Rated X wrote:I know very little about the Japanese G1 cartoons. I would watch them, but I just cant get past those annoying subtitles and voices that all sound like the same actor.
We keep trying to tell you who this guy is, but I can't for the life of me figure out why you're not getting what we're saying. It comes off as just making you look bad, and that's what we're trying to avoid, yet you still seem to not understand no matter how many times we try to explain to you who this guy is. It's really frustrating.
The clip I keep showing you barely even has any dialogue in it, and ALL of it is English words anyway, so you don't even have to bother reading what little subtitles there are. I think you're man enough to survive a mere 30 seconds of someone speaking English.
Rated X wrote:How many times was the mold used in Japan ?
This mold? This particular Generations mold? Once. Only one time has it ever been used in Japan. As this toy: Generations Bumblebee Goldbug.
Any other release of it has been all Hasbro.
Rated X wrote:Nightbeat
Minerva
Goshooter
Siren (never heard of him either)
Okay...
I'm gonna take a deep breath... and try to clarify all this.
*deep breath*Now, in 1988, Hasbro continued the Transformers line with many more toys of new characters who were created after the cartoon had ended. These included:
- the Powermasters,
- the Large Pretenders,
- the Pretender Beasts,
- the Pretender Vehicles,
- the Small Headmasters,
- the Small Targetmasters,
- the Sparkabots,
- the Firecons,
- the Triggerbots,
- the Triggercons,
- the Seacons,
- the Autobot Six Changer known as Quickswitch
- the Powermaster Mercenary known as Doubledealer
- and new Cassettes for both Autobot and Decepticon alike
Of these, we'll be looking at the Small Headmasters, particularly the Autobot ones. They were called "Small" because they were smaller sized figures from the bigger Large Headmasters of 1987, and had slightly different engineering for their Headmaster gimmick, with simpler-designed head robots whose helmets were formed by their vehicles' driver's seats placed over the main head unit.
For the Autobots, there were three Small Headmasters released:
- Siren w/ Quig - a fire chief Mazda RX-7
- Hosehead w/ Lug - a fire truck
- Nightbeat w/ Muzzle - a blue and yellow Porche 959
Quig, Lug, and Muzzle were the names of their Nebulan partners who turned into their heads. Yes, the Nebulan partnership thing continued into 1988.
Here is what each of them looked like:
Siren w/ Quig
Hosehead w/ Lug
Nightbeat w/ Muzzle
When Japan created their Super-God Masterforce cartoon, they took the Small Headmasters and reworked them into a slightly different concept called "Headmaster Juniors". A Headmaster Junior is similar to a regular Headmaster from a Western perspective, except that the larger robot body, referred to in this version as a "Transtector", is lifeless, being driven and fully controlled by its Headmaster, who is not a Nebulan or an adult, but a teenage human. The head attaches to the body and forms a bond with it, granting the body life via the human that forms its head, who essentially
becomes a Transformer in this supernatural science fiction process.
The three Autobot Headmaster Juniors were all new characters in Japan, different from their Hasbro counterparts. The toys of Siren and Nightbeat were redecoed to go with these new identities, while Hosehead's toy remained unchanged deco-wise.
- Siren was changed into Goshooter, better known as Shuta Go, whose toy was now a police car
- Hosehead was changed into Cab, whose toy stayed as a fire truck
- Nightbeat was changed into Minerva, who was a GIRL and whose toy was now a Porche ambulance
Here's is what these three looked like:
Goshooter (A.K.A. Shuta Go)
Cab (same toy as Hosehead)
Minerva
As a side note (and I only mention this because I know some are gonna point out that I didn't if I don't mention it), both the original Hasbro Siren and Nightbeat toys were later released in Japan as mail-away figures, who were now special toy versions of the Goshooter and Minerva characters, renamed "Goshooter Siren" and "Minerva Night Beat", respectively. But I digress.
Now, after all this, you may be wondering why the Japanese would use the Generations toy for Nightbeat as the base for a new toy of Goshooter. Would it not make more sense for them to redeco Nightbeat into Minerva? Or wouldn't it make more sense for there to first be a Generations Siren toy for them to make Goshooter from? Well, there is a very specific reason for their making a Goshooter out of Nightbeat instead of going with one of the other choices.
Back in the 1980's, when the folks who worked for Hasbro were making the commercials for the Hasbro toys and making the Marvel G1 comic books, for some unknown reason, the head designs for Nightbeat and Siren got swapped with each other somehow, and both the animators for the commercials and the artists for the comic books ended up drawing Siren with Nightbeat's toy face, and Nightbeat with Siren's toy face:
This was later corrected for Siren in later comic books created in the 21st Century by Dreamwave, Fun Publications, and IDW, but not for Nightbeat who, due to his becoming a very popular character, kept Siren's visor eyes in all of Nightbeat's future fiction to come, as the visored look had become an iconic look for Nightbeat. Thus, Generations Nightbeat has a visored face.
In Japan, however, Siren's and Nightbeat's counterparts, Goshooter and Minerva, did NOT have their head designs swapped, and so kept their respective toy head designs, with Goshooter having his toy's visored eyes.
Thus, the Japanese are using the visor-eyed Nightbeat toy to make a visor-eyed Goshooter toy, all thanks to Nightbeat's iconic head design having originally come from Siren, whom Goshooter was redecoed from.
If all that
still doesn't help you to understand who this guy is and why this toy is being made, then I frankly don't know what else there is to do.