Micro-Commando Diatron-5, better known as Space Transformers, is a perplexingly insane and incredibly low-quality pseudoanime straight from South Korea. The plot focuses around a Cyborg woman named Ivy, who defends the entire universe from enemies with her built-in evil-sensing computers. The enemy infects her with a virus. Now the only one to save her is Diatron-5, a Humongous Mecha shrunk down to microscopic size that goes in to fight the bacteria. Two kids, a battle station called the "Star Wars" and Diatron's inventor join her in the battle against evil. Evil being an androgynous woman named Mary, her brother with blue skin who looks suspiciously like Spock and their fleet of robots and forest green demon-like aliens.
It was dubbed twice; first with an American-sounding cast under the name Micro-Commando Diatron-5, which can be viewed here
, and later on under the name Space Transformers with a British-sounding cast (some being from Space Thunder Kids as well), released by infamous producer Joseph Lai, that can be downloaded here.
Bits and pieces of the film were redubbed and incorporated into Space Thunder Kids by Joseph Lai, in the same manner as the Godfrey Ho Ninja Movies.
Space Transformers provides examples of the following:
- All Your Base Are Belong to Us
- Apocalypse Maiden: Ivy
- Art Shift: The animation ranges from extremely poor to half-decent.
- Artistic License – Biology: So many instances. For the most egregious example, people do not have small galaxies inside their bodies.
- Battle of the Still Frames: There's a beautifully crappy example of this (sans the battle) torwards the end. A good 1 minute sequence of nothing but a handful of completely still frames of the titular mecha panning around the screen to make it look like it's flying in space, to the tune of a visibly improvised and trippy BGM track. There were absolutely no attempts to make the backgrounds loop evenly or even sync properly with the robot, at one point it just pans through a completely still robot + BG image, and in other, Diatron-5 starts inexplicably flying backwards.
- Batman Can Breathe in Space
- Bloodless Carnage: The red soldiers are shot down by Checker/Crackle, yet no wounds appear. Their clothes aren't even torn! However, this is probably due to the cheap animation rather than censorship.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Diatron-5 basically wipes out the entire enemy fleet with a single 5-shaped laser blast.
- Delicate and Sickly: Ivy
- "Fantastic Voyage" Plot: Perhaps the only one to involve a giant robot, and once inside Ivy's body, nothing at all even remotely resembles a normal human-body's insides. It's not even like Osmosis Jones where the white blood cells are people, there's just a whole complete galaxy and a planet with human kingdoms inside her body!
- Gasp!
- Hong Kong Dub: Two of them! Both with different Dub Name Changes.
- Incredible Shrinking Man: Gene and Karen along with their Combining Mecha are shrunk to enter Ivy's body and fight off the virus that's infected her (which is rather strangely portrayed as goblin-like warriors and shrunken enemy mecha).
- Literal Ass-Kicking: Biphon gets Mary to surrender by repeatedly kicking her in the butt.
- The Mockbuster: To their credit, the plot is fairly original (if insane), but almost everything else was ripped off from something else. Interestingly, it does not rip off Transformers, at least not directly. "Diatron-5" is actually Battle Buffalo, a robot from Takara's Diaclone toyline, which was also the source of about half the cast of G1, including Optimus, but Buffalo itself was never imported under the TF brand. Ironically, this film is probably the only reason anybody remembers it.
- There are also SD-ish, Robot Buddy sized facsimiles of Vifam and a Scopedog. They didn't even bother to rename the former, he's actually called Vifam in this.
- Also a bunch of character designs were lifted straight from Space Runaway Ideon, with minimal changes, like Cosmo's lookalike losing the afro and the evil general being just a blue-haired and gray-skinned Damido with more Spock like features.
- All of the above were due to the then-current South Korean ban on Japanese media. Korean audiences were fascinated with anime (mostly seen through bootlegs), and animation houses in Korea were happy to oblige with legal, if somewhat fly-by-night, product.
- Mysterious Waif: Ivy
- No Name Given: Ivy doesn't have a name in the Diatron-5 dub.
- Non-Dubbed Grunts: Especially jarring, considering the original voice actor sounded like a small boy, and the dub voice was an adult male.
- Orgasmic Combat: The sequence where Mary gets beaten up by Biphon sounds awfully like a rape scene if you have your eyes closed!
- Saving the World
- Shower Scene: Ivy's in the shower when the assassin sneaks into her house and shoots her.
- Stay In The Spaceship: The scientist tells the young girl this.
- Tag Team Suicide: Checker does this after Charlene is killed.
- Terminally Dependent Society: It's said multiple times that Earth is doomed without Ivy to devise their defense plans.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: In the Joseph Lai version, the red robot and the main male character's female sidekick don't appear or get mentioned anymore after they get captured by the villain.
