​

We're back after the fairly successful run with the original series that started it all, moving forward in chronological order to the first entry out of Japan: The Headmasters

If you weren't around for the first thread, I'll spare you the extremely lengthy explanation of the project and its structure (if you want all that, go read the first post of the G1 thread, it contains everything you need to know in a lengthy spoiler-tagged block. Just replace the G1 references with Headmasters ones. and ignore the talk about what comes next) to just explain the basics:

Spoiler: No-longer-necessary explanation now that the series is finished

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Each week we will have 4 episodes of the series set as the active discussion. Within that week, usually running from Sunday night to the following Sunday night at just before midnight Pacific time, everyone is free to comment and discuss those episodes however they wish in terms of what they watch, when they watch it and what form their comments take (from full-blown reviews like what I or Scoff wrote in the G1 thread to smaller questions or comments like other posters. I'm no holding anyone to doing anything more or less than they want to, nor am I expecting specifics in tone or tenor. Feel free to be as serious/non-serious as you would like. The name of the game is to be interesting and/or fun, not stifling.) Then at week's end we move on to the next batch until the series is finished. Thankfully unlike G1 this should be shorter, taking 9 weeks to do 4 episodes per week (with a 3-episode final week. Equally thankfully none of the explicit multi-part episodes occur in such a way that would require juggling weekly counts to fit them together the way G1 did.)

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That said, doing this series (and the next two if we continue through Japanese G1) presents the first significant quirk in terms how the episodes are watched. Two quirks, in fact:

#1) What version is watched? The subtitled "original" Japanese language version, such as what was released by Shout Factor, Madman, Metrodome, and other licensed distributors? or the (in)famous Omni Productions English dub that dominated the "tape-trading" market (both the literal one and the figurative back room internet version via stuff like torrent sites or even limewire back in the day) through the early 2000s.

#2) Where and how are people going to be able to watch it? G1 had the advantage of being on Tubi.tv aside from the movie. But there is no streaming service that offers the series to watch online the way several of the western ones are.​

To answer those questions:

First, (#1) - That's up to you. If you have one version or the other, go with it. If you have to get one version or the other (more on that in a minute), the subbed one is probably easier and cheaper to acquire since subbed DVD collections are a nice, cheap $20 per series or like $50 for the whole trilogy, whereas buying the Malaysian bootleg DVD trilogy can cost you upwards of $60-80 plus shipping depending on the deal you find on ebay. Personally i'll be watching the subbed version because I want to look at it critically, and that means I have to judge the series on its proper merits and not how it looks through the lens of the crazy dub. I'd love to watch the insanity of the dub, but I don't think it'll let me judge the series the way I want to. But that's just me. If you want to watch the series as a goofy so-bad-its-good comedy with all the memes that the Omni dub created, who am I to stop you? In fact, someone watching the dub as a counterpoint to my subtitled watch might be interesting.

And for (#2) - Unfortunately without a streaming service, the best suggestion I can offer is to get the DVDs. I realize asking people to spend money for a silly project like this probably isn't much of a selling point, but if we're being honest about things then the reality is that the series is fairly cheap to acquire (like I said, we're talking around $20 US per JPG1 series, and usually a slight discount if you get the trilogy set)

Purchase links I found:

Spoiler: Purchase links for the series

Amazon.com
Headmasters individual set: $18.23
Japanese G1 Trilogy set: $50

Amazon.ca (Canada)
Headmasters individual set: $23.99 Cdn
Japanese G1 Trilogy set: $59.99 Cdn

Amazon.co.uk
Headmasters individual set (Metrodome version, Marketplace only): £28.98
Japanese G1 Trilogy set (Metrodome version, Marketplace only): £99.99

I checked Australian Amazon and it doesn't seem like anyone there is selling the Madman sets.

I don't want to sound like a corporate Hasbro shill, but we as fans do need to show our support for the brand and for offbeat releases like the Japanese trilogy if we want to continue to see stuff like that made available to us. Maybe it'll happen less often as we seem to be moving out of the era of physical media releases, but if Hasbro thinks nobody will buy products relating to the various series that weren't designed western releases or aren't wholly part of the G1 Nostalgia Supertour™, of course they'll never release anything like that that. So I do think it's worth it if you have any interest in the history of the series to show it by purchasing these DVDs at a reasonable price (in the US and Canada, at least) and sending a message to Hasbro (and Takara) that we like and want to see them support all facets of Transformers and be willing to take risks outside of making narrow clones of just the things that are historically the most supported.

That said, for those that can't do it this way, I may have a workaround. Let me know in this thread or via private message and I'll see what I can do.

ACTIVE DISCUSSION

Series-in-review/recap

As of February 24 the re-watch of Headmasters has completed. Over the week of the 25th through March 2nd I will be posting a series review and retrospective along with other closing elements. As with G1, this thread will remain open for any late-comer discussion and as an archive to the project.
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I hope that this series goes as smoothly as G1 did, and maybe it finds even more audience and fun. I enjoyed a lot of doing G1 and I'm anxious to see how it works out watching a show that's less popular, less universally known, and perhaps a bit more "work" since it's Japanese and not going to conform to the standard western tropes we know.

Anyway as I said earlier on if you want to follow along and need help with a way to watch the show, let me know. If you have any other questions or comments, you can also let me know and I'll do my best to respond.

And other than that I'll see you back here on Sunday night/Monday morning for the official start of the TFW Headmasters Rewatch

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Episode Review Index (my reviews)
1) Four Warriors Come Out of the Sky
2) The Mystery of Planet Master
3) Birth of the Fantastic Double Prime
4) The Great Cassette Operation
5) Rebellion on Planet Beast
6) Approach of the Demon Meteorite
7) The Four-Million-Year-Old Veil of Mystery
8) Terror! The Six Shadows
9) Cybertron is in Grave Danger, Part 1
10) Cybertron is in Grave Danger, Part 2
11) Scorponok, The Shadow Emperor
12) The Dormant Volcano Mysteriously Erupts
13) Head On!! Fortress Maximus
14) Explosion on Mars!! Maximus Is In Danger
15) Explosion on Mars!! MgaZarak Appears
16) Return of the Immortal Emperor
17) SOS From Planet Sandra
18) Daniel Faces His Biggest Crisis Ever!!
19) Fight to the Death on Plant Hive!!
20) Battle for the Defence of The False Planet
21) Find MegaZarak's Weak Spot!!
22) Head Formation of Friendship
23) Mystery of the Space Pirate Ship
24) Ultra Magnus Dies!!
25) The Emperor of Destruction Vanishes on an Iceberg
26) I Risk My Life For Earth!
27) Miraculous Warriors, the Targetmasters (Part 1)
28) Miraculous Warriors, the Targemasters (Part 2)
29) The Master Sword is in Danger!!
30) The Zarak Shield Turns the Tide
31) Operation: Destroy the Decepticons
32) My Friend Sixshot!
33) Duel on the Asteroid
34) The Final Showdown on Earth, Part 1
35) The Final Showdown on Earth, Part 2


Previous Rewatch threads:
Generation 1

 

I watched the first five episodes of Headmasters the first 4 episodes.

I notice the story seems to move much faster than the US cartoon.

 

Yeah, I saw that channel, but it only carries those first 4 episodes. There used to be a channel I knew that had all of Masterforce and Victory in the Omni dub, but it's cleaned out too (it appears that the author purged it of its videos, as links no longer work at all and don't even have anything like a DMCA takedown notice)

That's why I set up an alternative option for people who can't get or don't have DVDs. If you or anyone wants the chance to watch everything, let me know and I can set you up.

 

I plan on watching the first episode tonight and will have the review tonight or tomorrow. I'm not sure how long it'll take me to get through each episode.

EDIT: my plan sucked. I didn't start watching the episode until 11:30 and an hour later I'm not even halfway through because of some false starts, pauses for long diatribes, and the fact that I switched from watching the episode on DVD on my TV to on my computer in case I want to do some images for the review. So I'm not going to promise anything but I will try to get through the rest of it tomorrow and have the first review up if not tomorrow night then Tuesday.

 

I'll just be doing what I did for G1, reading your ridiculously clever reviews Liege and responding with some snark and/or semi-clever observations.  

 

From what I remember of the last time I watched the series through (Which was at least 6 or 7 years ago): Prepare to be disappointed.

 

EPISODE 1: FOUR WARRIORS COME OUT OF THE SKY

THE SHORT VERSION
It's a new dawn as Japan takes some of the characters we know and love and pushes them aside so we can meet a bunch of new guys most of us don't care about. So basically it's just like a lot of season 3 and The Rebirth, just in a different language!

REVIEW
It's been a while since I've watched Headmasters. a year since I have in any capacity (last year I watched 2 or 3 episodes of the Omni dub as part of the precursor to this project. Two years ago I watched similar episodes in Japanese. But I haven't watched the whole series through in at least 6 or so years. With that in mind, I'm not sure what my initial thoughts of an episode I've seen recently, but for a series I've only watched through once quite a while would be.

While I spent quite a bit of time in this episode picking a some of the concerning broader aspects of the show that I disliked, I found that for the most part, the action here progresses well enough. There are some moments that made me cringe a bit, but I suppose no worse than the bad parts of western G1, so I have to give them a bit of slack there. I don't have much to say beyond that as most of this episode is a weird combination of background and setup for what's to come without a ton of things really paying off yet. So for now it's just a serviceable episode that hints a the potential for a decent show.

The sad part is knowing that even some fairly restrained expectations are going to take a hit based on the series' reputation for slowing to a crawl later on.

THOUGHTS AND MUSINGS

Spoiler

-Before I get into the episode itself there is some stuff from the wiki that is interesting to note and provides a bit of context to elements of the series:

-Thematically, according to the creators as reported on the Wiki, the intent of this series was to convey the concept of "transformation" in a more metaphorical sense, hence the introduction of the Headmaster characters in this series being different from the western G1 version in that they were non-combatant refugees who fled the great war and are returning now to find their place in defending their species from the tyranny of the Decepticons. This sort of conceptual theme/metarphorical subtext is something that was definitely not a normal part of most western cartoons at the time, especially toy commercial type ones such as The Transformers, so to see it played out here is interesting, as it's in the hands of creatores who have a more cultural history/familiarity with that sort of thing (sure, there are anime series that are just about "cool stuff happening", but for the most part imparting meaning into their works is a far more central creative tenant in Japan than it is in the west for projects like this.)

-This is part of why Chromedome ends up becoming the focal character of the series, carving out a character arc that is not entirely unlike Hot Rod's character arc in season 3 (if it were handled a bit more consistently, that is.)

-The series writers admitted that they pulled strongly from the history that Toei animation had with sci-fi robot series in the past, which is likely a big part of explaining how the show morphs from something kind of approximating the tone of G1 at the beginning to its very anime-esque, very Japanese shonen action series type feel by thet time it gets to the end.

-Curiously, the writers also claimed that early episodes were based on unused western scripts, most commonly believed to be remnants of the cancelled 4th season. but with that said there's never been any definitive proof that scripts for season 4 were ever completed beyond The Rebirth. Speculation is that instead maybe what the writers meant is that Headmasters took concepts from an early draft/pitch version of what would become the Rebirth, integrating concepts from it into the early portion of Headmasters until it found is plotline that would be followed through the rest of the series. It is true that the early portion of the series feels far more connected to what came before than some of hte later parts.

