With the demise of Transformers Generation 2, the Transformers brand once again faced oblivion, and this time, it looked like Transformers might disappear from store shelves worldwide. Hasbro decided to take a gamble and hand the brand over to their subsidiary, Kenner, who had made the Star Wars and Super Powers lines in the 70s and 80s, and was doing well with Batman at the time. The result was a complete rebooting of the Transformers franchise. Cars, jets and other vehicles gave way to realistic animals with molded fur texture. Subgroups disappeared and line-wide size classes were established. Articulation on a level with the Cyberjets and other later Generation 2 designs became the norm.
The Beast Wars had begun. With the brand in Kenner’s hands, many changes were made to the Transformers line. The line became known as “Beast Wars: Transformers”. Autobots and Decepticons were replaced by Maximals and Predacons, a play on “Mammals” and “Predators” (although there were Generation 1 Predacons, these Predacons were canonically not related). Most importantly, Kenner introduced size classes for Beast Wars, named Basic, Deluxe, Mega and Ultra – these size classes, in one form or another, have carried forward for every Transformers line since.
Beast Wars toys from the 1996 lineup, including popular characters like Optimus Primal, Megatron, Cheetor, Rattrap, Rhinox, Waspinator and Dinobot
The Beast Wars line also went with size-class wide gimmicks at first. The initial Basics were “flip changers” – by lifting a part in the beast mode, usually a tail, the toy would automatically transform to robot mode. Deluxes tended to sport missile launchers or spinning weapons, unless you were Cheetor, in which case, you shot water out of your gun. Megas and Ultras were larger and more complex, incorporating more spring loaded missile launchers and other battle actions or weapons. Notably, all of the Beast Wars toys could store their weapons somewhere on the toy in their alternate modes – no more laying parts to one side when you transformed your robots! (This feature had existed earlier – Beast Wars simply applied it across the whole line)
The initial release of the Beast Wars line came in “rocky” packaging bubbles, and the bios set the story in the modern era. By the time that the second run of figures including the Ultra Class came out, the packaging had moved over to smooth bubbles, though the bios would not adopt the pre-history setting until the second year of toys arrived. The first year of the Beast Wars toys featured another quirk that dropped out fairly quickly – all of the robots in the Deluxe, Mega and Ultra classes featured “mutant” heads as well as robot heads. Some of these were battlemasks, pure and simple, while others were genuinely alternate heads.
The initial release of Optimus Prime – who in Beast Wars was a new character named Optimus Primal – and Megatron in the line was as a two pack of basic class toys. These initial toys made Optimus Primal a bat armed with twin swords, and made Megatron an alligator. This set was only ever available in the rocky bubble format, and included a comic telling a story involving the new Beast Wars characters – but like the early bios, the storyline was set in a contemporary, modern setting rather than the prehistory era shown in the cartoon.
Later in 1996, Optimus Primal and Megatron were released again, this time as the year’s two Ultra Class toys. Both got new beast forms which would be forever identified with the characters – Optimus Primal was a gorilla, while Megatron was a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Optimus Primal featured a lever-activated mechanism to allow him to beat his chest in beast mode, or swing his weapons around in robot mode. He also had two shoulder mounted missile launchers which could be folded away when not in use, a giant cannon tucked in one of his forearms, and a mace in the other, along with twin swords. Megatron got a water-squirting gimmick in his T-Rex head, and a “punching” action on his other arm, which incorporated his beast mode tail. He also had hip-mounted missiles. Both were excellent toys and a great showcase of what the Ultra class was all about.
The initial Mega class releases included Scorponok and Polar Claw. Polar Claw was a mighty polar bear, while Scorponok was a scorpion. Both feature spy drones that launched from their robot modes – when the trigger was pressed to launch the minion, they would fire off a spring-loaded launcher and transform automatically, which was a pretty cool touch, although the mechanisms are known for wearing out over time.
Stand out characters among the Deluxe class in the inaugural year of Beast Wars included Cheetor, Dinobot, Tarantulas and Waspinator. Each Deluxe could transform from a realistic beast to a fully articulated robot, and each featured some kind of special weapon, be it Cheetor’s water squirting gun, Rhinox’s spinning chaingun, or Tarantulas’ grappling hook. A trend that crept in with the Beast Wars series that the line would often have the robot modes use the animal’s claws / talons / paws as the robot hands. Sometimes actual robot hands were molded in, but others like Dinobot and Tarantulas featured claw hands.
