I didn't watch as much cartoons as you had growing up but I did catch the Transformers Animated movie on DVD a few years back. Is the Japanese version different from the English version? I do know that the film had cheesy 80s music.
The japanese version is butchered compared to the original english release, they added so much new dialogue that there is literaly no part in the film where there is ANY silence effectively killing any atmosphere the movie had.
The scenes that suffered the worst was the attack on the autobot shuttle where they decided to give death screams to Brawn, Prowl, Ratchet and Ironhide rather than leave it silent and let the visuals and music do the work. The second scene to really suffer was Optimus' death scene were again the japense dub just wouldn't shut up-effectively ruining the whole scene.
Remember this isn't a dubbed japanese film Waifu-this along side the whole G1 cartoon was an english cartoon later dubbed into japanese. (Although there was three japanese only sequals)