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Do you know where there's great quality videos of 1980s TV advertisments for Transformers toys? I would be very grateful if someone could point me in the right direction. There's plenty of low-quality ones out there (ruined with corner logos too), but I'm looking for something better.

I'm looking for excellent VHS-quality (i.e. nearly 576i or 480i) video rips without the uploader putting their logo into the corner of the screen, and no skipping/fuzzing/truncation/glitches in the video. Please help if you can.

Does any TF fan site have these? I'd particularly love to see the ones with Galvatron and Metroplex again.

Any ideas?

Could a mod move this please? I've accidentally put this in the 'general' area rather than the 'Transformers' area. Thanks.

I've never seen brilliant condition ones, though IIRC some of the DVD's have commercials on, they might be of better quality.

I suspect though, that tapped of the telly 10th generation VHS copies are likely as good as it gets for most of them, Hasbro/the advertising companies wouldn't really have much need of the master tapes once they've done their job of plugging that years toys.

The ones on the Shout Factory DVDs I have seem to be ripped from VHS/YouTube with little to no cleanup.

Thanks guys.

I'd love to get a hold of the UK commercials, particularly the ones with Metroplex (great music in it) and the one with Galvatron.

Do the UK commercials feature on these 'Shout Factory' DVDs?

Also generally, are the Shout Factory DVD ads free from corner logos?





Thanks again.

Mmm, IIRC for a lot of this stuff the masters are lost and the DVDs generally contain lightly restored off-air copies. For UK stuff I'd say chances aren't that high at all as the best surviving ones are likely to be the aforementioned multiple-generation ones that people have caught when they didn't pause recording quickly enough back in the day. I'd suspect the component animation is still probably in a vault in Japan or Korea somewhere, but I wouldn't be that optimistic about the actual commercial-y bits.

One set of guys who might be worth contacting on the off-chance are the Blood for the Baron people - putting together something like http://bloodforthebaron.com/store/003/index.html presumably requires a lot of contacts and poking through old UK VHSes, and you never know they might be able to hook you up with someone who has a lot of this sort of thing. It's a long shot but it might be worth a go.

Great reply Cliffjumper!

Cliffjumper wrote:Mmm, IIRC for a lot of this stuff the masters are lost and the DVDs generally contain lightly restored off-air copies. For UK stuff I'd say chances aren't that high at all as the best surviving ones are likely to be the aforementioned multiple-generation ones that people have caught when they didn't pause recording quickly enough back in the day.

I agree that the masters are probably lost. But I'm surprised that TF fandom does not seem to have good quality copies of the UK commericals somewhere!

I mean, those ads were cool - and fandom collects/archives everything - so it is a bit puzzling that clean(ish) digital uploads of these commercials do not seem to have surfaced after all these years.

Cliffjumper wrote:One set of guys who might be worth contacting on the off-chance are the Blood for the Baron people - putting together something like http://bloodforthebaron.com/store/003/index.html presumably requires a lot of contacts and poking through old UK VHSes, and you never know they might be able to hook you up with someone who has a lot of this sort of thing. It's a long shot but it might be worth a go.

That's an interesting lead - thanks for the pointer!

It's possible that not a lot of them were taped at the time... The following is received history picked up from a few fanzines and the like of the era: for much of the 1980s VHS recorders were a luxury (usually rented rather than bought) and tapes were also expensive... It wasn't until about 87-88 (as I understand) that using them for actually archiving stuff was something many people could afford to do, otherwise mainly being used for taping something on the other channel or for when people were out which would then be taped over... up until that point tapes could be £7-10 (with pre-recorded stuff being around £25) each, meaning most households would own a handful and just record over things.