-Lastly, before I get into the meat of the review, I want to address something that is probably going to be a running theme of my look at this series and potentially the rest of the JPG1 trilogy. I am going to, plenty of times, probably take umberage with certain aspects of the storytelling and characterization in ways that I worry could be perceived as either a) unfortunately geewun-ish (ie being strongly attached to the idea that the only 'right' way to portray the series is as the western G1 portion of it was done) or b) perhaps worse, dismissive/intolerant of the inherent "Japaneseness" of parts of the series to the extent that it may seem like I'm against it from a cultural perspective. To the first I have to say that I only mean to value adhering to elements set up in G1 for consistency's sake. I don't like it when characters are portrayed one way in the previous show and are turned around into something different in this one for little to no explained reason. I'm all for the series finding its own voice to show the newer characers how they wish. But I don't like seeing characters that were consistently one way in G1 be consistently a different way in this show without good reason. Think of it like how I generally disliked the transition from aggressive, gruff, anti-social Grimlock to goofy comedy Grimlock over the course of G1. With regards to the second: I have no strong dislike of anything on the basis of origin. I don't even dislike anime. I love a lot of anime series, and they were a big part of what I watched growing up and even now (I still generally watch Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex at least once every year or two). My issues here are twofold: First, in some cases I feel like suddenly shifting the internal logic of the series from what was established in G1 (for which Japan fairly directly adapted the English scripts) to a more shonen anime sensibility creates some of the issues from item (a) above. It also makes some of the story decisions more jarring. And second, and most concerning, is that there are some things that I will not apologize for being critical of - namely the treatment of some of the secondary characters in ways that come across as socially tone-deaf and not just violations of established canon. But I'll maybe deal with that a bit more when it comes up (while trying to toe the line and not get too political if I can help it)

So enough about that. Let's start watching the show!

-We start with that vaunted bit of standard anime procedure: a jpop song opening using animation that is never even close to anything that acutally happens in the series proper. I won't grade the opening or anything like that, but I will say that for the most part I don't mind the song. There are certain parts of it that are quite cool (the key change in the middle is nice), but its sort of lounge-singer-esque sound is a bit odd for an action space battle show. As for the lyrics of the song, it's pretty standard, filled with references to how current suffering will have meaning because it paves the way for peace for the ones we love, even if we are (implied) to no be around to see it. It's a very Japanese sentiment in these sorts of shows and it's fine given the audience the show is shooting for.

-We begin the episode noting that it's the year 2011. Worth noting here that we haven' just gone 5 years ahead from Season 3. In Japan the timeline for the 3rd season was moved up to 2010 instead of 2005/2006, so this series is set just a year after Season 3 ended with "The Return of Optimus Prime"

-The one thing I do want to point out before I get any farther is that whether you're watching the Shout subtitled version, or the Madman/Metrodome versions that are dual audio is that these modern foreign distribution versions of the series contain a bunch of cuts. Notably apparently cut from this episode was a recap segment off the top that explained what happened through G1, from the incitement of the great war all the way through he events of the movie and season 3. But since The Movie had yet to actually be shown in Japan, the events of it are done in a really vague and incorrect fashion, including having Optimus just randomly die during a firefight outside the ark, shot by a stray blast from... someone. All the while the other Autobots just keep on fighting like it's no big deal that their leader just dropped dead. Awesome. You can see some screencaps of this montage on TFWiki.

-It's a nice bit of continuity that the Decepticons land on Cybertron via the Space Bridge port that Shockwave often manned throughout G. The one that kind of looks like a mini Iacon with a space bridge tube sticking up out of it.

-I'm going to do my best to no really talk about the voices of various characters unless I think they really deserve it, but I do find the way that Japanese shows process the voics to make them sound electronic is a bit disappointing. It's that same warbly effect that was in Scramble City when I reviewed that and it sometimes sounds like it's obscuring the clarity of the actor (even if I can't necessarily tell what he's saying since I don't speak Japanese.)

-The subtitles for this series tend towards using western nouns wherever possible, so the Decepticons are referred to by that name instead of their Japanese name of "Destron". This can be a little confusing if you're following along with the audio and notice the distinctions (more notable when the Autobots are referred to as "Cybertrons" in dialogue and Autobots in subs. And it makes it confusing to the uninitiated westerner for the fact that the planet is still called "Cybertron" as well (though at times it seems like there's a pronunciation difference, where the faction sounds like the way it's said in the west (sigh-ber-tron) and the planet uses an alternate pronunciation (say-bah-tron). Though that could just be my ears deceiving me. Note that for this I'm referring to both the Shout subs and the ones from the Metrodome release in the UK. There do appear to be some subtle differences in translation of the lines, but for the most part it seems that noun usage is consistent from what I've seen so far.

-Meanwhile, back at the plot, the new Decepticon headmasters are so eager to prove to Galvatron that they're capable warriors that they just crash right through the ceiling of their base, shattering the glass dome instead of leaving through the door. And Galvatron seems oddly nonplussed by this.

There was a perfectly good door, jerks.​

-Equally odd is that there's only 4 Terrorcons present (Hun-Gurr is missing) and Rippersnapper is in charge for some reason.

Swindle showed up fashionably late to work. The other 3 guys I guess just couldn't be bothered.​

-Strangely after the 4 present Terrorcons depart on their mission, they're followed by 3 other Decepticons. I think they're all supposed to be Predacons, but it's honestly hard to tell. The years have not been kind to the visual fidelity of this series. Moreso than G1.

-Badly rendered Iacon is identified as just being a generic Autobot HQ, not Iacon. Unless it's actually not Iacon and the Autobots just like that sort of dome-like structure.

-Inside Spike and Carly are having tea in a fine china set. As most Americans are wont to do in 2011 apparently.

-Remember in The Rebirth where I commented about how square-jawed Spike looked? It seems like Toei got that memo and replicated it here.

-Disappointingly we learn that some character quirks don't carry over between languages. Grimlock is without either his silly comedy nature or his brash anti-authority aura. Blurr talks fast, but mostly repeats himself a lot, and Wreck-Gar is just bland and normal instead of full of pop culture references.

-The technobots take off to join the battle and they're just 4 too, missing.. geez, I'm bad with their names... Scattershot, I think? And Lightspeed is the one issuing their order to move out. I didn't mention it before, but in the arriving Decepticons it wasn't just Hun-Gurr that was missing. The other two combiner teams (the Combaticons and Predacons) were also short at least one member apiece (for a time. Swindle was missing at first then appeared after a a camera cut). It's actually kind of reassuring that Toei was making these errors in Japan too and it wasn't just that western G1 was saddled with this stuff because of AKOM.

-Ohh.. oooooh. Those scene transitions. Curiously, even though Toei would have access to all the stuff they did for G1, they redid the flipping logo scene transitions for this series, re-drawing the logos in a very disappointing fashion, taking away their finish and rigidity to look kind of bland and knockoff-ish. But at least they kept the audio cue (one of the very few bits of music or sound that seems like it was retained at all for Japan aside from the transformation sound effect.

Is it a cheap knockoff if you're ripping off your own product to produce an inferior result?​

-Oh my god, Hound! It's weird to see such a centrally Season 1 character suddenly relevant again. To the point of getting to talk. Also in this scene but not talking are Sideswipe and Smokescreen.

-And Jazz from out of nowhere! It's a veritable season 1 reunion!

-It's odd to notice that Hot Rod is still called "Rodimus" in Japanese.

-So.... Mindwipe has actual, literal magic powers. Alright.

-Here we get our first instance of the slapstick comedy that tended to work its way into the series in Japanese productions as Skullcruncher is impacted by Mindwipe's hypnotic suggestion and falls asleep even though it was Grimlock that was the intended target. So Galvatron calls him an idiot and steps on him to try and rouse him. I'll admit it's at least worthy of a smirk.

-In Autobot HQ we see something that looks not unlike a neuron or something. But I'm not sure what this is supposed to be. Vector Sigma? It's what's being talked about but we've seen the Vector Sigma chamber before in G1 and it clearly doesn't look like this.

This is your Cybertronian brain on drugs​

-Ahh, Sixshot. Unlike in The Rebirth where he was a one-scene wonder, he's going to be a big part of this series. Sadly watching in Japanese robs me of the great "Ninja consultant" role assigned to him in the Omni dub.

-Some commander Ultra Magnus is. He stands there and lets Sixshot hit him in the shoulder and complains that it's a cheap shot. Then he fires at Sixshot's legs and claims they are 'evenly matched'. Huh? It feels like this is set up to look like some sort of samurai movie, except it doesn't quite come off as easily with guns as it does if they had swords.

-Uughhh, Japanese Daniel and Wheelie. The only things that might actually make me miss the previous English Daniel and Wheelie.

-How the hell did they not hear Trypticon sneaking up on them? He's a hundreds-of-feet-tall giant metal Dinosaur with all the stealth and brainpower of... a giant metal dinosaur.

-Trypticon is defeated single-handedly by Wheelie. Primus help us all...

-Sixshot tries to take out Magnus by choking him. Seems a little bit ineffective given that he's a big robot who doesn't breathe.

-Magnus gives a stern "yosh!" (a sort of resolute affirmation often in response to an order or request. Kind of like a cross between casual acknowledgements like "alright!" and "will do!" and sometimes a more formal "roger!" or "yes, sir!") without moving his mouth. And it's not even a total animation failure as he clearly nods his head during the line. Someone just seems to have forgotten to overlay the lip flaps.

-As they fly away from the battle, you can clearly see that Sixshot's troops are the other Decepticon multi-changers (specifically the triple changers: Blitzwing, Astrotrain, an Octane). That actually kind of makes sense.

-The newly-introduced train-bots (something of a staple of the Japanese series given their love of trains.) get around by driving across the dirt in their train modes. I guess i would be silly if they were restricted to just riding human-built rails, but it looks funny.

-Noticeable as part of Magnus' troops here: Prowl. He seems to have recovered nicely from his bout with an untimely melty/smokey death. I'd guess maybe they cured that by 2011, but it's now almost 9 years later and I want to know where my death cure is. Right along side my Back to the Future hoverboard.

-And it looks even funnier when they start flying in train mode.

-"suddenly, Metroplex comes to their aid." How does something the size of Metroplex do anything 'suddenly'? How did nobody see him coming for miles away?

-After seeing it briefly in Scramble City, here's another rare use of Metroplex's alternate "moving fortress" mode. Similarly we'll end up seeing Fort Max's mobile mode repurposed to act as the Headmasters' spaceship later in the series, whereas in the west both characters' appearances in G1 only used their battle station modes and robot modes.

-In what I can only describe as a bit of bad perspective cheating and terrible layout, Metroplex drives into the covered bridge/access tunnel to the Autobot base even though his initial approach makes it look like he should be far too tall to fit. It should be like when a semi ignores the height warning on an overpass and decapitates its trailer. But instead we're just fine becuase... let's go with 'it was mass shifting' and move on! NO QUESTIONS ALLOWED! MASS SHIFTING!!!

