I bought the Rhino DVDs of Beast Machines a few years back, and generally I thought that BM was okay, it just lacked the humour that most American TF series up to that point had. It was too dark, serious and depressing... essentially in tone it was how many adult fans treated Transformers: As serious 'adult' collectables for hardcore grown up adults who aren't immature babies, rather than a toyline made primarily for children.

Plus I wanted to throw a brick at Nightscream's face. I found myself horrified to discover that evidently George Lucas cribbed Nightscream in writing Anakin Skywalker*  


*Yeah yeah, Star Wars fans, this is just a joke.

Where the heck did they say that? From what I recall of their interview with Ben Yee on the Madman DVDs, they said that originally Hasbro gave them the directive to not directly link the show with the previous Transformers series, or even have the planet be Earth (no doubt due to Generation 2 not doing very well). The 'planet buster' moon was their safety - they could get rid of it when they eventually needed to establish that the strange, primitive world was indeed Earth.