I somehow keep thinking about The Transformers: The Movie lately. In particular, I found myself rewatching the attached clip more than once, mostly for the sheer joy of Welles’s performance.

But today it occurred to me that it isn’t just a scene of Orson Welles turning Frank Welker into Leonard Nimoy for marketing purposes (though goodness knows that’s interesting enough when you put it that way). It’s also an interpretive illustration of what dealing with Amazon or Google or Apple or one of the other tech companies is like: a monolithic, all powerful entity offering you what seems like a sweet deal…except that “your bargaining posture is highly dubious” and the alternative to acceptance is to “proceed on your way to oblivion.”

And in any case, the evil, world-devouring monster doesn’t actually have your best interests at heart and is almost certainly going to betray you once it gets what it wants anyway.

And come to think of it, Unicron kind of looks like an abstract version of the Apple logo (okay, that’s a stretch).