Toransufômâ: Scramble City Hatsudôhen

This OVA is split in two parts: the first half is just recap and recycled footage from the American cartoon episodes 'More Than Meets the Eye' and 'Master Builders', resulting in slightly over 10 minutes of actually new footage.

Even if the original Transformers cartoon was basically just half-hour toy commercial, it was never quite so blatant about it as Scramble City is. SC basically uses that 10 minutes of new "story" to show nothing but big robots fighting, which it uses as an excuse to throw all the season 2 gestalts on the screen, silently telling children "do you have these yet?".

Scramble City was meant to bridge the 20-year gap between season 2 and *The Movie* and not season 3 as you are most commonly told. The Movie actually IS part of the Japanese continuity, and although it didn't make it to the far east until 1989, most people did know the basic premise of the film, thanks to generous coverage by TV Magazine which published much of Transformers printed material at the time.

However, it does not fit into the American continuity for one big reason; the episode ends with Trypticon making his debut, and if you've seen Five Faces of Darkness, you know that he hasn't even been built yet (the Japanese dub of the cartoon changed this). Scramble City was meant to be the first part in a series, but for some reason, no other parts were made. "Scramble City 2" is not a sequel, but merely a retelling of this one using the actual toys with stop animation.

Despite having received something of a cult status in the west due to being a part of Japanese G1 Transformers that never made it into the English-speaking territories, I have to say that you'll be better off not having seen this. Like I said, there's only about 10 to 12 minutes of actually new animation, and the storyline is nonexistent.