GM Hopes Movie Roles Transform Cars Into Sellable Stars

— -- As this week's opening of the Transformers movie approaches, loyal fans are ready.

Brian Kelly, 35, owner of Detroit Comics in Ferndale, grew up watching the cartoons and collecting the toys.

"It was definitely the coolest thing out there," he remembers.

Theus Weathers, 7, of Detroit is growing up with Transformers. Why does he like them? "They're robots," he says with a happy shout.

There you have it. The retro-cool cartoon, toy and comic book franchise from the 1980s has a fan base that spans generations. But, like the Transformers slogan says, there's "more than meets the eye."

The Transformers movie will give four General Motors vehicles one of the biggest product-placement opportunities ever for an automotive company.

If the flick is as huge as some people are predicting, it could help transform perceptions of GM in ways that may play out for years to come.

What makes the Transformers partnership important? For one thing, the movie has all the trappings of a blockbuster -- toy and video game tie-ins, and more. For another, the cars get as much screen time as many of the flesh-and-blood actors, with a particularly juicy part reserved for the new Chevrolet Camaro that's coming out in 2009.

But more than that, GM has teamed up with a franchise that evokes fond memories and resonates emotionally with men in their late 20s to mid-30s, and is also popular with kids.

You know all that talk about struggling American auto companies needing to improve their image and reach out to the youth market? Transformers speaks to the 35-and-under crowd.

The timing for GM couldn't be better, as the automaker has fought off plenty of bad news in recent years. No talk of buyouts or billions in health care liabilities here. It's all about the shape-shifting bots.

"Everybody I hear from is totally geeked for the movie," says Kelly, who's downloaded trailers from the Web and also was part of the local crew that worked on a Transformers shoot at the Michigan Central Depot in Detroit last year.

Although fans of cartoons and comic books can be touchy about changes to the source material, Kelly hasn't sensed much controversy about GM's involvement in the movie, which required some tweaks to Transformers lore.