The Touch

"The Touch" is a song by Stan Bush, featured on the 1986 album The Transformers: The Movie - Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. It is possibly the pinnacle of human achievement. It is fondly remembered by many fans for being featured in two climactic battles in The Transformers: The Movie.

"The Touch" is first featured in "The Transformers: The Movie" when Optimus Prime, having just arrived to Autobot City, takes on several of the Decepticon forces by himself. It plays again, near the end of the feature, as Hot Rod (G1) opens the Matrix of Leadership. The song was used again during the climactic scene of the cartoon episode "The Return of Optimus Prime, Part 2".

Fiction

Generation 1 cartoon

At an undetermined time period following the creation of the Headmasters and Targetmasters and the seeming defeat of Galvatron and Scorponok, Powermaster Optimus Prime spent a good deal of time relating Transformers stories to the human schoolboy Tommy Kennedy.

After a series of stories wherein he described the events of the battle with Unicron, Optimus Prime had to depart to attend an interstellar peace conference in the midst of a barrage of questions from Tommy. As he was blasting off, Prime declared "But until I return, I leave you with 'The Touch'!"

Following this, the music video for "The Touch" began, although how Tommy was able to view it in the barren wasteland where his meetings with Prime typically took place is unknown. Season 5

As Stan Bush could not have written the song for the 1986 theatrical The Transformers: The Movie within the context of the cartoon timeline (as the events of the movie had not happened at that point in continuity), it is possible that the song was simply a general release that Prime was personally fond of.

Another possibility is that a fictionalized film account of the events surrounding the battle with Unicron was created sometime after the year 2005, and that Stan Bush's music video was produced to accompany that feature. This theory is not out of the realm of plausibility; in the UK comics, resident letter answerer Grimlock reviewed a Transformers film in an article entitled Film 2006 With Grimlock.

Trivia

• Bush launched a campaign to have "The Touch" included on either Guitar Hero or Rock Band. 1 He recently announced the campaign's success, with "The Touch" hitting Guitar Hero: World Tour as free downloadable content. 2

• As part of the media hype building up to the release of Revenge of the Fallen, Bush released a reworked version of "The Touch" with a more modern, Linkin Park-inspired sound. This is notable because, while completely unsanctioned or unrequested by Hasbro or Dreamworks, it is totally hilarious.