Rigged Online Games Mirror Real Life

I talked before about this game called Dice Dreams that came with my phone.  It was fun for a little while but as I wrote about, with each level the cost to build the "set" to advance to the next level kept getting higher and higher and taking longer and longer--unless of course you're willing to shell out a bunch of money.

Finally it got to the point a few months ago where I just abandoned the game and uninstalled it from my phone because it was getting to the point of tedium.  So I needed a new game as sort of my backup game when I had nothing to do on Empires & Puzzles, which is my primary game.  

I tried this game called Royal Match because it said it didn't require in-app purchases.  And of course it doesn't, but like Dice Dreams it gets to that point where if you don't start making in-app purchases you're going to get nowhere fast.  The levels in that game are mostly like a Candy Crush-type thing.  You know, match 3 or more things to clear the level.  It starts out pretty easy and I blazed through the first 300 levels in a week or so.  But then they start making the arbitrary maximum number of moves a lot lower, so basically the only way to win is to get a huge combination every single turn.  Or of course buy a bunch of continues and/or items.  When you first start playing you get some free items and can earn more, but as the levels get harder and harder, you slowly dwindle your supply.  The goal as always being to make you spend money.  Having been through that with Candy Crush years earlier, I quit by the time I got to level 500-something.

I briefly tried a couple of others before Facebook advertised a game called Transformers Earth Wars.  As you know if you actually read this blog, I've loved Transformers since the 80s, so a game featuring that was up my alley.  Instead of a match-3 game it's more of an RPG.  Like Empires & Puzzles, you build a base and mine raw materials (alloy, energon, and then "ore-13") to build more stuff.  You also get "crystals" to recruit main characters and "chips" to recruit the smaller Targetmasters or Micromasters, which for some reason includes smaller characters like Rattrap from Beast Wars.

The game won some love from me right away because I started out with Jetfire, my favorite Transformer.  And then it gave me a few more Jetfires:  the weird "Cybertron" one, the one based on the GI Joe Sky Striker (aka an F-14), and the Shattered Glass alternate universe variant.  I got some of my other faves like Grapple, Skids, Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime, Whirl, and two versions of Optimus Prime.  It was pretty fun for the first week or two getting new characters and building up my base and advancing on the story campaign and so on.  I even unlocked the Decepticons so I could recruit Megatron, Starscream, Bludgeon, and so on.  You don't have to build a separate base for them.

You can eventually get "Combiners" but to do that you have to get 5 characters of 3 stars or higher.  And then there's some other thing you have to do so they can go together or something.  I think right now the most I have is 3 characters in a set for "Optimus Maximus."  You can also get Titans like Omega Supreme, Metroplex, Fortress Maximus, Trypticon, or Scorponok, but I'm not really sure how.

After a week or two the game started to do like a lot of these games.  It took longer and longer to advance to the next level and get new stuff for my base.  I couldn't make most of my characters more powerful because to "research" them to the next level could take over a day--unless of course you pay.  

Far more annoying to me was even though I had probably less than half of the characters, I kept summoning duplicates.  Those duplicates get recycled into some "shards" that can eventually used to summon new duplicates!  At least that's how it starts to feel.  I mean one time I had 9 summons and got 8 duplicates and 1 lesser version of a character I already have.  Another time I had 4 summons and got 3 2-star Arcees.  3 out of 4 tries!  I'm no C-3PO, but I'm pretty sure the odds of that happening if the system were truly random are pretty fucking remote.  Programmers might think they're being clever to rig things this way, but when something like that happens, it's like a cold shower and I think, "Well, this sucks."  Then I don't really want to play anymore.

And it sucks because I love Transformers and I like collecting the different characters just like I did in real life until they sort of got to the point where there weren't many new ones I wanted and I had no money anyway.  I want to play your game because I think it's pretty neat as sort of a Transformers RPG.  But you're making it so hard to like your game when you rig it so I can't hardly ever get new characters who are any good or upgrade the characters I have.

I know that the companies making games need money, but A) I don't have money and B) Even when I spend money it'll screw me over.  Thus there's not much incentive for me to spend what little I can afford.  That's how it's been with Empires & Puzzles for a while now but I don't want to quit because I've invested so much time and energy into building my camp and roster and so on.  Plus, ALL of these games are rigged the same way.  Unless you're going to play free solitaire or something, they're all going to do this bullshit to try to coerce you to spend money.

But the problem is the more they try to coerce you, the more it becomes drudgery instead of fun.  A month or so ago, Empires & Puzzles added a new list of daily goals that give you meager rewards.  I call it "homework" because that's basically what it is; it's like getting a bunch of assignments to do in your spare time.  That's really not fun.  I mean, who really likes homework?  Kids play games instead of doing homework, right?  The Transformers game has its own homework, though less so.  Each day there are 3 new goals to get points you can use to get meager rewards.  And you can eventually send your characters on "missions" that get them experience and some meager rewards.  The experience can help at first but when you can't "research" most of the characters, that starts to be less and less of an incentive.  Mostly I just do it to get some meager rewards like "Z-Energon" that can eventually be used to research two characters at the same time.  Though of course it'll probably take months to save up that much--unless I pay.

Everything is geared to making you pay, and pay, and pay.  And when you don't have money, it's kind of a reflection of how much it sucks being poor in real life.  In real life, most of the best experiences are reserved for those who can pay for them:  vacations, space tourism, fancy cars, good food/booze/drugs, and so on.  Occasionally us poors get some schadenfreude like when those rich guys died in that sub, but that's not too often.  Usually we have to content ourselves with what we can get and maybe we tell ourselves it's just as good or even better.  Like people who would say a McDonald's cheeseburger is as good or better than some fancy Kobe beef burger made by a famous chef.  Yeah, sure it is.  [eye roll]  Or like saying my Ford Focus is just as good as some rich dude's Bentley.  Ha ha, sure it is.

So eventually these games turn kind of sad because they only reinforce the income gap.  The 1% can afford to buy access to get all of the characters and make their base totally awesome.  Another percentage can buy a little access to get some good stuff.  And poor shits like me have to scrimp and save to make even the slightest progress.  It really does get sad and kinda depressing.

It would be nice to have a world where everyone could get equal access to fun stuff and nice things.  And where even our games aren't rigged to try to bleed us dry.  But that's not likely to happen, is it?

Stuff I Watched: Late June-Late-July

 Here we go again.  About 2/3 of the movies on this list fall into two categories:  Stuff from Tony Laplume's list of 2021 movies that sounded interesting or crappy cheap Bruce Willis movies.  Not a lot of big movies because there hasn't been much coming out in the last month or so.  

Transformers:  Rise of the Beasts:  This really proved they learned nothing from the moderate success of Bumblebee.  Instead, they go right back to their bad habits, though maybe a few less bad jokes and stereotypical accents.  Like the 2010s X-Men movies they set this in the past even though it largely negates the movies that came out in the 2000s and 2010s.  The hook this time was they incorporate the Maximals from Beast Wars...and then do almost nothing with the Maximals.  Like most of the Bayformers, they have almost no personality; in this case they don't even have stereotypical accents or gimmicks to make them stand out in any way.  Rhinox and Cheetor barely get any lines while Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh is wasted as Airazor and Ron Perlman is wasted as Optimus Primal.  The bad guy is Scourge, who's almost nothing like the Scourge introduced in the 1986 movie.  But I guess they couldn't use Megatron/Galvatron so they had to come up with someone else who could be a bad guy.  For some reason he has spider or dog bot henchmen and there's a "Nightbird" who's nothing like the Nightbird in the original series and some other henchman who turns into a tow truck.  But who cares?  They have no personality either.  Bumblebee is "killed" early on so he's not in most of it.  Optimus Prime is nothing like how Optimus Prime should be; like in previous movies they make him a violent psychopath, who grudgingly learns to respect humans.  If that Optimus Prime died, I wouldn't have shed a tear like the original dying in 1986.  Wheeljack is nothing like Wheeljack.  Arcee is just there.  I didn't have any idea who "Stratosphere" was because I guess they basically made it for this movie, though I guess there was a toy for the second or third movie in 2009-2011.  Mirage is voice by Pete Davidson (ugh) and for some reason turns into a Porsche 911, which literally was Jazz in the original toys.  

Most of it focuses on puny humans when in most Transformers series the humans are just sidekicks.  There's a Latino guy who has a sick brother and is going to steal Mirage to make money.  And there's a black girl who's being overlooked at her job in a museum.  Then they join with the Autobots to find this movie's McGuffin:  the "transwarp key."  What is it?  Does it matter?  No.

Watching the movie on Paramount+ on my TV that's something like 4K, I can't even say the effects were good.  They actually looked pretty shitty in parts.  People who whined about Ant-Man 3 would definitely have a beef with this.

Like 2021's Snake Eyes, it really irritates me as a fan of the universe how little they manage to get right.  I'm not sure the many screenwriters watched a single second of Beast Wars or even the previous Transformers movies.  They should stop trying to do these big stories and just go back to "a boy/girl and his/her car that turns into a giant robot" stories.  That's the only way they can seem to make this work. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  About the only cool thing is the one human is recruited for GI Joe, hinting Hasbro is still trying to create a "cinematic universe" though with how this movie has done, I'm not sure it'll happen or even if this planned trilogy will happen.  Since the human was a communications guy I checked but he isn't named for Breaker or Dial-Tone, the two main GI Joe communications guys.)

