Yes, it’s been a while, but I’ve dragged myself back to deliver the verdicts on (yet) more editions of the ongoing struggle for universal peace that is The Transformers Armada. If you’re not current on these reviews, you can drop by here first if you like:
Transformers 01
Transformers 02
Transformers 03
Transformers 04

For those of us still awake, the story is pretty simple (and discovered in any or all of those above reviews). It follows the adventures of Rad, Carlos and Alexis who discover the Minicons™, a race of smaller Transformers™ who get stuck to the others with glue or something. This increases their powers and thereby swings the balance in the evenly matched war of Autobots™ (the good guys) and the Decepticons™ (the bad guys). Except both get them, which doesn’t help at all really. It’s almost like they’re supposed to never attain a conclusion so as to prolong the sales pitch as long as is robotly possible.

Anyway, the animation is average, the cool Keekkeekkuhk Kehk™ sound the old-school Transformers used to have is long gone and this is pretty much ordinary Saturday morning fare. It’s just aimed at a fresh new batch of school-age boys who want to be able to transform themselves into robots (there was a whole club of these geeks at my school).

There are three episodes on this disc, they all go something like this:
The kids find a new Minicon™ and must race the Decepticons™ to get there first. Naturally, there are massive ringing clashes between vast robots (in which none is granted lasting, permanent or fatal damage) and some hackneyed western jargon slung about that is at least five years old (Who says, ‘That’s da bomb!’ anymore?).

Oh there’s a new character who’s like a double agent and his name is ‘Sideways’ (please note: All Transformers™, while sold separately at a retail outlet near you, are male… female robots are still just fantasy to most geeks). Anyway, the girl says something at one point that may well have been aimed at any sniggering nerdly adults watching when she says; ‘There’s something strange about Sideways… ’

I laughed anyway.

Picture quality is fine for an animated series, although there are moments of frame jitter that I’ve noted in nearly every disc now. This is where the image on screen jumps out of frame for a frame before settling back. It’s fast, but I noticed it and it happens three or four times per disc on average. There are also sloppy animation moments where characters are mis-sized in the compositing of these digital scanned images.

The colour is fine, though the backgrounds suffer that washed-out thing that Japanese animation seems to soak in regularly. Blacks are true and overall the 4:3 transfer is pretty clean for a kid’s animated show.

Sound is fine with clear dialogue, stock standard sound effects and the same bits of music they play in each episode. Nothing new or earth shattering to report here actually.

The New Transformers: Happylad

There are no extras. There is a war between good and evil robots going on you know. We must all tighten our belts.

Overall I’d say if you’ve queued up to purchase the previous four volumes, there’s no doubt you’ve already bought this one. If you’re tossing it up, I loaned my copies to my neighbour’s boys and they thought it was awesomely outrageously cool (or something like that). And, if you are about to enter the bracing waters of Transformers™ for the first time, I recommend you go back and look at reviews one through four first.

I shoulda started the review like those old Phantom™ comics did: For those who came in late…