I love all three, but think Victory was the best. But it's gotta be watched in Japanese with subtitles. Heck, I watched Headmasters three times all the way through without subtitles and still loved it.

 

The dub is used for the purposes of comedy.

 

Headmasters was nice because I got to revisit some favourite characters in new episodes after twenty years of watching the same episodes over and over, but Daniel and Wheelie really got on my tits. And the lame ring of friendship stuff at the end made me want to eat my own face and then sick it back up onto my skull in disgust.

The fight between Ginrai and Overlord in the desert in Masterforce is one of my favourite TF cartoon battles. Always nice to see the bad guy hand the good guy his arse.
The Masterforce kids were irritating at first, but once they stopped being the main focus of the series it got good very fast.

Victory dragged for me. It felt like the old G1 series with the Decepticons always after energy, but the characterless cast lacked the appeal of the older series crews. And watching Star Sabre transform via that same bit of stock footage every episode just made my brain turn to mush.

I'm happy I have them, but I'm still more likely to pop in an episode of the old series and watch Optimus Prime go up against Megatron than slip on any of the Japanese shows to pass the time.

 

The original American cartoon had plenty of bland characterization, however, it was still a lot better than Victory, with all the characters at least having some basic trait to set them apart from their peers, even if it was just a funny way of talking...Victory didn't even have that much.

The only characters who did not have one-dimensional characters were Hellbat and Leozack, thanks to their Starscream-imitation. Deszaras and Star Saber are only set apart from the rest of the gang by being the leaders.

The autobots are not just flat but the stiff military structure makes it apparent these are far, far from the friendly bunch of reluctant soldiers that Optimus Prime and co. were. Constantly addressing each other with their military ranks rather than names does not help the viewer to associate with these guys (not that the interchangeable characters help either).

And of course there's the story (or the lack of it, rather)...it almost seems like every episode is just a repeat of the last with locations and dialogue altered a bit. And of course, there's no excitement because the decepticons never come even close to victory which seriously underminds the threat they're supposed to represent. Which is not helped in the slightest by the autobots and the narrator who sound and act like these decepticons were the worst thing since Hitler.

 

**Spoiler Post**

I agree, I thought the Japanese continuation of G1 was laughable at best. Galvatron being doomed by a Autobots holding hands? Arcee has a new job as Secretary? Rodimus and the others just decide to take a train to nowheresville after Cybertron is blown up? The whole thing with Sixshot?

No, the series is junk, and didn't get much better with each following series either.

As for the Unicron Trilogy, that's a different story. While I liked the comics far better (well, at least the ones we got), but at least there was some storytelling there.

 

I've not watched Headmasters yet, probably won't get round to it for a while after reading this thread.

Masterforce FTW.

 

QFT. I got headmasters thinking it would be almost like a continuation of my love of G1, only to see it was a weak story, featuring DANIEL AND WHEELIE. And as someone said, Metroplex versus SixShot and Galvatron's death? Ridiculous.

Oh and Onesock: CEasar is the correct way to spell my name dammit.  

 

For the price they are charging the box sets I'd sooner cut imy left foot.

The earlier Japanese ones were better than the ones that were shown and dubbed for Cartoon Network.

It should be duly noted that over there the shows all had sort of an Easternized Cutural Philosophy going through them which some goes over my head.

 

It only went to show that Transformers no matter what country it's in shouldn't be treated as High Drama.

See above.

 

Apparently the average Australian earns more than the average American. Well, it would certainly explain the price of things here.

But still Madman still sells the best Beast Wars DVDs made yet, simply due to features. Also, because Mainframe uses PAL, no US DVD set match Madman's in terms of visual quality unless whomever currently holds the rights to Beast Wars releases the series on Blu-ray.

 

Everyone seems to be getting at Galvatron's death wrongly. Wasn't it suppose to be an Energon Blast Ring that Chromedome and the Autobot Headmasters created?

 

The JPN G1 continuity makes my brain hurt. i stay away but Victory and Zone easier to understand.

 

I think the problem people have with that is that before that, Galvatron had survived an explosion of an entire planet while standing in ground zero. And how is he finally stopped? With a few tonnes of ice.

That's got to be the worst case of inconsistency since...I dunno, the origin of Devastator?

 

I've been meaning to watch the Japanese series for a long time now. I've only seen a few episodes of Headmasters and Victory, and they weren't too bad. Haven't seen any of Masterforce yet.

I'll probably buy all three sets just to have them.

 

I'd say the coolest part of watching Headmasters so far has been seeing cameos of my G1 favorites. There was one episode, towards the middle where it starts at some Autobot base and you can see Autobots just hanging out in the background. Jetfire was one of them ;-)

After the first five or six episodes, you don't really see many G1'ers anymore.

 

I'm pretty much in agreement there. The storylines were horrible, the charachters were lousy and completely diffrent, it just was terrible, I havent' watched Victory but I can't imagine it'd be much better than HM or Masterforce.

 

Headmasters treated Cyclonus and Scourge so very badly...  

 

Yep, it was the mid-air ring-around-the-rosie of death.

http://transformers.wikia.com/wiki/Head_Formation

Here it's called "Head Formation" but I could have sworn the word "friendship" got mixed up in there somewhere. Please, someone verify this or I'm gonna have to pop-in my Headmasters DVD and I don't want to subject myself to that kind of pain.

 

Methinks you think of "Head Formation of Friendship" which was the title of a HM episode.