Viewers mainly took exception to the act of taking a sledgehammer to Rattrap's legs, taking a normal character and making him disabled as opposed to starting off with a disabled character. How many people would've loved Nightscream to be disabled. Imagine him, he can fly in bat mode, but in robot mode, he has stubby wheels. It would've given him some license to be so whiny and irritable. It was a creative move that shouldn't have been done, so getting into it (Rattrap's personality change being logical for his crippling) wasn't even looked at; Skir had already lost viewers the moment they saw Rattrap's robot mode.

 

It was pretty much the lowest point in all of Transformers history... enough said

 

I'd sooner say that the "movie hate" claims that spot, but to each their own, I guess.

 

This statement can be applied to most of Beast Machines.

 

We didn't have the station that carried BM...so I read the summaries on Ben Yee's site back in the day. ...and thought it sounded ludicrous. Then the 3 kiddies TF toons came out and I lost ALL faith in the TF series. But then the DVD set came out for BM, and I was there. I finally got to SEE the series, and I have to say I really liked it! The music could have better, but the stories were good and I really enjoyed the series.

 

^
Though RiD was aimed at kids, I heard it generally had a neutral-to-slightly-positive reception to a positive reception. At the time, people seemed to feel it was like G1 in spirit even though it was clearly aimed for the Japanese audience (because it was quick filler due to Transtech being cancelled and Armada not being ready for a year) and aimed at a younger audience. It certainly seemed to have overall better reception than Beast Machines did.

 

Your opinion does mean fact  
Objectively, Generation 2 I think stands as the lowest point of the franchise creatively and commercially. I view Beast Machines as more of a misstep (after all, the brand really didn't loose much shelf space when RiD came along), but considering the pile of crap Takara gave us as media between 2002-2005, I still view it hard to view BM as THAT bad.

But, by making a "normal character" and making him disabled, you grow the character and develop stories based on his response and adaption. Making a "new character" disabled doesn't do much since the audience has no attachment to them.
Again, you might not have liked Nightscream, or cared for how Rattrap developed, it doesn't make the concept inherently bad.

I do agree with that. It is a decent cartoon series, well written and produced. But by aiming older, it lost a key focus of the franchise (especially where cartoons are concerned), and that was to sell toys.

IIRC, BM had good ratings, but those ratings came from viewers in the pre-teen range, and range that isn't going to be running out and buying toys.

A lot of that is perception and opinion. At the time, RiD hit when anime was big, and the Transformers franchise had spent a better portion of the prior 3-4 years as a rather "serious" cartoon. RiD was really a sort of "palette cleanser" for the brand after having spent the prior 6 years focused on Beast characters.

It also benefitted from a number of other factors:
the show aimed younger, so kids (many of which are now fans, keep that in mind when talking about the "positive reception") actually wanted to go and get toys. Being a quirky anime REALLY helped in that as well
The 80s nostalgia boom was just starting to hit full force, reviving interest in the old Transformers brand.
The series itself was the first major push for realistic, vehicular Transformers since the end of G2 in 1995. The aggressive push by Hasbro to re-acquire G1 trademarks helped in feeding into nostalgia.

Yes, RiD was received much better than BM, but probably has just as much to do with a change in brand direction (for the record, Hasbro was moving back to vehicles with TRanstech anyway) and a change in the demographics as anything else.
But it isn't right or fair to say "we got RiD because BM sucked" or "RiD was better received because it was a better show".

 

I'm actually indifferent to Nightscream. A lot of other people hate him though. And you must factor out writing out of a sense of trying to develop the characters as writers see fit (a vision fans did not share with Skir in that manner of development) and fan alienation. Rattrap was a popular character. They viewed it as character assassination. That's part of why BM generated outrage. It also felt forced.

Previous disability was usually limited to a 1 episode experience, take the brief blindness- BW did it in "Dark Voyage", I recall it in Route 66, Untouchables specifically, and know it was used so often it became a worn out cliche by the '80s (didn't Batman TAS & Thundercats use it once?). It was just one way to screw with a character for drama's sake and then to reset it in the end. Problem was, Skir didn't hit the reset button and did it to a popular character. It also meant all battlefields had to be flat or have ramps so as not to render Rattrap useless. He's a robot, they blew up Waspinator and reassembled him so many times, the sense was why couldn't they build legs for Rattrap, or would that be challenging the Oracle's will? It was just a bad idea, like the original idea for Rattrap (which never would have made it past the censors in the first place).

When it comes to talking tv series or movies, what isn't? Prevailing perception and opinion defines what series, movies, games, etc are popular, well-liked, high-regarded and which are hated, scorned, and torn to pieces, as well as which have mixed reception or rather muted sentiments towards. While any person can love or hate series independent of what everyone else thinks of it, it is just like how evolution affects species not individuals (something sci-fi writers routinely screw up).