Metroplex cares not for your 'maximum clearance height' warnings.​

-I'm going to overlook that a) the Autobots have space bridge tech when prior to this the terrestrial space bridges had always seemed to be exclusively Decepticon domain (requiring the Autobots to sneak access to the 'cons system to get to Cybertron easily) and that b) the train bots travel it while visible in the beam in their vehicle mode, complete with train horn sound to lodge a pedantic and nerdy complaint that the bridge beam here is reddish-orange whereas all prior space bridge beams have tended towards blues/purples or whites. Get with it, Japan. Stop wrecking my continuity.
-Still not loving those budget scene transitions.

-Back on Cybertron, it's in grave danger and apparently widely on fire for some reason.

-Fun Fact: Athenia was the unnamed planet hosting the galactic olympics in Five Faces of Darkness. It had a name in production materials but was never used on screen in the west. If we count that as canonical info, it doesn't explain how the world went from the usual odd shape (looking like someone cut a giant 'wedge' out of a proper planet) to a generic spherical world between that show and this one.

-Also is that cybertron showing up as visible from the surface?

Last time Cybertron was that close in orbit of a planet, i started causing disasters and siphoning off the atmosphere.​

-Kup refers to Optimus not having the "control matrix" to activate Vector Sigma. It's a little unclear if he's literally referring to the Matrix of Leadership, but that seems to be what's implied (or my subtitles are just janky) in which case it would almost make sense since Japan didn't have the Movie to tell them the true and grander purpose of The Matrix. Except that The Rebirth featured Optimus sticking The Matrix into Vector Sigma in The Rebirth like someone putting their bank card into an ATM. So I guess maybe this is one of those points where plot elements of The Rebirth and this show run parallel to each other.

-Holy hell, we've been gone 5 minutes and now all of Cybertron is literally on fire? What are you doing, Optimus? Dammit, I knew we should've let Rodimus stay in charge.

This feels like the equivalent of that Simpsons gag where Homer sets fire to a bowl of cornflakes​

-You know, Spike and Carly seem awfully unconcerned with the fact that Daniel and Wheelie aren't anywhere to be found on Athenia and are instead running around in mortal danger on Cybertron. Parenting 101!

-Daniel's dumb comedy run and shriek of "ahh! a monster!" at the sight of Tantrum earns a point in the column of the new ongoing thing I've decided to replace my memorable lines bit with: a set of counters tracking some of the more insane or inane things this show does. For right now I've identified 6 elements I'm going to start with:

1) Daniel acting like a little kid, younger than he should be (more on that in a sec): The incident above is one, but I'm also retroactively adding another for his shenanigans on Athenia while following Wheelie around

2) Arcee losing all her capable warrior and reliable Autobot charm an becoming a shrill, doting, shrieking, useless 'girl' whose only job is to do traditionally feminine things like play den mother to Daniel and Wheelie, be swooned at by other bots, and act afraid and ill-at-ease with scenes of combat. TVtropes, a website I tend to pull concept names from quite frequently, calls this "chickification" so I'm going to stick with that name. Arcee has barely appeared so far, so none of that yet.

3) Carly being essentially reduced to living set filler, either doing boring housewifey things (like serving tea) instead of ever being useful to the cause (remember when it was explained that she went/was going to MIT and figured out how the Immobilizer worked? Or when she was useful about making sure She and Spike didn't get killed on Cybertron? Cause this show sure doesn't). Spike hasn't done much either except provide exposition, so I'm only giving her 1 point for the fact that her concern about the conflict doesn't extend to the fact that her son is missing.

4) Any time there's a blatantly cliched moment that you'd expect in a generic Shonen anime series. So far that goes to the Sixshot/Ultra Magnus showdown.

5) Any time characters call their super attacks like it's an anime series or a Super Sentai (aka Power Rangers) show. None of that yet.

6) Shocked utterances of "nani?!?" ('what?!?') largely because that's a common internet meme too. We've had a couple of those.

In the future I'll keep not just the occurrences in a given episode, but also a running total for the series-to-date. I also reserve the right to add other things if I start noticing them cropping up.

-Daniel is saved from Tantrum by a Trainbot, who rightly chastises him for being in the battle and threatens to send him back to Earth (even though his family is on Athenia right now). All sane and sensible. Daniel's response is the most childish fake laugh you can imagine as he says "oh, no..." like a 5-year-old throwing a mild fit. Which brings me to the point I mentioned above: How the hell old is Daniel supposed to be? It's never established in this or the previous series, but we can sorta roughly guess that he'd be no older than 13 or 14 given the 20-year timeskip between the first two seasons and the movie and some extenuating factors (assuming Spike is about 15 and Carly about 16/17 pre-timeskip, I'm granting enough time for Carly to go to MIT and get her degree like she talks about in her debut, and for Spike not to be a dad before he's 18-20) and presumably no younger than maybe 8 or so just given how he acts and how much of a leash he gets in the series. For reference, David Mendenhall would've been about 13 or 14 when he recorded most of Daniel's lines.

I tend to think that Daniel makes the most sense being maybe 10-12. It's old enough for him to grasp most of what's going on around him and be treated not like a total baby by his parents, but young enough that it doesn't seem out of place for him to get as scared or upset as he does at varying points in the show.

This is important because even though Japan's decision to push the series to have the movie, season 3 and Headmasters all occur in 2010 and 2011 would awkwardly screw up Spike and Carly's ages (if we assume the pre-movie seasons are still 'real time' like they were in the west, it would mean that Japanese Spike and Carly are at or beyond 40 by this point, which makes having a son even as young as 12 or 13 would've been perhaps a bit odd (a quick hit of research suggests that in the late 70s at least the average age of first-time mothers in Japan was about 25. Not unusual when you consider the generally socially conservative societal shape of Japan at the time, expecting women not to remain in the workforce longer than is necessary for them to find a husband and settle down into the life of a housewife. And since we're talking about a series written by writers who would've grown up through the 60s and 70s, their experiences would've colored media portrayals in the 80s and beyond for a bit). But somehow in spite of all of this pointing to the idea that Daniel should be older than he was portrayed in the west, Headmasters makes a very stressed poin of having Daniel act like he's maybe, I dunno, about 5 or 6. More crying. More tantrums. More spoiled behavior. More naivete. He generally comes across like he has almost no maturity or social awareness (which I guess in a way makes sense given that he's been raised by his socially maladjusted father around nothing but giant millions-of-years-old robots who have only lived a fraction of their lives with an understanding of organic being social mores). It seems likely this was a conscious decision by the writing staff to make Daniel more of a viewpoint character to what they would've expected to be the young audience of the series (as I've talked about before, Japan skews quite a bit younger in terms of what age they feel The Transformers brand is aimed towards. The concept of the show is somewhat derided as being more childish than we tend to treat it in the west. Instead they prefer sci-fi series like Gundam and other mecha series as being the type of thing that appeals to your 8-12 year-old crowd. Which makes sense for where we go in Masterforce, but that's a discussion for another time.

I guess what I'm getting at is that why Daniel is such an annoying and immature kid here makes sense in a meta way, but not in a practical story way. And worse yet it makes it harder to even want to tolerate him than was the case in the west. Every time Japanese Daniel opens his mouth I wish I could hear David Mendenhall again acting like he did in the movie. It was annoying, sure. But it wasn't nearly this annoying.

-We now return you to your regularly scheduled show about giant robots and my generally more playfully snarky and less critical and philosophical ramblings therein.

-For the first time I actually find something in this version of characters being portrayed with more gravitas than Western G1 did, with Kup remembering a war story from 4 million years ago accompanied by sad music and the sense that this is a terrible memory he'd rather not revisit. It's a change from the sometimes doddering old senile bot he was played as in Season 3.

-Japanese Blurr's character tic of just stuttering is really annoying. I don't even need to understand every word to find it grating.

-A large battleship is heading towards Cybertron! If I were watching the Omni dub this is where I'd make a "Spaceship Bruce!" joke. Sadly I chose to be all 'proper' and watch it in Japanese.

-The fight between Superion and Abominus is actually pretty cool. Though I find the excessive need for the fights to be physical instead of them relying on their guns to be disappointing.

-And now Defensor is having a fistfight with Devastator! It's the most action Defensor has ever gotten. Best. Series. Ever!  

-The Decepticon Headmasters introduce themselves even they've been fighting for practically the whole show. Also they have spherical explosive meteor things in their hands to use as weapons for some reason?

-Bah. Slag's appearance here shows us that Japan still leans on the goofy comedy Dinobot character style as he charges in with exaggerated comedic animation and repeating something like "jih jih jih jih jih jih!" as he charges. I know from reading up that these sorts of verbal tics are a common crutch in Transformers to avoid having too much dead space with no talking. Beast Wars is apparently super guilty of this with every character resorting to some sort of tic that they scream out constantly as they fire their weapons.

-Mindwipe has the very disappointing name of "Wipe" in Japan.

-Here the subtitles identify the spaceship version of Fort Max as "Battleship Maximus". That's debatabely better than "Spaceship Bruce"

-The Autobot headmaster quartet show up just long enough to introduce themselves an say they have history with the Decepticon ones to tease the next episode.

-And then because Toei are jerks, there's no 'next episode preview' It's just right into the credits, which are full of a really silly jpop song and Spike an Daniel "transforming" into weird approximations of the vehicle modes of the Headmasters. Seriously, it's weird.

-But at least I'm done episode one and it only took me... oh, man... About 2 and a half hours combined over 2 days. I'm gonna have to find a way to speed this up. Hopefully some of it will come from not having to do so much background talk and research and just snarking about what happens in the show itself.

In(s)anity Tracker
Childish Daniel count: 1
'Chickified' Arcee count: 0
Useless Carly count: 1
Shonen anime moment count: 1
Stock anime attack-calling count: 0
"Nani?!?!" count: 3

Final Grade: B

 

Small shoutout @Scoff as I shamelessly rip off lovingly pay tribute to his tendency to have snarky captions with his images instead of just presenting the image along with my points this time around.

In order to not steal all his thunder, I'm going to refrain from using snarky fake dialogue like he does. Because I'm not quite that shameless.  

 

I don't like it, either. It's a legit gripe no matter what the series is.

Then how will we be able to collect them all?  

Is it earl gray, hot?  

I actually genuinely love this. It's always good to see the older characters, even in background roles. Give a bit more sense of there being more to the universe.

Eh, I don't mind it. Magic's been a thing since A Decepticon Raider.

Sounds perfectly in-character to me.  

So... what, does he judge trainees on their Naruto-running and give grades on swapping with a log?

That's also been a thing in this series since the beginning.

... Ho, boy.

I like trains, too. Rail Racer from RID 2001 is one of my favorite combiners.  

HAH! Suck it, 1986 movie!  

Maybe they contracted out the Go-Bots after they fixed Gobotron in their own series?

Both of these piss me off, but Carly the more so. Carly was and is one of my favorite characters in Transformers. Not 'human' characters, but characters period. She was clever, brash but also badass and very smart. I liked that about her. And Acree I felt was under-utilized, but had some good moments in season three.

The sad parts are 1. this is completely plausible and 2. it's a wonder he's not more messed up!