High Heat:  No it's not a movie adaptation of the baseball video game from the 2000s.  My quip on Facebook:  imagine if Black Widow, instead of joining SHIELD and the Avengers, had opened a restaurant with Don Johnson?  That's basically the premise.  Ana, a former Russian agent (Olga Kurylenko of Black Widow, Quantum of Solace, and Oblivion--the Tom Cruise one) met Don Johnson and they got married.  And now in part thanks to some mob money they're opening a new restaurant.  It's going great until the mob shows up to burn the place down for insurance.  Then Ana has to use her particular set of skills--the one that doesn't involve cooking.  Overall it was surprisingly good, a mixture of humor and action without trying to ape a Tarantino or Guy Ritchie movie like others have done.  Though besides Kurylenko and Johnson there's no real big-name talent, it's pretty well done.  Better than I would have expected. It was also on Hulu.  (3.5/5)

The Bachelors:  I saw this on Amazon after I watched that Yellow Bird on the previous entry and it looked interesting.  It's an indie drama starring JK Simmons as a husband and father whose wife dies so he moves with his teenage son to a private school in LA.  While he meets a French teacher (Julie Delpy, who was in all those movies with Ethan Hawke), his son meets a girl in French class who cuts herself.  There are some good moments that get a bit dark...and then the movie wusses out by in the end falling back on easy answers.  Can't get over your wife's death?  Forget talking to a shrink, drugs, and shock therapy (which like the "Mind flayer" in The Mandalorian has been better calibrated these days to not be as bad as in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) and instead just get rid of all your wife's shit.  Then go on a drive with the hot French teacher, your son, and the girl who cuts herself.  Problem solved!  Um...probably not.  But I guess in the real world it would take years and years to resolve the problem and who has the time? (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Kevin Dunn plays the school headmaster and was also in Transformers, which used "headmasters" as a gimmick.  That was really more of a bad joke than fun fact.)

Let's Kill Ward's Wife:  Also on Amazon, this indie crime comedy.  Ward (Donald Faison) has a real bitch of a wife.  His friends start to think, "We should just kill her."  Then one does, sorta accidentally.  One friend (Patrick Wilson) finds out online how to dispose of the body while the murderer and his wife find it sexually thrilling, Ward finds it liberating, and the only guy with no family is freaking out.  And then...it just ends.  At only 83 minutes this really needed to be longer.  I mean, usually in something like this there's a guy falling apart and they have to keep him silent and there's usually a cop who gets on their trail...but nope.  I guess they got away perfectly clean.  Hooray? (2.5/5)

The Virtuoso:  This isn't about someone playing musical instruments.  This is about Anson Mount as an assassin who has a job with some collateral damage.  Then he goes to a small town in the Poconos to find out who or what "White Rivers" is and in the process finds out some other assassins are in town.  It's slow but tense and well-crafted.  Voiceover can be annoying sometimes, but Mount's rich, soothing tones are nice; he should do relaxation videos.  It mostly avoids the cliches of assassin movies.  My only complaint is Anthony Hopkins should probably just retire; his soliloquy at one point was not really great but who's going to tell him to do another take, right?  It could have used someone a little more spry.  Abbie Cornish, Eddie Marsan, and a chubby David Morse also appear so it's a decent cast.  If not A-list then maybe B+ list.  (3.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Like The Ghostwriter or Layer Cake the main character's name is never given.  The credits just list the characters as "The Virtuoso," "The Waitress," "The Mentor," and even "The Dude," but not THAT the Dude; he does not abide in this movie.)

Needle in a Timestack:  Like The Time Traveler's Wife or The Lake House or other things, this is a love story but with a sci-fi twist.  The twist takes nearly a half-hour to show up though.  First we have Nick and Janine, a happy black middle class couple in the not-too-distant future.  Then all the sudden there's like this sort of tidal wave effect and everyone is just like, "Oh, another time slip."  Because apparently people who have enough money can travel in time and sometimes there are ripples that can change things.  There are even companies promising to safeguard your data during a time slip.  The first time it happens not much changes except the couple's dog is a cat.  But then there's a much bigger time slip and suddenly Nick is married to Alex, the girl he was seeing before Janine.  And Janine is with Tommy (Orlando Bloom) a rich guy who presumably is the one who changed things.  Then there's another time slip that leaves Nick with no one until the end where maybe things will end well.  Or maybe not?  I guess it's up to you. At one point early on Nick wonders if they used to have kids and it shows them playing with kids, but this point is never brought up again.

Overall it's a good story.  A little slow in parts.  Probably could have been cut by at least a half-hour if not cut down to a 45-50 minute episode of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror.  I think both shows have probably done something similar.  And shows like The Outer Limits or whatever.  Still, it'd probably be a good watch with your significant other on Valentine's Day or an anniversary or date night.  Just saying. (3.5/5) (Fun Fact:  this is based on a story by Robert Silverberg, which I'm sure is pretty different from this since it was probably written a long time ago.)

Settlers:  This is a somewhat slow sci-fi movie in the tradition of Solaris or Moon.  It focuses on a family on Mars.  Apparently it's far enough in the future that there's been enough terraforming or whatever that they don't need spacesuits to walk around and can breathe and everything.  (I guess spacesuits are expensive to film in and probably hard to act in, especially for a kid.)  Then the family comes under attack and young Remmy's parents are killed.  The last third or so of the movie posits the question:  what would it have been like if young Bruce Wayne and Joe Chill had been stranded on a desert island together?  By that I mean, what if you were forced to live with the dude who killed your parents?  It's kind of icky and grim.  The end was pretty predictable.  I literally predicted it about 10 minutes in advance.  Like Needle in a Timestack, it leaves it up to you, the viewer, to decide how you want it to end.  Always kind of a dick move.  Still it wasn't bad overall. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  South Africa stands in for Mars.)

Die in a Gunfight:  This is supposed to be sort of like if Romeo and Juliet had survived but like Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca been separated for a few years before getting back together.  There's copious amounts of narration by Billy Crudup that's reminiscent of Ron Howard in Arrested Development and some crude animation.  Then the story gets underway and it wasn't really very interesting.  Honestly I couldn't really pay much attention.  I started reading instead.  The attempts to translate the Montagues and Capulets to modern day as rich media companies didn't really work.  The lovers, Ben & Mary, had very little chemistry.  And why the hell did Ben jump in the way of a bullet when he had a gun and could have just shot the guy instead?  It was pretty lame. (2/5)

Poker Face:  This isn't the Peacock series made by Rian Johnson.  This is a straight-to-streaming movie directed by and starring Russell Crowe.  He plays an aging rich guy who is dying.  He invites all his old friends to his mansion ostensibly for a poker game.  And then he slips them a truth serum drug so they reveal some secrets.  One guy reveals he told his brother about Russell Crowe's house and all the art inside.  And guess what?  The brother shows up with a goon and an art expert to steal the valuable art.  So then it turns into Panic Room as they go to a panic room--until Crowe's wife and daughter show up.  Some very mild mayhem ensues and things wrap up pretty easily.  It really wasn't as interesting or exciting as I thought it'd be.  A big chunk of the movie is just Crowe hanging out in an art gallery and meeting with a guru to get the truth serum drug.

From the description, I thought this movie was going to be like this old 70s movie on the Rifftrax site called Sisters of Death where a guy lures this sorority to his remote mansion to find out who killed his daughter 7 years earlier and then they start dying one-by-one.  Instead, like I said, it becomes more like a stripped-down Panic Room.  There's not even much poker in it!  And I'm not sure why one of his friends is played by Liam Hemsworth, who looks like an off-season Santa Claus.  Looking it up on IMDB, Hemsworth would only be 32 and in the movie Russell Crowe's character is 57, so how could they be childhood friends?  It really makes no sense.  There had to be another way to work Hemsworth into the plot if it was that important for him to be in it.  Overall it's competently made but not all that interesting.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Crowe does some of the music for the movie, but I don't think he sings.  So viewers are spared that.  At one point I was thinking if Russell Crowe dyed his hair gray he would be great in an Ernest Hemingway biopic.)

The Little Things:  This was made by WB during the pandemic, so that's why I had never really heard much about it until I saw it on Hulu and finally watched it.  Maybe it was on HBO Max before I got rid of HBO or it might have been one of those where you could watch it at home for $20 or some absurd price but if so I never watched it.  The movie stars Denzel Washington as a Kern County deputy who goes to LA to pick up a piece of evidence.  But then he gets involved in the investigation of a serial killer that's led by Rami Malek.  They start investigating and you know the bad guy is going to be Jared Leto by that Family Guy bit on Law & Order logic where he was the only other big name we hadn't seen yet.  Except...is he the killer?  Or just a weirdo who wants to mess with the cops?  The answer is...inconclusive.  Overall while well made it's kind of slow.  No big chase scenes or anything like that.  It's supposed to be taut and gritty but ends up more sleepy and bland.  But Jared Leto gets hit with a shovel, which I found as satisfying as Pete Davidson getting shot in the face in The Suicide Squad.  You might want to stop and rewind that part a few times to savor it. (2.5/5) (Fun Facts:  the movie takes place sometime in the early 90s for...reasons.  I watched it on July 19th and on the door of one victim's refrigerator was a flyer advertising the then-unknown band No Doubt playing the Roxy on July 19th.  Serendipity!) 

Copshop:  I remember seeing commercials for this during the pandemic in 2021.  It's the kind of movie I probably would have rented on Redbox or whatever, but I never got around to it.  Then Tony Laplume did a mini-review of it and I found it on Peacock, so I watched it.  And wished I hadn't.

The movie is from Joe Carnahan, who after the fairly decent Narc has spent most of his career as a wanna-be Tarantino or Guy Ritchie with movies like Smokin' Aces.  This is just another of those.  A long-haired Frank Grillo gets himself arrested by punching a black female cop named Val Young.  She takes him back to a sheriff's office in Gun Lake, Nevada (GUN Lake, hardy har har) where soon enough Gerard Butler is brought in for drunk driving.  Butler is looking to kill Grillo but then things get more complicated when another assassin (Toby Huss of King of the Hill) shows up.  And supposedly exciting mayhem ensues but it was mostly just dumb and boring.  I guess we should be thankful Carnahan stopped at two wacky assassins for this one.

