Beast Machines Was Hindered By Its Own Premise--And Toys

 A couple months ago I posted about Star Wars cartoons The Bad Batch and Resistance that they were largely hindered by their own premise.  Meaning that the show does not work because of something in its very concept.  An earlier example of this is Transformers Beast Machines from 1999-2000.

A little background:  by 1991, the original Transformers line was on its last legs.  A couple years later came Generation 2 which featured reissued 80s toys and then some originals.  There was a not-very-good comic that lasted 12 issues and by 1995 that line too was dead.

Along came Beast Wars in 1995.  Instead of cars, planes, and so on the Transformers become real-ish animals.  The heroic Maximals largely turn into mammals while the evil Predacons mostly turn into insects and dinosaurs.  The computer animated TV series from Canadian outfit Mainframe premiered in 1996 and like what Pixar was doing with Toy Story it made stories that were suited for kids and adults, which was good since many original fans (like me) were entering adulthood and would not have really wanted to watch a show as silly as the original TV show in the 80s.

The first 26-episode season of that show was really well done and thankfully free of a lot of stupid gimmicks.  New characters were periodically added, but the writers managed to never make it seem too forced or like in the original series, just have new characters show up in the background.  This is because computer animation was expensive and time-consuming, so they had to keep the cast small.

The next season began unraveling things by introducing stupid gimmicks like "Transmetals" that were animals covered by metal (basically undoing the whole premise) and "Fuzors" that were two animals spliced together like Silverbolt, who was a wolf/eagle, and Quickstrike, who was a scorpion with a snake head for its stinger.  And then season 3 brought more gimmicks and an end to the series as the Maximals defeat Megatron and tie him to their ship as they blast off to Cybertron.

When the new Beast Machines series began, it jumped from syndication to Fox Kids but kept the same design studio and most of the voice actors.  In the first episode, Optimus Primal, Rattrap, Cheetor, and BlackArachnia are all back to their original Beast Wars design but can't transform.  No one remembers how they got to Cybertron and while scratchy/screechy techno music plays in the background, they're chased by a herd of "Vehicons," or tanks/motorcycles/planes that are basically like original Transformers.  

Eventually they find the "Oracle" at the center of Cybertron and "reformat" into weird "technorganic" forms similar to the ugly Transmetal 2 designs at the end of the Beast Wars run.  You can see what the toys look like on this Wiki page. With the toys and packaging it was obvious Cheetor was supposed to be the centerpiece, though he was only a protégé of Optimus Primal in the show and the one before it.  This is just one of several problems.

(You can see on those boxes it's Cheetor featured prominently, not Optimus or Megatron or even the character himself.)

Cheetor's toy was pretty lame.  There were two different sizes, both pretty large and also very spindly and hard to stand.  And not really with any cool weapons.  This is what the "Supreme" size looked like:

Meanwhile, the first Optimus Primal toy was a smaller deluxe size and didn't really look like the show:

By the time they made a better Optimus, the show was already canceled and the toyline just about dead.  A third, larger one with a lot of bells and whistles (almost literally) was released in a later toyline.

As ugly as those ones were, then there was Rattrap, who was also delayed, but not as much as the second Optimus Primal one.  It has the TV show's Segway mode and regular legs but is still pretty freaking hideous:

According to the Wiki page, the show was originally supposed to be called Beast Hunters--a title later used for the third season of Transformers Prime--and have a mostly different premise.  Hasbro, Mainframe, and the writers all had different ideas that got tossed into a blender and what was poured out wasn't very good.  Especially since they just throw you into it with the first episode being almost entirely the Maximals running around being shot at by Vehicons while awful "music" plays.  It's not really until the second episode that they can even transform into robots and then they're just weird looking in both modes.

There were a lot of other problems too.  The main villain is again Megatron but he's almost entirely in a metal cocoon thing in the first season.  They made a toy to sort of replicate that, which seems kind of silly.  I mean if you're playing Transformers, what are you supposed to do with that?