 

I was kind of burying the lede there but that was my way of preemptively bringing up the whole Carly/Arcee thing. I'm always worried that it's going to look like I'm on some sort of woke 21st century social justice bender screaming at the show for failing to address representation and gender equality in a meaningful way. That's never been my intent with that gripe. I'm mad that they took a pair of useful, interesting characters and made them annoying background pieces. And I am frustrated that it was done via turning them into very shrill stereotypes that weren't terribly acceptable, even 30 years ago, outside of a very conservative environment (which, to be fair, Japan has always more or less been in a social sense). But like you note below, it's frustrating because it undermines what they were for no good reason. The show is going to gradually dispense with a lot of older characters as it progresses in order to make room for the new toys it needs to sell. It's an acceptable part of the franchise's existence. But these are the rare times where it does so by making a character with a long established personality and history from before the east/west canon split completely different and irrelevant. I don't mind, for example, that they changed Chromedome from being a thoughtful scientist in his western character bio to the 'hot-blooded youth' type of typical shonen action hero because Chromedome's character came from episodes that didn't count in Japan and because he only existed for 3 episodes and barely built any character in that time in the west. But Carly and Arcee were around for a full year+ and all their adventures in the series to this point were canon in Japan too with no real changes.

To be honest, a lot of this seems to be at the feet of lead writer Masumi Kaneda, who seems to be a bit... out there based on some of his interviews. Like the one where he likened the sequel series to this (Masterforce) to having themes relating to 'surpassing the gods' and a sort of Adam and Eve plot relating to the villains with the continuity's Scorponok equivalent being the equivalent to the serpent in the garden of eden. Or how when the manga form of Victory features reappearances of 2 of the 3 central human characters from Masterforce, the one omitted is the girl (Minerva) because Kaneda felt that including her would've meant the story would be "buried in female characters" even though there was precisely one female supporting character in the whole series and any others were one-off appearances.

I can imagine the look on some poor kid's face as he gets the "complete" Terrorcon set that features 4 limb bots and no torso or Abominus add-on pieces.

The extra fun part is that the picture I show has Swindle in it, but he literally wasn't there in an almost identical shot a few seconds beforehand. It's that picture minus swindle, cut o Galvatron talking, and cut back with Swindle suddenly standing in the back row. It's like showing up late for a meeting and trying to slide in at the back of the room without your boss noticing you were ever gone.

It might be. But it also won't have that fresh from the replicator taste as it's being serve in a very proper-looking set of china.

Spoiler: don't get too attached. I think by episode 6 or 7 most of the classic characters are dispensed with aside from a handful on each side who take secondary roles. Others do show up in the background from time to time but are never, ever important. I'll probably mention it when we get there, but it feels like the first few episodes were made based on some shared story notes that came from the western writers' room prepping for The Rebirth and the cancelled 4th season. So we get a half-dozen or so episodes that feel really connected to what came before and then the show starts drifting away into its own little niche that only dips its toe into pre-Headmasters material when it's necessary.

True. I think I don't like that a Transformer has it. Magic feels like it should be a strictly organic thing, almost like a balance against the unchecked power the Cybertronians have.

True. I guess it's a good thing that it's Galvatron in charge now and not Megatron. Sadly little slapstick moments like that are about as far as we go in terms of getting Crazy Galvatron again. Most of the time he's pretty much a standard villain.

  He'd fit right in with the Naruto universe. Because if it's acceptable to be a "stealthy" ninja in an orange tracksuit, then nobody would bat an eye at a 30-foot tall robot that turns into a bunch of different things.

Fair enough. It just always looks silly. And it's likely going to be a more prominent thing from now on as the anime series all love to have a lot more physical, up-close combat than G1 did. Everyone still uses their guns, but why use a gun all the time when you can have a fistfight? or use a sword?

Yeah.... Thankfully I don't think it's an ongoing thing that Wheelie is portrayed as being terribly competent. But the scene has a very looney tunes feel to it with Wheelie taunting Trypticon to follow him so that he'll step on a small suspension bridge and collapse down into the huge chasm below. The only difference is that instead of hitting a desert floor in a puff of dust, he falls into a river. And Wheelie doesn't go "meep meep." Though I'm not sure if that would make him better or worse.

They are very cool bots with a fun design. It's just funny that it's so stereotypical. Like if you made a list of 5 things that a Japanese transformer would turn into, trains would probably place high on it along with suped-up drift racer economy sedans (when Drift shows up in later continuities, it would've been funnier if he was a tricked out Honda Civic).

It's like if someone suggested a list of Canadian based Transformers and their alt modes would be a Zamboni, a snowmobile, and... hmm... a sentient bottle of maple syrup?

I've talked about this a few times, but the reason Prowl is still around is likely because the movie didn't actually debut in Japan for another 2 years after this series started. The premiere of Headmasters was in July of 1987 and The Movie didn't appear until August of 1989. Apparently Japan tried to fill the gaps with recaps of versions of movie events in kids magazines and TF-related channels, but they were not always the best at conveying what actually happened. So it's not surprising that the swath of characters who died in the movie would continue to pop up throughout the Japanese G1 trilogy (and not in an AKOM-y way where it's clearly just someone grabbing the wrong model sheet to fill out a crowd).

And just to illustrate what I meant about how sketchy the Japanese retelling of events could be, the original Japanese version of Headmasters featured a freshly-animated recap of earlier events including the death of Optimus Prime based on their notes and not using any Movie footage whatsoever at the start of the premiere (we don't get to see it because all the international releases cut stuff like that and 'next episode' previews. Thanks Toei!). This is the Wiki's screengrabs of how they show Optimus dying:



And apparently everyone in the background just keeps on fighting like nothing happened.   yep, seems about right!

What really makes it fun though is that according to the Wiki, when Japan aired Dark Awakening they included the dialogue about the various dead Autobot tombs that Daniel passes, including name-dropping Prowl.

I dunno. That seems like too respectful of a use for the go-bots given the way references to them get treated in proper Transformers canon. It's more likely that the Autobots would just take over Gobotron, kick the Go-Bots out, and rename it Athenia so they can pretend it's never been anything different.

I already said most of my piece above, but yeah it's definitely annoying. I'm probably going to keep harping on it as both characters reappear so they can do nothing of importance (ahead of starting this series again I re-read the recaps I did on another site as part of my often-talked-about prototype version of this project (I only watched a couple of episodes of each series) and at least half of my comments for Headmasters were lamenting how badly Carly and Arcee got treated.

I mean, in the interests of fairness I would almost understand if they wanted Carly to be more 'motherly' as part of some kind of character growth where she realized that the responsibility of having a kid meant she couldn't be quite so adventurous an gung-ho as she was during the series. "I can't risk my life on a whim when I have someone who depends on me" would be a fair bit of development. But that doesn't happen because we often see that she does less parenting of her own damn child than Arcee does.

Yeah. I guess it does kind of explain Daniel's screwed up development. It's not like he'll have had much opportunity to socialize with human kids his age. His closest friend is a tiny robot (Who's still twice his size) who spent who-knows-how-long surviving alone on Quintessa like he was Tom Hanks in Castaway, except a robot. And in space. Not exactly a healthy role model.

Great. Now I'm imagining Wheelie finding a depleted Energon cube, drawing a face on it, calling it 'Gonny (johnny) and talking to it all the time like Wilson.

And if I really think about that, it might explain a lot about why Wheelie is the way he is.

 

Ugh, do not get me started on the treatment the Go-Bots have gotten over the years. I owned Go-Bots and transformers back in the day, had fun with both. It honestly feels so fucking... petty, the treatment they've gotten overall.

 

Funny, this is probably the bit that annoyed me the most. In season 3, the Decepticons are sneaking around trying to get back on Cybertron, and now they just arrive on Cybertron like it is 1985AD.

This is mainly due to that I had headcanon that after the Decepticons left Cybertron in 2005, I imagine that the Autobots raided the Decepticon HQ on Cybertron and found a cell of Autobot personality chips (their bodies were destroyed like the Renegade Decepticons) and the Autobots were able to give new bodies to the personality chips (one of those was Broadside). Also, in the aftermath of the Decepticon exodus from Cybertron, I like to think that maybe the Autobots pillaged valueable Decepticon art and technology and then leveled Decepticon HQ (at least permanently disabled the Space Bridge). If the Decepticon HQ was not significantly destroyed by Unicron.

This is because if you consider that if Broadside in robot mode is the same size as Devastator how did the Autobots not have control of Cybertron over the last 4M years if the Autobots had Broadside and SkyLynx on their side and no giant Decepticon was ever implied to be in active duty during those missing 4M years (this is based on my assumption that many of the season 3 Autobots were trying to collect energy for the remaining Autobots on Cybertron).

I kind of assumed that Iacon got destroyed when Optimus left Cybertron 4M years ago (at least in the retcon part of Search for Alpha Trion)

Cool

Far less cool.

I guess that means that in any Blitzwing appearance after FFOD part 5 was not an animation error.

Must rewatch this scene.

Could they not have used Bluestreak instead.

Lastly, I am trying to watch this series in a semi-detached way from the original US cartoon. Essentially, I would like to know where it differs from the US cartoon (correct me if I am wrong but I believe that it disregards the Rebirth episodes), but are there any other plot points where it differs as to explain why for example Prowl is alive in this series and any other differences?

 

That whole claim of "western scripts" is pure bunk for one simple reason: Scripts don't get written unless there's a contract to produce the episodes. And if there is such a contract, then those episodes get made regardless of what happens in the interim. That's how syndicated cartoons worked.

Like you say, it's more likely they took ideas from an early pitch that Sunbow had to get another season. Similar to Michael Charles Hill's pitch for a G.I Joe Season 3 that then never came.

 

It's always possible that they had some freelanced script submissions left over from a season 3 call and they hung onto them saying "maybe we'll use these for season 4" before they found out season 4 was cancelled. This is almost like something that happened with Star Trek: The Next Generation based on what I remember from a documentary about the early years of the show's production. Early in the show's run they commissioned a bunch of freelance submissions including for episodes focused on doing something with Wesley Crusher, with the intent on picking the cream of the crop to make into actual episodes. But then a writers' strike happened and without enough finalized scripts to fill out their episode order they started taking from the additional submissions and we got a bunch of extra episodes with "Wesley saves the day" plots or sub-plots. This is then what fueled the fandom's hatred of Wesley for being an annoying mary sue character that always looked smarter than the adults even though it was (arguably) never the show's intent to lean so hard in that direction.

But yeah, the more likely scenario is that Toei got some draft notes from The Rebirth and plans for season 4 and decided to scrap most of it and only keep a few elements once they found out that The Rebith was all that Sunbow was producing for the west. You can see it in the inclusion of things like the Plasma Energy chamber and Galvatron's plot to use it to basically murder everyone on Cybertron. They happened in both The Rebirth and Headmasters, but differently enough that it's conceivable that they came from different iterations of that story treatment and that Toei had mapped out an early path that had similarities to the west, but moved farther and farther away from those designs once they had the freedom to do so.

I think the "unused scripts" myth persists because the idea that there's a file box of completed episode stories sitting in a basement in Marvel's animation offices for the last 30 years appeals to fans who are always hungry for more material from the favored era of the show that they grew up on. And because occasionally we get stories about stuff like "Dark Glass" in Beast Wars that actually did (allegedly) get to the point of being completely written.

It also reminds me of the myth about the production of Samurai Pizza Cats, that persists to this day claiming that Saban bought the rights to the show and received a box with one of the following in it:

a) No scripts at all, just audio/video masters
b) Original scripts still in Japanese, which nobody in the Saban office could translate
or
c) Notes/summaries/information/scripts that were so badly written or translated as to be unusable.