The problem is there are no characters I could really care about.  Grillo keeps whining about his family but that's all the depth his character has.  Butler has a sense of honor or something but there's very little to him.  Huss is just annoying.  Val Young is supposed to be the hero but the only backstory they give her is she has a spouse (not shown) and her grandpa or great-grandpa was a Nazi soldier in North Africa.  Ick.  The other cops in the "copshop" are less competent than the cast of Reno 911.  Really Lieutenant Dangle and company probably would have wrapped this up sooner.  It drones on and on for a while and in the end there's not even really any final resolution.  And Young's imitating Robocop's gun drawing technique really never had a payoff.  Just saying. (2/5)

Invincible: Atom Eve:  This wasn't exactly a TV episode and wasn't exactly a movie as it's about 55 minutes.  It's a prequel to Amazon's Invincible TV series that focuses on Atom Eve.  She has the power to control molecules and stuff.  She's sort of a cross between Captain Atom and a Green Lantern in how she can make stuff with "sparks" of energy.  This gives her origin story as being born to a woman with some kind of unnatural ability in a government facility.  The government doctor (Stephen Root) who helped to create Samantha Eve whatever her last name is, gives her to a normal family, but it soon becomes clear she doesn't really fit with them or anyone else.  By the time she's 12 she starts to fight crime though the doctor warns her not to because the government will come after them--which it does with freaks created from her mom's DNA.  Overall it was really good.  While it had some violence, it wasn't quite as graphic and gory as in Invincible.  I really wish I had watched the show more recently or read the comics more recently because I couldn't remember what all her deal was supposed to be except she becomes disillusioned with traditional superheroing and wants to do more to help people.  I don't remember if she used her Dark Phoenix mode in the main show either or if that's something that might come up later.  I wish this had been a little longer to maybe get into more about her superhero career and stuff before she met Invincible in high school.  Anyway, even if you didn't watch Invincible you could still watch that. (4/5) (Fun Fact:  A needless cookie scene shows us what Invincible is up to during that time...which isn't much.)

White Elephant:  The problem for this cheap straight-to-streaming movie I watched on Hulu is they spent a bunch of money to cast Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, and Michael Rooker.  Rooker is the only one who really does much.  So almost all of the other roles go to nobodies, which includes most of the important roles to the story.  The movie is about a small town in Georgia that for some reason has a bunch of powerful gangsters.  Willis plays the head bad guy, who has Rooker and a Latino former Marine kill some other bad guys.  A couple of local cops see them and while one is killed, the other (Olga Kurylenko) escapes and goes on the run.  Meanwhile, Rooker starts to have second thoughts because it's his dead wife's birthday.

At this point in his career, with his health issues, there's not much Bruce Willis can do.  Meanwhile, John Malkovich contributes pretty much nothing except a nonsensical ramble about ancient Greek justice, which would probably be noted "citation needed" on Wikipedia.  So they spent most of their casting budget on two old guys who hardly do anything.  Rooker is pretty good but the script doesn't help much.  We don't really get into the meaning of the title until about 3/4 of the way into the movie, when it barely matters.  It would have been better to take Malkovich's paycheck and use it to hire someone to play the Latino Marine who isn't about as menacing as a parking garage valet.  And besides budgetary reasons, why are all these gangsters hanging out in some tiny Georgia town instead of Atlanta or Savannah?  It made little sense.  While it's not boring, it's only barely passable entertainment. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  Rooker and Willis previously appeared together in an "original" movie on Tubi called Corrective Measures.  That was probably a little better than this.)

Paradise City:  No it's not a biopic of Guns N Roses.  It's another cheap action movie on Hulu!  Made by some of the same companies as White Elephant and with the same problem:  they spent money casting old guys who don't do a lot and leave most of the real stuff to actors who should probably only be guesting on an NCIS show.  One of the old guys is again Bruce Willis but this time he's the father of the guy who eventually turns out to be the hero--Blake Jenner.  Is he one of those Jenners?  I shudder to think.  Anyway, after Willis is seemingly killed, his son teams with Stephen Dorff for a little while to find the ones responsible.  But then Dorff is captured or something so most of the movie is Jenner and a Hawaiian woman running around Maui and Savannah-as-Hawaii to find the bad guys, who of course are led by John Travolta.  Anyway, it's slightly better than White Elephant but not a whole lot.  At least everyone probably got a week or two in Maui out of it. (2.5/5) (Fun Facts:  The Hawaiian girl's name is "Savannah" and they filmed part of the movie in Savannah!  To escape detection for crimes years earlier, Travolta's character gets plastic surgery; it's too bad the old him didn't look like Nicolas Cage for a whole Face Off thing.)

Wrong Place:  To complete the trilogy of crappy 2022 Bruce Willis movies I watched on Hulu--this!  It kind of irked me right away when Willis's daughter finds out she has cancer and has to have surgery and radiation therapy.  Then his wife at a dinner with him starts blathering about "God's plan"...and then she dies on the way home when they hit a deer.  So "God's plan" was to give his daughter cancer and then kill his wife?  Seems like a shitty plan to me.

We fast-forward a year to where the daughter might be a little skinny but otherwise doesn't look like she just had radiation treatments months earlier.  I mean she has long hair and everything.  Her father has retired from the local police force but starts working as a night watchmen for a pawn shop.  A couple of biker gang meth dealers chase a guy to the back door of the pawn shop and he wounds/busts one while the guy they were chasing dies.  The other biker guy takes Willis's daughter hostage to try to get the other guy sprung.

It was all pretty boring.  Again because Willis can't do enough to support the whole movie, the lion's share of the acting falls to unknowns.  I got bored so after eating my lunch I started reading comics and largely tuning out.  In the end Willis dies so I guess "God's plan" was to make the girl who had cancer an orphan.  Great plan! (2/5) (Fun Facts:  This was shot in Alabama instead of Georgia. This was written by "Bill Lawrence," but not the Bill Lawrence who's the creator of Scrubs and Cougar Town and showrunner of Ted Lasso.  He should probably sue to make the other guy go by William Lawrence or something.  I mean, when I saw that name I thought, "Why is that guy who did those good TV shows writing this piece of shit?!")

Midnight in the Switchgrass:  When I saw Tony Laplume had watched a cheap, lame action movie starring Bruce Willis and I hadn't, I was pretty annoyed.  How did I miss this?  So I found it on Peacock.  It is pretty lame.  Maybe slightly less cheap than the three above.  Willis is barely involved in this; he's not even around for the final resolution.  Mostly it's about Megan Fox going undercover and getting roofied by a creepy-looking trucker who, wouldn't you know, turns out to be a creep?  There's also another cop investigating who doesn't do much but does more than Willis.  While this wants to be Silence of the Lambs or something similar, it's really not.  It's not really exciting or thrilling.  The end especially was pretty lame, without much of a payoff.  I had to actually watch it a second time to make sure that was really it.  Barely passable entertainment. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  Text at the bottom of the screen calls the one cop guy's base "Division of Law Enforcement Florida" but his shirt says "FLED" and then he calls himself a state trooper to someone else.  Which is it?)

Survive the Game:  I found this on Tubi and it said it was leaving the next day...I should have just let it.  I mean even by the extremely low standards of the previous 4 movies on this entry it was really bad.  Like "it should be on Rifftrax" bad.  Willis is barely involved as a police...guy who's taken captive by some...people for...reasons.  I think mostly that moldy reason that he busted someone and that person's son wants revenge.  For...reasons the bad people take over a farm owned by Chad Michael Murray (remember him?!) whose family died a few months earlier because he was distracted while driving.  And since Willis is too old, some dude who looks like young Sam Elliott goes around playing Die Hard On the Farm.  If this had some better actors and not ones who went to the Ed Wood Acting Academy maybe this worn premise could have been entertaining.  But even Bruce Willis is obviously bored with this whole thing, making far less effort than any of the other movies listed despite that this was earlier than some of them. (1/5)  (Fun Facts:  The movie was made in Puerto Rico and for some reason when they're outside, the backgrounds look like green screen.  The sky is an insanely bright fake blue--or maybe it's like that in Puerto Rico?  I doubt it.  One of the female henchpersons looks like the "After" picture in an article about botched plastic surgery.)

Detective Knight:  Rogue:  The first in a hastily-made trilogy it's...pretty much like the other Bruce Willis movies on the list.  He's the title character but he still doesn't do a whole lot.  Maybe for insurance reasons he can't even drive a car anymore.  Most of it feels like a lamer version of that Echo Boomers movie I watched a couple of months ago about a crew of young people who rip off Boomers.  Though these young(ish) people--led by a former NFL quarterback--aren't so specific in who they heist from.  When a job in LA (actually Vancouver) goes bad and wounds Willis's partner, he and a black detective from the Caribbean somewhere (I don't know if they didn't say or I just wasn't paying attention) go to New York (still Vancouver) to find them.  There's some complication thrown in about the boss of the bad guys having some dirt on Willis but it's all really dull and lethargic and been-there, done-that feeling.  But hey, there's 2 more.  Yay? (2/5) (Fun Fact:  One of the robbers is Wayne Gretzky's son(?) and they steal a rare Wayne Gretzky card.)

Detective Knight:  Redemption:  The nonessential sequel!  So there's a nutty preacher who works as a prison counselor who along with some other guys dresses as Santa to knock off banks.  He says he's doing this to "liberate" people and get back at greedy banks.  I suppose no one told him (or the screenwriters) that most banks are insured so the only one he's screwing are taxpayers--mostly the non-rich ones who can't afford to hide assets offshore.  Knight (Bruce Willis) is in jail awaiting trial for the end of the last movie.  Then evil Santa breaks out some prisoners in the easiest escape since Pressure Point.  I mean there was basically five guards and only one had a gun.  The former quarterback from the last movie escapes with evil Santa and joins his crew, but tries to sell them out to get immunity.  Meanwhile, Knight is sprung to hunt down the bad guys, but his partner in a wheelchair actually does more "leg" work than he does.  Willis saves most of his energy for a gunfight at the end.  I clocked it and I don't think he even has a line until 26 minutes in!  He's probably the title character with the fewest lines since Superman in Batman v Superman.  Again it's all really dull and lethargic. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  In a rather incompetently staged cookie scene, Willis is returned to duty full-time.)

