Head on! Head on! HEAD ON!
Today we’re taking a look at the second three heads out of that Headmasters box I snatched up — the three beasts. To get in the right frame of mind, here’s Hironobu Kageyama’s highly energetic opening theme to the 1987 TRANSFORMERS anime, THE HEADMASTERS. Remember, this is the version where the small Headmaster guys are all robots that combine with lifeless robot bodies, which is why we didn’t get it over here in the U.S.; in the U.S., the robots were all living Transformers whose heads were removed and reengineered into power suits for humanoid aliens called Nebulans. It was really weird, and never really made any sense. Heaven only knows how Hasbro would’ve tried to explain the animal Headmasters we’re looking at today …
A box of heads.
One of my favorite TRANSFORMERS gimmicks of all time is the Headmaster gimmick. You have a vehicle or a robotic animal that has a seat in it, like the Japanese DIACLONE cars, planes, dinosaurs, and bugs that — after some repainting and filing down of the sharp points — made up the bulk of the first two years of the TRANSFORMERS toy line. Unlike the TRANSFORMERS versions of those older toys, though, the Headmasters vehicles and animals actually come with drivers, blocky little armored guys who can move their arms and sit down, but are otherwise nigh to unarticulated. However, when the vehicle or animal transforms into a robot, the little armored guy ALSO transforms — into the robot’s head!
In Japan, the idea was that the little guy was a smaller robot that basically used the vehicle or animal as a kind of transformable mecha, while in the States we were offered up the confusing concept of “binary bonding,” where the little guy is a human being or humanoid alien in an armored suit, and the larger robot is a Transformer who had his own personality — so, two minds in one body. There wasn’t a lot of time to explore the concept in the cartoon, because it ended with the three-episode mini-series that introduced the Headmasters. The comics of the time didn’t do a lot with the idea until Simon Furman began writing two polar opposite takes on the concept. On the one hand we had the biggest Headmaster on the Autobot side, Fortress Maximus, who was binary bonded with the human Spike Witwicky. Spike abandoned his position as the head of Fortress Maximus, so their personalities remained distinct and they had a bit of a mental tug-of-war for control of their merged body and consciousness. On the other hand we had the biggest Headmaster on the Decepticon side, Scorponok, who by the time Furman was writing him self-identified as his humanoid identity, Lord Zarak. I believe he was simply following from former writer Bob Budiansky’s lead, but regardless, the way the character was written, it seemed that Scorponok’s own consciousness was gone, that Scorponok was merely a role that Zarak played for his Decepticon troops. He pretty much admits this to Optimus Prime in issue #74, as the story builds to the impending confrontation with Unicron.
Whatever the way it works in the fiction, the fun of the toys is that all the figures and heads are cross-compatible. Consequently, in Japan, Takara produced a handful of heads that didn’t appear in the cartoon and had no larger robot bodies they went with. You could use them as replacements if you lost the original heads, or you could use them as cool-looking alternatives to the “canon” figure heads. These heads now fetch big crazy money on the aftermarket — though it’s not like original Headmaster heads are cheap on their own. So when this item started popping up on the internet, heads turned, and money exchanged hands …
A beautiful window box full of men and animals who turn into heads.
