Rated X wrote:Thanks guys. That is a very weird "master" concept. I take it these brainmasters came out only in japan ? Around the time Hasbro jumped the G1 ship when powermasters and pretenders didnt do so well back in america ?
Yep, they were all Takara's doing when Hasbro decided to switch to primarily Micromasters in 1989.
However, the three smaller Brainmasters (Blacker, Laster, and Braver) did get redecoed and released in Europe in 1991 as a new group called the Motorvators. Blacker was redecoed into Gripper, Laster into Flame, and Braver into Lightspeed (no relation to the Technobot of the same name). And their smaller Brainmaster figures were renamed as simply "Energon Figures". And none of them came with their original combiner pieces (the three Brainmasters were originally a combiner called Road Caesar).
Rated X wrote:I might just buy this guy for my classics shelf and put him next to trailerforce Ginrai. Were they in the same cartoon ?
Ginrai was in the Super-God Masterforce cartoon, while Star Saber was in the Victory cartoon. But, Ginrai did make a couple guest starring appearances in Victory in which he would team up with Star Saber.
Rated X wrote:I never liked how all Japanese robot cartoons used the same clip whenever they transform or combine. It always seemed lazy. The American cartoon artists hand drew the transformation different each time.
Not quite true. A lot of the transformations seen in the G1 cartoon were recycled from episode to episode. They just played them over whatever environments they needed to be in the background instead of in a fancy sequence. Optimus Prime's transformation was the most notorious case of this.
Though, I think they did give each transformation a fresh drawing for each one that happened in the 1986 movie, but that being a movie was a special case.