When I was a kid, the original series of this show aired every Saturday morning (from memory) and I’d watch religiously to see the heroic exploits of Optimus Prime® and the rest of the Autobots™ and Decepticons™ slug it out each week. Actually, yeah, it must have been Saturdays, because we weren’t allowed to watch TV before school.

Everyone would come to school on Monday and we’d play Transformers™® by calling ourselves a two-pronged name and folding ourselves into biologically impossible positions. Unfortunately we got banned from playing after one kid, Dennis Someone, dislocated his hip trying to make himself into a Volkswagen®.

It vaguely struck me as odd that robotic monsters from another world could be transformed into a car from our world. What’s up with that? Anyhow, I was a little skeptical about how good this show would be, this ‘brand new’ series. I need not have worried, for it’s just as full of cheesy dialogue, still frames stretching out the animation and big-arse robots firing lasers without hurting each other.

In this incarnation (heh heh, geddit?) The Transformers® have been at a grudging peace for millenia. After their endless equally matched wars, fighting for the Minicons™, the Minicons™ were blasted into deep space to stop the war. Naturally, they landed on Earth (as does everything ever shot into space by any alien culture) and the Minicons™ were buried under primeval lava. That is until three modern day kids - Rad (?), Carlos and Alexis (all minorities nicely covered) – discover the wrecked ship in an old cave and awaken the Minicons™. The awakening sends a message to the Transformers'® home world of Cybertron® and, soon enough, the Transformers® are on Earth ready to fight the Decepticons™ and prevent them catching the myriad buried Minicons™.

Herein are no mention of the Insecticons®, the Constructicons® or the Dinobots®, the last desperate attempts to modernise the show before it disappeared up its own arse in the mid-'80s. However, we do manage to get the same Keekkeekkuhk Kehk™ ‘transforming’ sound effects we all loved so much the first time around. Unfortunately though, it isn’t used as often in favour of the more modern, yet lamer, ‘Transform!’

In this first (of many) DVDs (stay tuned for more reviews in coming weeks) we get three episodes, as we do in the rest.

• Episode One: Encounter sees our team of youthful friends discover the wrecked craft and accidentally sending a message to Cybertron® which brings the Transformers® a-runnin’!
• Episode Two: Metamorphosis brings the discovery of the Miniconsâ„¢ and their pairing with each of the kids.
• Episode Three: Base takes the kids to the moon where the Autobotsâ„¢ share their knowledge and show the kids a long flashback to Episode One! And there’s bonding.

  Aimed squarely at kids (boy kids), this is full of colour, metallic clanging and shooting, plus breakneck speeds as the transformed robots drive around everywhere looking for more Minicons™. It’s not brain surgery by any means, but it’s fun and silly with a fairly exciting animation style that, while low budget, still maintains interest.

The first thing I noticed here was the exquisite colour of the show. Every frame is bursting with it and this really goes a long way toward the visual appeal of the series. Digital animation has been employed for some trickier devices, though I can’t imagine why the Transformers® themselves haven’t been computer animated. These robots are an inbetweeners nightmare! Even an animator’s nightmare, for that point. I shudder to think about some poor Japanese people hunched over lightboxes sweating over a single frame for hours with whip-cracking masters behind them.

Occasional compression problems occur, unfortunately, giving Rad a massive compression coldsore at 17:31 in Episode One. This runs for 13 frames, too. Poor little guy, no date for him on Saturday night. There’s also a pixelly Transformers® logo at 2:47 in Episode Two which I didn’t understand, because the thinner lines around it were all nicely vectored. Oh well.

Dialogue is, as mentioned, cheesy as all get out, but it’s fun enough. There isn’t any lip synch either, of course. Being this show is made for several cultures and languages, they don’t bother with that which again adds to the low budgeting. It’s much easier to draw two open mouths than the eight different base mouths for synching.

Music is typical of a show of this nature, re-using scraps and shreds here and there to add impact. It all sounds okay and does the job well enough though. Sound effects are sometimes a little too bossy for the action described though, with several scenes of the Autobots® gently punching fists homeboy-style resounding with echoing reverberations of full metal clanging. Oh well, boys like it loud and aurally assaulting.

The Minicoms'™ speech is computer noises that sound like they were lifted from The Black Hole or Tron or something similar and get very repetitive very fast. Also, Megatron®, the most evil of the Decepticons™, sounds a lot like Skeletor® from He-Man™ used to. (“Now I find they’re incompetent! Bumbling fools!� etc.)

There are no extras on this disc, and each episode runs as a single chapter on this DVD 5, single layered, single sided disc. Oh, and each disc opens with an advertisement for the brand-new range of Transformers: Armada® toys! Nice work Hasbro®™.

The New Transformers: Flush Load

There can be little denying the boys (mostly) will have a ball watching this as did I when growing older (not ‘up’). The colour and content are well rendered, even if the storylines are fairly base, but that’s okay. It’s giant robots that not only fight each other but turn into stuff! Stuff like cars and rockets and spaceships and stuff. That’s cool.

In all it’s good simple fun, but a little less than generous in its overall presentation.