Beast Wars Theme

[Armonia Bunda]

BeastWars: Transformers is a Daytime Emmy award-winning computer-animated television series produced by Mainframe Entertainment that premiered on April 22, 1996 in syndication in the United States.[1]

Though reviled by many Transformers fans when it first hit the airwaves in 1996, Beast Wars is now considered by many to be among the finest examples of Transformers storytelling, striking a happy balance between character, humor, and story.

Beast Wars opens at an unspecified time and place, where two warring factions of robots have crashed on a strange planet populated by animals like those on Earth. The planet abounds in mystery, with vast deposits of raw energon and evidence of alien activity. The Energon forces the newly arrived Transformers to take on protective beast forms to shield themselves from the ambient Energon radiation. And so begin the Beast Wars...

Though at first the show seemed to be in an entirely separate continuity, by the end of the first season's 26 episodes, viewers had been treated to a number of classical Transformers references, such as Unicron and even the reappearance of Starscream, last seen as a ghost in the third season of the original cartoon. These ties to the original story increased as the second season progressed and the planet was revealed as prehistoric Earth, the characters having been thrown back in time. The third season was entirely structured around the Maximals defending their dormant Autobot ancestors aboard the ancient crashed Ark.

The show won over many viewers through fun, intriguing stories and generally high production values. Strong characterization, top-notch scripting and voice acting, and complex, overarching plot threads are among the reasons cited for the show's enduring popularity. Some of the show's mysteries and machinations still remain topics for fan debate decades after its conclusion.

The show's CGI, though somewhat primitive by today's standards, was revolutionary by television standards of the time (and puts some later shows to shame). Mainframe's animators took pains to ensure their characters gestured and emoted in great detail, and the "camera" work often took creative advantage of the format's flexibility.

Beast Wars was produced by Canadian animation company Mainframe Entertainment, and distributed for syndicated television by Claster Television and Alliance Atlantis. Prior to working on Beast Wars, Mainframe had pioneered in the use three-dimensional computer-generated imagery for television animation with their critically-acclaimed ReBoot series, which was itself the world's first fully 3D CG-animated television series with 22-minute episode lengths (and even predated such films as Pixar's Toy Story). Character modeling for the series was done using hardware developed by Silicon Graphics and software by Softimage, with toys from the Beast Wars toyline provided by Hasbro to use as a basis for each character model.

Character animation was all done in-house, with Mainframe creating a working environment that allowed as much work to be done within the same company as possible, creating smooth communication and work efficiency between each production department, in contrast to how competitor productions of the time would instead divide their animation labor between multiple companies for budgetary reasons. Lip-syncing and facial expressions for the characters were made using an advanced facial animation program called GRIN, which had been custom-made by Mainframe themselves.

Executive producer Christopher Brough recruited television writers Bob Forward and Larry DiTillio to serve as story editors for Beast Wars, which the two were initially disinterested in due to not being fans of giant robots. Nonetheless, Forward and DiTillio were willing to meet and talk with Brough, who wanted the two for their adept storytelling prowess and was willing to give them total creative control. Since neither Forward nor DiTillio had been familiar with the Transformers brand beforehand, the pair decided to create something completely new and different from the ground up. They found an appeal in the science fiction aspect of Transformers, with the characters themselves being technological lifeforms who were at war with each other. Thus, the duo sought to create a sci-fi show first and foremost, one that explored the nature of the robotic characters and the greater world they inhabited.

Limitations of the CG animation forced the cast to be kept relatively small in number, which led Forward and DiTillio to write more character-driven plots with enhanced interpersonal drama between the characters. As the series progressed, Forward and DiTillio soon became aware of the Transformers internet newsgroups like alt.toys.transformers, where they began to interact directly with the fandom and learn more about the existing Transformers mythos, which would greatly influence the later story arcs of the cartoon.

When it came to each season's finale, there was an uncertainty about whether or not there would be another season to follow. A rule of thumb that Forward and DiTillio abided by when crafting each finale basically boiled down to "Kill 'em all, let Hasbro sort 'em out." This led to the first and second seasons each ending on dramatic cliffhangers with the fates of multiple characters left open ended. For the third season, once it was determined that its finale would be the series ender, the script went through several draft revisions to add in more scenes that would wrap up most of the series' major plot points, tying up as many loose ends as possible. Veteran Transformers comic writer Simon Furman had even been brought in to write the second part of this finale, which was his first-ever script job for televised animation.

