petelarrivee
Beast Wars was the first Transformers series in a long time, and it was much better than it had any right to be. While a retread of the original Transformers story at it's core, it very quickly evolved beyond that into a surprisingly well-written, and often rather impressive series. As the writing improved, so did the graphics, leading to some truly impressive visuals by the end of the series run.It had great writing, likeable characters, solid voice acting, and fantastic action scenes.
So naturally, when Hasbro asked Mainframe to do a followup series for the Fox Network, they asked them to toss all of that garbage out the window.The characters aren't even close to the same ones we grew to love in Beast Wars. Each one undergoes a very specific and embarrassing watering down.
Optimus Primal goes from a very strong, but flawed leader with confidence and intelligence to an uncertain, wishy-washy spiritualist whose inaction and lack of certainty was the ONLY reason there was even a plot to be had.
Cheetor goes from the 'Kid that grew up,' to the 'hotheaded emo teenager who thinks he knows everything better than the boss.'
Black Arachnea... I'm sorry, PINK Arachnea goes from a badass former Predacon ninja to a whiny stereotype trying to get her boyfriend back. I AM NOT KIDDING!!!!
Rattrap goes from being the cocky, fun, sneaky trapsmith to an R2D2 unit, for all intents and purposes. The only thing he can do is hack machines. That's it. He has no other use or purpose. He's not even funny.But the biggest WTF character change is our lovable villain, Megatron. Once, a brilliant, manipulative, power-hungry megalomaniac with multi-layered plans to achieve his goals, now he's some sort of anti-organic fanatic with a hatred for all things natural and his ultimate goal is to... You know, I'm not really sure. He wants his to be the only intelligence guiding the planet Cybertron, but then he wants to absorb all the stolen sparks (which I thought couldn't exist outside of bodies for very long at all,) and become some kind of God... But mostly he just complains about still having a beast mode (which he went to great lengths to obtain, by the way,) and chews out his Vehicon Generals for losing over and over again.The character designs are ugly with a capital UG. Our resident Pink Widow spider, the only female character in the show, looks more like a PINK cockroach hybrid in robot form, and as a spider, she looks like My Little Pony met H.R. Geiger in an alley.Optimus Primal looks okay as a gorilla, but as a robot... He looks more like that little CGI NFL football robot in the corner of an NFL game during commercial breaks.Cheetor looks like he should be playing Jai Ala in the Dr. Moreau Island Tournament.Rattrap... Dear Gods, Rattrap... Rattrap looks like a partly vivisected member of the Mickey mouse Club with wheels instead of legs. Why does he have wheels instead of legs? Well, it's very simple, because you see - I'm kidding, it's never explained and is the single dumbest feature of the new designs.But the all-time award for worst character design goes to the new character, their Bat-boy, "Nightscream." Good God, he looks like an emo anime kid got down with a nightmare version of Hermes that maybe cheated with a Go-Bot on the side. And his character is entirely useless. He adds nothing.Oh, and let's talk about the Vehicons. Now, these are the only things that actually do look good. They look like Transformers as we know them, robots that turn into vehicles. Pity their personalities are as appealing as a dumpster fire behind a Chinese Restaurant.Thrust is a bland, gravelly voiced idiot.
Jetstorm is like a game show host for a kid's game show. He tries to be all menacing, but his digs make Toby MacGuire's Spider-Man look like Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
And Tankor... Our 'big-dumb-strong' archetype. Oh, but there's a twist! He's actually Rhinox! Remember Rhinox? Good, strong, practical Rhinox who was peaceful at heart but would dish out a whooping if you deserved it. A spiritual spark at heart, Rhinox was - Nope, just kidding, now he's just a cookie-cutter villain and nothing makes sense.And remember all those great battles in Beast Wars? Yeah. Those were fun.
Beast Machines repeats this sequence endlessly:
Vehicons show up. Maximals throw energy, and run away. Vehicons show up. Maximals throw energy and run away. Repeat ad-nauseum. Add in the fact that the transformations themselves aren't even interesting or aesthetically pleasing to watch. Hell, when Pink Arachnea transforms, she actually looks like it's causing her pain to do so. The story is beyond stupid. Cybertron apparently has an organic core, which has been dead silent for eons, but needed Optimus and pals to bring organic matter back to Cybertron to make techno-organic paradise rainbow-sunshine-I'm-puking.Apparently the original transformers, their human allies, the other transformers based on animal designs, or millions of years of war between the factions never had a SINGLE opportunity to bring back a freaking fern.
