were revisited and expanded to truly flesh out the show's history. Running to 30 episodes, the third season ended with the two-part The Return of Optimus Prime, bringing the legendary Autobot leader back to life. Broadcast in Japan once again, the series was retitled Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers: 2010 (or Transformers: 2010 for short), advancing its setting to the eponymous year. 1987 marked the end of the original American series, mirroring its beginning with a three-part miniseries entitled The Rebirth. Penned by regular series writer David Wise (who had previously written several of the series' mythology-building episodes), this finale story introduced the Headmasters and Targetmasters, as well as several other characters. Concluding with the restoration of Cybertron's Golden Age, the Decepticons stole the final scene of the series to prove that their threat still lingered. It is unknown the exact reason the American series ended after the movie, though it is assumed that Sunbow had lost its contract to keep its cartoons running by 1987 (the final Transformers episode "The Rebirth" coincided with the final G.I. Joe episode "G.I. Joe: the Movie"). Additionally, a fifth season of sorts was aired in 1988, serving as a kind of "best of" collection of the series. The most notable feature of this twenty-episode run was the new intro and concluding segments added to the episodes, which consisted of Powermaster Optimus Prime (rendered in a mixture of puppetry and stop motion animation) relating the events of the episodes to a human boy named Tommy Kennedy. The opening sequence comprised animation taken from contemporary toy adverts, and Prime occasionally referred to new toy characters like Cloudburst. Apparently never re-run after its original airing, the series aired More Than Meets the Eye Parts 1-3, Five Faces of Darkness Parts 1-5, Dark Awakening, the out-of-place Surprise Party, The Return of Optimus Prime Parts 1-2, The Rebirth Parts 1-3, and most notably, The Transformers: The Movie, split up and aired in five segments, with Stan Bush's music video for "The Touch" included in the final part. Transformers: The Headmasters Rather than import The Rebirth as a conclusion, Takara, the Japanese producers of the Transformers toyline, opted instead to continue the Generation 1 universe by creating the full-length 35-episode series, Transformers: The Headmasters (two additional clips episodes were produced after the fact for direct-to-video release). Supplanting The Rebirths position in Japanese continuity, The Headmasters occurred one year after