When the reality apparently is that Saban knew they weren't getting story notes in their purchase because they had been given carte blanche to reshape the story as they saw fit so it would make sense to and appeal to a western audience (given that the original series' humor was densely packed with culturally-ingrained Japanese humor that wouldn't make sense if translated. Puns and wordplay and pop culture jokes and the like)

 

EPISODE 2: THE MYSTERY OF PLANET MASTER

THE SHORT VERSION
Everything you wanted to know about this series' spotlight-stealing-squad but were afraid to ask! Oh, and characters you actually know die!

REVIEW
Ok, the major plot of the series kicks off as we get a good long look at the new Headmaster characters, some much-needed backstory, and set all the pieces in motion for the grand status-quo shakeup that's going to happen in the next few episodes (mild spoilers, but you knew something like that was coming)

But I can't help feel this episode ends up being rather disappointing all around. It promises a lot and fails to deliver on almost all of it. What should be big signature moments are instead disappointing, brief, or disappointing and brief. A lot of the little nagging things I've noted that make the series impenetrable for western audiences start rearing their heads here and potentially warn off an audience before they get much farther into the show. And for any talk about how the various anime series over the years did a better job of telling coherent and interconnected, almost serialized stories, this one proves that Japan is just as capable of stringing togeher incoherent nonsense and completely random and pulled-out-of-the-writers'-ass explanations for things as any mercenary western writer might be accused of.

The episode isn't unforgiveably bad. There are some occasionally cool moments, some nice ideas brought out, and some very slick and pretty animation at times (the fact that I can only say "at times" because the episode's animation is internally inconsistent is also points against it). But when I think back to how G1 started strong with a pilot that rose above its rough edges to deliver a strong start to the story, it's not a good sign that we're now two episodes in and my recaps have been dominated by picking apart all the flaws without enough bright and shiny high points to offset those criticisms. Let's hope things pick up more as we go.

THOUGHTS AND MUSINGS

Spoiler

-I promised I wasn't going to get sidetracked with extraneous stuff before I got into watching the episdoe, but a bit of research ahead of starting this one led to a pair of fun discoveries.

#1) Daniel, who I noted sounds incredibly immature in this series, is unsurprisingly voiced by a female voice actor, as is standard practice for most young kids in any animated project. What I didn't know until I looked it up was that the actress in question here, Tomiko Suzuki, was one of 3 actresses to portray Daniel. She covered this series, a different actress (Masumi Goto) did the Japanese dub of season 3, and a 3rd actress (Mayumi Tanaka) would take the role when Japan finally got around do doing The Movie a couple years after this series. Suzuki is possibly better known as the Japanese voice of Dende from Dragonball Z (as a fun aside, movie-Daniel-voice Tanaka is best known as the Japanese voice of Krillin in every Dragonball thing ever made. Which explains why Krillin still sounds like a little girl 20+ years of real time later when he's supposed to be a grown-ass man with a wife and kid). There are other notable voice actors in the Headmasters field, but I'll save those for reference elsewhere in the series.

#2) Listening to the theme song again (just called "Headmasters") I kept thinking about how similar it sounds to the Dragonball Z theme, Cha-La-Head-Cha-La. Turns out this is for the very good reason of being recorded by the same singer. Hironobu Kageyama was the voice of the DBZ theme, this theme, the theme of Sonic X, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles anime series, and the Japanese dub of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" as used for the theme of Rocky III.

-So. Who wants to hear about crazy Japanese robots!?!?!

-There are some MASSIVE spoilers in the title/credits sequence. A lot of anime is famous for having "evolving" credits that avoid revealing undebuted characters or important plot points until after they've occurred in the series. But here it's like "screw it, we're just going to put this stuff in the title sequence even though it doesn't happen for another few episodes". I guess they didn't get the budget to pay for sequence revisions.

-One of the things I noticed in episode 1 and now again here in the opening line of this episode is that the language is a bit harsher than we might be used to for a kids' cartoon. The Metrodome subs (presuming that's what my digital video files are based on) choose to translate the line as "damn you!" while the Shout DVD subs use "scrap you!" (the Shout subs seemed to have been made with some Hasbro input, choosing a lot of modern Transformers 'flavor' bits like 'scrap' being the default Cybertronian curse word. As I understand it, this is one of those weird cultural quirks where curses in Japanese are not always considered as risque or inappropriate as they are in the west. Someone screaming the Japanese word "kuso!" for example is not treated as severe of an utterence as someone using the word "shit!" or even "crap!" in English. It's just a matter of what is/isn't viewed as inappropriate or profane and not that Japan is cool with people swearing like sailors. Instead, statements in Japanese that will get you aghast looks and disapproving responses from others tend to come in other forms. To draw a more personally known western parallel, Quebecois French pulls most of its really bad curses from religiously based exclamations. Most of those wrods and phrases could be translated into direct English and they would seem to mean absolutely nothing, or be considered as tame as could possibly be. "Tabarnak", for example, is just the French word for tabarnacle, a box in a catholic church that holds the eucharist (I'm not going to go into deep explanation here. Wikipedia is your friend.). But for someone who speaks Quebecois French to exclaim "Tabarnak!" is to essentially drop an f-bomb. And that's bascially what's happening here. The curse words that are likely being exclaimed in this series aren't considered particularly grievous, but translating them in a western-aligned "soft" way would probably make them sound quite silly ("Darn you" and "you fool!" type stuff) so the subtitles have to amp it up a bit. And that's where terrible fansub groups did things like get a hold of Dragonball Z in Japanese and misunderstand that the soft explitives in the series were supposed to mean that characters like little 5-year-old Gohan cursed like a comedian on an HBO special. Even though he didn't.

-Dammit, I promised I wasn't going to get dragged off in broader "the more you know" type debates (especially since I expect someone could easily come along and tell me I'm full of crap and everything I said was wrong  ), but here we are again. Back to the robots! Again!

-We'll learn why shortly, but the animation is making a significant point of showing us the headmaster mini-bot transforming and inserting themselves into their body's transformed vehicle mode or animal each time they have to shift forms. It's a lot of time spent on close-ups of transformations.

-Also fun is that in typical shonen fashion, each transformation is accompanied by action shouts like either "transform!" (in English, mind you) and/or "head on!". The latter even happens when a Headmaster is shifting to vehicle mode and their head comes off instead. For those of you keeping track at home, that's our Shonen Anime moment of the episode (I realized after posting the first episode that the tracker works better if I call these moments when they happen)

-Mindwipe continues to use his magic hypnotism, this time to apparently blind his enemies. Even though Chromedome and Brainstorm don't seem blinded, but rather simply unable to look into the light Mindwipe is emitting.

-Meanwhile, back at the base, Kup, Blurr, Arcee, Wheelie, and Daniel are all watching the fight, apparently doing nothing productive with their time.

-Daniel shockingly exclaims "those four warriors are on our side!" A fair thing to note considering they just showed up and started fighting with no fanfare. In response Wheelie chides him with "You're always easily impressed, Daniel." That seems needlessly mean. It makes Wheelie come across like that friend you once knew who was always kind of a jerk to everyone but you just didn't see it at the time.

-Optimus falls from being wanged in the shoulder by Galvatron's cannon mode, in a rather weak display of resilience by the Autobot leader. Hot Rod then charges into battle to defend his commander and the effects team drops the ball by having the muzzle flashes of his gun be animated well away from where the barrel of the gun is positioned on screen.

No amount of fanwanking is going to convince me that he's actually firing the 'guns' in his forearm exhaust pipes. Sorry.​

-As Galvatron retreats from Hot Rod's poorly aimed attack, he is attacked by an Autobot backup squad consisting of Jazz, Grimlock, Slag, and a poorly colored Sludge. This is about the last important thing any of them do in the series. Well, Jazz gets to stick around a bit longer, but this is quite literally the final appearance of the Dinobots in G1-connected canon. Snarl and Swoop don't even appear here, as they made their final cameos in the last episode

I don't know about you, but I don't want to be the guy that has to give Grimlock his pink slip.​

-Optimus looks unusually puffy in this episode, with rounded arm lines and a swelled and less boxy chest. Considering the usual high quality of Toei animation in G1, seeing them slack off so much here is concerning.

Realizing his time in the spotlight was growing short, Optimus geared up for his jump to that other bastion of 80s pop culture: professional wrestling. Now he just had to wait for that call from Vince McMahon to come in.​

-Speaking of, Optimus promptly abandons the battle so he can go check on Vector Sigma. I hope nothing terrible happens while he's gone

(*ominous foreshadowing* dun dun DUN!)


-In what is going to become an ongoing theme of this series (and this episode) something that in theory sounds incredibly cool turns out to be quite boring and underwhelming. Here it's a big showdown between 3-4 combiner squads from each faction in their combined mode. Devastator, Bruticus, Menasor, and Abominus vs Superion, Defensor, and a squint-hard-to-make-him-out Raiden (the combined form of the Trainbots, making what I guess technically counts has his debut in the series). But instead of a big flashy battle, they just shoot at each other across an expanse before Bruticus, the last bot you'd ever expect to employ something wussy like 'tactics' or 'cleverness' shoots a tower structure and makes it collapse on the Autobots, forcing them to run. And that's it. Don't worry though. That's not even going to set the low bar for "holy balls did that ever fail to live up to expectations" showdowns in this episode. We'll get there yet.

-Daniel wonders why the Autobots haven't called in Metroplex. Ignoring that he's on Earth (except I thought he was on Athenia. Maybe this is a subtitle error?) and I would also guess ignoring the logistics of getting him to fit into the space bridge launch bay. Wheelie, in a shocking role as the voice of reason, questions if Daniel really wants Metroplex to leave his post unguarded and his planet defenceless. To which the young Daniel (remember, he's biologically probably about 10-12, but acts like he's about 5 or 6 in this series) mutters "damn it" under his breath. I'm aware of the lightness of the curse given the big dissertation I just gave above, but it's funny to have a little kid even mildly cuss here. And of course his parents are nowhere to be found to scold him for it, because they're back on Earth or Athenia or wherever the heck they're supposed to be right now.

-In a cool sequence in spite of the somewhat lackluster animation aside from the nicely detailed Fortress Maximus battleship mode, Max enters the fray by running down the 4 Decepticon combiners and shooting at them until they're all somehow incapacitated on the ground (really, we don't see any of them get hit. They get shot at, there's a cut, and a cut back and they're all out cold.)

