Development
With the conclusion of the US Transformers cartoon series in 1987, Japan produced their first exclusive anime series, Transformers: The Headmasters, to supplement the fourth and final US season and to carry out the story concepts begun in The Transformers: The Movie and carried on through the third season, using the existing cast and adding the eponymous Headmasters into the mix. With the completion of the series, the evil Decepticons had finally been forced off Earth, and the stage was set for the beginning of Super-God Masterforce.
Although nominally occurring in the same continuity as the previous Transformers series, there was a very obvious effort on head writer Masumi Kaneda's part to make Masterforce a "fresh start", introducing an entirely new cast of characters from scratch, rather than using any of the previous ones. To this end, although the toys are mostly the same in both Japan and the West (barring some different color schemes), the characters which they represent are vastly different - most prominently, the toy known to Western audiences as Powermaster Optimus Prime is known as Ginrai in Masterforce, a human trucker who combines with a Transtector (a non-sentient Transformer body, a concept lifted from Headmasters) to become a Transformer himself. The other Powermaster toys (known in Japan as Godmasters) and the Headmaster figures released during that year were the same: human beings who become robots.
Read more about this topic: Transformers: Super-God Masterforce
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