I still haven't seen the 2nd or 3rd Transformers movies... I'm sure I'll rent them or buy them used on eBay at some point for Rifftrax purposes... but it's not something I'm dying to get done. The biggest problem I had with the first movie was the action scenes. It's really the only reason I went to go see the thing in the theater... to see big robots fight... having no real expectations for how they were going to fill the non-CGI scenes. I actually didn't mind the whole Lebouf getting a car angle... seemed as good a reason as any to shoehorn in robots in disguise...considering the absurdity of that subject matter. But the action scenes were just a confused, shaky cam mess... concentrating on puny humans running around beneath the carnage... and nobody paid to see puny humans.
As far as the whole childhood memory thing... I had some Transformers as a kid... but they were always second banana toys. I grew up squarely in the lower middle class, and the Transformers toys were relatively expensive. It was always a bigger bang for your xmas/birthday buck to ask for GI Joe or Star Wars or whatever else that was based around $3 action figures... or Legos... which never cease to kick ass. So I guess I never got too drawn into the whole backstory... I'm sure I saw every episode of the original cartoon series multiple times... But couldn't tell you much beyond the fact that Starscream and Cobra Commander had the same voice.