Beast Wars: Transformers (franchise)
From Transformers Wiki
| This article is about the real-world franchise. For the historical event within the fiction, see Beast Wars (event). For a list of other meanings, see Beast Wars (disambiguation). |
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Beast Wars: Transformers is a franchise that began in 1996, following the end of Generation 2. It was a massive reinvention of the Transformers brand, featuring robots that changed into realistic, organically styled animals instead of the traditional vehicles and mechanical beasts. The accompanying cartoon was another visual break, being the first fully-CGI Transformers series. It also did the seemingly unthinkable and replaced the original factions of Autobots and Decepticons with complete new ones called Maximals and Predacons. Though originally decried by fans, Beast Wars dramatically reinvigorated the brand after flagging sales in the Generation 2 franchise.
"Beast Wars" is also frequently used as a catchall term for the overall Beast Era in which Beast Wars and other series occur.
The Beast Wars franchise features the following primary components:
- A toyline — (1996–2001)
- A cartoon series — (1996–1999) called Beasties in many Canadian markets to appear less violent (Ha!).
- A video game for PC and PlayStation based on the first season of the cartoon.
- A video game for the Nintendo 64 based on the Transmetal and Fuzor versions of the characters from the cartoon's second season (and some from the toyline).
- A video game for the PlayStation, with the same name and general concept as the N64 game, but significant differences.
- Several comic series that were produced both during and after the franchise's original run.
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Overview
From 1992 to 1995, Hasbro's attempt to revive the Transformers brand with Generation 2 proved to be not as successful as originally hoped. Facing the reality of cancelation, Hasbro was left with the decision of either ending Transformers for good or trying something dramatically different to breathe new life into the brand; ultimately, they chose the latter. The major change in direction followed organizational changes within Hasbro. The company had previously acquired rival toy manufacturer Kenner as part of their 1991 Tonka acquisition.[1] In 1995, they transferred their boys' toy lines from the Hasbro headquarters in Rhode Island to Kenner's offices in Cincinnati, Ohio. Kenner was tasked with revitalizing the brand with new ideas and, in 1996, Beast Wars was the result.
Lead designer Chris Gross inadvertently kicked off the Beast Wars concept when he proposed a stylistic change from hard-edged, blocky robots to Guyver-inspired "organic" machines.[2] The "mutant heads" on the first few Beast Wars toy designs were conceived of as a way of easing the transition from traditional Transformers into Beast Wars by showing that there was a robot within the beast, not just an animal that transforms into some kind of monster.[2] The Beast Wars line title was inspired by a past toyline of Kenner's, namely the Future War line of Terminator toys, which was chosen based on the idea that it portrayed a "visceral conflict".[2] The show would not have been made unless a drastically new concept from the original Transformers was created, as Generation 1 was considered a stale property at the time.[2]
To promote the new toyline, an animated TV series was created by Canadian production company Mainframe Entertainment, who had pioneered in computer-generated imagery with the success of their first animated series ReBoot. Television writers Bob Forward and Larry DiTillio were brought in to serve as the series' story editors. Having never worked on Transformers beforehand, the two brought a fresh perspective to the series, and created a whole new world and lore from the ground up. Voice talent for the show was based in Vancouver, British Columbia, with such actors as Garry Chalk, David Kaye, Scott McNeil, Richard Newman, Venus Terzo, and more, first joining the Transformers voice acting legacy through Beast Wars. Many would even return to Transformers to lend their voices to the casts of later animated series, such as those belonging to the Unicron Trilogy of the mid-2000s.
By mid-1999, Beast Wars had spanned three-and-a-half years of new toys and three seasons of the TV series, with new developments and new innovations constantly brought to the table year after year. While the cartoon ended that year, the toyline crept along past its formal lifespan with a few final releases just making it out to retail stores and fan conventions in both 2000 and 2001.
Japanese release
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In Japan, the first season of the North American cartoon was aired in 1997 with what was basically a gag dub, striking a markedly lighter tone full of adlibs and pop culture references added to the dialogue, meant to up the humor and appeal to a much younger audience than the English version. This dub was accompanied by releases of the concurrent toys, but only about half of the ones released in the West (mostly just those of the in-show characters). Because the second and third seasons of the show were only 13 episodes each (half the length of the show's first 26-episode season), the second season was deemed too short to span a year's worth of Japanese television, and thus its Japanese release was held off until production of the third season was completed.