Because developing new CGI character models was, at the time, an expensive and time-consuming process, the number of on-screen characters in Beast Wars was relatively small compared to most other Transformers shows. They are listed in order of appearance. (The stasis locked Autobots and Decepticons aboard the Ark are not on this list.)

The lasting popularity of the Beast Wars cartoon went on to ensure its place as a poignant and memorable part of Transformers history, with multiple parties creating numerous continuations, spinoffs, and other addenda.

In late 1999, Beast Wars received a direct sequel in the form of Beast Machines, a two-season animated series that continued the story back on Cybertron in the same future era the Maximals and Predacons had originally hailed before coming to prehistoric Earth in Beast Wars. While most of the original Beast Wars cast of Maximals returned, Beast Machines replaced the Predacons with the all new Vehicon faction, still led by the same Megatron. Beast Machines also distinguished itself from Beast Wars with a much darker and more cerebral story, which left the fandom far more divided in its reception of the series than it had ever felt about Beast Wars. In the years since, Beast Machines has been looked back on more favorably, but still nowhere near as fondly as its predecessor.

Additionally, Issue #1 of Devil's Due Press's G.I. Joe vs. the Transformers: The Art of War, featured a glimpse of Optimus Primal within the memory banks of the Decepticon Soundwave, suggesting that a version of Beast Wars may very well have also happened in the G.I. Joe vs. the Transformers continuity, but that notion has never been explored beyond that single cameo.

Over the course of its roughly three-year run (and even long after), the continuity of the Beast Wars cartoon underwent a rather fluctuous evolution, with numerous changes and retcons made to it along the way by multiple disparate parties.

One of the biggest changes that occurred across the cartoon's three seasons was its depiction of the Predacons. In the first season, it was constantly stated that Megatron sought to acquire enough energon to fuel the Predacons' ultimate goal of conquering the galaxy, and occasional references were given to the notion of him being a "tyrant". In the series' production bible, the Predacons were described as "a race of feral conquerors who believe they alone have the right to rule Cybertron (and any other planet they can train their lasers on.)"[4] Likewise, Megatron himself was described as "the most feared leader of the Predacons",[4] suggesting he was originally meant to be the overall commander of the whole faction (like how his Generation 1 namesake was the leader of all Decepticons). This is further supported throughout the first season in instances where such treacherous Predacons as Terrorsaur and Blackarachnia would express a desire to overthrow Megatron and "rule the Predacons" as a whole.

By the second season, however, things changed dramatically for the Predacons. Megatron rarely, if ever, mentioned galactic conquest anymore, and his primary agenda switched from obtaining energon to altering history. This was played off as having been his true goal all along, retconning his depiction in the first season. Furthermore, his desire to change history was due to a complete overhaul of the Predacons' status back on Cybertron. Instead of the galactic conquerors they were billed as in the first season, the second and third season reimagined them as disgruntled second-class citizens subordinate to the authority of the Maximal government on Cybertron. The episode "Other Visits (Part 2)" first made mention of a coalition called the Predacon Alliance, while "The Agenda (Part 1)" introduced one of the alliance's ruling bodies, the Tripredacus Council. It was these episodes that fully reinterpreted Megatron as not the Predacon leader he was originally made out to be, but rather a rogue criminal.

No doubt, the first-season depiction is what inspired the portrayal of the Predacons seen in the two Japanese-original spinoff series Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo, wherein the Predacon leaders Galvatron and Magmatron were each known by all Predacons (and Maximals) as a respected Emperor of Destruction (the same title Megatron had in the Japanese version) with their own vast resources spread across the universe, and who answered to no higher Predacon authorities. This was due to the second and third seasons of the American Beast Wars cartoon having not yet reached Japan at the time when Beast Wars II and Neo were in production (see below for more). The Japanese simply weren't aware of the changes the second season would make to both Megatron's leadership status and the political structure of the Predacons as a whole, and thus didn't know about the Predacon Alliance, the Tripredacus Council, or Megatron really being just a lowly crook with delusions of grandeur.

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