Recently just rewatched the whole Beast Wars cartoon, and also recently just reread the Unicron arc of IDW1.

Maximals and Predacons got sandbagged HARD. I mean, I can get if maybe a few characters get some adaptational villainy, but ALL of the Maximals being evil mooks? All of the Predacons being jobbers? Everyone on Eukaris getting iced after maybe one or two issues of spotlight in Windblade?

I didn't think much of it at the time, but in hindsight it feels, I dunno, disrespectful? Edgelord material? And a couple years after the lackluster 20th anniversary no less. If this was in an unimportant one-off universe then no big deal, but in a mainstream universe?

Here's hoping IDW2- and Hasbro- treats Beast Wars better for the 25th anniversary next year.

 

And here I was thinking of The Gathering & The Ascending, which were awful Beast Wars stories, that managed to miss everything that made the show special.

Interesting observation on the main IDW timeline too. Don’t know if it’s because they disliked BW, didn’t realize the degree to which they’d dumped on all the rest in their comics, or what. Did they ever say in an interview?

 

I don't think there's any malice involved, IDW is just simply inept when it comes to anything Beast Wars related.

 

I feel it's worse because it was also just after Primal won the ballot for Power of the Primes. So to see him reduced to a mook was just...wow.

Like, yeah, they go out of their way to show us that their exterior shells are basically just "Pretender shells" and not what they really look like, but man, Primal got shafted.
Also, felt like it was extremely sloppily trying to explain the origin of the term "Maximal" by tying them in to Maximo - I much preferred Sins of the Wreckers alluding to it with Tarantulas' experiments being referred to as "attaining the maximal". On the nose, but given the nature of his projects, it fits.

 

I personally don't believe there was any malice involved, just incompetence and laziness on behalf of mediocre and downright bad writers that had the helm of IDW's original continuity.

Edit: Thinking more about this whole thing something amuses me about how IDW approached the Maximals / Predacons. I've seen people get pretty triggered over the Marvel era's concept that the Decepticons were mostly spawns of the (actual) Liege Maximo which had the implication that Decepticonism was something they were built / born with rather than it being something they created / adopted, yet that's almost exactly what they did here with the Maximals / Preds. They're nothing more than beastly spawns of the inferior Liege Maximo with no personality / character to speak of. Though if you wanted to be more cynical you could just say this was a really lazy attempt to nostalgia bait people who really like the Beast era... by including all these characters they like as evil mooks.  

Having taken the time to read these at times kneejerk / reactionary responses to a fairly basic and simple concept has lead me to the conclusion that some people really struggle with anthropomorphizing the Cybertronian race. They read that Decepticons are possibly a race of military hardware that has a built-in flaw that makes them lean towards being bad people and immediately think the author is trying to say something about human ethnicity and such, similar to how in recent years idiots have been making a stink about how Tolkien treated Orcs in his fiction.

If you think I'm overreacting, there are pseudo intellectuals who were honestly arguing Mairghread Scott was racist or something similarly stupid due to the whole 'true forged body' of Starscream thing from Till All are One.

 

I think that Barber planned Shockwave to be Onyx Prime since the start of the exRID season 2. There's a tip in the 35th issue with Garrison Blackrock and his company called Onyx. He had already planned this since 2014 and the Primal vote was only in 2017. Maybe if the comic did not have to end in 15 editions after Fisrt Strike the Maximals would have more prominence and Primal could even betray Shockwave, and and they would do a PotP event but had no time.

The Beast Wars characters are only fulfilling the function of being the generic minions of Onyx/Shockwave and Unicron, they are fulfilling the same functions as the micromaster that were the generic minions of Jhiaxus. Or did you expect Barber/Zama/Milne to invent hundreds of new generic beast characters (since it was important for the plot to be beastformers)?

 

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels that the majority of the Beast Era characters got done dirty in IDW 1.0 especially since POTP seemed to be leading into a major change in the status quo of making them more important starting with having Primal be established as the new ruler of cybertron or at least be crowned king of Eukaris but all we got was them being given the red shirt treatment to use a Star Trek reference. What made it hurt worse was that how Tarantulas was written in Sins of the Wreckers was a great example of how you can both do new takes on classic characters that are just as good if not better then the original takes thus putting them in for a new generation of fans but alas we never got anymore since then.

