@Socius: S.M.U.R.F.S. for everyone! The Smurfs are communists, so its creator won't pay a burgeoise lawyer to make an unjust capitalistic lawsuit against anyone who creates a movie about them. Now maybe he left this world, and then a corporate got hold of the smurfs copyrights alongside
Mafiaa and will get their lawyers ready to make additional profits from sues.

As of the original topic, I never saw much on transformers, actually "oldschool" stuff I saw and liked a long time ago was
Jaspion,
Jiraya and
Jiban among other
tokusatsus(Except of course Power Rangers). I heard about
Changeman too, but never saw it. I think all those mentioned series have one or more resemblances to Tranformers, specially the "giant robots" stuff.