-Daniel, again rightfully, gets excited that Fort Max is on their side as he took out the Decepticons. Wheelie's response? an unimpressed "The decepticons are too weak." Jeez, Japanese Wheelie is kind of an asshole. I'm not sure if this is better or worse than silly rhyming Wheelie. Maybe if they were combined? And you had jackass Wheelie who rhymed things like profane limericks to throw shade at people? That'd be fun. I'm also starting to think that "Jackass Wheelie" moments need to be added to the tracker. So you know what? Let's make it so. That's 2 so far for this episode and none that I made note of in episode 1. *New tracker category: Jackass Wheelie moments. Count now at 2*

-In a slightly disturbing bit of trivia (not really disturbing. More meta-disturbing), Wheelie is voiced by actress Kazue Komiya. The biggest thing I can find for her outside of the Transformers is that she was the dub voice for Dolores Umbridge in the Harry Potter movies. But what makes this awkward is that Komiya has one other role that she plays in Headmasters: Carly Witwicky. That's right, Daniel's best friend is also his mom. This kid is going to have so many psychiatry bills.   Komiya did other work in the Japanese dub of G1 as well, voicing the adult Carly (not the pre-movie version) along with Elita-1, Marissa Faireborn, and Nancy (the lady Junkion). In spite of them recasting the role for her post-timeskip age-up, Kazue Komiya is only 2 years older than her original pre-movie teenager voice, Gara Takashima

-In contrast to G1, which always made a point of showing transformations to get the most out of marketing the key concept of the toys, there are a lot of cheats in this series where characters transform off camera in between cuts and with no transformation noise to even clue you in that it's happening.

-After a transition jingle (still with bad off-brand logos) we suddenly find out that the Decepticons retreated. Because showing them retreating was too much work.

-For some reason after the batle Rodimus invites the Headmasters and their ship (which nobody realizes is a giant Transformer yet) to the Autobot base on Athenia. Becuase apparently their base on Cybertron wasn't good enough, I guess?

-We get our first look at Cerebros, or as he's known in this version, "Fortress". Because on his own he's Fortress, and when he's combine with the ship for giant mode he's Fortress Maximus. Get it?

-Kup ponders why the name "Fortress" is so familiar to him, leading Wheelie to chastise his slow-witted nature and smack him. Damn, Wheelie, why you gotta be a jerk to everyone? *That's another Jackass Wheelie moment*

-Kup now explains the history of the Headmasters, who bailed on Cybertron during the great war because they were small and weak and lacked adequate transformation skills to fight. Landing on the peaceful Planet Master, they learned to transform their small bodies into the heads that would attach to and pilot larger, normal-Transformer-sized bodies (essentially lifeless shells that exist only to be controlled by a headmaster unit. These bodies are usually referred to in Japanese fiction as "transtectors" I'm also jumping ahead slightly as not all of this is learned at the time the backstory is being relayed in this episode). It's kind of a cool idea and is perhaps a better use of the separable headmaster head/body concept than the binary-bonded organic beings of the western continuity. So if anyone wants to point to my reviews and say I've done nothing but savage the Japanese take and uphold western G1 superiority, here's a counterpoint!  

-The Decepticon Headmasters were apparently outcasts from Fortress' I guess factionless group of refugees, and were exiled from Master when they turned on the others. But they went elsewhere in the galaxy and learned "brutal and magical skills" before their leader, Zarak, allied them with the Decepticons. That was pretty cool right up to learning "magical skills". I know we already went over that magic is indeed a thing in the Transformers universe, but even though I like the franchise's later dalliances with the spiritual in terms of Primus and the Matrix and all that stuff, there's something about 'magic' that just doesn't sit right as being a power of Transformers themselves.

-For as much as I ragged on some of the animation earlier, here it looks a lot sharper and nicer. This episode itself is inconsistent internally, which is an odd change of pace from G1 where whole episodes were either well animated or crap, but at least internally consistent.

-This bit of infodumping complete, we head back to Cybertron to check on Optimus heading into the core of Cybertron, looking for Vector Sigma's chamber. I only note this to point out that my subtitles keep mistakenly using a zero instead of a capital O for Optimus' name, so it's constantly rendered as "0ptimus Prime" (even though his Japanese name is Convoy, yes. I'm aware. I'm likely going to stick with western names where appropriate just so everyone knows who we're talking about)

-With a valiant "Damn you, Decepticons!" 0ptimus Prime battles with... the Centurion Droids from The Key to Vector Sigma episodes, who are mindless security bots and absolutely not Decepticons. Is Japanese Optimus going senile?

-the Centurion droids scream as 0ptimus hurls them off the bridge to their apparent deaths. Ok then.

-The ghost of Alpha Trion appears (a nice callback to the fact that he died in The Key to Vector Sigma) and 0ptimus immediately asks "who are you?" Maybe he is going senile if he doesn't recognize his own father.

-Immediately after killing another Centurion, he finally figures out it's Alpha Trion. The Space-dementia is hitting him hard.

-Cutting back to the other Autobots on Athenia, we discover that 0ptimus doesn't have the Matrix with him because "it's on earth, collecting and storing released energy." Uhh, guys? The Matrix doesn't work that way. It's not a battery pack, it's the repository of accumulated Autobot knowledge. Unless it's absorbing a set of Encyclopedia Britannica, I'm not sure what you're hoping to accomplish. But at least this does explain why the Omni dub renders the Matrix as "the power pack", because they mistook it for being a battery style device. And just to make things even more confusing, Omni also refers to energon cubes as "power packs" as well. That sort of craziness almost makes me wish I was watching that verison of events instead  

-Fortress wanders over to the Autobot computer and asks if he can use it. As the most sensible respondant, Rodimus Kup Blurr Spike Carly DANIEL says "sure, go ahead." Since when did you start thinking you were in charge of anything, kid? Where's asshole Wheelie to make a cutting remark at you right about now?

-Spike now appears out of nowhere as Fortress explains the nature of Vector Sigma (I'll get there, don't worry. But before that this is important). He sounds really amped up and serious about this. I only realize why after a quick trip to some anime voice actor info sites. Masashi Ebara was essentially Japan's answer to Frank Welker for Transformers, dubbing no less than a dozen characters including permanently voicing the adult, post-movie Spike, Dead End, Long Haul, Ratchet, Seaspray, Shrapnel, Skywarp, Smokescreen, Teletraan I, and Broadside, and occasionaly providing the voice of a ton of other characers in one episode or another (including several Transformers where he would provide their voice in one episode while someone else would do it in another.). But the nature of his hyped up, enthusiastic voice is made clear when you realize he is also the voice of Naruto's Might Guy. I am now going to constantly imagine Spike giving strong, impassioned lectures about the burning power of YOUTH!. As a fun counterpoint, the voice of pre-movie Younger Spike, Show Hayami also voiced a whole whack of characters including Ironhide, Tracks, and Ultra Magnus (but the last one not in this series) before he went off into the wide world of anime and was the voice of Dragonball Z henchman Zarbon and Bleach mega-villain Sosuke Aizen.

-So about Vector Sigma (side note: it was only when proofing this to post that I realize I never came back like I promised to talk about this point. So here I am, hours after watching that part of the episode, firing it up again to refresh myself for the point I'm making) - Fortress' explanation of what Vector Sigma is... well, it sure is something else. He says it's the 'mother computer' of all Transformers. Good. That's pretty much correct so far. Then he says it "equally supports the Autobots and Decepticons" with a graphic that shows something that looks kind of like a pulsing venn diagram (two interlocked and equally sized circles). Ok, I guess you can frame the fact that it's willing to create both factions with personalities suited to their respective side in that way. It's not the most precise way to frame it but close enough. Then "up until now The Matrix has used its wisdom and power to control Vector Sigma and shut out any Decepticon influence" What? No! No. No. No. No. No! That's not how it works at all. The Matrix was able to function as a key because it shared circuit characteristics with the original key as well as Alpha Trion due to their age and shared design elements. It didn't "control" anything. And if it did, doesn't that suggest that the Autobots over the centuries did a piss poor job of keeping a leash on the computer if they just let the Decepticons replenish their ranks through it in the intervening time period? ARGH!

-Back in the bowels of Cybertron, 0ptimus continues to pass through strange, James-Bond-ian deathtrap rooms that are in no way familiar to how we got to Vector Sigma the last time around. Because I guess it's no exciting enough to be 'worth' the trip otherwise.

-When Chromedome suggests he and the other Headmasters should accompany Hot Rod to Earth to find the Matrix, Wheelie butts in to reprimand them with a sharp "don't push your luck." The longer this episode goes on, the more of an asshole Wheelie becomes. *Jackass Wheelie moment*

-Blaster, chosen to accompany Hot Rod to Earth, suggests that Wheelie needs to chill the hell out and listen to some music. Glad to see that at least one character retained their usual personality in the hop across the Pacific.

-Wheelie, on the other hand, is now an ungrateful prick instead of just being a regular prick. *Jackass Wheelie moment*

-It takes Blaster's sensors to spot Ratbat hiding in the autobot HQ in an obvious place on the wall where his colors and blatant Decepticon logo stand out. Good to know they have both a crack security setup and observant other bots keeping an eye on things.

Let's see, blank walls. Blank walls. Blank walls. Giant purple cassette shape thing with a Decepticon logo on it. Nope, nothing out of the ordinary!​

-Ratbat is exposed and chased down by Steeljaw, which then adds in Ravage for good measure. But all I can think of is how much of an understated advantage having Frank Welker on the English voice staff was. he animal noises and grunts provided by the actors in this series are quite obviously human-sounding in their vocalisations.

-It's the first of a fated showdown between Soundwave and Blaster! Here they... just sort of mildly chrip at each other with disinterested voices while they fail to make any of their shots count even though they're only a short distance apart in some sort of cargo room. Then soundwave uses the shoulder cannon thing he always has to fire some sort of smoke bomb and vanish like a ninja. I feel like the defining aspect of the whole Blaster/Soundwave rivalry is that fans have built it up in their heads like they're mortal enemies who fight harder than anyone else, but then reality sets in and most of their actual battles in the franchise are boring disappointments. But will this continue? (*foreshadowing!!!*)

-I just realized that the Japanese dialogue keeps pronouncing "energy" with a soft "g" sound (like how you'd say the 'g' in words like 'burger' or 'goose') instead of the proper hard sound (aka where it sounds like a 'j' in 'giant' or... 'energy') So it's distracting to hear them constantly mention "ener-ghee". It's almost enough to distract me from the fact that they have no idea how the Matrix is supposed to work. It also makes me curious if they pronounce "energon" the same way ("EHN-ur-gone" instead of "EHN-ur-john")

-How prescient! the next lines are Sixshot and Soundwave talking about Energon cube supplies. And yep, soft "g". Weird. This isn't some sort of weird b/v thing where there's no separate phonemes for that sound in Japanese. They clearly can make a 'j' sound since there are so many words with the 'j' sound phoneme in them

-So many of the laser fire sound effects in this show are disappointing. They lack any sense of force or density to the noise. It's no a hard "pew pew pew" or the throaty "bwomp" of Megatron's fusion cannon. Instead it's very soft "ssshew sshew sssshew" noises or even just "eeee-eee-eee-eeee" with no real punctuation or force.

-Suddenly as Hot Rod, Blaster, and his cassette bots battle the Predacons in the arctic, everyone looks really shiny and plasticy. This isn't an episode with missing or poor detail like AKOM, but it is quite inconsistent with how much detail it provides and where it chooses to use it.

The best thing about no longer being a Prime is that Hot Rod now has the necessary 3 hours each morning to apply all 6 coats of wax to his finish. Sunstreaker is super jealous. That is if he's not actually dead already.​

- This fight between the various Autobots and the Predacons might be notable if only for being one of the very few times I can recall the Predacons spending much of the fight in robot mode instead of just fighting in their animal forms.

-Rodimus stops the merge into Predaking by driving up and leaping through their pre-link formation. POints for originality since usually we have to wait for the merge to complete before someone manages to just shoot the combiner apart.

