Revisiting BEAST MACHINES
Posted: Mon Oct 10, 2011 2:52 pm
In the spirit of Mako Crab's Beast Wars thread, here's my retro look at Beast Machines. Yes, I'm watching G1 season three, Headmasters and Beast Machines all at the same time. Variety is good.
It’s hard to believe that Beast Machines first aired over a decade ago. I was still in college, unmarried and forcing myself to get up on Saturday mornings to tape this show, which alternately irritated me for the departures from Beast Wars conventions and yet kept me glued to the tv every week to see what would happen next. I hated the ending of the series at the time, but it inspired me to create a photocomic that I worked on and updated for two years. When Rhino made the complete series available on DVD a few years back I bought the set. Just recently I decided to sit down and watch some episodes again.
The Reformatting
The “technology versus nature” theme of the show is hammered home from right the start, as Optimus Primal, back in his original Beast Wars body, is hunted by Vehicon tank drones. In short order it’s established that he can’t transform, and that his memories are not intact. One by one Primal is reunited with Rattrap, Cheetor and Blackarachnia, though the whereabouts (and existence!) of Rhinox and Silverbolt are not addressed, something that bothered me at the time, having grown attached to these characters over three seasons of Beast Wars. I’m sure Rhinox having no toy in the line made his inclusion problematic, hence the solution the writers came up with which will be touched on in later reviews.
The Oracle is also introduced in short order, as are the cavernous depths of Cybertron. Having just watched several episodes of G1 season three and Headmasters that feature characters wandering those very same depths, I have to think having the Oracle as a tour guide would have saved all of them enormous amounts of time.
At the time of first broadcast there was a lot of complaining about the very non-traditional and “ugly” robot modes given to the Maximals. I agreed then, so maybe I’ve just long since become used to the way they look in Beast Machines, because I hardly give it a second thought now. True, there’s a huge change between the Beast Wars and Beast Machines designs, so much so that without the identical voices, we’d never know these were meant to be the same characters. Given the logic behind the story, that these new bodies are a new kind of Transformer, it makes sense that they’d be very different in appearance. They do contrast greatly with the Vehicon designs, two of which we see in this episode.
The animation and design remain excellent. Mainframe’s designers were clearly going for a more stylized look on this show, and for the most part it works well, even 12 years of CGI advances later. The shiny chrome of Beast Wars is gone, replaced with tons of detail and flat tones and textures. Some of the ‘sets’ are very detailed, such as the stone/brick tunnels beneath Cybertron or the cathedral-like chamber that houses the Oracle. The characters are covered with color and patterns, with the only real flaw being that the designs force them to ‘morph’ rather than shift modes in a more traditional way. But again, this appears to be deliberate since the Vehicons generally change in a more recognizable manner with vehicle components visible in robot mode and vice versa. Even the Vehicon designs cheat though.
Overall: The first episode makes an effort at bringing new viewers up to speed with some expository dialogue (this is our home planet, Cybertron, right? Why would our own kind shoot at us?) and situations (the memory loss as a plot device allows the characters to “meet for the first time”). But it’s much easier to follow when you already know who the players are. I’m not sure how accessible this storyline would be for a new viewer who knew nothing about the characters. G1 had a narrator to fill us in on the basics, something Beast Machines obviously doesn’t use. Regardless, it does set up our four main characters as fugitives on the run, with no knowledge of why they’re in the situation, allowing the audience to discover the answers with them.
Master of the House
The first “answers” episode. Megatron rules Cybertron, has killed/otherwise dealt with the entire population of the planet without destroying the infrastructure (something Blackarachnia and Cheetor discuss), and has armies of mindless drone Transformers called Vehicons to do his bidding. At this point we and the characters still don’t know how he went from being strapped to the Autobot shuttle to controlling the planet, but a lot of the questions posed in the first episode are answered, if not all.
“The Reformatting” and “Master of the House” are really two halves of the same story, establishing the status quo and heaping tons of guilt on Optimus Primal. And with all the radical character design changes, it was good to see that Megatron is still in his Transmetal 2 dragon form, even if he now hates it and all organic life. I’ve often theorized that his prolonged exposure to the original Megatron’s spark may have had something to do with developing a hatred for organics, but the writers never explain it, because it wasn’t important to them. Megatron needed to be the extremist in favor of technology for this series to work, and so he became one.
