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I've been reading through Kozo Morishita's autobiography and it reveals some fascinating details on G1 Transformers production when he was directing it
>He was brought on to Transformers while he was working on Albegas
>Apparently, Morishita was appointed director of the Transformers TV show after he impressed Sunbow and Hasbro with his GI Joe toy commercials
>It was animated by Studio No.1 for most episodes, the studio responsibile for their most famous series like Harlock, Mazinger, and Dangaurd Ace. This also explains the large number of important anime industry people who worked on the show.
>Morishita frequently had to travel between the USA and Japan during production, advising production phase.
>G1 Transformers brought so much money to Toei (both from Hasbro and Takara) that it helped fund the Saint Seiya adaptation, with Saint Seiya borrowing many creative elements from Transformers as another toy driven anime series
Tl;dr G1 Transformers is pretty important to 80s anime and the impression that its just another outsourced US cartoon to Japan that Japan had no creative input on and was viewed as such there is sorely mistaken misinfo. There's so much production info on the Sunbow show (especially with how it relates to directly to Saint Seiya) that I'm surprised none of this has been translated and shared before.
