A journey through the JP Gen1 cartoon.

[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.