Then for some reason Megatron makes Vehicon "generals" out of the sparks of Rhinox, Silverbolt, and Waspinator.  He literally had billions of sparks to choose from and chose two former Maximals and the hapless Waspinator?  And holy cow was Jetstorm so annoying.  Just one bad joke/pun after another, with the idea seeming to be that if he said it really loud it'd be funny--it wasn't.  Ever.  But the "Ultra" size toy of him was one of the better-looking ones.  It has sort of a Robotech look to it:

And then in season 2 you have "Savage Noble" who's like a werewolf that turns into a dragon for...reasons.  

They also added Silverbolt, Obsidian, and Strika, but the toys they made were little and crappy-looking; the Silverbolt one looks worse than a Happy Meal toy:

Watching the show I wasn't sure if he was supposed to be a turkey or vulture or turkey vulture, but actually I guess that's supposed to be a condor.  Um...sure.

Then I guess even though they weren't making a toy for it, some Hasbro genius thought it'd be a good idea to include a "Plantformer," ie a plant that turns into a robot.  So in season 2 they introduce "Botanica," who crashed on a planet of sentient plants or something and so could turn into some kind of plant.  Like Swamp Thing, she derives power from "the green" of Cybertron and weakens if disconnected from that.  Even as a nearly-45-year-old man I couldn't help thinking just how lame that was; I can imagine how kids would feel about that.

(Fun Fact:  In Transformers #100 or Regeneration One #20, there's a Beast Machines/Botanica reference in the last panels when Rodimus Prime dies and Plantformers begin to rise!)

As I mentioned too the toys seemed to put a lot of emphasis on Cheetor for some reason.  The show rightfully focuses a lot on Optimus Primal because of course through just about every iteration of the show, it's always about Optimus Prime(al) vs. Megatron.  When they try to get away from that, like in the 1986 movie and the TV season afterwards, it doesn't work.  Optimus and Megatron are your Batman and Joker or Superman and Lex Luthor or Spider-Man and Green Goblin or Thor and Loki; you have one then eventually you have to have the other or it won't work.  Hasbro should have realized this but they didn't so they focused on the wrong character and the toys they made of it weren't even that great.

And Phantom Readers might snort and say, "Like you could do any better."  Maybe I can.  I was of course thinking of how I might approach a sequel to Beast Wars.  It's kind of a take on the Headmasters/Targetmasters episodes of the G1 show with some Captain Planet thrown in for an environmental message.

The idea is that similar to Beast Machines, Megatron escapes in transit and the Maximal ship crashes on a planet, only not Cybertron.  It's some alien world that's dominated by two factions.  There's one faction ruled by an evil asshole who wants to pave over everything and strip mine the planet for some important mineral, like some kind of energon-type thing.  A damaged, weakened Megatron is brought before this asshole and in exchange for a new body, he agrees to help the asshole destroy the other faction.  Being Megatron, he convinces the asshole to create a Vehicon army for him that of course later he'll use to take over everything for himself.

The Maximals of course meet this other faction who live in the jungles or forests and want to save the trees and animals and stuff and have been resisting the evil asshole's attempts to pave paradise and put up a parking lot.  For whatever bullshit reason the Maximals have to take on "technorganic" bodies that would hopefully be less ugly and stupid.

And because Hasbro loves gimmicks, the aliens should be able to transform into weapons or accessories for the Maximals and Vehicons.  Maybe they could even be some kind of plant!  Then there are various battles and so forth to save the environment and precious resources and all that stuff.

I thought of calling it Wild Beasts or something since they'd be like in the wild of the planet and they're beasts.  So there you go.  It would never happen but maybe I can go write some goofy fanfic of it and post it on the old Transformers message boards.

Anyway, if you want a writing message, I think it would be the basic:  fail to plan, plan to fail.  There was a lot of half-assed "planning" in this line and show and it never really came together.

 (Fun Facts:  At least one writer, Stephen Melching, would later work on the far better Transformers Prime computer animated series.  Comic book writer Marv Wolfman writes a couple episodes of this and also worked on previous series and I think GI Joe and other 80s stuff like that.)