Beast Wars Transformers was my favorite show in the 90's, any fans here?

Beast Wars Transformers was my favorite show in the 90's, any fans here?

I would have loved it as a kid. On the other hand, when I watched it later and ended up liking it anyway, at least my appreciation wasn't tainted by rose-tinted glasses.

Still took a while for it to grow on me.

this show is one of the few cases where a remake would actually be justified

the tech just wasn't ready yet

Eh, it doesn't bother me no more than watching "dated" animation from any period does....could be cause I grew up with it, but that's just how CG looked back then

I'm mostly the same, but it also makes it really tough to sell the show to newcomers. Heck, many pickier people considered its CGI unwatchable even back when it came out.

i didn't watch it as a kid, but i watched a few episodes on Netflix a few years ago and really enjoyed. for 1990s TV budget CGI, it aged better than i thought it would.

i have no idea how i'm going to afford this, but I must have it. and the cheetor one.
bullshit. nobody thought that in 1996.

No it's true. I remember the CGI being a main criticism of the show when it first came out

The writing would be shittier

from who? it's not like 2d tv animation was winning any fucking awards at the time, batman aside. that kind of cg was blowing people's minds. we were astounded by how complicated things could be, how dynamic the fights could be.

Yeah the cgi has aged poorly in some respects but the facial animation still blows even many modern day cartoons out of the water. Every character is ridiculously emotive.

what other figmas exist?

Loved that show.

that's no figma, it's a masterpiece

and from what i hear, it's actually SMALLER than the original. for over 100 bucks i'd like something Leader-class, is that so much to ask?

Beast Wars was the TF cartoon I grew up on, and it's still my favorite series from the franchise. Dated CGI aside, the characters and story are still top-tier.

I'm waiting for my MP Optimus Primal to come in, and Cheetor's next on the list; they look too damn good to resist! I'm already drooling over/dreading an entire MP Beast Wars line: my poor wallet...

we already got the best possible rhinox, rattrap, and waspinator we could ever ask for
I just need them to make this sucker. i'm sure the artist wouldnt charge them much

Right here. Dated animation aside, the writing on the show was pretty damn solid, especially considering it was just a glorified ad for selling toys. Dinobot's last words is downright Shakespearean.

"Tell my tale to those who ask. Tell it truly, the ill deeds along with the good, and let me be judged accordingly. The rest...is silence..."

where do the neckshells go? They either disappear or are somehow connected to the thighs via kraut space magic.

also the hands are terrible, absolutely

>especially considering it was just a glorified ad for selling toys.

>fiction can't be good if it's inspired by a toyline or has a toyline

man, I know you're not being a dick but I really tire of this mindset....the reason most successful toylines are a success is because they inspire imagination or have a cool concept, there is literally no reason to assume something is lesser fiction simply because it's toyetic

And I mean sure, some fiction that's toyetic does suck....but that's how things go in general, there are tons of shitty cartoons that never had toys or were never based on a pre existing franchise....what something is based on if anything doesn't determine it's quality

I wish more people got that. toys inspire the same as anything. and to make a good toy series you have to do something right. have real good solid action and shit that makes you care about their fighting. not to mention good designs

>Dinobot's last words is downright Shakespearean.

Probably because it came from fucking Shakespeare

Not to mention that in the case of action figure lines like Transformers, there is usually a story made up for it anyway so they lend themselves to fiction quite well, it's not like it's as random as say making.....rocking horse: the series, or super ball: the series

Hell, the toys have their own fucking canon if you think about based on the tech specs and shit written on the backs of boxes

Rattrap and Dinobot were my first OTP

>rocking horse: the series, or super ball: the series
I would watch both of these

>the toys have their own fucking canon
i love how a lot of shittier toy commercials end up having their own canon. transformers had them for sure with the excited announcer saying dumbass shit, but even shit like ninja turtles did. My headcanon is that the issues with Turtles Forever are explained away by realizing the 88 universe was really the shitty-toy-commercial universe. that's why they had the wrong voices, crummy personalities, and everything existed in a perpetual state (the bad guys are always attacking, april is always being kidnapped by fucking weird monsters)

>best possible
Wait and see if more MP's come our way

Yeah it looks like they go up onto the thighs. No idea how the legs are supposed to be articulated.

oh you're right, they do seem to magically go up on to the thighs.. uh.. well i'm okay with that, it would only require another long hinge.
the hands are perfect, it's how they should have been from the beginning. a raptor's claw makes a perfect thumb, it's articulated just right. I've been thinking that ever since the beginning, and I drew my own with that same thing. because if you flip it over it's even curling the right way to be a thumb.
I'm no engineer but I've thought of a few decent beastformer ideas, since that's really hard to do well. I like the idea of a scorpion whose tail forms one leg with a pointy toe, and whose pincers fold away to become forearm shields with elbow spikes. I also think there are much better ways to do tyrannosaurs than the usual crummy way theyve done it.