In the meantime, two Japanese-original cel-animated series were created to fill in the void, with each receiving their own accompanying toys and manga series. These were 1998's Beast Wars II and 1999's Beast Wars Neo, respectively. While both of these series used cel animation, the toys' box art was rendered in a CG style similar to the original Mainframe cartoon (whereas the Western releases of the toys were the opposite, featuring hand drawn box art). Once both of these had finished their original broadcast run, the remaining two CG-animated seasons of the Mainframe series, along with their accompanying toys, were finally released in late 1999 under the name of Beast Wars Metals. Like the first season, the Metals dub was just as light-hearted and littered with adlibs.
Reception
Beast Wars was the first complete reinvention of the Transformers brand, discarding the previous setting, characters, and factions to create a brand new story. Transformers in the Beast Wars cartoon were much smaller (often human-sized) and initially transformed into "fleshy" or "scaly" non-robotic animals, before the second season introduced new concepts like the Transmetals. Initially met with outrage by many fans (for a variety of reasons), Beast Wars would eventually win over most of its detractors and become highly regarded, largely due to the exceptional quality of the cartoon series. It is now not unusual for even longtime fans of the 1980s Transformers to consider Beast Wars to be their favorite of all Transformers franchises. This is perhaps best shown by the fact that, about fifteen years later, the first two fan-voted characters to enter the Transformers Hall of Fame were Beast Wars fan-favorites Dinobot and Waspinator, and again in 2017 when Optimus Primal won the Power of the Primes fan poll.
Sequel
A direct sequel series followed Beast Wars in the form of Beast Machines. In contrast to its predecessor, while it kept the heroic Maximal faction, Beast Machines brought back vehicular altmodes for the enemy faction, replacing the Predacons with the Vehicons. It also utilized a more futuristic "alien" aesthetic, with the Maximals turning into "technorganic" beasts (a molecular fusion of the organic and the technological), while the Vehicons turned into "living" vehicles with robotic heads in place of the driver's seats and cockpits. Beast Machines also received a cartoon series that continued the lives of the Beast Wars cast on their home planet of Cybertron, but took a much more cerebral approach to its story that yielded a far more polarizing reception from the fandom.
Anniversaries
10th Anniversary
2006 marked the tenth anniversary of Beast Wars and many parties sought to celebrate the occasion in different ways. From Hasbro came Beast Wars 10th Anniversary, a small line consisting primarily of reissues of eight toys from the original 1996 toyline, redecoed in more show-accurate color schemes. Six of these reissues were Deluxe class toys that included both a packed-in DVD containing a single episode from the cartoon (each episode being one themed around the character with whose toy they were packaged) and an all-new build-a-figure component of Trans-Mutate, a show-original single-episode character who had never received a toy beforehand. Additionally, two brand new Deluxe class molds of Optimus Primal and Megatron were released as part of the line, and had built-in compatibility with the Cyber Key gimmick of the then-contemporary Cybertron toyline.
For BotCon 2006, Fun Publications created what was, arguably, their most famous and well-received set of BotCon exclusives: "Dawn of Future's Past", a set of mostly Cybertron toy molds redecoed/retooled into most of the main cast of the Beast Wars cartoon's first season, in forms representing the Cybertronian bodies the characters had before coming to Earth and scanning their beast modes. An accompanying comic story of the same title served as an immediate prequel to the cartoon, telling the story of what all happened right before the first episode. The following year, an additional prequel to that prequel was released at BotCon 2007, in the form of an animated short titled "Theft of the Golden Disk" (which even had David Kaye reprise his role of Megatron!).
TakaraTomy also celebrated the anniversary with two new developments of their own. First was Beast Wars Reborn, a special two-pack release of the original Ultra class Optimus Primal and Megatron toys in new show-accurate colors and tooling (Hasbro would also release these two as part of their Beast Wars 10th Anniversary line). A four-part Beast Wars Reborn prose story written by Hirofumi Ichikawa (set after the events of the Japanese dub of Beast Machines) was published in issues #97–100 of Figure Ō magazine from March to June of 2006. In 2007—the tenth anniversary of the Japanese release of Beast Wars—TakaraTomy released Beast Wars Telemocha Series, a proper line of Beast Wars reissues very similar to Hasbro's Beast Wars 10th Anniversary line, complete with pack-in DVDs and show-accurate redecos (even more accurate than those of the Hasbro line).
