Transformers “season 5” was a series of 20 episodes from the original cartoon. Despite being called a “new season,” all of the episodes were reruns, and it would hardly be the first time this franchise devastated excited children. “We killed Optimus Prime, kids! Why would you ever trust us?!” And speaking of Prime’s demise, the theatrical 1986 movie was split into five parts for this batch, making it sort of a “the best of Transformers collection” if we’re wanting to be charitable.

So what made these “new”? Why, the promise of the coolest fucking thing ever, of course: OPTIMUS PRIME LIVE!!! You see, each episode was introduced by a little boy named “Tommy.” Tommy was Optimus Prime’s best pal in the world, at least according to Tommy, and he would bug his robot buddy to tell him stories about his violent robot adventures. I guess Optimus had nothing better to do with his time, or maybe Tommy blackmailed him with scandalous photos of him and the Go-Bots in compromising positions, but in any case, I feel that Prime’s participation is…reluctant here. Like, is it just me, or is Prime just praying to The Matrix that Tommy might just slip out of his giant robot hand? You think he’d lose any sleep if that happened? I can’t say I do. And why the hell are they hanging out on Mars?

Now these are very rare and hard to come by, probably because most kids didn’t bother to ask their parents to tape them since they had already seen them before. It’s also possible they didn’t air in many regions. All of the episodes have emerged on YouTube, but in extremely poor quality, and most fans probably don’t even know that these interstitials even exist.

I gotta come clean. There is something kind of, well, adorable about all of this. Like, they constructed a giant animatronic Optimus when there had to be cheaper options for reheating syndicated leftovers. Heck, they even used some stop-motion animation to bring him to life. I dunno. It’s just pretty charming.

Have a great day, y’all!