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.