Sounds like you'd like some of Jizai's non conventional ideas.

well they're certainly interesting!

yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssssssssss

Define remake. Completely remake with different writing, animation, voices, etc or just a graphical update like, I dunno, the Star Trek remasters?

The graphics do have a certain charm to them. But it'd probably be weird seeing robots with hyper realistic animal parts on them.

there are a few things about beastformers that you have to just kind of... squint at and accept. mainly: parts of an animal that should be articulated flesh and bone, turning into shit like... rigid shoulder pads, hip armor, a railgun, a rotate blade...
the more realistic it gets, the less that would work.

>there are a few things about beastformers that you have to just kind of... squint at and accept. mainly: parts of an animal that should be articulated flesh and bone, turning into shit like... rigid shoulder pads, hip armor, a railgun, a rotate blade..

Alien tech bro, only explanation you need

well no, you obviously do. If they could just do anything, they wouldn't bother to do the complex parts-rearrangement they actually do.

TRUKK NOT MUNKY!

No but seriously I loved this show when I was a kid.

whatchu mean, bro?
will his elbows have something in them this time, not just hinges at the krelbow? because it looks like no. and the robot chest looks wrong.... and the gorilla head looks wrong in this shot but it looks better in others.

what was their end game?

funny, I felt the opposite as a kid. I wasn't terribly knowledgeable about transformers having been born in '85 and seeing all of ONE episode of the show, but I thought cars and trucks were gay and terrible, and animals were awesome. I designed my own beastformers (not sure if i was aware of the classic predacons, but they looked like robot animals) that mostly just swapped out hands and feet inside the limbs, and head inside the body, like the transforming TMNT figures.

Never got to watch it much as a kid, but I vividly remember from the few episodes I caught here and there thinking it was fucking awesome as a stupid little kid.

Decided a few years back to sit down and give it a watch to see how thick my nostalgia goggles were, and I fucking loved it.

And now you've shown me that figure exists and I hate you because I liked having money.

I think they wanted to manipulate humanity in some way. maybe slave race

...

Ever see that episode of Star Trek TNG where they went into a hole in space and some super-intelligent alien entity experimented on them for reasons?

I always figured it was something like that.

Joke's on you, I fucking hate Cheetor!

I'm still gonna buy it though.

>and from what i hear, it's actually SMALLER than the original. for over 100 bucks i'd like something Leader-class, is that so much to ask?

Yes. Japanese toys go on quality, not size.

Who /Beast Wars Uprising/ here?

I can't believe what a masterpiece they made of that fucking mess. From the very beginning, the designs for this thing were intentionally made to look like some kind of mutant creature, not any kind of real cat. the legs didn't need to be how they were in order to become robot legs, they just had this total mutant vibe going at the time (hence the alternate heads)
but SOMEHOW this MP one manages to make him turn into a real proper cheetah. I just.. I can't even

they really seemed to do it intentionally to dinobot too, giving him those bizarre feet and webbed hands. it was a different design aesthetic for sure

nevertheless, the other masterpieces were bigger, weren't they?

Imagine Cheetor's gut gun squiggling with every shot. Skin tearing and regrowing when transformation occurs. Everyone would look like the Thing with mechanical bits.

That's something I'd actually expect from beastformers in the Bay movies.

These look so nice, I'm glad I gave up on buying TF toys a couple years ago, because otherwise I'd be so fucking tempted.

>Skin tearing and regrowing when transformation occurs
that's... a real neat imagination you have, user.
>That's something I'd actually expect from beastformers in the Bay movies.
actually i'm kind of with you there. Though they DID have a beastformer (human mode, that is) and her skin just managed to fold away into segments.

Now that's a remake I wanna see.

In a a way, its like Galeon from Gaogaigar with a new skin. Like a hybrid of Takara's design philosophy with the bio-punk/extreme aesthetics popular in American toys at the time.

>Though they DID have a beastformer (human mode, that is) and her skin just managed to fold away into segments.

You mean that human Transformer in... was it 2? I don't think I've seen any of the Bay movies beyond that. That's a Pretender, not a beastformer.

I mean, in the show they often yelled or screamed when they transformed. With realistic fleshy covering, they'd actually have a reason to do so.

Along with the viewers.

But a realistic Beast Machines remake would be freakier.

Yes, and also more expensive. Primal also has light-up eyes that most other MPs lack, and a intensive paintjob where almost all his beast parts are covered in fur texture. Meanwhile, other Japanese collectors lines like SHF or Figma are reaching the $50+ range, and are even smaller.

