A journey through the JP Gen1 cartoon.

[griffin]

Ep 18 - A Powerful Foe!! Sixknight the Wanderer

Sixknight, a six-changer, arrives on Earth and starts destroying things and killing people. He joins up with the Decepticons so that he can draw out and defeat Super Ginrai, a worthy opponent. He underestimates the Human element and retreats when defeated.


Since Sixknight (Quickswitch) is an Autobot toy, it didn't make much sense for him to arrive and kill humans, even if he is supposed to eventually turn good like his toy. And even if he does become an Autobot later, it won't make much sense, as redemption by Decepticons who change sides, is usually only possible if they haven't killed anyone, or have always had doubts about their allegiance. Sixknight has killed hundreds, possibly thousands, and is quite arrogantly evil, like a true Decepticon.
And he looks down on Autobots as inferior beings.

I still can't understand, if after years of having the iconic hero, Convoy/Optimus Prime on their world, why doesn't anyone immediately assume it is Optimus when they first see Ginrai's Transtector transform to robot mode? Or even question why he looks like the legendary Convoy/Optimus. I know it would be due to the plot of this series, but surely something should have been mentioned ages ago when he was first introduced, so that the kids watching the cartoon aren't confused at seeing the 'return' of a character they had been watching for the last few years, including his death only a year before (in Headmasters).


Ep 19 - At Full Strength! The Four Godmaster Gunmen

The fourth Godmaster is suspected to be a race car, as both sides find out it survives crashes undamaged. The driver of the car, Road King' is told about the Godmaster and Master-braces, and joins the Autobots when his mentor/father is threatened by the Decepticons.


The origin of this Godmaster is unknown (at this stage) but could have been built at the same factory as Lightfoot's.

Road King is quite accepting of his fate, and willingly joins the Autobots as if intergalactic warfare is such an easy thing to sign up for.

The battle at the end of the episode was very quick. The Seacons show up and within seconds are all destroyed, and the Decepticons are retreating. Admittedly, the battle was not the point of the episode, but the introduction and fleshing out of the Road King character.


Ep 20 - The Autobot Warrior, Sixknight?!

Sixknight returns, but only to try to find out how he could have been beaten by a human (in a powerful exosuit). He ends up abandoning his evil destructive ways and heads back off into space. Meanwhile, Cancer is given a small Decepticon 'pet' by Mega, called Browning.


Talk about product placement, with Browning showing up, without any need for it in the story. And I wonder if it will appear much in the future, or at all.
And Mega shows concern for Cancer, and tells him to love his new pet... not a very Decepticon trait.

Browning reminds me of Laserbeak from Armada... a cutesy little creature, that doesn't change size when transforming, like Megatron or Soundwave.

Ginrai is asked by Hawk to be the new Autobot leader... a human they've only recently met while being on Earth thousands of years, to lead *their* Autobot mission there. That scene almost felt like the Pretenders were going to announce their departure, so I was glad they didn't.


Ep 21 - Save the Little Girl! The Chojin Warriors, the Godmasters

The Decepticons start capturing doctors so that the Humans start suffering from lack of medical help. When one of Cab's friend's life is in danger, he leads a rescue of the doctors.


Not sure how effective the plan to capture all doctors will be, as there would be millions of them all around the world. With just a handful of Decepticons, it would take years to capture them all, and by then, more would have been trained up. And why not just kill them? Why keep them alive if they want to prevent humans from ever getting medical help? It's not like there hasn't been human carnage in this cartoon already.

We get to see another fancy Cybertron/Autobot vessel, with a giant submersable Hovercraft. Where do they get the time to build all these things?

When Ginrai enters the cave with all the doctors, it's almost looks like he's only interested in rescuing the one doctor who can help Cab's friend... and the rest of the doctors don't seem to care if they don't get rescued, as long as the girl is saved.

Buster is definitely not a dude... in this episode you can see she's got a rack under that jumper.

This show has a lot of english used in it, and I was wondering if it does confuse Japanese viewers, especially if any of our words sound like a JP word with a different meaning. It may be a novelty to have a little english thrown in, but having quite a bit could make it a confusing blending of the two languages.


Ep 22 - Life? Death? The Desperate Lightfoot

The Decepticons again try to target the 'traitor' Godmasters, by focussing first on Lightfoot. They capture his father and demand Lightfoot surrender to them. The rest of the Autobot Godmasters help him rescue his father. Meanwhile, Grand arrives on Earth to give the Earth Cybertrons/Autobots schematics to build Godbomber, an armour attachment for Super Ginrai.


Just on halfway through the series and we get a new intro sequence, to the same music. It looks nice seeing some new action scenes, but spoils it a little seeing Overlord before it's been introduced in the show. Well, it's only supposed to be a couple episodes away until that happens. The new intro only shows Godmasters and King Poseidon, with no sign of Pretenders or any real Transformers/Cybertronians.
I'm hoping this isn't a sign of things to come with the Pretenders, as we are seeing less of them in action now.

The first mention of Grand Maximus, and the appearance of Grand (Cerebros), plus a tiny portion of the Spaceship Maximus is seen before it cloaks. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be Fortress from Headmasters, but if it is, it is one of the few links to the existing Gen1 & Headmasters series.

Lightfoot's father is called Leftfoot... I wonder if his mother was called Rightfoot...

Ranger/Joyride tickles Hydra/Darkwing... oookay.

I just noticed something. In the US (comic) series Dreadwind/Buster seemed to be the senior one, but in the JP (cartoon) series Darkwing/Hydra is the senior one.