-The Metrodome/Madman subs drop the ball as Menasor arrives, translating his line as "Rodimus, go on ahead! Leave them to me!" as if he's intending to aid Hot Rod by fending off the Predacons, which makes absolutely no sense at all. Confused by this, I started up the Shout version of the episode and found the line there was rendered as "Rodimus is trapped. Leave him to me!" which he says to the Predacons. Strangely, this might be one of the very rare times that the Omni dub does a better job than one of the official subtitling jobs, as the Omni English line is "Rodimus Prime I'll take care of you! You won't get away!"

-Hey, remember all those Autobots not involved in the plot? I wonder what they're doing right now?
a) Kup opines that if Rodimus hasn't communicated with them, he hasn't found the Matrix yet. Because god forbid he actually try communicating with his apparent sorta-leader himself.
b) Arcee wistfully and softly states that she hopes Hot Rod is alright. Because god forbid she actually do something about it. This is the same bot that needled Hot Rod during the Battle of Autobot City that she was out there to protect him. and now she just weeps about him being in danger... argh. Still, this isn't quite strong enough for me to call it a full chickified Arcee moment. Bu don' worry. We'll get there before this episode is done.
c) Wheelie grumbles that he's losing patience. Because god forbid he manages to go more than 5 minutes without being a complete dick. *Jackass Wheelie Moment*
d) Daniel actually kind of passively tells Wheelie off, suggesting that they really should have more faith in Rodimus.

And that's the whole content of that scene change. 20 seconds just to remind us that these other characters are here too!

-Back at the plot, Menasor positions himself above Hot Rod, who has embedded himself nose first (in car mode) into the ice, his foot up to crush the helpless Autobot and secure victory when *BLAM* Superion shoots out of the sky with a massive drop kick. Because screw the gun he has in his hands!

-In a rare showing of sense, Menasor plucks the disabled Hot Rod from the ice and holds him out as a human (robot?) shield, banking on Superion being enough of an Autobot not to endanger his one-time leader.

-It of course turns out he's entirely wrong since Superion just charges in and decks Menasor with a punch. But nice try.

-It's also worth noting out that this sensible attempt at planning came from a combiner who is noted for the fact that his component bots a) are each quite crazy and b) can barely stand one another (or mostly that the limb bots all viciously hate Motormaster), both of which serve to severely inhibit his intelligence and common sense in combined mode. It's like if you told me that Grimlock went out and single-handedly built a brand new team of Autobo- Oh yeah. That actually happened...

-Uhhhh... Presented with very little context:

Whoa guys, it's a family show. Might wanna keep it PG. Secondary thought: since it's two combiner bots, would that count as an orgy?​

-And no situation is too dangerous for Hot Rod not to get in some siiiiiiick juuuuuuuuumps!

You can't hear it from this far out, but Hot Rod almost certainly has his radio tuned to Kenny Loggins' "Danger Zone"​

-Soundwave deploys Laserbeak and Buzzsaw! The latter hasn't been seen since early season 2's Auto Berserk.

-Alright, it's time for one of the most talked about and shrouded-in-legend bits of Headmasters when it comes to what western fans knew of the series before its wider availability outside of Japan: the big climactic fight between Blaster and Soundwave.

Admittedly I wasn't always huge into Transformers in an unbroken line through my life. Like most kids, I loved them as a kid, got too old for toys, and put them all away as I was desperately trying to act grown up and whatnot through my teenage years. It wasn't until I got into college and started noticing a bit of a market online for purchasing classic Transformers figures that my nostalgia was reignited and I attempted to get back into collecting and learning where the series went (For the most part I never really bought much. I got some Japanese PVC figurines, a couple of 'world's smallest' TFs, and a few of the early G1 reissues from both Toys R Us' Hasbro releases and Takara ones via an import shop in town (including an original Megatron)). It was around this time that I read a bunch of the synopses of the Japanese series online from various low-rent angelfire/geocities style fansites even at a time where those hosts and their low bars of production value were hilariously out of fashion. Having just heard about the fact that the franchise continued in Japan afer G1 ended in the west, I was hungry for basically anything new for TF tha tied back to the franchise the way I remembered it. Not that I necessarily hated the new anime stuff, but it wasn't what I grew up with so obviously there was some bias.

So then imagine my excitement when I read about how this series featured the two G1 tape players getting a big, dramatic fight to the death in the Arctic as a way to settle the score between them that had sorta simmered along for the entire first 3 seasons of the series. It sounded awesome and edgy and like nothing that G1 ever did outside of the Movie with its relatively sanitized violence. Clearly this was a sign that Japan's more lax attitude to aggressive and violent content made for a much better story and prove why Japan was, both before and after the anime boom, the superior storytellers (keep in mind this is coming from someone who has a very strong memory of watching Ninja Scroll late at night on a cartoon channel here in Canada, complete with all its ultra-graphic violence and explicit sex intact, so anime had that early-formed memory of being able to be all edgy and 'adult' that everyone age 13-25 agrees is "obviously" better.  ).

Then I got some bootleg Headmasters episodes (Omni dub, of course) off a torrent site or something and... well... If I'm being charitable the fight turned out to be 'kinda disappointing'. If I'm being brutal it turned out to be laughably dumb and a shallow way to pull off a rather cruel trick. This is the entirety of the fight coreography:

1) The pair stand about 20 feet apart in the wide open space and shoot at each other, somehow appearing to miss 60% of their shots even though neither one is moving. What shots do hit seem to cause almost no damage whatsoever.

2) Seeing how useless their guns are, not surprising given that this is an anime series and guns are usually for losers, they somehow cover all the distance betwen them without any on-screen indications and punch each other square in the chest, with both their fists punching through the tape deck covers (Blaster shatters Soundwave's glass door, while Soundwave rips a hole in Blaster's metal tape cover.

3) Weakened by the mutual punch, they each stumble to their knees

4) Blaster punches Soundwave in the jaw hard enough that it causes Soundwave's arm to be torn off for some reason.

5) One-armed Soundwave charges Blaster and does a flying spear/tackle that carries them both into a protruding ice formation. Soundwave follows this up with a strong kick to Blaster's chest. Neither of these things cause any secondary visible damage to Blaster.

6) Reeling from the force of the attack, Soundwave falls to the ground. Blaster, meanwhile, is still pinned to the wall, but leaps off and performs the a flying elbow drop that would make Macho Man Randy Savage proud. Oooooooh yyeeeeeeaahhhhhh. (note: this recap segment is now brought to you by Slim Jim. You'd better believe if I get some free time that I'm photoshopping Blaster into a neon cowboy hat, sunglasses, and bright jacket with tassels all over its arms.)

7) Sounwave sits up, decks Blaster with a left hook to the jaw (because his left arm is all he has at this point) and Blaster crumples to the ice.

8) Soundwave stands up after his punch, emits a weird warbling "wooooooaaaaaaggghhhhhh" sound (it's hard get a clear sense under all his elecronic processing) and then explodes out of nowhere. (Side note: Soudnwave's exploding body makes a familiar sound: the same noise usually use for Megatron's fusion cannon in G1. That's right, it took a bot dying to hear one of the better G1 sound effects that had been brushed aside in favor of the much weaker sounding laser fire the series has been using so far.)

9) we cut back to Galvatron, who'd been watching the whole fight somehow from his base. He quietly mutters Soundwave's name, then emits a scream of rage skyward. This is also the source of the memetic Omni version of the scene: "Darn that Soundwave. Eeeeeuuuuuuuughhhhhhhhh!"

10) Hot Rod, who saw fit to watch the fight and never intervene to help his comrade, finally runs up. but a weakened and damaged blaster (who still shows no outward damage besides the hole punched in his cassette deck chest plate) can only meekly remind Hot Rod that he can't waste time worrying about his (Blaster's) fate, he has to find the Matrix. He then keels forward and dies, turning monochrome white and black like the energy-siphoned bots did in Call of the Primitives (as opposed to the charcoal look tha Optimus and Starscream took on in The Movie when they died.

That's the entire fight. Total runtime? about a minute and a half. That's the entire final showdown between the two. Honestly, if anyone was watching the series just for this apparently iconic moment, I wouldn't blame them for shutting it off in disappointment. Because it doesn't even begin to deliver on the kind of protracted and entertaining one-on-one battle everyone always hoped the two would have. It was the kind of thing that could've carried most of an episode, setting up a climactic showdown, showing their history, filling in the blanks as to why they're personal mortal enemies for reasons beyond just "they're both tape decks" (that said, I wouldn't want another 'they were best friends before the war and ended up on opposite sides' type story. Those are too cliche. It could be as simple as their similar roles bring them into direct conflict a lot and having each of them get missions foiled by the other has bred a level of personal hatred. Just they could've done something with them that built up the whole episode to a 5-7 minute knock-down, drag-out fight that ultimately cost both of them their lives. instead we get a double chest punch, a flying kick, an elbow drop, and then they both croak outta nowhere.)

For comparison, here's a portion of the fight shown in both Japanese and with the Omni dub, starting at about point #5, running through #9 in Japanese, then after the scene transition (added by the video creator as it uses the more detailed G1 insignia rather than the Headmasters version) switches to the same starting point for the Omni dub and goes all the way to the end at #10 by including Blaster's death and Rodimus' promise of vengeance (which is mentioned more just below this).
Also because it hasn't been talked about since I'm not watching the Omni dub for this project (I was kinda hoping maybe someone else would take that bullet  ), the Omni guys came up with a lot of pointless alternate names for various things in the series:
-Blaster is called "Billy" for some reason (it gets better and I'll talk about that when I get to episode 4)
-The "power pack" in question is the Matrix. This is what I talked about above with the way this series treats it like a battery to be recharged. And the fact that they then confuse it with calling Energon cubes "power packs" as well.
-None are present in this clip, but other highlights are that Hot Rod is always referred to as "Rodimus Prime" even when he's just Hot Rod, but with the cast's odd English accents (Omni Productions was done in Hong Kong by British ex-pats who it would seem might have lost some of the 'authenticity' of their accents by spending so much time abroad) it always sounds like "Roadimus Prime" (pronounced "ROW-dih-muss"). Jazz is "Marshall", Spike and Carly are "Sparkle and Carrie" (the latter is actually reasonably acceptable given how the Japanese pronounce Carly's name), the Decepticon Headmasters are in one instance called "the Robotic Regiment", and Fortress Maximus' spaceship mode is called "Spaceship Bruce"

-But enough about that. Back to the actual scene: Perhaps the single worst moment in it? Blaster has just died. Hot Rod (I'm having a hard time not calling him "Rodimus" thanks to months of watching season 3 and because the subtitles continue to call him that since that's his non-Prime form's name in Japan) makes a grim promise of "your death will not be in vain." to honor his fallen friend and comrade. And then he turns to Steeljaw, who we needn't be reminded is Blaster's subordinate and is probably closer to him than every other non-cassettebot Autobot and says...

*pause for effect*

... "Take care of the situation."

What.

What?





WHAT?!?!