With these restrictions in mind, a lot of people would try to make the tapes go as far as possible by avoiding taping commercials and the like wherever possible. Plus VHS was never really a particularly great storage medium; original tapes from 1986 or whatever would surely be barely usable by now, meaning someone would have to go out of their way to dub it onto another tape, and again when that one started wearing out and so on... I mean, there could have been people doing that (I mean, there were people audio-recording Doctor Who as it went out in 1964, which cost an absolute fortune, so you never know) but whoever was doing it would have to be fairly hardcore and, as you say, the results would have emerged somewhere by now (especially seeing as someone that into it would have transferred them to digital as soon as the tech became avaliable).

Cliffjumper wrote:original tapes from 1986 or whatever would surely be barely usable by now

Ah now. That's a generalization that doesn't hold up at all - I've played VHS tapes from the mid '80s (some heavily used) that still play fine.

Varies. The audio seems to go before the picture, in my experience.

It's like some CD-Rs don't last a year, whilst others are readable after a decade-plus.

I dimly recall blank tapes being £2-3 a pop in Poundstretcher at some point when I was a kid, which would've been around the time TF videos were getting remaindered. I think any memory of TF adverts being on TV has been overwritten by seeing a few online...

It's also worth remembering that, whilst Doctor Who would have had an geekish adult audience from the get go (very little SF TV at the time, it's lucky the first missing episodes are after the shows big break into popularity meaning those inclined to record sound of the telly would likely be doing so), the TF audience would be young kids, many of who probably weren't even allowed to use the video themselves*.

Most of the ads I've seen on Youtube (and certainly the better quality ones, the Headmasters comic ad from '87 could well have anything happening in the psychedelic picture swirl that's left now) tend to be from the tail end of the line, late 80's/early 90's when most fans would have been older, and possibly even properly classing themselves as "fans" who looked out to record the commercials for the sake of it, plus cheaper tapes and so on.

Tellingly, even though Who would have had many adult fans by the time Transformers was going, most of what they were putting on their odds and sods tapes isn't actually any better picture quality than the TF adverts are now. Indeed, for the DVD's the restoration team tend to recreate trailers by simply taking the right clips and BBC globe and adding the soundtrack from fan tapes rather than use the pictures.

As a slim chance, it's possible the ad agencies themselves kept some masters as representation of their work (after all, it's fair to say it was a successful campaign and a good one to show off to new clients). But even if you could find out which agencies made which ads, and they're still going after a quarter century... Pre digital chunky master tapes (which IIRC are a good deal bigger than a normal VHS, depending on the format) take up room and it costs money to store properly. If you're a big ad agency doing lots of campaigns a year the room in the vault soon runs out and stuff from five, six years ago isn't so representative of your current work anymore. So it gets chucked.

Even with the home video market blooming at the time the idea that one day there'd be both a market for them and the means of getting them out there in a cost effective means wouldn't have occurred to anyone.

The Revenge of the Cybermen DVD has an excellent documentary on it about fans and their tapes (paying 800 pounds for a pirate copy of the Daemons in colour...) that sums up the period and the difficulties extremely well, it's not completely comparable because of the TF fans being younger but it gives a good overall impression and if it happens to have made its way onto the modern equivalent of buying a pirate video off some bloke in a pub it's worth a look, called Cheques Lies and Videotapes.


*If you were younger than 8 in the late 80's when you're parents started trusting you to use the video unsupervised don't tell me, I'll only feel inadequate.

secretcode wrote:The ones on the Shout Factory DVDs I have seem to be ripped from VHS/YouTube with little to no cleanup.

I've just seen a snippet of these and AAAAAARGH the blurred out kids' faces are frightening!


The quality of video is poor too. A real shame.

barney wrote:I've just seen a snippet of these and AAAAAARGH the blurred out kids' faces are frightening!

And it's something I've always found a bit dodgy as well, if they legally need need to track down the kids in the advert and get permission to use them (and possibly pay a residual fee as well) but can't/won't manage it blurring the faces seems a bit of a crap way round it. The kids are still there after all, they deserve the mollah.

IIRC the legal reason is the original contracts the actors signed didn't take into account any sort of home video release for the ads so new deals would have to be made. The same thing affect the "Season 5" openings as no one has a clue where Tommy is now. Though how hard they've looked...