From: Transformers: The Movie
Genre: Movies, Cartoons
Who said it?: Kup
The story behind the quote: This quote comes from the Transformers: The Movie. Not the live action Michael Bay films. This is from the animated movie that was released in 1986. The film was actually pretty controversial for its time because of the deaths of practically the entire cast of the TV Series… during the first 20 minutes, no less!
The movie is set in the year 2005 (which was pretty far off in the future then) and, somehow, the treacherous Decepticons have managed to conquer the Autobots home world of Cybertron. The Autobots, however, refuses to give up the fight and have set up bases on the planet’s moons. Unknown to them, both factions face a bigger threat than themselves: the planet eater called Unicron.
Anyway, the quote comes during two parts in the film. The first part is when Kup and Hot Rod, two Autobots who had to retreat from a recent battle encountering a group of shark-like robots. The elder Kup tries to make friends with them by giving the “Universal Greeting,” which is the quote. However, this is met with disastrous results…
The second time the quote is used is when Hot Rod and Kup rendezvous with their fellow Autobots who were under attack by a group of robots called the Junkions. Here, Hot Rod tries his hand at using the Universal Greeting…
Geek wisdom: The Universal Greeting is actually kinda smart as it proves that its not really the words that people look at when you first meet them; its actually the actions of people that are more important. People tend to focus on the words people use and that’s okay.
However, words are just that: words. We tend to forget that actions always speak louder than words. It’s easy to make promises and say what we’re gonna to do something but they’ll have no meaning unless we can back it up by actually doing them.
I suspect, but have never been abe to find confirmation, that this supposed to be how you’d verbalize the connection sounds of a 300 baud modem. (At the very least, the Japanese version is “berwip crawna-wi pinibon”, so there’s *something* phonetic going on there.)