I know IDW 2.0 isn't that popular with fans but I SERIOUSLY hope that should they get to BW characters sooner or later they'll be handled far better then in IDW 2.0. That's all I'm asking for at this point especially since it's bad enough we have little to no new BW content in current Transformers media to begin with.

 

The first Beast Wars “The Gathering” was actually really good. I chalk up the messed up way the BW characters got used was just another example of poor management by IDW’s editorial staff and writers.

 

More like “Did IDW have something against the audience?”

 

I wish they would sell this on comixology. Any reason why they don't sell it?

 

Make no mistake, the way that the Beast Wars cast was by and large turned into a bunch of nameless mooks in the craptastic Unicron event frustrates me, but to claim that IDW hated Beast Wars feels like an oversimplification. There were definitely writers who were willing to give those characters their due, M.Scott and definitely Nick Roche among them. Scott, for her part, was impeded by having such a broad cast of characters and too little time to really flesh any of the Beast Wars characters out, but I still feel like there was an effort to bring Tigatron and Airazor back to the public consciousness, and Roche absolutely rocked Tarantulas (who, IMHO, was a far better antagonist in Sins of the Wreckers than Overlord was in Last Stand simply due to pathos). It all came down to the writer and the circumstances they had to work with, I feel.

 

It's more like they had no real plans for them, and a bunch of mook roles to fill, so they plundered those existing designs. Nothing personal.

The bigger issue was their failure to build on The Gathering early on. Instead of developing the cast that were introduced in that, they opted to chuck a whole bucketload of others into the fray and have a big slaughter party. That was a poor show.

 

Yeah, you have to figure that if IDW1 had been continuing, Barber and the artists wouldn't have just gone all-out on using the Maximals and Predacons as mooks.

 

Absolutely; it's weird to blanketly blame "IDW" because you didn't like how certain Beast Wars characters were portrayed.

"I didn't like the use of Beast Wars characters in Unicron" makes a little more sense than thinking the publisher somehow had an agenda against the characters.

 

BW characters who were well done in IDW1:

Rattrap - actually one of the most well-developed characters in the series, whose actions have extremely important ramifications
Tarantulas - one of the most emotionally and morally complex characters in the whole continuity, whose actions also have extremely important ramifications, and whose faction of Beast Warriors absolutely DOESN'T suffer from the problems of Onyx's mooks

BW characters who were done okay in IDW1:
Airrazor, Tigatron, and the rest of the Eukarians. Again, not just mooks, but actual characters. Ultimately they weren't all that important but I didn't feel like they were done a disservice either.

The rest were just kind of "there."

 

I also quite liked the Sins of the Wreckers take on the Beast characters/technology.

In terms of the rest of the discussion, I don’t have much to say. I never made it through Optimus Prime or the Unicron books but I am aware that things were clunky and rushed.

Like so many others, I loved the Beast Wars show and toys, however, I think I am a it different in that I don’t really see those characters existing in the same world as the G1 characters. Now that isn’t to say they can’t, but I’d want something that seemed to explain the continuity and build further on the world as I grew up seeing it.

One example that sticks out is some stuff I’ve read about the Hearts of Steel books. Fee free to correct me because I’ve never read them but from I understand is that these characters were retconned to be the Axalon crew that were all used as part of a war game simulation by Shockwave. This concept seems to have some unique potential in explaining much of the odd anachronisms that plague the original Beast Wars cartoon. I personally have no problem reimagining those cartoon stories like that.

Spoiler

”In fact, something quite similar is a component of the Cyberverse season 3 storyline, which I’m really enjoying.”

Also, while I never watched Transformers Animated, the descriptions I’ve read about it sounded a bit like a framework that would work for a Beast Wars story.

In the end, I don’t think anyone was trying to make a meta-critique of Beast Wars in IDW. I think the writers and editors of the latter half of IDW Phase 2.0 had a lot of pressure to market and sell the Hasbro brand and toys in a way that was unrealistic to achieve while preserving strong storytelling. I don’t really hold any of them accountable for the end result because I’m sure it wasn’t easy work for anyone involved.

