The name of the episode was "Kanzen Henkei! Transformer Tōjō" (完全変形! トランスフォーマー登場, "Perfect Transformation! Enter the Transformers"), and featured an all new opening:
And ending:
Sprocket and Hydra of Allspark.com have made some notes/comments regarding the dub of the itself, noting any changes made and whatnot:
Sprocket wrote:Aaand the intro's a clip show.
Saw that coming.
Man, but the footage used does not fit this song.
Oh Lord, Cliffjumper sings about how great he is. Hah. "Ore wa Cliffjumpah~"
Hah! Instead of "You want the horns? You got 'em." it's "ARMS UP!" In fact, every Autobot says that when they put their weapons out. That and "TRANSFORM!"
Well that's clever time editing. They cut out the stuff between Starscream's strike and Cliffjumper falling. There's lots of little edits, but they're really seamless.
Starscream's voice is flamboyant as HELL.
And the commercial bumper's a CGI turnaround of Optimus and Arcee in vehicle and robot mode with the G1 theme as a jingle.
The Vehicons have slightly more lines, including 'Transform!'
Bumblebee's the same as he ever was.
Arcee's catchphrase seems to be 'saiyaku', whatever that means.
The bit with the idol group's as akward as I thought it would be. It's slightly less annoying than the Otobotto family though.
And the arms Microns are very low budget CGI. It's O.P, B2, and R.A. They're floating in weapon mode the whole time. They try transforming and...to be continued. I'm getting a bit of a Zako Zako hour vibe from it.
And instead of a 'next time' bit, they put clips of the next episode into the credits.
And that's it!
Hydra wrote:As mentioned, there were some little additions here and there.
Compared to Animated, it's much more loyal to the source material.
It seemed like Cliffjumper's fight was edited down a little bit. I had heard that series might be edited for violence.
I haven't compared the timing to the original yet.
The voices in general are very fitting, though. I'd describe SS as flamboyant, but not much more so than the original.
He seems to be based after the JP G1 Starscream voice (at least, that was the general reaction to it).
Arcee's "saiaku!" is kind of like "Oh, GREAT!"
They call "Transform" when they TF, and "Arms Up" when deploying weapons.
It didn't seem to replace other lines, though. Cliffjumper did have his little line about his horns.
The idol segment has a bunch of girls who know nothing about TF being educated on them by Vector Sigma.
Although I suppose it was low budget, I thought the Micron segment was pretty funny (and thankfully short enough
that it doesn't shave airtime down.) They all try to transform by wiggling around... and it ends before they manage to.
Pretty much fits what I had heard thus far about the dubbing. I'll probably enjoy watching the series play out in Japanese.
-Hydra
So, all in all, it seems that it's not perfect, but still a pretty good dub and even more faithful to the English version than Animated's Japanese dub was (which was also a faithful dub in spite of its own changes)
