In the waning days of the Generation One era, the budget allocated to entertainment had been severely cut by Hasbro management. To keep the cartoon going into a fifth season it was decided to repackage old episodes with bookends featuring a live action puppet of Powermaster Optimus Prime interacting with a character named Tommy Kennedy (played by actor Jason Jankowski aka Jason Jansen). The writers of these segments used these intros and outros to name drop figures that were current at the time including the Pretender, Landmine and Quickswitch bu