Detective Knight:  Independence:  The unnecessary trilogy is completed!  This time Knight (Bruce Willis--still) is back in "LA" (played by New Mexico this time) and basically bookends action scenes at the beginning and end and in the middle has a couple of lethargic scenes.  Most of it is about a paramedic (Jack Kilmer, who kinda looks like a young Val Kilmer, only without much talent) who gets fired and steals a baggy police uniform that for some reason he wears the badge on his belt and no one has a problem with it.  There's also no name plaque, rank insignia, department patch, or even a hat!  Stripper uniforms are more convincing!  For some reason even though banks are closed on 4th of July, a bank manager and a couple of guards are in one and then mayhem ensues.  That mayhem involves CGI effects about as bad as Birdemic or Jurassic Shark.  This was pretty much a step down, which is saying something.  With someone a little more spry in the lead, they probably could have done a slightly better job. (1.5/5)

The Old Way:  This is basically a cut-rate version of True Grit starring Nic Cage.  Only instead of a girl hiring a marshal to track her father's killer, a girl accompanies her father to find who killed her mother. Or I guess you could say it's like Road to Perdition in the Old West.  

Nic Cage (in a cheesy fake mustache) is a former gunfighter who 20 years ago killed a boy's father and uncle.  Then he met a woman and settled down on a farm and opened a general store--and took off the fake mustache.  They had a girl who's 12 when the boy who lost his father and uncle tracks down Nic Cage's farm and kills his wife.  So Nic and the girl set out to find him and his gang.  In the process they bond a little and he teaches her how to shoot and stuff.

While Nic isn't exactly young, he's still able to carry a whole movie, unlike Bruce Willis or some of the other actors mentioned above.  If you like modern westerns this wasn't bad.  It wasn't great either.  You wouldn't be unforgiven if you thought you'd already seen most of it in another movie. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  the bad guy's gang includes Abraham Benrubi of ER and Robot Chicken and also Clint Howard.  Seriously.)

One Way:  Another cheap action movie on Hulu, but this one is Bruce Willis free!  Instead there's bacon...Kevin Bacon.  Who does...almost nothing.  Seriously I think he was in that Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special more than this.  Marvel probably pays better than Saban Films.

Anyway, some dude named Freddy who looks like Robert Pattinson playing a meth head Vanilla Ice character has stolen some cocaine and money.  He gets on a bus going through Georgia.  There's a young girl and a pregnant woman and a creep on the bus.  The pregnant woman largely does nothing.  Most of the "action" is on the phone as he calls people trying to get a ride while the bad guys try to find him.  Kevin Bacon is his scummy dad who of course sells him out.  Overall it was OK but would have been better if it featured a main character we could actually give a shit about. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Every bus station they stop at looks like an old KMart for some reason; since they never go in the stations I wouldn't be surprised if they just threw some lighted letters on an old KMart to save money.)

The Enforcer:  My tour of cheap action movies on Hulu continues!  This is a pretty typical story in a lot of ways.  Antonio Banderas is "Cuda" because he drives a Barracuda muscle car.  He takes on "Stray," a young fighter and meets a runaway girl he puts up in a motel.  She soon disappears and he finds out his employer (Kate Bosworth in an Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction wig) is courting the people who took the girl.  So he sorta incompetently goes on a killing spree to get revenge.  I mean he goes to this building and beats up the front door guard with a golf club.  The guard is wearing a bulletproof vest, but Banderas only takes the guy's gun.  The vest would really have helped him later.  I'm just saying.  Anyway, it's not a terrible movie.  It's just the kind that's entertaining enough for about 90 minutes. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Most of this movie was made in Greece though it's supposed to take place in Florida.  Banderas recently played a Greek billionaire in The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard.)

The Locksmith:  Another cheap action movie on Hulu.  This time it's a pretty familiar story:  a guy gets out of prison and tries to avoid the old life until someone pulls him back in.  This time it's Ryan Philippe (looking like white Pedro Pascal) who is the eponymous locksmith who went to jail when a robbery went bad.  His partner was killed by a crooked cop.  Ten years later he's out of prison and someone (Ving Rhames) sets him up with a job and place to live.  After trying to go straight and reconnect with his wife (Kate Bosworth--not in a wig this time) and daughter, his dead partner's girlfriend convinces him to help her steal some money from her boss.  But things go wrong and soon crooked cops are after him and his family.  It's mostly predictable but again another that's entertaining enough for about 90 minutes. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  This is a rare movie actually filmed where it's supposed to take place--New Mexico.)

Twenty Years Later:  I originally saw this movie on the Movie House app but it was one of those that wouldn't play.  Eventually I decided to see if it was on another app and found it on Amazon/Freevee.  This is a low-budget movie funded by indiegogo back in 2014.  It's about 3 friends who 20 years ago hid a "treasure" and then 20 years later one of them is given the map for his birthday by his overbearing mother and dragoons the other two friends into helping him find it.

This is the sort of movie that would have been a lot better with a real budget so it could have had actual actors, better cameras, locations that didn't seem like they were all in a recently built subdivision, and so on.  For what it is, it's an OK story about friends who drifted apart coming back together and reforging their bond.  It's just not really professional quality but not so bad that it'd be a good Rifftrax. (2.5/5) (Fun Facts:  the movie was shot entirely in Michigan, though I don't know where.  At one point one guy tosses a baseball and when another guy drops it, he's like "Nice one, Alan Trammell," who of course was a shortstop for the Tigers for 20 years; the captioning actually calls him Alvin Trammell, lol.  The writer/producer/director is this guy with a caveman forehead who of course gets to have sex with the hot girl way, way out of his league.  Can you say, "casting couch?")

The Search for Simon:  Like the previous entry, I first saw this on the Movie House app but it wouldn't play.  Eventually I found the "Director's Cut" on Tubi.  This is similarly a crowd-funded indie movie originally from around 2014 but it's British and made a little better.  Writer/director/producer/star Martin Gooch (who looks like older, skinnier Nick Frost) is David Jones, who believes his brother Simon was abducted by aliens 30 years ago.  Winning 63,000 quid in the British lottery has helped him to travel the world in a fruitless search for aliens.  Meanwhile his obsession has made even long-time friends embarrassed for him while a shrink wants to use him for a book.  In the shrink's support group, he meets a girl and quickly ruins her life.  Then the truth about Simon comes out.  There are funny parts, weird parts, and dramatic parts with a happy ending that uses a clever way to give David what he really needs.  The production values aren't great because obviously it's pretty low budget but it was still a decent movie. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  "Gothic Horror" is an anagram of "Martin Gooch" as shown in the opening.  One of the places David searches for Simon is in Offutt's backyard in Utah and it was the same year I was there.)

Time to Just Say No to More Lazy Reboots

While I loved Futurama in its first incarnation and the second incarnation was good too, I decided I am not going to watch the third incarnation on Hulu.  Really I think it's time to just say no to more IP-mining reboots.  Maybe it's a little arbitrary, but as Picard said in First Contact, "The line must be drawn here and no further!"  I mean, you've got to have a limit sometime right?  Right, people who have watched The Simpsons for 35 years or 45 "seasons" of Survivor or The Bachelor or whatever bullshit show the Kardashians are on now?  Some people will endlessly swallow dreck but I don't want to be one of those.

A big part of my decision was watching a few episodes of the lazy Beavis and Butt-Head reboot.  It made me mad how bad it was.  Just so lazy and not funny at all.  And then seeing ads for Futurama, it seems like they're not really doing anything different with the show.  And I think of Beavis and Butt-Head and all those mediocre seasons of The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, American Dad, and Robot Chicken I choked down until I could stomach no more and I think, "Why the hell would I want to do this again?"

There would probably be a few decent episodes and yet would they really be much better than classic episodes?  And you get that thing where if they don't replace the voice actors so they sound completely different then they still sound different because the original actors are older and especially if you're listening for it you can tell.  And like the Beavis and Butt-Head soft reboot it just seems like you're giving me the same thing I already watched for about 10 seasons.  

Now if you were giving me something new, like a Futurama The Next Generation thing then I might be more curious.  But just doing the same thing makes it seem like more lazy IP flogging.  I don't need to see it because I've already seen it.  Been there, done that.  Give me something new!

Not to say that all IP flogging is bad.  Properties like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Marvel it can be fine because the shows they've come out with are usually different enough from each other that it's not all the same.  At this point with so many options, why should I just watch a lazy IP-flogging reboot?  But it's Futurama and almost everyone is back!  So?  I can just watch the old episodes on Hulu or I have the Fox incarnation on DVD.  When you do something different, then maybe I'll tune in.  Until then, it's dead to me.  That goes for Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill, and anything else from the 90s they might want to bring back with no real creativity.

That's my line in the sand.  Where is yours?

(PS:  If you think I won't stick to my line in the sand, I still haven't watched more than a couple of minutes of Clerks II after I swore to myself never to watch it.  I did inadvertently see the opening couple of minutes on Pluto TV a few months ago because I didn't know what it was.  I quickly turned it off so I still haven't really watched it or obviously Clerks III either.  It's a lot easier to stick to a resolution like that than if I said I wasn't going to eat French fries or drink soda or something like that.)

Android Lost is a Great Prequel

Android Lost: Prequel to The Legacies of Mars by Casey Davies
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is probably one of the best prequels I've experienced in any form. Unlike a lot of big budget movie prequels, it doesn't strain to explain and wind up making things murkier. Or give you the secret origin of things you don't care about.

