Introduction

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Beast Wars, the 90's iteration of the Transformers franchise which reinviograted the brand, preventing it from fading away into oblivion after a massive decline following the franchise's dominance throughout the 80's. To tie in with this anniversary, the characters of Beast Wars are set to appear in the final chapter of Netflix's War for Cybertron series. 

Titled 'Kingdom', this chapter will feature the Autobots and Decepticons joining the Maximals and Predecons of Beast Wars. Hasbro has also released new toys of the Beast Wars characters, creating figures that look pretty close to the characters seen in the Beast Wars show back in 1996:

As well as this, IDW Publishing, notable for their various Transformers comics that they have been publishing since 2005, are releasing a new Beast Wars comic book series, featuring a reimagining of the conflict between the Maximals and Predecons.

So, what purpose does this blog serve? Well, I'm going to be using this blog primarily to review every episode of both Beast Wars and it's sequel series Beast Machines, with the aim to have a new post up every week. I may then go on to discuss other Transformers media, but we have a long way to go before we get to that point.

I thought I'd start with a brief introduction to the series, talking about how the series came about and why the decision was made to make such a radical change to the series:

Going into the 90's, Transformers was no longer the giant that it was in the toy aisles, eventually leading to the line getting completely cancelled. Two years later, Hasbro tried to bring the brand back with the short lived Transformers: Generation 2 toy line. This was met with a "new" (i.e. episodes of the original 'Generation 1' Transformers cartoon combined with CGI opening credits and transitions) cartoon series and a short lived comic book series published by Marvel and written by longtime Transformers comic writer Simon Furman. 

When this failed to catch on, Hasbro were met with two options - either throw in the towel and end the franchise for good, or revamp the concept drastically in order to cater for a new audience who hadn't grown up with the likes of Optimus Prime, Megatron, Bumblebee, and Starscream. Ultimately, the latter was chosen, and Hasbro tasked their newly aquired divison Kenner, who were famous for bringing Star Wars toys to the masses throughout the 70's and 80's, with this reinvention.

Kenner's idea was simple - take the concept of two warring factions of robots who transform into vehicles, but instead of vehicles, the robots transform into animals. While Transformers had taken on animal forms before in the form of the Dinobots and the Insecticons, they were still primarily robotic animals rather than the organic looking forms that Beast Wars adopted.

With the toy line underway, Hasbro's next step was to create a TV series in order to sell their toys. This task was appointed to the Canadian studio Mainframe Entertainment, who had recently made a name for themselves by creating the world's first full length CGI animated TV series, ReBoot.

Hasbro approached Mainframe with a box containing the first wave of Beast Wars figures, and asked them to make a show about the toys. Mainframe accepted, taking on the show primarily as a creative excersise. To write the show, Hasbro got writers Larry DiTillio and Bob Foreward to act as the show's story editors. While the gig was primarily work for hire, Mainframe collaborated with Hasbro as well as DiTillio and Foreward in order to create the show.

While the backstory for the Beast Wars toyline was under the impression that this was merely a continuation of the original conflict between the Autobots and Decepticons (as depicted within the comic book that came packaged with the 'Optimus Primal VS Megatron two pack) with the leaders of the Maximals and Predacons Optimus Primal and Megatron being the same characters from the original Transformers series (albiet now taking the forms of a bat and an alligator), the cartoon took a different approach with the Maximals and Predacons being ancestors of the Autobots and Decepticons and Optimus Primal and Megatron being completely new characters separate from their Generation 1 counterparts.

Initially, existing Transformers fans who had grown up with the original cartoon. comic book and toyline were not receptive towards Beast Wars, primarily because of the change from vehicle alt modes to animal alt modes. A lot of this controversy mainly seemed to centre around Optimus Primal due to him being a gorilla rather than a truck, leading to what could be considered an early meme in the form of the phrase 'TRUKK NOT MUNKY!'. However, both DiTillio and Foreward, who had no knowledge of Transformers prior to taking on the job, paid attention to all the Transformers message boards and, upon coming across various pieces of Transformers lore, began adding existing lore into Beast Wars, leading to the show's naysayers dwindling and the show has gone on to become one of the more beloved entries in the Transformers franchise.

Interestingly, however, in Canada, the show had a different name. Due to some kind of stipulation that prevented shows made for children having the word 'war' in the title, the show was instead given the rather bizarre and nonsensical name 'Beasties'. 

This seems like a good place to round things off for this week. Join me next week when I discuss the first episode: Beast Wars Part 1.