It’s hard to believe that Beast Machines first aired over a decade ago. I was still in college, unmarried and forcing myself to get up on Saturday mornings to tape this show, which alternately irritated me for the departures from Beast Wars conventions and yet kept me glued to the tv every week to see what would happen next. I hated the ending of the series at the time, but it inspired me to create a photocomic that I worked on and updated for two years. When Rhino made the complete series available on DVD a few years back I bought the set. Just recently I decided to sit down and watch some episodes again.
The Reformatting
The “technology versus nature” theme of the show is hammered home from right the start, as Optimus Primal, back in his original Beast Wars body, is hunted by Vehicon tank drones. In short order it’s established that he can’t transform, and that his memories are not intact. One by one Primal is reunited with Rattrap, Cheetor and Blackarachnia, though the whereabouts (and existence!) of Rhinox and Silverbolt are not addressed, something that bothered me at the time, having grown attached to these characters over three seasons of Beast Wars. I’m sure Rhinox having no toy in the line made his inclusion problematic, hence the solution the writers came up with which will be touched on in later reviews.
The Oracle is also introduced in short order, as are the cavernous depths of Cybertron. Having just watched several episodes of G1 season three and Headmasters that feature characters wandering those very same depths, I have to think having the Oracle as a tour guide would have saved all of them enormous amounts of time.
At the time of first broadcast there was a lot of complaining about the very non-traditional and “ugly” robot modes given to the Maximals. I agreed then, so maybe I’ve just long since become used to the way they look in Beast Machines, because I hardly give it a second thought now. True, there’s a huge change between the Beast Wars and Beast Machines designs, so much so that without the identical voices, we’d never know these were meant to be the same characters. Given the logic behind the story, that these new bodies are a new kind of Transformer, it makes sense that they’d be very different in appearance. They do contrast greatly with the Vehicon designs, two of which we see in this episode.
The animation and design remain excellent. Mainframe’s designers were clearly going for a more stylized look on this show, and for the most part it works well, even 12 years of CGI advances later. The shiny chrome of Beast Wars is gone, replaced with tons of detail and flat tones and textures. Some of the ‘sets’ are very detailed, such as the stone/brick tunnels beneath Cybertron or the cathedral-like chamber that houses the Oracle. The characters are covered with color and patterns, with the only real flaw being that the designs force them to ‘morph’ rather than shift modes in a more traditional way. But again, this appears to be deliberate since the Vehicons generally change in a more recognizable manner with vehicle components visible in robot mode and vice versa. Even the Vehicon designs cheat though.
Overall: The first episode makes an effort at bringing new viewers up to speed with some expository dialogue (this is our home planet, Cybertron, right? Why would our own kind shoot at us?) and situations (the memory loss as a plot device allows the characters to “meet for the first time”). But it’s much easier to follow when you already know who the players are. I’m not sure how accessible this storyline would be for a new viewer who knew nothing about the characters. G1 had a narrator to fill us in on the basics, something Beast Machines obviously doesn’t use. Regardless, it does set up our four main characters as fugitives on the run, with no knowledge of why they’re in the situation, allowing the audience to discover the answers with them.
Master of the House
The first “answers” episode. Megatron rules Cybertron, has killed/otherwise dealt with the entire population of the planet without destroying the infrastructure (something Blackarachnia and Cheetor discuss), and has armies of mindless drone Transformers called Vehicons to do his bidding. At this point we and the characters still don’t know how he went from being strapped to the Autobot shuttle to controlling the planet, but a lot of the questions posed in the first episode are answered, if not all.
“The Reformatting” and “Master of the House” are really two halves of the same story, establishing the status quo and heaping tons of guilt on Optimus Primal. And with all the radical character design changes, it was good to see that Megatron is still in his Transmetal 2 dragon form, even if he now hates it and all organic life. I’ve often theorized that his prolonged exposure to the original Megatron’s spark may have had something to do with developing a hatred for organics, but the writers never explain it, because it wasn’t important to them. Megatron needed to be the extremist in favor of technology for this series to work, and so he became one.