‘Transformers: The Last Knight’s’ Crazy King Arthur Connection Comes From The ‘80s Cartoon

Slap on your sunscreen and put on your shades, because summer is here. You can tell summer is here because it’s June 21st, the first day of summer. You can also tell it’s summer because there’s a new Transformers film in theaters. It’s just not summer without the sights and sounds of metallic monsters clashing amidst the rubble of American cities!

Transformers: The Last Knight is the fifth entry in this unstoppable franchise, and it’s unlike any other film featuring terrifying robotic aliens comprised of whirling silverware. This time around, the sci-fi franchise is looking to the past to inform its present: that’s right, The Last Knight features King Arthur, y’all! But why? And how? And, again, why? There’s a lot to unpack about director Michael Bay’s latest bombastic blockbuster now that it’s stomped into theaters. Let’s start with where we left off…

What Happened Before

If summer just hasn’t felt like summer over the past few years, that’s because we haven’t heard Mark Wahlberg shout about “Transformahs” since 2014’s Transformers: Age of Extinction. That film, also directed by Bay, acted as a sequel and a reboot for the long-running series. Age of Extinction featured an all-new human cast, introducing Wahlberg’s character, a single dad and struggling inventor with the impossibly cool name Cade Yaeger.

Set five years after the events of Transformers: Dark of the Moon and that film’s massive war in Chicago, all Transformers (good and bad) have been deemed enemies of America. In order to fight the Transformers, a CIA black ops agency… built their own Transformers and teamed up with a Cybertronian bounty hunter named Lockdown. Keep your giant robot enemies closer, I guess?

Cade Yaeger (a man whose name must be said in full) came across a badly wounded Optimus Prime and helped repair him, against the wishes of every human around him. Optimus, the few remaining Autobots, and the new humans went up against the Transformer drones and their builder, Stanley Tucci.

Tucci’s Grinch-y CEO character had a change of heart, though, once he learned that the resurrected Megatron (now Galvatron) sought to terraform Earth using ancient Transformer tech. The good guys ultimately defeated the bad guys, and the victorious Optimus Prime departed Earth in search of the Transformers’ “creators.”

What’s Happening Now

What isn’t happening now?! Just like Fast Five, Transformers: The Last Knight is uniting the disparate casts of the previous films! Not only are Wahlberg and Tucci back for more, but three actors from the first Transformers trilogy (Josh Duhamel! Tyrese Gibson! John Turturro!) are returning after sitting the last one out.

Following up on Optimus Prime’s quest for spiritual answers, The Last Knight will get straight-up existential. In Last Knight, the Autobot leader finds the Transformer home planet Cybertron, now a dead world. Optimus learns that in order to reignite Cybertron, he’ll have to recover a lost Transformer artifact on Earth–and he’ll probably also have to destroy Earth in the process. Oops?

While Optimus Prime was searching for himself out amongst the stars, relations between humans and Transformers devolved into war. In an attempt to broker peace, Cade Yaeger and beloved Autobot Bumblebee teamed up with an astronomer and exposition deliverer played by Anthony Hopkins and an English lit professor from Oxford University played by Laura Haddock. Hopkins holds the truth about the Transformers’ secret history on Earth; he also has a Transformer butler named Cogman. Sure, why not?

So anyway, about that secret history…

Last Knight Literally Features Knights

We don’t know how or why, but Transformers: The Last Knight features literal knights. And not only knights, but the Knights of the Round Table. And not only the Knights of the Round Table, but the Knights of the Round Table and King Arthur himself. So yeah, The Last Knight is a movie that features shots of the legendary Knights of the Round Table flanked by medieval Transformers.

We know from trailers that Hopkins’ astronomer knows a lot about the Transformers’ secret history on Earth, and that’s a history that apparently involves hanging out with King Arthur. As if that wasn’t baffling enough, The Last Knight indirectly connects the Transformers mythology to Arthurian legend–and ABC’s fairy tale drama Once Upon a Time!

Liam Garrigan plays King Arthur in The Last Knight, and he also played King Arthur in a recurring role in Once Upon a Time Season 5. This guy has been typecast as a very specific type! If you’re looking for a medieval king, Garrigan is apparently your guy.

Those connections aren’t the craziest thing about The Last Knight, though…

This Has All Happened Before

Transformers hanging out in medieval England is totally a thing! On October 24, 1985, the original Transformers animated series aired the episode “A Decepticon Raider in King Arthur’s Court.” The Season Two episode, written by Douglas Booth, saw a group of Autobots and Decepticons transported back to 543 A.D. While they didn’t interact with King Arthur directly, they tore things up in medieval England.

In the episode, a random time travel device sends a group of Decepticons, the Autobots Warpath and Hoist, and Auto-bud human Spike back in time. There, the Transformers get involved in a territory dispute between the fictional Sir Aetheling the Red and Sir Wigend of Blackthorne. The two try to squash their beef at a jousting tournament, which escalates to the Decepticons jousting for Blackthorne against Aetheling and the robot Warpath. Fussy Decepticon commander Starscream decides to take matters into his own hands and tries to take over Blackthorne’s castle, but he’s defeated by all the good guys. The episode ends with all the robots returned to their rightful time in 1985, the time stream undamaged.

What Have We Learned?

The Transformers and King Arthur are two literary titans that fit together like… the Transformers and King Arthur. Yeah, it’s a truly bizarre pairing, but there is an equally bizarre precedence for it. Or maybe Michael Bay just wanted to make a King Arthur movie and decided to add some Transformers. When you look at how badly King Arthur: Legend of the Sword tanked at the box office last month, maybe that wasn’t a ridiculous call. Maybe Guy Ritchie should have considered spicing up his Arthur movie with some ’80s cartoon heroes. After all, G.I. Joe also had a King Arthur inspired episode wherein the Cobra ninja Storm Shadow came to wield Excalibur.

After The Last Knight, I think we could all get behind a Guy Ritchie-directed G.I. Joe: Excalibur movie, right?

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