Raymond T. of Seibertron has been in contact with Metrodome over future Transformers DVD releases in the UK. Here’s the email he received from them

“I’ve no news of the 20th Anniversary of the movie I’m afraid but we are planning a summer release of Takara – Headmasters.

We’ve managed to track down all the original 1991 Japanese Takara masters for Headmasters. These are better quality than the ones we have in the US and they are complete. Tracking them down has been a bit of a job.

My plan at the moment, is to release a 4 disc DVD using these original Japanese masters with the original Japanese audio and we’ll create accurate English subtitles. The original dubbing by Star was pretty dreadful, so my thoughts are to keep it intact, as it was originally broadcast in Japan.

However, I am also looking into the possibility of copying the English audio dub from the US masters and placing it as an optional audio track on the DVD. This is only possible if they are exactly the same so we’ll have to do technical comparisons and configurations etc. and this may end up being too expensive and the US master list is not complete so we won’t be able to do this to all at the moment but I am looking into it.

As for re-dubbing. I’ve dismissed that for the moment as I think it will be far too expensive.”

Chris McFeely, who has worked on the Seasons 3/4, Season 1 and RID Boxsets, has provided some more info

Yeah, I can confirm that what Seibertron have posted is accurate – this is the news I was waiting for permission to release, but Ken hasn’t replied to me in two weeks, and since Seibertron have it up now, what the hey.

The news, of course, was that Metrodome have acquired the original Japanese masters for “Headmasters.” In the recent company restructuring, I’m sad to say that Jane Lawson, a lovely woman who was the product manager for Transformers and our link to what the company was up to, was made redundant. Ken Law is currently handling the product while searching for a new manager. Anyway, where Jane’s approach to Headmasters was “We have the dub, and we’ll see if we can get the Japanese,” after this development, Ken’s approach is “We’ve got the original Japanese, now we’ll see if we can put the dub on it.” The original version is now paramount. Personally, I’ve reccommended that the dub be included, just for the sake of giving viewers a choice. That bit about the US master list not being complete is news to me, however.

Regarding the movie, though, last I heard an Autumn release is planned. Which reminds me, I need to bring up the business of a fan commentary to Ken again!

Unfortunately, and for whatever reason, they only have 17 English masters, as opposed to the 35 Japanese ones they have.

Also, last year, it was reported that TVNihon and Wolfpack Productions would be doing the subtitles, but that’s off the cards now.

Chris McFeely has posted a update he received from Metrodome

‘Transformers The Movie – Reconstructed’ will be released on 29th August 2005. We’re going back to the original picture negative and doing a brand new telecine. It will be 16 9 Widesceen Anamorphic, but will have curtains as the viewable image is 1.33 1 and 1.78 1 and it changes scene by scene. We wanted to give the fans the maximum possible Transformer image. Everything the laminators drew will be visible and this will be the first time anyone, anywhere would have seen the whole movie in its original form. It should be quite something”.

“There is no convenient way to refer to this non-standard format of film transfer. However the process we applied can be described thus

35mm film has a native aspect ratio of 1.33 1.

This particular 35mm negative had been shot by several different animators using various size gates, therefore the framing is inconsistent.

In order to respect the full film frame and place it within the wide screen video format of 16 9, the telecine was set-up to create an anamorphic transfer which results in a side curtained 1.33 image within a 1.78 ratio.

Due to the inconsistent framing within the negative the image size changes from shot to shot.

The resulting master preserves the entire field of potential viewable negative.”

“‘Transformers Takara Headmasters’ will be released in a 4 disc box set on 26th September. This will have brand new English subtitles and the original English dub so you can watch it in whatever way you want.”

Discuss this here in the forums.