Watch Transformers G1 Free: 97 of 98 Official Episodes

The received wisdom about the original Transformers cartoon being free online is out of date, and pleasantly so. When the news went round, the story was that Hasbro had put season one on its own YouTube channel. Sixteen episodes, a nice gesture, roughly the length of a modern anime season.

That is not where it stopped. The channel now carries the run into all four seasons, out to the three-part finale that closed the show in 1987, and the coverage is very close to total.

I went and checked, because the gap between what was reported and what is now up is exactly the sort of thing that stays wrong for years.

What is up there

Episodes sampled across the whole run, at the start, at two points in the long second season, deep into the third and at the very last one. Every sample came back the same way: a Hasbro Pulse upload, around twenty-three minutes, which is the runtime the series is supposed to have, carrying an English broadcast master rather than a clip or a compilation.

The numbering deserves a note, because this is where archive uploads usually fall apart. Hasbro labels its uploads by season and position inside the season, so an episode reads as Season 2, E09. Our index numbers the series straight through from one to ninety-eight. Those two systems agree here: with a sixteen-episode first season, Season 2 E09 is episode twenty-five, and that is exactly where it sits. Checked at four points across three seasons and it held every time. Click episode fifty and you get episode fifty.

There is one gap. A single episode in the middle of the run is not on the channel, which is the sort of omission that happens to a forty-year-old library and is worth knowing about before you start rather than discovering at the moment it matters. The exact count and the exact shape of the run are on the list below, queried live, so they stay right as the channel changes.

Whether this counts as anime

It is a fair question and the answer is more interesting than the argument usually allows.

The show was animated in Japan, principally by Toei Animation, the studio that would go on to Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon and had already been making television animation for two decades. The scripts were American, the broadcast was American, the toy line driving the whole enterprise was American by way of Takara's Diaclone and Microman. The production was a genuine co-production, and the result is a cartoon that looks distinctly Japanese in its staging and distinctly American in its plotting.

You can see it most clearly in the transformation sequences, which are animated with a care the rest of the episode does not always get, and in the character acting, which is drawn to a Japanese television-animation grammar of held poses and sudden motion. Then somebody says a line of dialogue written for a syndicated American children's block and the two halves rub against each other. That friction is most of the charm.

How it holds up

Unevenly, and worth it.

The first season is the tightest thing here. It is short, it has a three-part opener that does the entire job of setting up the war, and it was made before the format had settled into repetition. The plots are absurd in a way that feels invented rather than templated, and the show has not yet worked out that it can solve any problem by introducing a new toy.

Season two is where the volume goes up. It is nearly fifty episodes, and it contains both the best and the worst of the series, sometimes in the same week. The animation quality swings hard depending on which subcontractor drew a given episode, and you learn to read the first thirty seconds for signs. When it lands, it lands: there are episodes in here doing genuinely strange things with scale, ghosts, time travel and a talking planet, and they commit.

Season three is a different show. The 1986 film had killed off most of the original cast, which is not part of this free run, and the series that comes back after it is set twenty years later with a new lineup, a harder edge and a colour palette to match. Some people find it the best stretch of the whole thing. Some people never forgave it. Both positions are defensible and you can now test them for nothing.

Season four is three episodes, a finale made under obvious constraint, and it is more interesting as an artefact than as television.

Where to start

Episode one, and do not skip the opener. More Than Meets the Eye is a three-parter and it is the only sustained piece of world-building the show ever does. Everything after it assumes you watched it.

If you want the highlights instead of the whole run, the second season rewards dipping. The episodes stand alone almost entirely, so you can jump around without losing anything, which is not true of much television made since.

One thing this free run does not include is the 1986 animated film, which sits between seasons two and three and is the reason season three has a different cast. It is not on the channel. Going straight from season two into season three without it will be confusing in a way that is nobody's fault but the licensing map's.

Why watch it here

The episodes play inline on the title's own page, in order, with the numbering already reconciled against Hasbro's own labels, which is the part that took the work. You can go from the list to episode fifty without translating between two numbering schemes or scrubbing a four-hour compilation upload to find where an episode starts.

The count on this page is a live query rather than a number I typed. If Hasbro adds the missing episode, it appears. If a video comes down, it goes. That matters more for archive uploads than for anything else on this site, because publisher back-catalogue channels are exactly where free windows open and close without announcement.