The Energon Pub

The elusive Jason Jansen, who played the human youth Tommy Kennedy during the long-forgotten fifth season of the Generation 1 cartoon, has at long last been found and interviewed.

http://digestmybrain.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/tommy-kennedy-found-an-interview-with-jason-jansen/

For those curious about the Season 5 episodes, here's a YouTube compilation video of all the new Tommy/Optimus footage created specifically this season:

ausbot wrote:I've always wondered why do this and the G2 reruns when they could have just re voiced Victory, headmasters and Masterforce? They has 3 perfectly good series already animated, the toys why not use them?

Well, since Hasbro had nothing to do with those series, maybe they just didn't want to bother.

Not to mention that all three focused on characters Hasbro wasn't selling in their market (Victory, especially), so had they dubbed these three, they'd be advertising a whole bunch of toys kids in the West couldn't buy, instead of the ones that they could.

Plus, Hasbro also didn't have an anime dubbing studio back then. Who would have dubbed the three show's for them?

Springer wrote:

Sabrblade wrote:Not to mention that all three focused on characters Hasbro wasn't selling in their market (Victory, especially), so had they dubbed these three, they'd be advertising a whole bunch of toys kids in the West couldn't buy, instead of the ones that they could.

Yeah, Hasbro would never do that in a series! Cough, cough... TFP Breakdown, Smokescreen, Unicron, Winged Vehicon...

Not back then, they wouldn't have.

Like PrymeStriker said, nowadays, Hasbro's become more focused on media than toys. But back during the days of G1, the toys were the highest priority.

ausbot wrote:Well they were selling the Headmasters toys when Headmasters was produced, Masterforce basically had the same characters as the west (very few difference) And Takara still had to get the rights from hasbro so my question still stands why did they never use perfectly good cartoon to sell their toys!

Alright. I'll try to break it down as best as I can.

• The Japanese cartoons went in very different directions with very different concepts from what Hasbro was trying to market. for example, Nebulans were a key aspect of the Hasbro continuity, while Takara did away with them completely. Pretenders were giant suits of flesh-based armor in Hasbro canon, while Takara changed them to small, quasi-mystical organic modes. Powermaster tech was just technology, while Godmaster tech was godlike magic. Brainmasters and Breast Animals were key aspects of Victory, yet those did not exist in the Hasbro market.
• The Headmasters only came about once Takara found out that "The Rebirth" would only be as short as it was. If it weren't for them making "The Rebirth", The Headmasters might not have come about as it did, leaving us without it anyway.
• Since Hasbro was pretty much done with the Transformers as a cartoon, having broke ties with Sunbow Productions, it's no wonder Hasbro didn't bother to reach out to the Japanese cartoons if they didn't care to have a Transformers cartoon airing at the time.
• And since Sunbow lost the rights to the Transformers, who would have even dubbed the Japanese shows even if Hasbro did want to bring them over? They would have needed an anime dubbing studio and that would have costed money.
• And such dubbing would have taken time to complete, thus delaying the releases of the JG1 cartoons on TV, maybe even as long as a year. The Headmasters advertises 1987 toys, but might not have made it to broadcast until 1988. Same might have applied for Masterforce and Victory, puching the 1988 and 1989 cartoons back until 1989 and 1990, respectively, making them all promote the toys of the previous year instead of the then-current year. The only way to possibly have avoided such a delay would have been to rush the production, which would have decreased the dubbing quality from the level that it already would have been, which, being done in the 1980s, would have already been pretty low to begin with.
• Speaking of anime dubbing in the 1980s, outside of a few examples like Robotech and Voltron (both rivals to Hasbro and the Transformers), anime dubbing wasn't exactly the most common practice back then.
• And since it wasn't that common, any attempts of a dub being reasonably faithful to both the original Japanese versions and the Hasbro canon would have been a nigh-impossibility due to just how different the JG1 cartoons were from the Hasbro cartoon. In addition to the conceptual differences listed above, there would have been cultural difference and ethical differences to filter through, which would have put whoever was interested in dubbing them in over their heads.
• Regarding the ethical differences, there are a lot of things that most definitely would have had to have been changed, edited, or outright cut out to make them fit for air on 1980's American television. Like when Wilder murdered a puppy on screen in front the little girl who owned it. Or every single time Killbison transformed, since he always stuck out his middle fingers in the stock footage of the sequence. Or the very nature of the Breastforce itself. And all the character deaths and torture scenes would most certainly be not permitted, even for those who get healed or revived later.
• And let's still not forget how many Japanese-only characters get such prominent focus in these shows when Hasbro was trying to sell other characters' toys. The Trainbots, Ginrai, Metalhawk, Minerva, Grand Maximus, Sixknight, Godbomber, Overlord, BlackZarak, Browning, the Brainmasters, the Multiforce, Galaxy Shuttle, Greatshot, Victory Leo, the Breastforce, etc. all were toys Hasbro didn't make and didn't have back then, so it would have been bad business to air cartoons for toys that they didn't own at the time.
• And as for those toys that Hasbro and Takara did share at the time, many of them were nothing alike in terms of character and color scheme. Nearly half of the Masterforce toys were redecos of Hasbro toys in all new non-Hasbro-owned color schemes, and ALL of them were portrayed as different characters than what Hasbro was trying to sell. Minerva was not Nightbeat, Ginrai was not Optimus Prime, Cancer was not Squeezeplay, easygoing Lander was not the adventure-seeking Landmine and so on and so forth. This is not something that a mere dialogue re-scripting could reasonably believably fix.
• Not to mention those who are definitely the same character were still portrayed very differently in the JG1 cartoons. Arcee's a secretary, Galvatron's not insane, Cyclonus and Scourge are bumblers, Daniel acts like a toddler, Wheelie's a punk, Chromedome's a hotheaded youth, Soundwave/Soundblaster is shifty in his allegiances, many Decepticons are just comedic thugs instead of soldiers who just lose, et cetera. Again, this cannot be fix by a simple dialogue rescripting.
• And most importantly, since Hasbro gave Takara the creative permission to do with the cartoons as they pleased, the JG1 cartoons were made with the intention of not having to be released to Hasbro markets, and so were free to contradict as much as they did from Hasbro's continuity. Takara was able to make these shows and all their supplementary material because of the freedom Hasbro gave them and lack of any real need to rely on Hasbro's version of the story. They were made by Japan FOR Japan, not for international release.