It's just a taut, thrilling story about a colony on Mars. There are several advanced androids, including Zamler, who struggles with the human emotions his creator gave him. They work hand-in-hand with humans like Shane, who was abused and forced to work on "the farm," which provides food but is basically a forced labor camp. When a threat to the Martian colony appears, the humans and androids must work together to stop it.

The book is not extremely long and it does a good job of setting the table for the first book in the series. If you haven't read the first book then go ahead and read this one first, but if you like not-too-hard science fiction then definitely read them.

View all my reviews

Who Killed the DCEU?

With Shazam 2 and The Flash officially failures, the last gasp of the DC Cinematic Universe or DCEU is Aquaman 2.  If it bombs like the other two then it is entirely, completely over for the DCEU.  So, who's to blame for the failure?

Culprit #1 Zack Snyder

The most obvious scapegoat is Zack Snyder.  His grim and gritty Man of Steel started the DCEU and set the tone for BvS and Justice League and Wonder Woman to a lesser extent.  It's easy to say that's where it all went wrong because the tone was different from Marvel movies--or that's how it was perceived.  Despite that by 2016, Marvel movies weren't all happy and "fun" all the time.  I mean Age of Ultron and Civil War are not really "fun" movies.  Infinity War and Endgame are just downright grim.

And really, anyone who had watched Snyder's movies except maybe that owl one should have known what to expect.  If you wanted "fun" you probably should have hired James Gunn back then.  So...

Culprit #2 Studio Execs

You can definitely lay a lot of this at the feet of studio execs for WB/DC.  First they hired Snyder, see above.  Second, once they had a moderate success in Man of Steel, they got dollar signs in their eyes and thought they could get a piece of that Marvel money.  And why not?  They had a stable of the world's oldest and most recognizable superheroes.  So I guess you can forgive them for thinking, why not us?  It makes a lot more sense than some other attempts to make a "cinematic universe" in the 2010s.

But where you can really fault them is the way it was done.  Instead of patiently developing characters, they just ham-fistedly jammed a bunch of new characters into a movie.  I'm not a Batfleck fan, but at least the way he came into it sorta worked--right up to where they ripped off The Dark Knight Returns duel and then become buddies because their moms have the same name--and Wonder Woman's entrance was amazing.  The other cameos though were so obvious and lame--almost as lame as Eisenberg's Luthor.

The end result because of the tone and because they didn't want to wait to develop the universe was a movie full of holes, ham-fisted cameos, and meh VFX.  Despite that the movie more or less broke even, it was still pretty much a failure but like bad gamblers, the studio stayed in and tried to win the next hands and really kept in far too long so they wound up getting cleaned out.

Culprit #3 Bad Timing

This can in part be blamed on studio execs.  A key part of the problem I think is they didn't even get the first piece of their cinematic universe in place until 2013.  That was after "Phase 1" of Marvel's universe.  That gave Marvel 5 years of a head start.  They also had five years to dictate the narrative and become THE name brand of superhero movies.

While DC's heroes are almost all older than Marvel's (except Captain America is older than some DC heroes), people who don't read comics or know the history of comics might not have even realized it.  To a lot of young people, Marvel was the one who basically invented superhero movies.  So while DC's heroes came first historically, many people saw their movies as the imitators--and not usually in a positive way.

Culprit #4 Bad Movies/No Movies

As an extension of #3, between 2008 and 2013 the only success DC had were the final two Nolan Batman movies.  Green Lantern was ambitious but failed and Jonah Hex was a total disaster.  Meanwhile, DC had already fumbled the Superman franchise in 2006 with Superman Returns, which like Green Lantern was ambitious but flawed.  Watchmen was a moderate success at best but that was a standalone movie anyway.  On various sites you can read about proposed projects that never got off the ground like Justice League Mortal which would have perhaps beget a "cinematic universe" in 2009-2010 but DC could never get its shit together to do it.

If you look at the history of The Flash, it went through numerous writers and directors before getting made into the flop it was.  If they'd gotten their crap together sooner, they could have made something to release before the pandemic hit.  Really they should have listened to me when I said a Flashpoint movie was a bad idea.

On top of that, they had that stupid "Birds of Prey" movie where after a mediocre opening they tried to change the title to emphasize Harley Quinn's involvement.  I'm still not sure why they didn't just call it Harley Quinn from the start since she's way more popular than Birds of Prey ever was.  Speaking of, they didn't use Batgirl in that and then basically mulched a whole Batgirl movie to get a tax break.

Culprit #5:  The Discovery Merger

If WB hadn't merged with Discovery last year, maybe things would have been different.  Maybe James Gunn & Peter Safran wouldn't have been brought in to take over DC's movies.  Maybe they wouldn't have announced a new slate of movies rebooting the DCEU.  Maybe then Shazam 2 and The Flash would have done better because they wouldn't have seemed like lame duck franchise movies.  They certainly wouldn't have made changes to the end of the latter because they knew they weren't going to continue that universe going forward.  Maybe they would have been able to keep Henry Cavill, Ben Affleck, and Gal Gadot as their "Trinity."  Maybe they would have given in to Snyderverse fans again and let him make the rest of his Justice League trilogy.

Or maybe it would have only bought this DCEU a little more time.  It might have just been like a gambler hocking a watch or car to stay in another hand before being completely cleaned out.

Culprit #6:  Ezra Miller

No matter what, I don't think Shazam 2 was ever going to be a huge hit.  Thanks to DC, Captain Marvel (aka Shazam) hasn't been a hugely popular character since the 1950s.  The first movie was probably only greenlit because of Geoff Johns's involvement as first the writer of Shazam comics in the "New 52" and later the creative director of the DCEU.  Like the Ant-Man franchise it was mostly an afterthought; it was second-string at best.  So its failure wasn't really that big of a deal because unlike the Ant-Man franchise, the DCEU wasn't pivoting on it.

That was The Flash.  It was the last big attempt to save the DCEU--or this version of it.  Basically it was the hail Mary and the ball was in the hands of Ezra Miller as the star of the movie.  Buuuut, "their" bad--perhaps even criminal--behavior put everyone from execs to fans in an awkward position.

I don't know about other people, but I don't like canceling anyone.  I don't really want to worry about what celebrities are doing in their spare time.  I don't read US Weekly or the Enquirer or watch Entertainment Tonight or those other shows.  I don't really care.  But when this stuff gets out in the general media, then it's hard not to notice and I can either shell out money to support a deranged lunatic asshole or I can stay home and maybe watch the thing later on streaming or Redbox--with a coupon.  Which am I more likely to do?  Yeah, I'm going to do the easy thing and not go.  Even if I'm not actively canceling "them," I'm also not going to go out of my way to support "them" either.

And then it's really awkward trying to promote a movie when you can't have your star doing interviews.  Instead you have to have a costar and the director--and they can't really answer the questions people want to know about their costar/star.  It becomes the elephant in the room--or on the red carpet.

Things might have worked out better if the movie had been given Blue Beetle's August release because then the SAG strike would have given everyone an excuse not to do publicity and it would have given everyone an excuse if the movie hadn't performed as well.  But then hindsight is 20/20, right?

If Miller hadn't gotten "themself?" in trouble, it's no guarantee the movie would have been a big hit, but it probably would have done better.  I mean the last thing DC needed with all its other problems was more negative press.

Culprit #7:  Squandering Success

While its movie universe has been a mess with only pockets of success--mostly Batman--they had some success for a while with the "Arrowverse" on TV and put together a string of decent animated movies.  But they never parleyed this into any success with live action movies.

The animated universe wouldn't necessarily have transferred to live action, but maybe they should have brought in some of the writers and producers from that; they seemed to have a much better idea what they were doing.

The "Arrowverse," DC made it clear right away that TV was TV and film was film when before The Flash had even aired they already announced Ezra Miller as the movie Flash.  How's that working out for you?  Would a Grant Gustin Flash movie have done better?  Could it have done worse?  I mean, really, could it?  

Mostly I think there was this stodgy old belief that TV actors aren't as good as movie actors.  That is often the case but the 90s saw George Clooney, Jim Carrey, and Jennifer Aniston become big stars while starting on TV.  Tom Hanks started on TV in that cross-dressing show.  Julianne Moore started on a soap opera.  All those SNL alums like Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, and of course Bill Murray.  I mean, come on, it's pretty obvious that just because someone is on TV doesn't mean they can 't be in movies.

Cross-pollinating TV and movies might have given DC an edge over Marvel, which until 2013 was only focused on movies and even then their shows like Agents of SHIELD, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage were kept separate from the main part of the precious MCU.  It wasn't until 2020 that Marvel began integrating TV with movies.  DC had a chance to do that first but didn't.

Besides the "Arrowverse" they also added a batch of TV shows for DC Universe/HBO Max like Titans, Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, and Stargirl--the latter two aired on the CW but weren't part of the "Arrowverse."  But again none of those crossed over with the movies or even the Arrowverse.  Two chances to integrate movies and TV and they blew it both times!

Those are just some potential culprits.  I'm sure it's not all of them.  What would you add to the list?

An Inside Look at the Making of Beast Wars

Friday I posted my "final" thoughts on rewatching Beast Wars.  While digging through my old reviews, I found some interviews I conducted with writers Bob Forward and Larry DiTillio back in the mid-90s.  Even if you don't like Beast Wars it kinda gives you an inside look at how a TV show is made and what it's like to be a television writer.

Screen capture from Tubi

Bob Forward Interview #1

Question 1. For those out there who don't know, could you briefly summarize some of the projects you have worked on previously?

Thank God for copy & paste. Here's the "TV Animation" section of my credits.

