“Transformers” comes out this week, and while the reviews so far have been mostly decent, I still maintain that I wouldn’t trust Michael Bay to borrow my car, let alone to handle such a fragile piece of my childhood nostalgia. In the hopes that history won’t repeat itself, here is our list of the 10 movies that chewed up our wonderful childhood memories and spit them out onto the big screen:

10. Inspector Gadget (1999)
The original “Gadget” cartoon certainly wasn’t the greatest masterpiece in television history, even by my then-unquestioning kid standards, but it was like dining on some nice comfort food; the title character would think he was saving the world, then mess everything up, then get bailed out by Penny and her computer book, which was always open to the same page (bugged the hell out of 8-year-old me). Instead, the movie took Dr. Claw’s menacing fist, turned it into Rupert Everett, and added a woefully conceived backstory to a character who was perfectly lovable when he was inexplicable.

9. The Flintstones (1994)
When a cast of characters and their respective catchphrases are so well-known, any remake is almost guaranteed to be a tense, “just try not to ruin it too badly” experience. But they did ruin it that badly. So badly, in fact, that they turned Betty Rubble, most young boys’ first idol of sexuality (besides Cleo from “Heathcliff”) into Rosie O’Donnell. Take that, kiddie erections.

8. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)
Tim Burton’s attempt to reimagine a long-unmoved piece of our brains wasn’t a total failure so much as it was just overwhelmingly inessential. 2005’s “Bad News Bears” already taught us that no movie was too recent for a Hollywood remake, but “Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory” is a whole other level of sacred childhood territory, and seeing it co-opted was a symbolic defeat for my generation. If Hollywood does anything to “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” I will quit going to movies forever.

7. Garfield (2004)
Cheesy as they may be, Garfield comics were a staple of my childhood bookshelf — my brother and I owned the first twenty-five books between us — but I will never forget sitting on the couch with him the first time we saw the trailer for “Garfield,” after which we sat in silence for about fifteen seconds, then he turned to me and said, “I really want to believe that that’s not going to be the worst movie of all time.” Consider yourselves lucky, Calvin and Hobbes.

6. Super Mario Brothers (1993)
Obviously, movies sometimes have to make concessions when they draw from source material outside the realm of reality, but how in the name of holy living f*** did these guys get turned into this, and this dragon get turned into Dennis Hopper? Answer: like all adults when it comes to video games, they screwed up in a really creatively spastic manner that no kid could have ever anticipated.

5. Scooby Doo (2002)
When your scardey-cat main character looks more like a ghost than the damn ghosts, your movie’s got a pretty fundamental flaw. Plus, not that the movie needed to be that suspenseful, but I had a sneaking suspicion the whole time (don’t know where it came from) that the ghosts weren’t real, but were part of an old man’s scheme to maintain some will so he could keep a secret nickel deposit, or something. All I’m saying is, if there had been a “Sixth Sense” cartoon series, it wouldn’t have made as good a movie.

4. Street Fighter (1994)
I’ll never forget the first time I beat Street Fighter 2; I was nine years old, and after about six tries, I finally beat M. Bison with Blanka in front of a gathering crowd at the Fun City arcade in Ocean City, Maryland. My love affair for SF2 after that was so powerful, I saw the movie twice in the theaters, the second time to make sure I wasn’t imagining that Guile, Japan’s attempt at an All-American stereotype, was being played by Jean Claude Van-Damme, that Dhalsim was a doctor with no stretch powers, and that Bison was Raul Julia (in his final role) flying around with scientifically explained electro power. What I mean is, the movie franchise should have just skipped straight to number 2.

3. Masters of the Universe (1987)
The tv show was pretty hokey to begin with, but the film version sure went out of its way to still be surprisingly terrible. It featured about five of the show’s fifty characters (and no Orko), He-Man was played by Ivan Drago, and “I have the power!” wasn’t uttered until about 97% of the way through the film. Bear in mind, I was frickin’ five years old, watching “Full House,” listening to Huey Lewis, and eating boogers when this movie came out, and I still hated it. How is that possible?

2. How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
The original animated “Grinch” piece is as close to perfection as one could hope to achieve with almost any artistic endeavor, which is why the big screen raping of this once-classic physically caused me too much pain to even be angry during this film. A Grinch backstory? A Grinch love story too??? Dr. Seuss’ widow even complained about the final product, and I’m pretty sure she also used the word “raping.”

1. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
Inessential, offensive, pointless, insulting, inexplicable, really really s*itty… A lot of similar words have come up over the course of this list, and this film personifies all of them simultanously, multiplied to a degree that only the perfect storm of a three-decade, worldwide cultural phenomenon letdown could provide. The fact that ripping on this movie doesn’t end after mentioning Jar Jar Binks (and in fact, barely begins) is a testament to a film that is truly awful independently of its implications, and by at once marginalizing the “Star Wars” storyline, capitalizing on an peoples’ immortal sense of nostalgia, discarding innovation for sterility, and having the worst dialogue ever committed to tape, this movie is in an absolute class of its own. How badly did I want to like it? I saw it three times in theaters, including skipping an 8th period class the day it came out. All those years of people telling me to stay in school, and what happens the ONE time I don’t take their advice?