20th Anniversary
After the attention Beast Wars had received from Hasbro for the tenth anniversary in 2006, as well the bombastic celebration for the Transformers brand's 30th anniversary—the "Thrilling 30"—which Hasbro threw in 2014... The fandom waited with bated breath to see how Hasbro had in store for the 20th anniversary of Beast Wars in 2016. Alas, there was very little fanfare from Hasbro proper, who opted to instead focus their attention more on the 30th anniversary of The Transformers: The Movie. The sole nod to the Beast Wars anniversary from Hasbro was the Platinum Edition release of the Year of the Monkey Optimus Primal, which did sport a celebratory logo (pictured right), but said release was more of a Hasbro Asia initiative than Hasbro proper.
For BotCon 2016, Fun Publications paid more heed. Much like 2006, the convention was themed around another Beast Wars prequel, with a majority of the exclusive toys representing Beast Wars characters in pre-beast bodies they had on Cybertron before the Beast Wars. The convention comic, "Dawn of the Predacus", was made by IDW Publishing, with its story tied to both IDW's 2006–2008 Beast Wars comics and Fun Publications' "Dawn of Future's Past" comic from 2006. Throughout 2016, Fun Publications also produced several prose stories for Beast Wars: Uprising, a completely different, dystopian-themed Beast Wars series that was largely unconnected to the TV series. One of these prose stories, "Intersectionality", even included its own "Chilling 20" anniversary logo (pictured left) as a joke.
TakaraTomy also released a bit of Beast Wars-themed product in 2016. Exclusive toys of Rattrap, Rhinox, and Waspinator were released at Transformers Fes2016, as part of the Legends toyline; these three were show-accurate redecos of their Generations toys originally released during the aforementioned Thrilling 30 range. TakaraTomy also released a Masterpiece version of Optimus Primal for October 2016, which led to several more Beast Wars characters receiving Masterpiece toys in the years to come. E-HOBBY also released Legends Convobat in December 2016, a redeco of the Titans Return Mindwipe and Titan Master Infinitus toys as a Headmaster-based update of the original bat Optimus Primal toy from 1996.
25th Anniversary
The twenty-fifth anniversary in 2021 was met with significantly more fanfare from Hasbro with the debut of Kingdom, the Beast Wars-themed third chapter of the War for Cybertron Trilogy toyline and cartoon. The success of the Kingdom toyline led to releases of more Beast Wars characters continuing into the subsequent Legacy line of 2022. 2021 also saw the release of the Vintage Beast Wars line of reissues (this time not redecoed show-accurately and even including some non-show characters from the original toyline), and a brand new ongoing Beast Wars comic from IDW, which served as a complete reimagining of the 1996 cartoon's premise, setting, and characters. The comic's issues sported a legit 25th anniversary logo (pictured right).
The then-upcoming sixth live-action feature film Transformers: Rise of the Beasts was also announced in 2021, as it featured new live-action interpretations of select characters from Beast Wars. Both the film and its heavily beast-themed toyline were originally scheduled for release the following year in 2022, but delays pushed back both to be released on June 9 of 2023 instead. In anticipation of the film's Japanese release later that year, TakaraTomy also created Beast Wars Again, a small line of Kingdom and Legacy molds given new show-accurate decos, which were sold as VS two-packs in the style of those released back in the original Takara Beast Wars toyline. This line was even accompanied by a special rebroadcast of select episodes from the cartoon's Japanese dub (albeit, with each episode split in half to air in 15-minute timeslots), rebranded with the new Beast Wars Again logo. Though, due to the belated release of Rise of the Beasts, both it and Beast Wars Again coming in 2023 ended up being less of a 25th anniversary celebration and more of a "27th anniversary".
Notes
- On April 4, 2019, Lorenzo di Bonaventura listed a live-action adaptation of Beast Wars as a potential future entry to the live-action film series.[3] This would eventually manifest as Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.