HE-MAN -- 2 episodes, SHERA -- 15 episodes, GHOSTBUSTERS -- 14 episodes, RAMBO -- 1 episode, BRAVESTARR -- 15 episodes, BRAVO! -- 11 episodes, C.O.P.S. -- story editor, SLIMER -- 3 episodes, CAPTAIN PLANET -- pilot, KABUKIMAN -- bible/pilot, SUPER DAVE -- 1 episode, HAMMERMAN -- 3 episodes, THE LEGEND OF ZELDA -- story editor, SONIC THE HEDGEHOG -- 4 episodes, BIKER MICE FROM MARS -- story editor, EXOSQUAD -- 2 episodes, WILDC.A.T.S -- story editor, DOUBLE DRAGON -- 1 episode, ACTION MAN -- story editor, THE SAVAGE DRAGON -- co-story editor (‘96 season), BEAST WARS -- co-story editor

Question 2. How were you chosen to work on the Beast Wars TV show?

I'd known Chris Brough for years, ever since we were both at DIC. We'd tried to work together before but had conflicting commitments. This finally worked out -- mainly because I loved the show from the get-go and told my agent to make it happen.

Question 3. Have you been surprised at all about the tremendously positive response to the show so far?

Yes and no. We liked it, but we were worried about the timeslot and lack of promotion. We were afraid no one would see it. We're very glad of the word-of-mouth though.

Question 4. "Fallen Comrades" was one of my favorite episodes. What was your inspiration for Tigatron?

Iron Eyes Cody.

Question 5. In "Call of the Wild", whose idea was it for Megatron to be carried in that chair?

That was Megs' own request. He enjoys getting a bit theatrical at times. And we figured what the hey, he's a star, let him have his fun.

Question 6. In "Before the Storm", Megatron was shown as quite cunning and smart, which is unconventional for a cartoon show villain. How did you evolve his personality?

Just as with Optimus, Megatron had ambitions but lacked experience in his field. The growth of characters is intentional. We felt a villain you saw develop would be more interesting than a cut-and-dried bad guy handed out on a platter.

Question 7. In "The Trigger" there was some great interaction between Tigatron and Airazor. Have you ever thought of maturing their relationship?

Yes, but... next question.

Now then, to what people want to know about it...Season Two.

Question 8. Everyone says that Terrorsaur and Scorponok are going to bump into each other, fall into lava, and die. To me that sounds a little...anticlimactic. Are they really going to die in this way?

You have to understand the realities of making a show like this. We live in this fantasy world where all the characters are real to us and they phone us up in the middle of the night complaining about their parts not being meaty enough. We deal with it. But then we get a hard dose of reality when the toy company that funds the show says: "Get rid of this character because it's off the shelves. Now. No dragging it out, we don't want to pay for another dime more of animation advertising something that is no longer making us money. But leave us a loophole in case we decide to reissue." So we do something quick and sort of permanent, like lava, but if we ever had to we could find them trapped in an underground cave or something.

Question 9. Has it been difficult to practically destroy everything you've built up and recreate the show?

Not as difficult as trying to convince Mainframe to scrap all their sets. :)

Question 10. As a writer I always feel a little sad when I kill off a character I've spent a lot of time maturing. How do you feel about killing off Optimus Primal?

At least he went out heroically. Frankly, I feel worse about Terrorsaur.

Those are all the questions. Thank-you for your participation.

Bob Forward Interview #2

1. You've worked on a lot of different shows, what show did you work the longest on?

BW is right up there. Many of the others were 65 episodes, but they were all done in a single year. Those were the grind-em-out days of syndicated animation. BW is looking to run almost three years at the moment, but without the pressure of five scripts a week, like in C.O.P.S.

2. Other than Beast Wars, has there been a show you've felt really good about, one that you've really loved to work on?

I generally enjoy every show I've ever worked on, for its own reasons. The only one that I detested from the get-go was "Captain Planet." For contractual reasons I was forced to write the pilot, but I hated the show so much (I considered it self-righteous propaganda) I changed my name on the script to "Billy Rubin." It almost aired that way but the producers figured it out at the last moment and changed that to "William Rubin." Other than that, I generally choose to work on shows because I think they will be fun.

3. Other than Beast Wars, what show would you just love to write a script for?

Gosh, there's so many smart-aleck answers to that I don't know which to pick. How about "One created by myself, with just scads of merchandising rights and a huge toy tie-in and movie potential?"

4. I heard that you directed the upcoming episode, "Code of a Hero". If so, how different is it to direct an episode compared to writing one?

Very. By the way, it's "Code Of Hero." I wanted to direct an episode for many reasons, not the least of which was I felt that I would learn a great deal about the CGI production process, which I hoped would help in writing future scripts. I've always felt that my background in cel animation production was useful in writing standard animation scripts -- I have a better idea of what to call for.

Anyway, this episode was one which I had initially conceived, but since I was hoping to direct it I could not officially write it -- it had to be written by a Canadian, to keep up the Canadian content. (Mainframe gets a certain amount of Canadian government funding.) I gave it to Ian Weir to write, who did an excellent job.

I then drew up an entire storyboard. The complete show, beginning to end, every single scene. This is, I believe, the first show that Mainframe has ever produced that had a complete storyboard. They'll occasionally board certain scenes, but not the entire show. But I came from cel animation and storyboards are how we keep shows under control.

Mainframe has a different technique. They use mostly live-action directors and they animate master shots -- in other words, they animate the entire scene, all the characters, doing everything, and then move the camera around to pick the angles -- closeups, medium shots, etc. For a live action director this must be heaven -- to be able to do infinite takes from any angle, and the actors always hit their marks and never flub their lines. Problem is, it isn't very efficient. Much of the animation that is done is never seen in the final cut, because it is taking place during one character's closeup, etc. The animators know this, and they are getting burned out, working overtime to do animation that no one ever sees. It also takes time and costs money. Storyboards force the director to make those decisions *before* animating, which can be tough. But at least there is a plan, and the animation can be done more efficiently. Mainframe is slowly moving in that direction, but the directors and producers are reluctant -- understandably -- to give up the freedom they had with the previous method. Still, the realities of time and budget will eventually make themselves felt.

Back to the board. Because I came from cel animation, I boarded it like a cel animated show. The show will probably have a different "feel" because of it -- it will be interesting to see if anyone notices. The original storyboard, all 169 hand-drawn pages of it, including several scenes that were cut for time, is being donated to the Botcon '98 charity auction if anyone is interested.

Ultimately, I learned a great deal, not the least of which was that in comparison with directors, we animation writers have an easy life. :) And I'm grateful for the education that was provided by everyone involved, especially my supervising animator (Walter Hsieh) who singlehandedly animated almost half the show, my editor (Patrick Carroll) and the entire crew of Suite G. I made up a crew tee-shirt and had them all autograph it, indicating the scenes they themselves had done -- this is also being donated to Botcon.

5. "Coming of the Fuzors" was intended to introduce the fuzors, but why weren't they given more air time in the episode itself?

The original title was "Recycled Steel," but it was considered too much of a giveaway about Primal's return.

6. How did you think up Silverbolt's ultra-noble attitude?

Mostly we try to chose character traits that will give us the most story potential. This generally means conflict. We didn't have a "white knight" yet and we could see a lot of ways in which this undeniable good guy could irritate the others. Silverbolt is Lancelot De Luc -- "My strength is as the strength of ten, for my heart is pure and my mind is clean" and like Lancelot, he *will* have a dangerous flaw that he cannot bring himself to admit.

7. What was your inspiration for the Wild West motif in "Coming of the Fuzors"?

Actually, that was suggested by Steve Sacks (one of the directors) during the first draft, and I have always had a soft spot for spaghetti westerns. I rewrote the scripts to fit, but I can't take the credit for the initial idea.

8. What kind of things would you like to do in a Season 3, assuming that it is a full season of 26 episodes?

In any case, as the Transmetals and Fuzors are no longer what anyone would consider "robots in disguise" on prehistoric Earth, I personally would like to get them off the planet. But we have no set plans.

9. When Terrorsaur and Scorponok fell in the lava, at least one of them was glowing. Does that mean that at least one of them will be back in Transmetal form either in this season or in the future?

No plans. It merely gives us that option.

10. Suppose that Beast Wars lasts beyond a hypothetical 3rd Season. What sort of access to prototype toys do you have to create characters with or do you just draw up story arcs and add the specific new characters later?

We're given some information about new characters but nowhere near as much as we'd like. And sometimes they change the characters on us at the last minute.

*Off the record: How annoying is it to be hounded by people like myself who want information on the show, especially those who want spoilers? Are there times when you think that maybe you have too much contact with BW fans?*

Oh, this can be on the record. It all depends on the attitude expressed by the questioner and the manner of the question. The thirst for spoilers puzzles me -- it's like wanting to know the final score of a football game before you watch it. After all, is it really the destination or the journey that you're supposed to enjoy?

As for too much contact -- well, it's been enlightening. I've never worked on a show with this kind of following, and the Internet has added accessibility. Ultimately though, I have to move on.

Larry DiTillio Interview #1

Question 1. For those out there who don't know, could you briefly summarize some of the projects you have worked on previously?

A1. I have been a scriptwriter since 1973 and have worked in film, television and animation. Starting with animation, I broke into that field in the early 80's working on He Man and the Masters of the Universe for Filmation. I then was given the task of developing a show featuring He Man's long-lost sister which eventually became She-Ra Princess of Power. From Filmation I went to DIC where I worked on Jayce and Wheeled Warriors and Hulk Hogan's Rock n' wrestling and from DIC to Ruby-Spears where I did some development work and wrote a few episodes of Centurions. After that I worked primarily freelance, staffing or story-editing on a bevy of cartoons including Galaxy High School, Conan the Adventurer, The Real Ghostbuster and others. I have written well over a hundred produced animation scripts. In Live Action I am best known as the Executive Story Editor on the first two seasons of Babylon 5. Other live action shows I wrote include Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, The Hitchhiker, Swamp Thing and Murder She Wrote.

Question 2. How were you chosen to work on the Beast Wars TV show?