You really start feeling it when you get a couple Soul or Chogokins or, heaven forbid, third party transformers under your belt.

>That's a Pretender, not a beastformer.

PRetenders are shells, partly organic shells, but shells none the less. Even though they kept saying she was a movie version of a pretender, the way her skin folded away, was seemingly completely organic on the outside, and was part of her transformation was closer to a Beast wars era beast former. Pretender shells are partly cybernetic.

...

>bio-punk/extreme aesthetics popular in American toys at the time.
it's funny, i hated that as a kid.. i appreciate it now, but it has no place anywhere near robots.
same thing, guys. the expanded universe stuff established that animalformers derived directly from pretenders.
that's their activation phrase, silly. it's the spark talking to the computer
yeah I guess if I account for inflation it's not so bad. It's just.. leader movie starscream was 60 bucks and I felt that was fair. also I could have done without the light-up eyes if it saved me a few bucks.

>i appreciate it now, but it has no place anywhere near robots.

Says you, maybe. I really like the aesthetic, and probably wouldn't have been a Transformers fan if not for BW being like that, and my favorite toys where the ones that pushed that aesthetic. Nowadays I'm really into that aesthetic in things like Guyver, and illustrators like Makoto Kobayashi.

fuzors are something i fucking loved. I wish they'd gone even further with it. Among other things, they can solve some of the difficulty in beastforming by taking the easy-to-transform parts of an animal while leaving out the hard-to-transform bits of that one or a different one. Like it's hard as balls to make a bird transform, it just doesn't have much in its body other than wings.. you typically have to have a big ol' mass of underslung robot parts you just pretend aren't there. but If those parts comprise a different animal thing, you're right as rain.

Transmetal 2 was the line where that reached its apex. Everything was spiky and asymmetrical.

unfortunately they lost the split in aesthetic between the modes, that even transmetal 1 kept (for better or worse, sort of swapping the organic and the metal, making the robot modes... uuuugly), so it reallly just looked like some rearrangement. and at the time the show started going way more toy-accurate (and had long since removed the energon surge reason for transforming), so it became even more pointless. cheetor would show up and just kind of.. stand. Megatron would land and just move his dragon neck over to one side.

I fucking had this one. Played the shit out of it.

>for better or worse, sort of swapping the organic and the metal, making the robot modes... uuuugly

Transmetal 1 was my favorite wave of BW toys, Beast Wars premiered when I was really young but even still my first TF stuff was some of the G2 figures and reruns/vhs tapes of G1 , and it made me really excited to see fully mechanical looking modes again, plus the pseudo vehicle modes which in retrospect probably seem silly/pointless at the time I thought was the coolest thing ever

that toy is so fucking great. I just got it a few years ago. Not only that but every recolor of it was great. Whoever realized that wasp wings could be rearranged into perfect jet fighter wings was a damn genius.
I wish we had more just straight up animal-to-vehicle kinda toys.
Of course most transmetal 1s weren't as lucky as waspinator. For one thing, insect aesthetic works nicely no matter what. but cheetor and optimus looked really stupid. Rattrap was pretty cool but it helps that a rat is basically just a bullet with tiny legs in the first place. For another, most of the third modes weren't that good. wheelrat is good, but jet-flanks kitty, surfboard monkey, and turbine-skate rex.. no.
They also had the unfortunate choice to give them all melee weapons only, which resulted in the show having to get creative

Conceptually and execution-wise, Transmetals were hit and miss, but I think they hold up pretty well as toys designs. What I fucking hate is the flaky chrome and some breaking parts (even outside of the gold plastic). This goes for other toys in the line too, like what idiot decided to cast almost the entire Quickstrike in brittle transparent plastic? I used to wish they got a re-release, just with better materials and shiny paint instead of vulnerable chrome.

my quickstrike was fine, but.. yeah, it's really annoying how toys had to follow all these bullshit SAFETY rules meaning they weren't allowed to have poky-outy guns or horns or claws, but none of that translated to an actual quality guarantee in the product.. the safety fuckers don't care about toys lasting more than a few years, they think everyone tosses shit out. They just care about fucktarded parents that apparently forgot how just-fine everything was in their day.

I liked the series a lot, and had a few toys. The story wasn't "realistic," but to me it never felt watered down. Plus, the setting allowed them to do new things with different characters without interfering with the main series.

