Destroy All Podcasts DX Episode 128 - The Transformers: Transport to Oblivion

...And yet the VHS case says that it's volume 7. I always thought that was strange when I was a kid. I guess it has to do with the order in which these episodes were released to VHS.

I had both the pilot and The Ultimate Doom on VHS when I was kid. (The actual FHE version Ultimate Doom, not the ugly one with Cyclonus on the cover.) Since those were the two major arcs of the first season, they were certainly the ones to have. Ultimate Doom was volume 2, so yeah, it must be the release order.

Have you guys ever seen the Dr. Smoov videos on YouTube? Look them up. They're re-dubbed episodes done as parodies. The best one is the Shockwave episode, where Autobots keeps breaking in through the space bridge.

I felt Jeremy did a good job discussing the way these cartoons produced and presented back in the 1980's (though perhaps I'm thinking of a different podcast in this case). I was a kid when Transformers was this big thing at the toy stores and the cartoon series accompany that craze perfectly regardless of how it was written and executed. Using Toei to do the show also was a fine example of what made shows like this so different alongside the normal "Saturday Morning" crap I was seeing before, where the use of recycled poses and other limited tropes were still the call of the day at studios like Hanna-Barbera or Filmation.

In syndication, producing an original animated series for about 65 episodes was common for a weekday syndication that could last about 3-4 months though the episodes are often shuffled around to be placed in a specific order (unless it was a two-parter or such). I think He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was the first such show to hail this new trend for American TV animation as it proved how possible it was for new cartoons to be made to sale to TV stations besides the previous releases of older programming from Saturday morning or the theatrical cartoons like Warner Bros. as was common to see (outside the dubbing of Japanese cartoons like Speed Racer or Battle of the Planets which would qualify as 'original' by our standards). Eventually more studios like Disney and Warner Bros. would come into the fold with their noted programming as well, and this sort of concept would continue on into the 1990's where it eventually died thanks to cable TV (as most would say).

Also good to discuss the way anime has evolved the way it was necessary to have restraints on how it is animated versus the lush, fully-animated works such as what Toei did in those feature films in the 60's.