Toys/cartoons are mixed. Someone can love a cartoon but be meh towards the toy or vice versa. Of course it certainly helps to have great toys and a great cartoon to boost the other. And yes, 2001 was when '80s nostalgia hit full force. It grew bigger over the 02-03 school year, kind of stagnated or fell a little in 03-04, and it seemed after that, it was on a lower frequency (still present, but not a dominant fad or big cultural phenomenon it was 01-04). The last big '80s nostalgia I remembered was for Rodney Dangerfield when he died. 01-02 has another factor, the 9/11 factor. There was a big down to earth focus after that, thus the boom in movies (Nov-Dec 01 had ticket sales matching a summer blockbuster boom. It was much bigger than previous holiday seasons), the focus on console wars (1st time I ever saw the local 9/10PM news actually cover it), and so on. It wasn't quite escapism necessarily, it was balancing all the dark news they were being attuned to/paying attention. Too much stuff like that really destroys morale and depresses people. It's why Bush tried to encourage normalcy (at least in that context; he tried to keep the wartime mantle for politics), which itself was based off of FDR's policies for the homefront in WWII, which in turn was based on the monumental mess wartime domestic atmosphere was during WWI.

I wasn't saying that. I actually said we got RiD because Transtech was cancelled. Reception has nothing to do with being better/worse, just how the viewers of a fanbase react to a series. There are a lot of B-movies that are loved for their lack of quality (only a certain lack of quality. Some crap movies are crap with no appeal), and then there's people who don't give a flying f*** about quality in any context and love things like Bey's Transformers movies.

 

commercially, the bulk of toys for beast machines were crap...the battle for the sparks branded toys at the end were the best (tank drone, motorcycle drone, jetstorm clone)

if the RID air attack optimus had actually been produced and marketed during BM then that probably would have sold well....

when you have a storyline that deviates drastically from the former one, and claims to be a continuation of that line and the bulk of the toys don't look like the freaking characters on the screen remotely (TANKOR) and blackarchnia and Megatron come to mind....


just not a good combo....

 

There´s also something about Skir saying that heroes should not use guns or something along those lines, but don´t quote me on that.

Btw, Didio from DC comic, apparently had a hand in creating BM.

 

Didio was an executive at Mainframe Entertainment durring the last season of BW and the development of BM.

Its reported that he told the writers of BM to original series and to ignore previous TF series and that BM had no connection to G1, he also said that Beast Wars was too "continuity-heavy".

 

Yeah, worked out real well  

The feeling I get was that he wanted to "make the series his own" or make Beast Machines more a "Mainframe product" than a "toy tie in product". Which doesn't work too well when the entire reason for the show's existence was to sell toys.
He also clearly didn't have any real part in producing the show given how continuity heavy BM is. Probably just spouted off some dictations about the show, which the writers and animators had to reconcile with what their client, Hasbro, wanted from the series as well.

Haven't seen any remarks from him about the series, I wonder how he feels about it now?

 

What he said was more along the lines is that he prefers writing characters that use more "cool" weapons, as well as creative resourcefulness; he didn't condemn guns at all. He specifically called out the Punisher as a hero that needs to use guns.

 

i really liked BM, but i will say that nightscream was a kick in the teeth. He's just so damn annoying and forgettable. Also savage/noble is awesome and i love him

 

Yeah, I always hated how everyone was a dick to him... 

 

So is this why DC resets its continuity every time you turn around? And I should have known such a stupid suggestion would come from a comic book writer. The batch that's dominated comics the past 10-15 years have just been atrocious. Seemingly lame-o writers from the '70s and early '80s did a better job than these so-called celebrated names. Maybe something about having one's name on the cover inflates their ego so much it starts to warp their vision. And modern comic writers have a habit of ignoring or picking and choosing which continuity to acknowledge to such an extent that how much continuity still "exists" becomes an open question, so no wonder BM was told to ignore BW, never mind BW was a huge success and had great ratings for its time.

 

this is exactly why BM is a shit series...you cannot call your self a continuation of a story (which is supposedly what this was ...of the conclusion of the beast wars) and yet they shit canned 3/4 of the established story lines, fucked up the remaining 1/4 of the story lines...and pissed off most of the fandom in the process of fucking up the previous story...plus the toys were mostly shit.

 

I agree the toys were shit.

But they did an excellent job with the established story lines and continued the high level of story telling trew out the end of the series.

And while the fandom originally rebuffed the series, it seems that at least near 1/2 have grown to like the series.