A2. Chris Brough, the head Honcho of Mainframe, came to my agent Candy Monteiro(One of the best know animation agents in Hollywood) and wanted writers to helm Beast Wars. Chris felt that Mainframe's first hit "Reboot" had great CGI animation but lacked good stories. He wanted to correct this on Beast Wars, hiring veterans of the animation industry to guide the show. Candy suggested me and Bob Forward. We met with Chris, liked what he had to say and especially the price he was willing to pay. The rest is as they say "history".

Question 3. Have you been surprised at all about the tremendously positive response to the show so far?

A3. Frankly no. The animation is spectacular and the writing is on a level far above most shows of this type and that will almost always get you a great response. I was more surprised by the initial hostility from TF fans BEFORE the show ever hit the air.

Question 4. "The Spark" was one of my favorite episodes of the first season. What was your inspiration for the sparks that give Transformers life?

The thing that interested me most about the Transformers was not their awesome weaponry or how cleverly they transformed but rather that they were SENTIENT metal beings. I spent a long time trying to figure out how this sentience was achieved and what it was that made our heores and villains so "human". This led to a whole theory of exactly how a Maximal or Predacon comes on-line which was refined over the course of the season until I came up with "The Spark". Later this also led to more theories about the TF universe as it exists in the Beast Wars period and what the source of the sparks was. The last thing I came up with was the actual name - Spark. I wanted something I could think of as the SOUL of a Transformer but didn't want to call it that. Suddenly out of the blue, came a '"spark" of inspiration (Groannn!).. Thus was The Spark born.

Question 5. Inferno is definitely one of the most interesting characters in the show. How did you come up with his unique personality?

A5. Coming up with Inferno's personality was actually fairly simple. He was after all birthed from an ant and right from the get-go I thought of him as that. Ants are fercious and ruthless warriors, so that component fit perfectly. They are also devoted to their colonies and Queens and so came the on-going "My Queen" and "The Royalty" lines. They also hate spiders (in addition to many other sorts of enemies) so it was quite natural for Inferno to freak out when he thought a spider was invading his nest. Much credit also goes to Jim who does an excellent job with the voice characterization, creating that lovable nutty berserker whom fans affectionately call "Ole Blender Butt".

Question 6. In "Spider's Game" there is a lot of sexual chemistry between Tarantulus and Black Arachnia. Was there any concern voiced from anyone that this might not be appropriate for a children's show?

A6. Nary a word was ever said against it. However I would argue that most of the sexual chemistry is coming from Blackarachnia. Tarantulas is really not interested in her as anything more than an ally. And frankly she drives him pretty crazy. There will be many interesting developments in their twisted relations in the new season.

Question 7. Someone told me that my favorite episode of the season, "Law of the Jungle" had a lot of revisions done to it. Is that true?

A7. Very few of the freelance scripts we assigned last year escaped revision and "Law of the Jungle" by Mark Leiren-Young was probably one of the easier scripts to revise. It is the job of the story editor to revise scripts, so that each script has the right "flavor" for the series. Freelancers often miss on characterizations and other things which we as story editors know better (largely because many times last year they were literally working in the dark, not being able to actually see completed episodes until after their jobs were done). Beast Wars is actually a very tough show for freelancers to write, nevertheless Bob and I still give half the work to freelancers.

Question 8. Have you found a 13 episode season constraining to your story arc at all?

A8. On the contrary. Having half the episodes actually allowed us to concentrate more on our story arc and insured that Bob and I would be handling key episodes.

It has also given us more time to work with the freelancers and see that their stories all fit into the continuity.

Question 9. Has it been difficult to practically destroy everything you've built up and recreate the show?

A9. No, because we haven't really done that. Yes there will be changes in season 2, but this hardly means we're giving up what we spent a lot of time and effort creating in season one. Yes some characters will change, others will depart but our story-line continues right where it left off.

Question 10. As a writer I always feel a little sad when I kill off a character I've spent a lot of time maturing. How do you feel about killing off Optimus Primal, Scorponok, and Terrorsaur?

A10. I'm writing a science fiction drama, and what is more dramatic than the death of a character? So as a writer, I feel great.

Larry DiTillio Interview #2

1. You've worked on a lot of different shows, what show did you work the longest on?

Actually my longest stint on any one show has been two years. Though who knows I may work three on Beast Wars. I worked two on Babylon 5, two on Captain Power, two on He-Man, etc.

2. Other than Beast Wars, has there been a show you've felt really good about, one that you've really loved to work on?

Babylon 5, Captain Power and He Man have to be my favorites.

3. Other than Beast Wars, what show would you just love to write a script for?

Xena, Warrior Princess is number one, Buffy the Vampire Slayer # 2. I may get a shot at Xena soon since I have a meeting with them on January 6th.

4. "Aftermath" was a good episode, but it seemed a lot like a commercial for the Transmetals. Of course, it's understandable that Hasbro wants the new toys advertised on the show. However, did you feel that you had to sacrifice some of the story in order to work in the new toy line?

Yes and No. Since we met with Hasbro before we ever began working on scripts, we knew that we'd have to do a story introducing the Transmetals up front. This is of course, endemic to toy-driven shows and there is basically nothing you can do about it. I had hoped we could take our time introducing Transmetals. Indeed my first notion was to have Megatron come up with Transmetal technology and change himself, then change selected members of his crew. Then the Maximals would have to '"acquire" the process and change themselves to match the Pred Transmetals. Alas that was not to be Hasbro wanted everything in the first show and we needed to comply. Thus I simply threw up my hands and said okay, we'll do it all at once and get it over with. Since I meant to use the aftermath of the explosion anyway, it became the means to Transmetal all the characters. Remember to Hasbro, the show is a commercial, they don't care a whit about story.

5. In "Call of the Wild" and "Dark Voyage" there was the message that the Transformers are more than just robots with beast forms, that their beast forms are a part of them. Do you feel that adding the non-organic Transmetal and the Fuzors has changed this?

Absolutely. While I mainly like the new look of the Transmetals, we lost some of their nice animal mode stuff in the translation. Rattrap and Cheetor certainly are not as "cute" as they were and we find we kind of miss that. Of course Rhinox and Waspinator and others still have the old beast modes, so it's not all gone.

6. In "Aftermath", Rhinox took Optimus Primal's death harder than the other Maximals. Why is this?

Rhinox was much close to Primal than any of the others. They are old friends. Plus Rhinox has that mystical quality to him which we've played on numerous occasions and played again in his "sensing" of Optimus's death.

7. What kind of things would you like to do in a Season 3, assuming that it is a full season of 26 episodes?

Personally, I'd like to reveal a lot more of the alien backstory and even journey to Cybertron on occasion and provide more background on the social system there.

But as no one has mentioned a third season yet, it's all pretty moot.

8. Have you and Bob ever brainstormed on a Beast Wars movie? I am aware that Hasbro has not asked for one yet, but have you ever considered what you would do hypothetically? If so, what would you like to do?

NOPE. It's certainly an interesting idea, you could theoretically do a lot more in a movie version of BW (assuming Hasbro didn't treat it as a very long commercial). However, given the nature of show biz, writers seldom sit around brainstorming on non-existent projects. When one is done, we move on and that is what I intend to do.

9. When Terrorsaur and Scorponok fell in the lava, at least one of them was glowing. Does that mean that at least one of them will be back in Transmetal form either in this season or in the future?

As of this moment, they are DEAD... But if BW goes on, you never know. It's a tradition to revive characters like this, and certainly it is possible, though for the rest of season 2, they are gone.

10. Suppose that Beast Wars lasts beyond a hypothetical 3rd Season. What sort of access to prototype toys do you have to create characters with or do you just draw up story arcs and add the specific new characters later?

Usually very little to none. We just start with existing characters, then fold in any new ones as appropriate.

Larry DiTillio Interview #3

1. For those who weren't there, could you briefly summarize what you talked about during your panel at Botcon this year?

This year's BotCon Panel was mainly a question and answer session with the audience. We never had the time or inclination to just flap our gums but rather to answer those burning questions on the minds of Beast Wars Fans. Of course many of these questions we did NOT answer because they had to do with the events of the upcoming 3rd Season. One bit of information was confirmed, DepthCharge will be one of the new characters in Season 3.

2. How have you coped with the runaway success of Beast Wars to keep from getting overconfident?

We are professional writers, we don't get overconfident. Every script is still done with the same care and work as we put into Season One. More actually, since we are dealing with multiple storylines.

3. Rhinox is a favorite character of mine, and yet he was restricted to guarding the base for most of Season 2. Will he get a chance to get out of base more in Season 3?

Unlikely. Rhinox is a defensive specialist and the Maximals chief techno. He is in effect the last line of defense should anyway breach the Maximal stronghold. Certainly he is as formidable as anyone in the field, but he is more important right where he is.

4. Season 2 was decidedly darker than Season 1 with more emphasis on the villains than the heroes. Will Season 3 continue this trend or will it get back to the lighter, more hero-driven stories of Season 1?

Season 3 has quite a few very dark shows, but many of these are hero-driven. We try as best we can to give both factions equal time. In addition the stakes of our little war have gotten much higher and this will tend to add some dark moments.

5. Tigatron and Airazor were already in essence written out of the show, why was it necessary to write them out more permanently?

SHADES OF HASBRO! When I said I was doing a story to write Air razor and Tigatron out, Hasbro said "Why? Just let them wander around the planet". Well I explained to them as I am doing to you that even if Tigatron and Air Razor were off exploring the planet, they were still there and they were still capable of recieving communications from the Maximals. And all of our audience knew it, so at times of great crisis it would have been perfectly legitimate to ask - why don't they call in Air Razor and Tigatron. Indeed events of Season 2 would have HAD to lead to that eventually. In order to stave off this necessity, they were clearly written out.

6. In my review of "Other Voices" I made this comment about Airazor and Tigatron's final scene: "It came as quite a surprise to me, and overall I thought the scene just didn't work. The music, the lines, the situation, none of it sold the mood or the scene to me." Would you agree or disagree with this assessment?

