Is there an authentic set that sells the entire series, or are they sold separately?

 

Transformers: The Japanese Collection - DVD | Shout! Factory

 

Thanks, is "Scramble City" on there?

 

No, apparently they couldn't get the rights for Scramble City and Zone.

 

There is some missing footage from Headmasters. Most Headmasters episodes start off with the title of the episode and then the rest of the episode follows. But a few episodes have a brief scene before the title displays. The Shout Factory release is missing all those brief scenes that occur before the title. It is also missing the commercial bumpers and the preview for the following episode. The Metrodome release in the UK and the Madman release in Australia are also missing this footage. I'm not aware of any release with English subtitles that has this footage. There is a Chinese dvd release that includes the English dub which does include the missing footage from Headmasters except for the next episode preview. That said, the missing footage is supplemental to the story. Nothing occurs within that missing footage that the rest of the episode hinges on.

And a few episodes of Masterforce have the wrong commercial bumpers.

Despite that, this is still a good release. If you want to watch this series, the Shout Factory release is probably the best looking and most affordable set with English subtitles. It's also the only set with English subs that is in NTSC format. The other releases with English subs are PAL.

 

@FAKER II: It is a shame we don't get the clip show that explains all the vague plot points from Masterpiece, though.

 

They all do, but apart from that handful of episodes, it's usually just recaps.

I really wish they'd included them all anyway, ditto for the next episode previews. Especially since those are included with Masterforce and Victory!

The clip shows are a bit of a oddity in some respects; Headmasters' clipshows are all crammed to the end of the series and IIRC cover all three series up to that point (including F!SRL and 2010) and not just Headmasters, with the last one including a preview for Masterforce, while Victory had a couple of clipshows that were only released on home video. I've seen clips of the last one and I found it really interesting; rather than just being a traditional clipshow featuring a narrator, it used footage from the final two episodes of Victory but with Masterforce footage spliced in with what I assume was all new dialogue dubbed in, with Star Saber reminiscing past Autobot leaders after getting his lights knocked out in what in the original episodes would've been the penultimate cliffhanger. This clip was on youtube but hell if I can find it anymore.

These DTV clipshows seem to be particularly elusive. I don't think even the Japanese DVD box sets include them!

 

Some of it comes off more as retcon than explanation. In the series, the Godmaster transtectors are said to be the offspring of Devil Z. But then in Big Book of Masterforce, they say that Ginrai's transtector was originally meant for Convoy and that's why it looks like Convoy. So the Godmasters came from Devil Z, but now the Autobots created Ginrai's transtector?

I'm pretty sure that only some episodes of Headmasters had footage between the opening theme song and the episode title. The earlier copies of Japanese G1 like the laser discs, those crappy VHS copies of the English dub, TV-Nihan's fansub, and the Chinese DVD release that has the English dub only have that footage in some episodes and all the episodes are consistent in length. And the episodes on Shout factory/Metrodome/Madman that are shorter in length match up precisely with the exact episodes on the other sources I mentioned that had footage between the opening theme song and the title.

I don't think Metrodome, Madman, or Shout factory intentionally left out footage. I think I remember reading Shout Factory address that and stating that the Headmasters video source they were given by Toei was missing the footage. I assume that is the same situation with Metrodome and Madman.

 

Zone and scramble city was on the complete japan collection in the uk but not here.

Headmasters episode 1 had new animation at the start of the first episode with more classic transformers in cameos. The uk dvd "transformers takara" single dvd has it uncut.

This one. Note it's the "star tv" or "omni" english dub.



The deleted scene. It's a full 2 min scene cut out!

Book of masterforce should be on the dvd sets as it goes into more info about the show.

 

I have that disc too. Too bad they only released the first 6 episodes. As far as I know, it's the only release to have the next episode previews in English. Strangely, it's missing the commercial bumpers.

The 9 disc Chinese DVD set of Headmasters, which has the English dub, also contains the missing footage at the beginning of episodes 1-3, and all the other episodes that are missing footage. It has the commercial bumpers but is missing the next episode previews. The weirdest part of the Chinese DVD's is that all 3 series use Transformers the Movie artwork. A few episodes on their Masterforce and Victory sets have random 10-15 seconds missing. You'll just be watching an episode and all of a sudden it skips forward a few seconds, which is especially noticeable if music is playing in the background. One really cool thing about the Victory set is that it has the English dub for the clipshow episodes. Until I got a hold of that set, I never realized the Victory clipshow episodes were ever dubbed into English.

 

Love how its like "Blah Blah Blah Oh btw Optimus is dead Blah Blah Blah"

 

Don't forget they didn't have the movie yet in japan so this is the first time japan kids saw prime die!

Well other then the nes game and this ad.

 

Weren't there info pages in TV Magazine that summarized the events of TF:TM?

 

If I were really determined to get the episodes in proper form and didn't care about the lack of subtitles, I'd probably just buy the JP DVDs. Because if those don't have them, no release will!

Would love to get my hands on the Headmasters Laserdisc box set tho.

 

I would love to have the Japanese DVD's but they cost way too much. From what I understand, there are less episodes on each disc. I assume this means the information is less compressed than all the other releases.

 

From what I understand, Japanese DVDs simply have fewer episodes per disc in general just because that's they way they do it in Japan. The quality is supposedly the same. It's like having ten books with 100 pages each instead of four books with 250 pages each. Doesn't mean the text or the images are larger.

 

Another factoid if you want to follow is that in the original "American run" (that is until the endReturn of Optimus Prime), the series is somewhat compressed/edited short. And the chronology is different from the shows we knew.

Then when we reach the official Western Release, the HM was the worst chopped up ( Toei must be heading its Aunt Flow or something when they released the rights). Even the resolution sucked.

Too bad I can't find any official JP Scramble City DVDs from my usual sources.

In the Zone DVD, even that had a much better resolution ( from the Shout version) aside from oodles and oodles of in house advertisement of the last hurrah JP TF toys.

Yet Toei has released, even if in SD on BDs, through DiscoTek/Eastern Star, awesome 70s Super Robot shows. Mazinger. Great Mazinger, Gaiking, Voltus, Godmars etc.Shout and the other previous Western Producers must have been low balling Toei or something.

 

The bad thing is the fanboy retcon garbage in the Shout subs

 

That struck me as less the work of fanboys, and more Hasbro enacting some weird policies onto the translators.

 

Phase 6? Sparks? There are so many random things that were NOT in the original translations that catered solely to the fanboy community. Has Hasbro pushed Phase 6'ers ANYWHERE since their inception? Nope. Has it been pushed solely by Furman who created it, and Roberts who is, well, Roberts, and I'll leave it at that lest the Church of Tumblr come to burn me at the stake for criticizing their lord and savior? No, nobody else. So the translation was done by someone cramming IDW and other stuff into the translations.