The guy he's worked hand-in-paw with for presumably millions of years just died and you're literally standing over his corpse and you say to him in a fairly unemotional tone "take care of the situation?" That is some hardcore cold-as-hell dickishness, Hot Rod. I'd expect something like that out of Japanese Wheelie, but not you. Could you imagine coming home from school as a kid, finding one of your siblings dead on the floor, and your mom turns to you and says "hey, clean that up, will you?" in the same tone she might use to say "I need you to cut the lawn."

I... just... holy hell. I get it. I do. This sort of non-emotioanl, teeth-gritted, don't-deal-with-the-issue-directly thing is a staple of samurai/warrior drama type stuff where Rodimus' refusal to look grieved or admit the impact of Blaster's death is supposed to show that he's doing the right thing by staying control of himself. But as an outsider who doesn't see things through the lens of that being traditionally accepted behavior, it just looks so callous as to suck me right out of the story. I don't need him to bawl or offer counseling to Steeljaw or anything either. Just... don't be an asshole about asking him to clean up his commanding officer's corpse on the battlefield.

-Almost lost on this because I'm still hung up on whatever the hell that was, Steeljaw speaks!

-and we see Soundwave's minions gathering up his exploded pieces. Laserbeak grabs his head and then in a reverse shot of them flying away, Ratbat and Buzzsaw appear to have untransformed cassettes in thier talons. Which begs the question of if we're supposed to believe that this meant Ravage/Frenzy/Rumble all died as well because they were in Soundwave when he blew up.

Sadly, FIWRIAW (Frenzy is White, Rumble is also White) never caught on in the fandom.​

-And just to cap it all of and rub some extra salt in the wound, we go live to Athenia Autobot HQ for the reaction of the various other Autobots who are watching this fight on the video screen:
a) it starts off with dead silence in the room as we pan over everyone watching. This is a very nice and impactful way to begin.

b) Kup grimly states "Blaster has fallen in battle." Sad and appropriate, though everyone was already watching so they kinda know what's going on.

c) Arcee buries her face in her hands and starts weeping uncontrollably. Because she's a girl. (meanwhile, I make a disgusted grumbling noise because why are you doing this to Arcee, Japan? What'd she ever do to you? Is it too late to bring back Paul Dini?) *That's our first 'chickified' Arcee moment. Pop some bubbly for the debut, then pour it out in memoriam of a good characterization of Arcee*

d) Beside her, Blurr stands stoneface and unflinching. He never betrays his emotions at what he's witnesse, remaining resolute and ironwilled like a real man, dammit. Also check out those lips!

given Blurr's color scheme, you can insert your own Zoolander 'blue steel' joke here. Oh, and Arcee is an emotional basket case. Get used to that...​

e) Wheelie looks on in shock. For once choosing not to make an insensitive, jackass remark. Good for him. It doesn't mean I'm taking any points off his scorecard for this episode though.  

f) Daniel cries hysterically into Wheelie's arm, repeating that he can't believe Blaster died. Two things stand out here: First, this is a prime piece of "Daniel acts waaaaay younger in Headmasters than he did in the movie or seasons 3/4. He cried when Optimus died, but he wasn't even this emotional and that was with Optimus dying on a bed right in front of him. and second, why the hell is Wheelie suddenly so huge? Normally he's a bit taller than Daniel, maybe like a head or so (Daniel comes up to around his shoulders. But here Daniel barely reaches up to his upper leg and his forearm is as big as Daniel's entire body. *Childish Daniel Moment*

If this episode was Western G1, I'd joke that Wheelie got into Optimus' roids stash. But the way this series' Wheelie acts, it wouldn't surprise me if he was Optimus' dealer.​

Wheelie then puts the tape Blaster gave him before he left into a player. I would've thought that given Blaster's personality it should've been some rock music or something. Like that instrumental piece that often plays for him in G1. But the music in the background is sad, sorrowful string music.

-If I can stop railing about this for a minute, I will say that the entirety of the battle and aftermath are visually solid, and are a step above some of the bad parts of this episdoe with lots of shine and shading and very clean character designs that are on-model. As I've said at least 3 times so far it's weird that unlike G1 where the quality was inconsistent from episode to episode, I'm two episodes into this series (Which is entirely credited to Toei animation and no other studios. Though I suspect they would've farmed out some of the busywork stuff like in-betweens and whatnot) and it seems to be inconsistent from scene to scene.

-I guess Blaster's death really gets Wheelie over being a knob to his comrades, as he offers support to Chromedome's assertion that the Headmasters have to go and help Hot Rod find the Matrix, including a non-handshake (they link hands and pause, no shaking motion at all) with complete and total sincerity. I didn't like asshole Wheelie at first, but is it weird that I suddenly miss him?

-On Cybertron, 0ptimus continues to face a crazy amount of danger and opposition in his bid to get to Vector Sigma. Remember that plot? It feels like ages ago with how much time I spent dissecting the whole arctic fight sequence. The narrator implores Hot Rod to hurry because Optimus is in danger, and we fade out to wait for the next episode. Cue cheerful credits pop song.

-having not talked about the credits song a whole lot yet, only describing it in brief last episode, I want to point out how weird it is watching Spike and Daniel attempt to "Transform" themselves into the alt-modes of the various Headmasters for comedic effect. They fail to become a tank or car and crumple to the ground (with both their attempts looking much the same) but "become" Brainstorm's jet mode by laying out on their stomachs and stretching their arms to the side, which has them actually looping around and flying away even though that makes zero sense. and then to ape Highbrow's helicopter mode by having Spike hold his arm above his head and have Daniel (balancing on Spike's open hand by his stomach) rotate around to turn his whole body into the helicoptor rotors. Unlike the jet bit where they fly away successfully, this one turns back to slapstick pratfalls as they rise up off the screen and crash back down. The song is utter nonsense and the animation is cute in a silly sort of way but equally insane. And it punctuates with a loud and proud "You are a Transformer!" as Daniel points at the screen. It really is the kind of thing that hammers home that their intended audience is quite young compared to what we tend to think of as attracting fans in the west (even fans who are in the intended age bracket for the toys (and not just in the way we are where we're buying to put on a shelf to display)

-In a final reflection on this review, I feel like I don't mean to get as frustrated or angry/exasperated-sounding as I do with this series. But for some reason the silly and poorly done antics of G1 made me cringe and/or laugh at their insanity while this one I find that the bizarre storytelling choices and character moments feel like a combination of baffling nonsense and insulting to anyone who watched the prior series (because, by all accounts, the Japanese translation of G1 was mostly faithful to the western scripts. They didn't rework characters into their sillier behaviors that they display in this series so far. How do you reconcile Daniel suddenly acting younger? Wheelie suddenly being a complete tool? Arcee going from capable warrior to fretting bundle of emotions? I can't think of a way to do it and as evidenced by the two episodes so far, they didn't really even boher trying. The new way is just the way things are. And we've always been at war with Eastasia. When I start making obtuse Orwell references I think it's a sign I need to close the text file and calm down. Maybe wrap some christmas presents   As a side note, I made that Christmas presents joke when I wrote the bulk of this review in the afternoon today (the 19th.) even though I'm now posting it clsoe to midnight. I just hadn't had time to proof, edit, and format it for posting before now. Because I was... you guessed it, wrapping Christmas presents.)

In(s)anity Tracker
Childish Daniel count: 1 (series total - 2)
Jackass Wheelie count: 5 (series total - 5)
'Chickified' Arcee count: 1 (series total - 1)
Useless Carly count: 0 (series total - 1)
Shonen anime moment count: 1 (series total -2)
Stock anime attack-calling count: 0 (series total - 0) *I'm not counting the 'head on' moment here because they did it wrong. And becuase if I counted 'head on!' the counter would eventually go up by like 12 every episode.
"Nani?!?!" count: 2 (series total - 5) *starting next episode I'm going to keep more consistent notation of when someone says 'nani!?!" in my comments. Because I don't remember when they were in this episode and I'm not rewatching the whole thing now.

Final aside: I wish TFW inclded Xenforo's table plugin. It's surprisingly garbage compared to simple bbcode tables, but it would make this tracker far cleaner. If anyone has an idea for how I can better format it within the confines of what this site's post coding allows, let me know.

Final Grade: C-

 

So it's a continuation of season three.

Still more dignified than his video game death in the Marvel comic.  

Water weight retention?

Sounds like they could be on one of those ships we saw in that history disc in Desertion of the Dinobots part two.

Still better on both parts than Soundwave hiding inside of Ironhide in Desertion of the Dinobots part one.

Sounds like there more emotion than whenever Cyclonus fell.

Fight and Flee comes back?

 

I really liked this episode, wish the US season 3 was more like this with heaps of combiners and other characters used. Really liked when Ravage was getting the better of Steeljaw, and Blaster had to provide more tapes to assist Steeljaw (so often it seems to me that older characters are canon fodder for the newer characters to sell more toys).

Epic Soundwave vs Blaster battle, love (especially as an Australian) Highway to Hell by ACDC playing in memory of Blaster.

Good pick up on Ravage, Frenzy, and Rumble in the screenshots.

 

  pretty much

He's not actually dead.

Spoiler

yet.

I'm almost willing to forgive that one because it'd be like one of us not knowing there's something stuck on our back. But here Blaster and company can look right at Ratbat and his GIANT DECEPTICON SYMBOL and not notice anything...

At least those times Cyclonus didn't die.

Pretty much. Maybe brushing off everyone else's feelings is how he deals with the burden of leadership.  

I.... don't think that happened. At leas not in canon. It the Japanese version it was just some random string music. And given the... questionable budget of the Omni dub, I can't see them springing for any sort of music license.

 

I completely missed this the other day. My bad on that.

The primary differences are:

1) as you said, The Rebirth doesn't count. This series picks up after The Return of Optimus Prime and does its own thing from there.

2) Not in an in-universe/canonical sense, but The Movie hadn't been shown yet in Japan. As a result, the knowledge of the movie's plot and events was somewhat limited for both the audience and apparently the writers of the 3 Japanese G1 series (The Movie wouldn't debut in Japan until August of 1989, which means that it was after all of Headmasters, Masterforce, and 18 of Victory's 44 episodes aired on Japanese TV). There was some consideration to trying to explain what he heck had gone on in the time skip between seasons 2 and 3 with text recaps in a TV magazine, but it seems like it didn't necessarily explain everything, including the deaths of some of the secondary characters like Prowl. So to an extent not everything that happened in the movie was immediately and properly integrated into canon. We saw this in the premiere of Headmasters where I noted that their version of how Optimus died was a little iffy (he gets randomly gunned down defending the Ark instead of his valiant stand at Autobot City)

What makes that weirder is that even though Prowl's death might not have been clearly referenced in the movie recap materials, it apparently was name-checked when Daniel reads off the list of graves in Dark Awakening.

This isn't the last time this happens either. I won't spoil it even though we won't get there for a while, but someone else who's supposed to be dead shows up in Victory in a non-cameo/background capacity.

Otherwise the series should jive with Seasons 1-3 of the previous show and I guess possibly Scramble City (though realistically I don't think that's ever of actual consequence). And the biggest story beats of the movie, more or less.

 

One last thing tonight: It turns out that all my estimating for Daniel's age was unnecessary. I don't know what their specific source is, but TF Wiki indicates that Daniel is supposed to be around 12 years old during The Movie, which means that he should at the tail end of 12 and into 13 by the time Headmasters starts.

And yet he acts like he's about 5.