As noted last week, when Hasbro and Sunbow ended their Transformers cartoon, Japan kept going with numerous series. We’ve already looked at The Headmasters, where the original post-movie cast was slowly phased out. This week they’re all gone outside of a random cameo…sometimes even when they’re supposed to be dead and their body lost in an exploding star in “Dark Awakening”. While we are far from done with Transformers intros this will be the last we see of G1 shows, although characters may pop up again in the future.
The Japanese shows included a mix of original toys we still haven’t gotten molds of in the US (though some of their ideas would be reused in Hasbro’s lines, as I’ll get to) and toys designed for the US line sometimes made into new characters and nothing like their US counterparts. For example, Nightbeat was turned into a medical car and his Headmaster into a girl I’m only calling 13 because she has bumps on her chest and I feel dirty just writing that sentence. Most of these are available in the US through Shout Factory if you want to pick them up (I know I do) so let’s see how G1 TV truly ended.
