The correct camera movement as the Constructicons shift to robot mode is included this time, though the footage is of a notably poorer quality, because they had to utilize the one-inch master tapes for the correct footage rather than the better-condition 35-millimeter print with the incorrect animation. The same folks from Rhino went on to form Shout Factory, using the same audiovisual assets, and the Shout Factory release corrected some of the more egregious errors pointed out to them by fans. The direction for the camera movement wasn't accomplished, so we get these dramatic shots of Bonecrusher's feet, Mixmaster's feet, etc. When this episode was originally released to DVD by Kid Rhino, they had been working with a lot of early, incomplete prints of first-season episodes, so there's a scene where the camera is supposed to pan up as the Constructicons change to robot mode. Each of the Constructicons has officially gotten to do something. Hook, the crane truck, lifts a third, unidentified component and adds it to the collection of Constructicon treasures. A kamikaze worker tries to ram Bonecrusher with another bulldozer, jumping out just before they collide, but Bonecrusher is by far the tougher of the two and emerges totally unscathed. Scavenger, a steam shovel, scoops up a power convertor and adds it to Long Haul's haul. Long Haul deploys a missile launcher (the Hasbro toy was equipped with this, but this is the only episode in which he uses it) and stops the human-driven construction vehicles from advancing Mixmaster, the cement truck who is described by Hasbro as a "chemistry lab on wheels," blasts acid at the vehicles that melts them into goop (but not before the drivers bail out, of course, because this is a family show). Scrapper, a front loader, snaps the cables holding the invention in place and it falls into the waiting Long Haul, a dump truck. "We are the Constructicons-we drive ourselves!" "No one drives us, stupid human!" balks the team leader, Scrapper. This trope was a common theme on Knight Rider, and it was used a few times for Transformers, but I think this episode was the most effective time it was employed on the show. The foreman is annoyed by the appearance of more laborers that he didn't ask for, until he realizes that the vehicles are driving themselves. (The disks are already Decepticon-purple, probably because visual designer Floro Dery was tasked with designing the Decepticon invention-of-the-week but wasn't told that they were a human invention that later gets stolen.) Suddenly, a fleet of construction vehicles appears from off in the distance, kicking up a huge dust cloud. Our episode begins at a construction site in the middle of nowhere, with the construction foreman (voiced by Corey Burton) providing some exposition about the energy disks that will draw power from the planet's natural magnetic field to provide electrical energy for the world. Glut, which you probably already knew, since it's got the Dinobots in it. The web site gives its original airdate as December 15th, 1984. "Heavy Metal War" was, I believe, the finale to the first season of Transformers, though due to the way syndication airdates sometimes differed, not every TV station played the episodes in the same order.
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