The Transformers
Season 3, Part 2 & Season 4 (1987)
Film:
DVD:

Starring the Voices of Peter Cullen, Frank Welker, Corey Burton, Chris Latta, Roger C. Carmel

Features:

• Interview with writer David Wise
  
• Ability to watch "The Rebirth Trilogy" episodes without teasers and recaps
  
• The remaining fourteen episodes from Season 3 and all three Season 4 episodes
  

Released by Rhino
Rating: NR
Region: 1
Anamorphic: N/A; episodes appear in their original 1.33:1 format.

My Advice: Hardcore fans should own.

The Transformers? They're more than meets the eye, dammit. It's a fairly simple concept: the Autobots are the good guys, the Decepticons the bad guys. They're robots but they can turn into trucks, car, jets, guns--all manner of stuff. When we enter this set, Starscream is back as a ghost and looking to get a new body by repairing Unicron. And things just get crazier from there.

The Transformers is an example, in cartoon form, of what can easily happen to something considered to be a commercial success. Certainly, cartoons and toys have always walked hand in hand, especially during the 80s. But in the beginning, you had a cadre of easily recognizable characters: Optimus Prime, the semi leader (not as in partial leader, mind you, but as in leader who happens to be a semi) of the good guys...Megatron, the villainous leader of the bad guys who would become a gun...and so forth. Just about anybody who grew up during that time period can name at least a solid handful of classic Transformer characters. Trouble is, once everybody's bought those toys, what to do? Create new toys. And new characters in the cartoon. Rinse. Repeat.

Thus, by the time you get to the third season, pretty much all of the characters have been replaced. So basically it's the equivalent of going from the classic Justice League (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman) to Justice League Detroit (Gypsy, Vibe, Steel). Then the fourth season--which introduces characters that have their heads transform, their weapons transform, and so on--kind of collapses under its own weight and implodes.

Evidence to this is provided by the nicely done interview with writer Wise, who was brought back to the series to end it with the five episodes that introduced both Headmasters and Targetmasters. Of course, with over one hundred new characters to introduce, suck factor is high when your budget is cut from five down to three episodes, with still the same agenda. The thing becomes even more of a toy parade than the previous episodes. Wise admits everything freely, and does so with such glee at times that it's fun to watch. This interview is the only special feature other than the ability to watch the three-part trainwreck that constitutes the entire fourth season without any teasers or recaps.

Now, with all of that being said, the nostalgia factor will still be high for this set. For those people who actually can look at the screen and tell Ratchetclaw from Uberhammer or whatever, they're going to want to snatch this up, as its the best DVD presentation we could hope for from this end of the cartoon's first generation.