THAT's why.

tl:dr - Hasbro didn't import them because they didn't fit the mindset that Hasbro was in at the time.

jamarmiller wrote:its something I always wondered too

especially Headmasters

Why make up a 3 episode miniseries, when they had the JP Headmaster series

The Headmasters only came about because of how short "The Rebirth" was.

And technically, Hasbro didn't "have" the Japanese shows at the time becuase they had nothing to do with them. The rights were all Japanese-owned.

jamarmiller wrote:It looks more like a continuation that rebirth and had characters from all the previous seasons too.

Mostly only in cameos and eye-candy battle scenes. While watching the series, it becomes pretty clear pretty quick that all of the Headmasters take the center spotlight and shift nearly the entire 1984-1986 cast into either the background, the sidelines, or just outright out of the picture.

Blackstreak wrote:I remember watching those. I didn't care for the Matrix editing of the series.

"Matrix editing"?

jamarmiller wrote:Ummmmmm................thats kind of the point though

Its the slow changing of the main cast ( from old to new ) and not a sudden change, say like Victory.

It wasn't really that slow. It was pretty much just as immediate as the changeover from the 1984/1985 cast to the 1986 cast as seen in the Transformers: The Movie. Or the changeover from the 1986 cast to the 1987 cast in "The Rebirth". Once the Headmasters appeared, they became the stars right then and there.

The only thing gradual was the shifting of the old cast out to make room for the new cast.

jamarmiller wrote:We could enjoy the new cast take the spotlight while still seeing the old cast make lots of cameos and such. WE could enjoy seeing the cast standing next to the old cast.

But even then, as the series went on, the cameos became less and less occuring, with many of the 1984-1986 cast just up and disappearing. Some of which even vanish after only one or two appearances early on in the series.

jamarmiller wrote:I mean Hasbro went with Sunbow then on to DIC with GI JOE and it was the same continuity but seriously dumbed down. way more than the JP Headmasters series was. As a kid , I would have loved the Headmaster series just for the sheer amount of new episodes. As a kid I was seriously disappointed we got 3 eps and only 3 eps

That I can understand. But unlike the DiC Joe cartoon, The Headmasters wasn't so much dumbed down as it was increasingly more violent and crueler in tone compared to the U.S. cartoon. character would get murdered, tortured, brutalized, and just mauled to an extent far greater than what had come before outside of the 1986 movie.

jamarmiller wrote:I remember ( like a previous poster stated ) just waiting and waiting for new eps to show with the new toys and nothing ever happened ( until I grew up and found the JP series existed )

It was a serious wasted opportunity IMVHO

I can see how one would feel like that, but it just wasn't a feasible idea back then. Toy sales were declining, so less money was being made, so the funds for cartoon material were decreasing lower and lower. If Hasbro couldn't afford to produce their own cartoons at the time, how would they have afforded importing three more cartoons that they didn't have the necessary resources to Americanize for?