BEAST WARS! Now we’re talking!

For the uninitiated, Beast Wars: Transformers was a 1996 toyline and tv series continuation of the original Generation 1 Transformers. Granted, the continuity of the series tends to pull from various G1 media including the original cartoon and the Marvel comics.

The original plan for the toyline was to act as a continuation of the conflict from the original Transformers toyline, but with the twist of the Transformers assuming realistic, organic animal forms.

The heroic Autobots became the Maximals, who usually transformed into mammals, birds and fish, but this wasn’t a hard and fast rule. While the Decepticons became the Predacons, whose alternate modes often consisted of dinosaurs, reptiles, amphibians and various arthropods such as spiders, insects and crustaceans.

Beast Wars was initially met with some resistance from fans of the G1 Transformers due in part to the organic nature of the alternate modes that were controversial from a design standpoint and an anti-beast, pro-vehicle stance among stalwarts of the fandom that would prefer Optimus turn into a truck and not a monkey.

For the record, Optimus is actually a gorilla in this series and not a monkey, but technicalities don’t really matter to fandoms unless its pedantic details like parsecs being units of distance and not time. This led to some parody and derision of this particular crowd with the phrase “Trukk not Munky” (deliberately misspelled by the way).

The 1996 animated series by Mainframe (of ReBoot fame) took the story in an original direction from the toyline with Optimus Primal and Megatron being separate characters from their G1 counterparts and setting the series 300 years after the events of the great war between Autobots and Decepticons. Necessitated by the cost of a CG animated series at the time, the cast of characters were greatly reduced to only five members on either side.

The Maximals consisted of leader Optimus Primal, an explorer forced into a leadership role by circumstance; Rhinox, team engineer and renaissance bot; Cheetor, an overconfident and impulsive young bot; Rattrap a sarcastic and rude pessimist who questions orders; and Dinobot, a turncoat Predacon with a Klingon sense of honor.

The Predacons are made up of the deliciously hammy Megatron; scheming scientist Tarantulas; universal chew-toy Waspinator; treacherous Terrorsaur; and the idiot Scorponok.

The limited cast of characters meant that the show was able to focus on fleshing out characters and storylines rather than forcing in as many new characters as possible to sell more toys. That said the show did end up introducing more characters but neither side ever had more than seven or eight members at a time.

The show certainly helped to warm attitudes towards the concept, helped out by a cast with stellar performances and complex storylines that wove in a mythic status to the original series. Many concepts in the Transformers universe such as sparks, CR Chambers, protoforms, stasis lock and the concept of the Allspark were introduced in this series. The show also had one of the breakout female Transformers in the form of Predacon Blackarachnia, who would go on to appear in later series such as Transformers: Animated or inspire similar characters such as Airachnid from Transformers: Prime.

The series also has the best Megatron. Period. A master planner, gambler and a very large ham, this version is excellently played by voice actor David Kaye. Plus he turns into a t-rex and those are awesome. And yes, Megatron being a t-rex and Optimus being a gorilla is a King Kong reference.

Beast Wars is often regarded today as the series that singlehandedly saved the franchise and it’s possible Transformers as a whole would not be enjoying the ubiquity it does today and instead fall into the abyss of novel, but ultimately forgotten toy driven series such as Inhumanoids or Street Sharks, or you know, Go-Bots.

Beast Wars fans for many years haven’t enjoyed the same level of revelry as the G1 fans for their series with the 20th anniversary in 2016 being little more than a footnote acknowledgement. Thankfully, that has changed recently and we’ve seen new figures released in the premium Masterpiece line with show accurate figures, a new comic series from IDW, inclusion of classic Beast Wars characters in the new Transformers: War for Cybertron: Kingdom toyline and Netflix series, and a new movie on the horizon that is rumored to include Beast Wars characters.

This was one of my favorite cartoons growing up and I still find myself returning to and revisiting the series from time to time (easier now that it is available to watch for free on Tubi). The CG may be very, very dated but the show has a charm and some really good stories that have helped it to endure.

I highly recommend checking it out for any fans of Transformers or anyone that enjoys imaginative and well written animated series.

Next week, something less fun, unfortunately.