The initial Basics were all pretty similar in terms of engineering, due to the nature of the flip-change gimmick, but they were all good fun toys along with it. Rattrap, Razorbeast and Insecticon all stand out among the initial releases.
Beast Wars Season 1 opening credits. Uploaded to Youtube by ThotThor[/size]
1996 significantly also saw the first completely new Transformers cartoon on US networks in nearly 10 years. The Beast Wars series was a full CGI cartoon produced by Mainframe, a Canadian company who had also made the Reboot cartoon series. The show brought to life a small core cast of the wider Beast Wars characters and included the voice talents of Scott McNeil as Dinobot, Waspinator and Rattrap, Ian James Corlett as Cheetor, Garry Chalk as Optimus Primal and David Kaye as the suave, sophisticated Megatron.
The show’s premise saw a band of Predacon villains steal a Golden Disk. Optimus Primal’s exploration vessel the Axalon was the nearest ship in the sector and was sent to intercept the Predacons. The battle that followed saw both ships crash-land on an alien world, and both Maximals and Predacons adopted animal alternate forms in order to survive outside their ships, where Energon radiation would otherwise cause their robotic forms to short out.
At the outset, the premise seemed like a rehash of the classic Transformers story. But Beast Wars took its own path and developed an overarching storyline more like the Japanese series. The first season of 26 episodes was mostly episodic, with the occasional episodes such as Chain of Command dropping hints of a larger plot in motion. New characters were introduced as the season progressed by way of Maximals from the Axalon who were contained in stasis pods, which had been ejected when the Axalon began to crash and were left in orbit around the world. The Maximals in the pods were Protoforms, Transformers who had yet to scan alternate modes, which was a concept introduced by Beast Wars. As Protoforms, the stasis pod Transformers were vulnerable to reprogramming as Predacons – so when a pod crashed to the surface, both sides would mobilize to claim the Cybertronian within to swell their ranks.
The Beast Wars had begun – and Transformers had once again transformed. The Beast Wars kicked off a renaissance of the Transformers line – the new cartoon was written with whole family appeal in mind, much like other classic animated shows of the time such as Gargoyles and Batman the Animated Series. The show got the balance of action and comedy just right. The toys were simultaneously celebrated and derided – fans loved the fact that full articulation was the norm, but bewailed the “claw handed” designs. There was also some gnashing of teeth over the liberties taken with some classic characters, ultimately culminating in the meme “truk not munky” in relation to Optimus Primal.
Superquad7
Agreed! Maybe @Sol Fury can give another one soon!
Back in
Need a update but that ok
Phantformer5533
Thank you for all these links! I definitely needed this in order to make my own list. Glory to transformers!
Vik
Awesome, such a dense history!
Metro Prime
Thanks. I have been doing that since that post. TF Wiki has been answering a lot of questions.
batfan007
You can always read some pages over at TFWIKI to catch up on those years, covers pretty much everthing.
John Does
Awsome looking forward,…
Metro Prime
It took me days to read all of this!
Excellent and informative write up. I'm impressed and it filled in a few blanks for me. I've been collecting since G1 with a few years of breaks until I started a major effort into collecting through the Energon era, the beginning of the Classics line, and intermittently through the years til I saw Titans Return and have been heavily collecting since. This write up has shown me where some of my more eclectic figures have originated.
Is there an update from 2015 to current in the works? I'd love to see what else I've missed.
Excaliberprime
good info here
Abishai100
Gen 1 – Gen 2
I think a good way to think about the immense shift in style and content between TG1 (Transformers Generation 1) and TG2 is to think about how the toys, cartoons, and comics focused more on variability of character significance for various storylines. TG1 offered stories relevant to particular characters, but TG2 offered a more liberal attitude towards who could be a randomized figurehead in a given storyline!
That's why TG2 was the 'gateway' to the modern Transformers era which focuses much more on general concepts and character randomization than did TG1.
That's also why TG1 is the ideal intro for anyone looking to become a Transformers fan. Hey, isn't that why we all love Transformers: The Movie (1986), the real art-piece that began showing us conceptual bridges between TG1 and TG2?
ChromedomeMaster
35 years of transformers, and i have only been apart of it for 10 years
3 Wheeler
I like the Long Haul Pic!!!
Djin
Great read
Blam320
That's really too bad. You're missing out on a lot, and I mean a lot of really good Transformers stuff by only caring about G1.
Rodimus Prime BetterPrime
For years I've wanted the G1 series in a blu-ray release. With this year marking its 35th anniversary, hopefully we'll finally get it. I don't care about anything but G1.