The last thing I’ll say is that it all seems a bit ironic as well. There was clearly a lot of pressure to wrap up the IDW universe so they could prepare a story that would go alongside the War for Cybertron toy line, which has been great. The new comics, however, haven’t been all that great.

It really goes to show that with the right people and a decent amount of creative freedom, Transformers stories can work spectacularly. I, of course, don’t have access to the research on marketing and sales that Hasbro does, but it’s hard to imagine that Roche, Roberts, Barber, Milne, Zama and other “newer” creators don’t generate value for the transformers brand. I imagine if Hasbro really leaned in on a creative team that loves Beast Wars and followed their lead they could grow that brand to be just as strong as the mainline transformers.

 

Yeah, man, one of the worst parts of IDW1. Maybe the worst. Certainly on par with the way they jobbed Star Saber.

My best guess? Because the IDW continuity is so G1 focused - to a fault - and arguably more focused on the cartoon continuity, there was this subtle implication by the writers to treat any other continuity as completely sh**. Remember how they offed Energon Jetfire? How often G2 characters were included just to be canon fodder? How they spit on Rodimus Prime every chance they get? How many missed opportunities there were to escalate characters who were not already popular? You get a bit of that last one finally in More Than Meets the Eye and Lost Light with the diverse array of characters they included, but otherwise, through phase 1, it mainly sticks to a lot of characters who were utilized pretty heavily in the G1 cartoon. There seems to be, throughout the run, the need to do this kind of cynical fanservice, as if to imply anyone who doesn't absolutely adore the first two seasons and the movie on the Sunbow show doesn't warrant anything. As if 33 years of continuity just is mostly sh**.

I think there is also this perspective outside the fandom that G1 is dominant and all other continuity is subservient, whereas within the fandom itself it all depends on when you entered the fandom (this doesn't tend to happen with fandoms who have more public awareness like Star Trek and more recently, Dr. Who). Most people on the peripheries still understand that maybe the original isn't "the best". "Oh, Beast Wars? That thing? Trukk not Munky amirite guys?" I get that impression a lot reading IDW. Like the hang out on the old Alt.Transformers message boards and just award the most toxic aspects of the fanbase. I even think a bit about this in regards to the new show - what's everything always have to be about? Optimus vs. Megatron. The Matrix. The original great war. Yadda, yadda, yadda. There are so many great stories to be told in Transformers lore - so many different fictions and prose stories and fan fiction that hasn't been even given so much as a decent comic adaptation - the need to go back to that one original well is odd? It would be like if Star Trek just redid Kirk and Spock and rebooted every damn show.

 

It is  

 

What you've said here is exactly why I'm also not happy with what Hasbro is doing with the overall Transformers brand nowadays at all let alone on where they're taking the IDW TF comics both the 1.0 and 2.0 versions. It's both annoying and insulting on how fans of the other TF eras are basically treated as red headed step children when they pull stunts like this. Intentional or not what IDW 1.0 did to a lot of the non G1 characters feels a lot like a slap in the face and it doesn't look like IDW 2.0 is going to be changing that anytime soon.

Yeah G1 is the original TF series and it should be held to great importance but NOT to the point of treating every other TF eras like trash in order to bring it up especially since a lot of the eras that came after G1 such as Beast Wars which was the reason why the brand is still alive in the first place. There's still a lot of untapped stories you can take with the other TF eras in IDW such as finishing off the Energon comics from Dreamwave,doing Transformers Animated Season 4 in comic form,and exploring the transitional period of the Autobots and Decepticons to the Maximals and Predacons as a way to help bridge generations of TF fans together yet instead all we get is yet another G1 retelling as if we didn't already have enough of that freaking song and dance number. If this keeps up they're only going to alienate the other TF fans who could've been future readers/fans but were instead driven away.

 

They really did most of the Beast Wars characters dirty.

Rhinox really should of just been a Shadowplayed Fat Tankor, i'd rather that than him gunning down humans.