The Maximals are now techno-organic, so...
They're no longer robots. They're not really in disguise. They don't even transform, really, they just kind of morph with a really cheap light show designed to hide the fact that they're not actually transforming at all.
On top of all of this, despite having next-gen graphics compared to Beast Wars, this show has a tendency to cut corners and re-use footage and animation constantly. No great scenic spectacles, or a diverse and interesting environment. The show takes place on three sets: Metal streets, underground tunnels, and caves. Nothing looks distinctive and there's no way to distinguish where anything is in geographic relation to anything else. I never thought an entire planet of steel and machines could even look so dull.One of the things about this show that irked me in particular was how often it repeated itself. Not just the repetitive battles, but conversations would repeat, sometimes twice in the same episode, and then again in the next episode, and the one after that. The plot doesn't move along as much as it slowly meanders, like the writers had no direction for the story arc and just had to Madlibs the plot together from each other's scripts.The second season sees the ruination of yet more characters, like Silverbolt, who is now the ugliest bird this side of a turkey vulture and some kind of revenge-driven samurai. Not that I ever loved the character much myself, but what little appeal he did have is basically gone.Then they introduce a new character, again. This time a plant-beast-bot who transforms from a fern with a face into a flower with a face, and I honest-to-god can't tell which mode is robot and which one is "beast."Then there's the werewolf that turns into a dragon... Oh God, I just... I just can't.There's also this weird tendency for the show to get very dark for apparently no reason, especially since nobody ever gets hurt in battle. It's one of those shows where the violence is all "Rated FV" and nobody ever actually gets hurt. There's no tension in the conflict because it's never really clear what's at stake or why these characters are doing what they're doing. The whole show could have been ended in the second episode, and at one point they even have the option of taking Megatron down once and for all... AND THEY GO THE EFFF HOME!!!!
Kind of lacks believability. I mean, Megatron basically committed genocide. He's not Team Rocket, he's a genuine threat. All they had to do was trash his fancy helmet and beat him down - boom. Problem solved. Show over. This show took everything that made Beast Wars Great and stabbed it slowly with an ice pick.
The producers claim the show was only meant to run for 2 seasons, but I think they saw what a turd it was, especially in the ratings and toy sales, and decided to pull the plug.I do give it 2 stars for the designs of the Vehicons and the still-great voice acting, even when reading lines of dialogue that sound like they were written by a fifth-grader for a school play. It's not easy to make bad dialogue sound good, ask anyone who worked with George Lucas.All in all, this show took aim at it's own foot and kept pulling the trigger until the banging stopped. Then it reloaded and aimed for the other foot.Don't waste your time. I certainly wish I never had.
Andrew DiMonte (NoArrow)
"Beast Machines" puts the remaining maximals - Optimus, Rattrap, Cheetor and Black Arachnia - back on their home planet Cybertron after the ending of "Beast Wars". Unfortunately, they wake up and find themselves with no memory, in their original forms (the very first ones from the first season of Beast Wars) and being pursued by fierce robotic drones. They find out that their nemesis, Megatron, escaped en route to Cybertron and conquered it before they could arrive. After escaping the drones they find "The Oracle" of Cybertron and are transformed into more organic transformers, who fight Megatron and his new team of henchmen - Jetstorm, Thrust, Tankorr, Obsidian and Strika.There are quite a few mysteries at the start of the series, including how Megatron managed to conquer Cybertron and the true identities of the main villains henchmen. It is pretty exciting at times, especially with the introduction of character Noble at the start of the second (and last) season. I wont give away anything, just watch the show!Of course, there are many faults that make "Beast Machines" not as good as "Beast Wars". First, it turns into a weird new agey, environmentalist show about three quarters the way through, because Optimus finds out that the planet's core has always been organic rather than metalich, so the maximals start fighting to bring plants and fluffy animals back. Also, Megatron often whines about how he wants to leave his organic form (a huge metal dragon) because instead he wants to be pure metalich. I have no idea why the writers put this development in, because in "Beast Wars" Megatron never complained once, and actually loved his dragon form. He basically becomes a metaphor for the evil logging corporation that's chopping down precious trees. And the introduction of Nightscream's naive character (a bat) takes away from Cheetor's conflict with Optimus for the same reason.All in all, "Beast Machines" is a good show, but not a match for "Beast Wars", 7/10.