The only thing about the story that didn't feel realistic to me is how nobody had any kind of personal life. They never talked about themselves, asked about each other, we don't even know most of their names before they arrived here and gave themselves new ones (even Megatron named himself that)
we don't know what the maximals' original mission was, other than that it involved the majority of their crew going into stasis.. and when said crew lost their memories every time they crashed, it was never like "oh I recognize you, you're.. that guy" it was just "welcome to the team, new perfect stranger. thankfully we have inbuilt programming that gives you the basics of what you're about, militarywise. oh fuck, yours got hacked. well, DIE new enemy!"

other than that though, the combat strategizing, the conflicts they had, it all felt really cool and realistic compared to most action shows at the time. I felt for Rattrap. he was just a fucking pilot, he didn't ask to be sent here.

ARMADA was better, people only like Beast Wars because nostalgia

I loved Dinobot. A truer hero has never been.

What strange mirror reality did you fall out of?

Wasn't Armada essentially an attempt to cash in on the Pokemon craze?

I think you need to check your own nostalgia goggles, there.

>Dinobot's last words is downright Shakespearean.
>"Tell my tale to those who ask. Tell it truly, the ill deeds along with the good, and let me be judged accordingly. The rest...is silence..."

you fucking retard

I want to fuck that frog

No feathers.

>surfboard monkey,

you may have a point with the others but I thought surfboard Optimus was the tits

yes

truly a dimension lush with bait

My friends were all diehard transformers fans, and we loved Beast Wars too.

They would talk about which character would be whom in the group and at the time I didn't think much of it until I realized that saying that I was the Tigatron of the group was actually an insult.

hey all they had was scans of the bones. it's amazing they were able to make organic modes based on that.
in fact, considering their motivation was "the animals here are energon-resistant, let's clothe ourselves in their flesh", choosing DEAD animals was pretty stupid.. not just dead, and not even bones.. but fossils. bone-shaped rocks. shit that was HELLA dead and might have predated the energon.
but tigatron was the best one.

I had a similar reaction with Power Rangers. I really disliked Turbo

everyone did. for a NUMBER of reasons

The first season has pretty weak animation.

Later seasons were significantly better looking.

oh yeah mainframe's animation started out really wonky, same with early reboot (it seemed intentional, like they were being cartoony. canadians are weird). but nobody was saying the GRAPHICS looked bad. we didn't know anything better was possible.

I think what some of the show's critics failed to consider is that BW was a weekly full-CG series with a television cartoon budget, likely a pretty rushed development and many characters. It wasn't the best CGI available with mid-90s tech, but it was decent for what it was and how many corners it had to cut just to make it onto screens in time. And it improved a lot as it went.

totally. it made great use of what it had, and it's amazing they were able to do so much.
The only thing that stands out now, honestly, is the lack of shadows. and someone had to point it out to me before i noticed. now I can't NOT see it.

It was a wise decision to leave those out unless absolutely necessary. There was the issue of freeing up computing power and speeding up rendering times, but it also made the animators' job easier. They could simply animate the characters floating a few inches in the air instead of taking extra effort and time to align their feet to the ground, and due to the lack of shadows this little trick was hardly noticeable.

I also find it funny how allegedly the Stonehenge model was just something Mainframe had lying around, and they threw it into the show because they lacked the budget to make background objects from scratch, and wrote their story around it.

you also have to love how they werent totally transformers-fluent, and at first they werent going to make it canon with anything else.. but they put little hints in here and there.. later on after it WAS trying to be canon, they'd have shit like.. watching the old movie to get a visual reference for optimus prime, and thinking the matrix of leadership was his spark container. conveniently forgetting that they had invented sparks. and getting its scale wrong. and then getting most of the scale in the axalon's controls wrong after the first episode.

>had the snapping turtle, frilled lizard, warthog, armadillo, squid, frog, and others
>they never appeared on the fucking show

Welp they were just redesigned go bots.

there's apparently some really good comics that intentionally focus on all the toy characters that never got to be in the show.

Yeah. They even put the original Optimus' famous "freedom is the right of..." quote into the script without realizing its significance, yet it totally fit. Same with namedropping the Great War, the writers didn't know that there was actually such an even in TF lore.

In the end they mostly lucked out, and I'm thankful they didn't plunder the old show and movie for quotes. More recent media has overused a lot of those to the point where I can't stand hearing them anymore.

And technically you could say that the animators didn't really screw up by mistaking the Matrix for something else, because if you look at the scene from the 86 movie, when Prime takes it out of his chest, for a few moments there's a second Matrix under it due to an animation error. Lets say that's his Spark container.

No Harambe jokes? REALLY?

>animation errors solve everything
god bless the 80s

that's racist, user

...

those fucking protohumans
who the fuck thought it was a good idea to make them blue-eyed? they were fucking disgusting and creepy.

At least they were only in it in seasons 2 and 3, only for a few eps. I don't dare imagine what they would have looked like with the cruder season 1-style CGI.