[Skullcruncher]

Yesterday I finally sat down and watched the first 13 episodes, I actually quite liked them especially the pretenders, the weird noises the seacons made cracked me up as did Shuta and his kicking of the armadill - tentakil is actually quite good at being a bad guy!

Going to watch the rest during the week, so far I rate it above the headmasters.

[jimoinj]

I’ve gotta disagree with Gok on the Headmasters Japanese Transformers series.

As far as Japanese culture and females goes, the Arcee as secretary explanation is wanting. What about Evangelion? Look at all of those fighting girl manga. Look at even Astroboy! All of these Japanese written and animated series feature strong, assertive and intelligent women who take up action roles. Well ok, maybe not intelligent for the soft-porn style fighting girl manga. Actually discount anything I mentioned about fighting girl manga, they are demeaning to women in other ways! But for Astroboy and Evangelion, they are not as demeaning to women as this series is. Evangelion is empowering if anything.

As Griff has mentioned, there are numerous continuity errors and nonsensical illogical and thoroughly implausible happenings. I mean, it makes the worst parts of the English language series look thoroughly realistic. Again these can’t be explained culturally, since there are logical and mature Japanese anime series such as Evangelion. It’s just lazy and poor writing, regardless of whether it’s written for kids or adults. The sudden introduction of unnecessary nonsensical plot devices like Maximus’ sword needed for his transformation, him not knowing about the sword, the care bears like group hug to get power. To use a sentence usually used to describe Michael Bay, this version of Transformers G1 is a raping of my childhood.

Gok, I realise you are a Japanese language speaker and perhaps feel closer culturally to this series than you do the American version. But it just comes across as you being an apologist for this series and to be grasping for negative comparisons from the English language G1 series or from other Western popular science-fiction/fantasy shows as a means of defence. I understand you prefer this series (which you admit is weak, at least compared to other Japanese series) to Rebirth. So I would really love to see your review of Rebirth, in a level of detail similar to this one by Griffin, to see where you can even begin to prefer this series over it.

[GoktimusPrime]

The thing with Arcee though is that in Transformers The Movie and Season 3 (or TF 2010 as it was called in Japan) Arcee was shown to be an active warrior and not a submissive female "OL" (office lady). So even putting aside any cultural bias, it's just an INCONSISTENT portrayal of that character. If the G1 cartoon were a role playing game and, the dungeon master would deduct experience points off the person playing Arcee in the Headmasters for making her act out of character!

This is different from say other female TFs in Japanese G1 like Esmeral and Lyzak who are arguably even MORE stereotypically submissive females (they're literally stay-at-home mums nursing juvenile Decepticons -- at least Arcee still serves aboard a battleship in The Headmasters even if she's not an active combatant); because regardless of whether people think these Transformers have been portrayed in a sexist way or not, at least they've been consistent.

The same thing happened with Carly in The Headmasters too -- when she was younger she was a pro-active risk taker, showing just as much courage as Spike... but then in The Headmaster she just dotes over Daniel. Heck, when it came down to a choice between sending Carly or Daniel to save the day -- they chose Daniel. They chose a child over an adult with experience in fighting Decepticons and what not... most likely because she's "only" a woman.

I know there are plenty of implausible things in The Headmasters... I do consider it the weakest of the Japanese G1 series -- but there are plenty of implausible things in the Rebirth too. The main problem I have with the Rebirth is that everything was too rushed. I know that it's because David Wise originally wrote it as a 5 episode story then at the last minute Hasbro told him to wittle it down to a 3 episode story and he HAD to showcase virtually that entire year's worth of toys in it ... I don't blame Wise for it really - even HE didn't like having to cut his story down. But unfortunately the end result was that yeah -- a lot of things are just rushed and we see a lot of "hi then bye" appearances of characters. Sixshot is a good example of this - I quite like him in The Headmasters where he did get more character development. Was it the best character development ever? Probably not, but at least he got some development! How much character development did Sixshot get in The Rebirth? Sweet bugger all.

Now I'm not saying that I love everything about The Headmasters or that I hate everything about The Rebirth - there are things that I like and dislike in both.
e.g.:
Some things I dislike about The Headmasters:
+ Death of Ultra Magnus: one of the single most crappiest fight scenes I've ever seen. Magnus totally deserved a better death than that.
+ Inconsistent characterisation of Arcee.
+ Too much Daniel and Wheelie (but at least Wheelie doesn't talk in stupid rhymes and Daniel never became a Headmaster)
...etc.

And there are some things I like about The Rebirth, e.g.:
+ I like how they gave the Nebulans green skin and some different facial characteristics to distinguish them from humans. In the G1 comics they all looked human - almost all (except one) like Caucasian humans too. Erm... right. At least the cartoon made them look more alien. Although Zarak is awfully buff for a cripple who supposedly has no use of his body... (do they take steroids just to look hot?)
+ Cerebros' pacifism was interesting. The fact that they even made him a sentient Autobot was interesting (since in the comics he was nothing more than a drone to help Galen/Spike bond with Fortress Maximus Mark II).
+ Showing us the duality of the Transformers and their Nebulan/human partners - talking and working with (and sometimes against) each other. Even in the comics it was often one or the other personality who dominated, and in The Headmasters the Transtectors have no independent will. In The Rebirth it actually feels like a partnership.

So yeah, there are things I like and dislike with both series, but on the whole I much prefer The Headmasters.

P.S.: I first saw The Rebirth in late 1987 or early 1988... and I first saw Japanese G1 around 1990-91 (albeit in the horrific English dub - I first saw The Headmasters in Japanese in 1998) -- so at the time that I first saw these series I young enough to not be scrutinising either series as much as I do now as an adult. And I remember after watching Japanese G1 thinking to myself that it looked a lot better than The Rebirth.