I imagine you mean "Other Visits" (since this is where the scene between the two take place). And naturally I disagree, I thought the scene played quite well.

7. If all Maximals are gone, wouldn't BlackArachnia, Inferno, Quickstrike, and even Rampage disappear as their sparks are Maximal?

Yes to the first 3, but Rampage's spark is unique, being neither Maximal nor Predacon but in essence a new and quite terrifying breed.

8. If the Autobots were defeated, wouldn't the Decepticons and Cybertron have been destroyed by Unicron in 2005 as there would be no Matrix to destroy him with?

What IF questions are always chancy. Yes Unicron might destroy Cybertron, or perhaps the Decepticons, freed of the constant need to contend with the AutoBots might have developed their own method of dealing with Unicron. When time and space bcfome flexible, so does history.

9. Megatron referred to the "secret war" between the Autobots and Decepticons about the time the Voyager satellite was launched in the late '70s. Yet BlackArachnia said in Part 3 of "The Agenda" that the Transformers were not activated until 1984. How do you account for this discrepancy?

Megatron has information that Blackarachnia doesn't. Which is why he referred to it as a secret war.

10. It has been reported at Botcon that you said that Optimus Prime would remain dead, if so, don't you think you've desecrated the hero to many fans of the original show?

No. Optimus Prime has died in the TF saga numerous times, are we to consider every one of those deaths to be a "desecration" (a rather ludicrous term when dealing with a television show anyway). Add to that, that whoever "reported'" what I said apparently didn't report the tone as well, which was purposely casual.

11. Let me run some numbers by you. At the end of Season 1 there were 14 characters on the show. By the end of Season 2 5 of them were dead: Terrorsaur, Scorponok, Airazor, Tigatron, and Dinobot. Don't you think that by killing nearly half your cast in one season you are alienating some fans of the show who thought that one of the dead was their favorite character?

No, we are telling a story about a war and if characters didn't die, it would be tantamount to saying wars can be fought without people dying. Well you can't and I refuse to give kids that impression. We tell violent stories but we try to show the consequences of violence as often as we can. This means losing people dear to us, as well as to the fans.

12. Finally, Season 3 will only be 13 episodes not starting until November. Until then reruns will have to be aired, reruns that have already been shown many times before. Since most of your target audience does not know when new episodes are aired, can Beast Wars stay competitive with the many new shows on the market?

Season 2 also didn't start until November and also had only 13 episodes. The show never lost any of it's steam because of it, in fact it is more popular then ever. As long as we strive to tell good stories, Beast Wars will remain a good show and it's visual style puts it head and shoulders above most of the new shows it is competing with.

As you can see, the first couple interviews for each writer I did a lot of the same questions to see if I'd get a different response.  Forward kind of blew off a lot of my questions but when I asked about directing the one episode I got a lengthy response; I think if I'd known that in advance I would have asked more questions like that, but, hey, I'm not a journalist.  The last interview with DiTillio I got a little more adversarial; I guess I was trying to get a scoop or something.  But it didn't really work.  Unfortunately in an email interview it's hard to get one of those "gotcha" moments.

Obviously at the time I was focused on the show in most of my questions.  That is what my readership--such as it was--would really want to know about.  At this point I wish I had maybe asked more about their careers and the business and some technical aspects of how the show got made.  I mean, unless I go to a WGA picket line it's probably not as easy to get time to talk to a TV show writer these days.  That would be more interesting to me now.

Looking them up on IMDB, DiTillio died in 2019.  It doesn't look like he did a lot after Beast Wars, just a few episodes here and there, including one for Transformers Animated.  Forward is still alive and had a project as recently as 2018.  He's the son of physicist and sci-fi writer Robert L Forward--the IMDB page says "J" Forward but it should be "L" from some independent research on Google.

BTW, I was thinking this is why you should be careful about what you say online.  I mean, I unearthed these interviews from over 25 years ago!  I don't think anything controversial or embarrassing was said, but still, it goes to show that anything said online can stick around a long, long time.

Rewatching Beast Wars: Final Thoughts

Rhinox with "The Guns"

Wednesday I went back through the first two seasons and summarized the third season to compare how I felt back in the 90s versus today.  Now here are some other thoughts I had while I rewatched the series:

• The last two seasons were sabotaged by Hasbro's toys.  The first season the toys were pretty simple:  they were mammals, dinosaurs, or insects that turned into robots.  It took the "robots in disguise" thing to a new level because just about anything from a rat to a T-Rex could be a Transformer.  But then in season 2, Hasbro decided to introduce gimmicky new toys:  Transmetals and Fuzors.  Fuzors were kinda neat in that they were basically a combination of two animals like Silverbolt was a wolf/eagle while Quickstrike was a scorpion with a cobra tail.  They weren't real animals but still animals.  The Transmetals though basically negated the whole Beast Wars concept because they were metal outside and flesh in robot mode.  So what's the point of that?  They could no longer be "robots in disguise" because the metal beast modes couldn't blend in.  Not that the dinos ever could, but still, what was the whole point of being beasts then?  It's the same kind of thing Hasbro did in 1986 with the third series of Transformers.  Up until then they had mostly been realistic planes/cars/objects except the Dinobots, Jetfire, and Omega Supreme.  But then with the third series for the ill-fated movie they set it in the future with futuristic cars, planes, and other things.  It really watered-down the whole Transformers concept and it's probably not a surprise it lost its popularity.
• The last two seasons were sabotaged by the budget and Mainframe's schedule as well.  The first season was 26 episodes but the next two were only 13 apiece.  It was a little disappointing.  Really it's because they didn't have a big enough budget to do that many episodes because especially in the late 90s CGI was expensive.  As well, Mainframe I'm sure had other projects and doing the CGI was time-consuming.  Those things combined meant there weren't as many episodes, which meant a lot less time people could be watching.  Nowadays when 6 episodes is a "season" 13 episodes is actually a lot but with a kids show it's better to have more episodes so they don't move on to the next thing.

• 

  Tigatron

  Season 2 is kinda depressing.  Given what I said in my first two points, the second season is kinda disappointing.  After bringing back Optimus Primal, the heroic Maximals lose Tigatron, Airrazor, and Dinobot while only gaining Silverbolt--and BlackArachnia at the very end.  The Predacons only lost two characters most people didn't care much about (Terrorsaur & Scorponok) and gained Quickstrike and Rampage.  Then at the end the Predacons basically win; it was sort of like Infinity War only spread out over 13 half-hour episodes.  It was kind of a drag rewatching it.
• Bad Easter Eggs.  Thanks to the emergence of the World Wide Web, Beast Wars was a show where the writers and fans connected, sometimes on a personal level.  This actually began to shape the story when the writers started to work in elements of the original 80s series.  And also the writers worked in some Easter eggs like where Megatron mentions a "code ATT" that's a reference to the Transformers newsgroup.  Unfortunately they included a couple mentions to my nemesis HooksX, who was a sociopath who likely started a flame war with himself and clumsily modified an email I sent to make it seem like I'd said something racist--despite I had no idea what he looked like in real life.  It kinda chafes that such an asshat is immortalized twice.  It'd be great if I could get those mentions bleeped out.  Besides that, though, I don't remember who all was in the group well enough so there are a lot of times when they say "Sector ???" or some code or something and I'm like, "Was that an Easter egg?"  Some of those things don't really age well unless you're the one who is the one being referenced.
• Forward was Looney Tunes:  I noted a few times in my reviews that episodes written by Bob Forward seemed to often have these lame Looney Tunes gags like someone getting literally flattened or having stars around their head after being hit.  Stuff like that.  If you were a little kid back then it might have been funny but I wasn't so it wasn't funny then and it was less funny now.  It's as lame as when a movie like Batman and Robin uses cartoon sound effects.  Unless you're making something like Roger Rabbit or The Mask, there's really no need for that because it's jarring.  Similarly when you have a cartoon that often has more adult-themed stories, the Looney Tunes gags are jarring and discordant.  I'm just saying.
• Honey I Blew Up the Transformers!  A funny thing is when you watch the end of season 2 and the Maximals and Predacons go into the Ark, the animators scaled them so they would basically be the size of Micromasters or the heads/guns of Headmasters/Targetmasters.  It really made no sense as when we see Dinobot and the Predacons with early humans in "Code of Hero," they're much bigger than humans.  Perhaps in part due to fan outcry or just the impracticality of having micro-sized Maximals basically living in the Ark, the animators scaled them up in season 3 to more the size of Bumblebee, Cliffjumper, or Wheelie.  But since the end of season 2 and start of season 3 are supposed to be instantaneous, the inconsistency is pretty noticeable, especially when binge watching.
• Before Lost there was Beast Wars.  You know how with Lost basically after the first episode a lot of people were like, "Oh, they're dead and this is Purgatory."  And the writers were like, "Nuh-uh" for six seasons and then in the finale it turned out that they were dead and in Purgatory?  And then were like, Ha ha, fooled you!?  There was something similar with Beast Wars.  In the first season the planet they crash on is pretty much like Earth in every way--except there are two moons.  So the writers were coy about that the whole first season.  And then the second moon turns out to be an alien weapon that blows up so there's only one moon.  Gee, it was Earth all along!  Ha ha, fooled you!
• Waspinator was the Kenny of Beast Wars:  It became a running gag sometime during the first season to have Waspinator get blown up or flattened or even cut into shreds and then somehow reassemble himself for the next episode.  It was like Kenny in South Park who in the first few seasons would always die somehow during the episode.  Someone really should have shouted, "Oh my god, you killed Waspinator!  You bastards!"  Except they couldn't use the expletive and no one really cared if they killed Waspinator.  A joke at the end of the series is Waspinator survives where all the Preds except Megatron die and he becomes sort of a god to the early humans.

Anyway, those were just some thoughts I had.  Mostly I really liked the show then and now.