More Than Meets The Eye
The Headmasters series takes place a year after the events of Sunbow Production’s third season that aired in the States. The peace that purveyed the galaxy is soon cast aside as a new war emerges, once again pitting the Autobots against the Decepticons. Headmasters on both sides of the battle will significantly alter the flow of battle, and give the viewer a variety of cool new characters to enjoy.
Just who are The Headmasters? Far from a Transformers expert, let me just point you to a Wiki page that explains. Basically, the Headmasters are traditional transformers, only far older — some four million years before the current Transformers, Headmasters inhabited Cybertron but ended up crash landing on Planet Master after engine failure. Conditions on Planet Master were truly harsh with acid rains and thick deserts. The Transformers created new ‘units’ that they could attach to as the head, which was critical in their survival.
That said, the Headmasters series begins with the Decepticons attempting to steal the Vector Sigma, a super computer on Cybertron. This is but one of several story arcs that are introduced throughout the series, which ultimately ends in the defense of Earth from a final assault by the Decepticons. Some familiar faces are present, including Optimus Prime, although his fate is met with the first few episodes. Dozens of new characters are introduced throughout the series, including Chromedome, Soundblaster (a revived Soundwave), Wipe, and Triggerhappy. There are also a variety of ‘combiners’ that I had never heard of, like the Stunticons, Predacons, Terrorcons, Protectobots, and Trainbots. I was impressed with the sheer number of characters that the Headmasters series introduced and maintained throughout the thirty-five episode run. Six-shot, probably my favorite in my youth, has a huge and continuous role throughout as well. For casual and hardcore Transformer fans alike, it’s a visual treat to see this many characters get the spotlight.
The DVD Release
The Headmasters set is four discs, and is packaged in a standard size case with two double-sided ‘pages’ holding the discs. The menus on each disc is lively with the theme song and lots of color. Between discs, a different primary color is used for the menu, but the general layout is very much the same.
Discs one through three contain episodes and the option to turn on English subtitles (a must for anyone that cannot understand Japanese), while disc four contains those things plus an art gallery. The Art Gallery is the only extra feature, which is a bit of a shame, being that it only has eighteen images. All of these still images have a white background with black ink drawings of different characters in their standard and transformed state. I would have loved it if Shout! could have brought in some Transformer expert to talk about the historical significance of this series in the Transformers canon, or better yet something vintage from Takara.
As for the presentation, expect a straight-forward transfer from the original material: a 4:3 frame with typical 80s TV animation quality. Audio is Japanese only with support for only English subtitles. The subtitles are in white (as opposed to yellow which you may have seen) and they are centered on the bottom portion of the screen. On a few occasions I had a weird issue where the subtitle text was slightly garbled — still legible, but a little distorted. There are a few misspellings in the subs as well you may catch, such as “on” being displayed instead of “one” which was clearly meant. Those are certainly nit-picky things to point out, but I wanted to mention them nonetheless.
Let’s get to the summary…