TV & VIDEO - Feb. 20, 1989

Twenty Chinese lawmakers have condemned a futuristic U.S. television cartoon series and urged the government to ban broadcasts of “The Transformers” and its toy characters, a Beijing report said Sunday. The legislators “believe that the absurd ideological content of ‘The Transformers,’ especially its promotion of war as something good, will poison the next generation,” the official People’s Daily said. “The Transformers” is about robots who can alter their shapes to become cars, planes and weapons, and who battle other evil robots. The official Xinhua News Agency said the program has been shown on Shanghai and Beijing television in translation, and several publishing houses have issued picture books of characters from the cartoon. American-made toys of the cartoon characters also have been sold in China for the “excessively expensive” price of about $270 per set--as much as the average Chinese worker makes in a year, the news agency said. The toys are sold in the United States by Hasbro Inc.