds lurking in our midst and that we should still be wary of them? I'm probably reading way too much into this, but I'm sure someone else has properly obsessed over this in a thesis or something).

Might the ET Celestial Savior notion have influenced the cannon of The Transformers? A communistic ethos of celestial grace and universal brotherhood (with robots as our brothers but still fully conscious ones endowed with personhood and an ineffable quality of the living) embedded within a toy line geared towards capitalist profit launched during the administration of a strongly anticommunist President? (importantly, some of the Contactees of the 1950s and 60s were quite openly partial to communism. George Adamski, for example, held up his Space brothers as coming from a society organized along communist lines, and even sang the praises of the Soviet Union, which reportedly drew the attention of the FBI). To be fair to Reagan, however, and to also tie it back to the ET theme: he did ameliorate his militantly confrontational stance with the Soviets in his bid for a binding arms control treaty, and he did openly muse about the boon to human solidarity that a threat from outer space might bring about (though his musing reversed the order I'm suggesting, by imagining that the cooperation among humans and the dropping of our parochial differences would be achieved by a threat rather than Space Brothers coming here to fix things for us).