Beast Wars continuity

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Amidst the sprawling Transformers multiverse, the television shows, prose stories, and comics that make up the loosely amalgamated "Beast Wars continuity" are something of an oddity. Although most "Beast Era" fiction is technically an offshoot of the much larger Generation 1 continuity family, its unique position in the wider Transformers brand—revolving around the exploits of various time-tossed descendants of the original Autobots and Decepticons—means that it is essentially a small continuity family unto itself nested within the wider Generation 1 universe. However, the Beast Wars cartoon is not a direct sequel to any specific version of the Generation 1 storyline; instead, it borrows facets from both the Sunbow cartoon cartoon and Marvel comic and composites them into a vague "mythology" that informs the universe.

Compared to the larger Generation 1 continuity family, which offers similar but fundamentally irreconcilable versions of the same core story, almost all stories in the Beast Wars continuity treat the 1996 Beast Wars cartoon and its followup as the sacrosanct foundation for various side stories, spinoffs, prequels, and sequels. Although most of these branching canons are mutually irreconcilable with one another, very few of these tales deviate from the original cartoon in any meaningful way, and the vast majority fall under the all-encompassing umbrella that is the "Beast Wars cartoon continuity".

Major continuities

Beast Wars cartoon continuity

English cartoons

• Beast Wars: Transformers (1996–1998)
• Beast Machines: Transformers (1999–2000)

The original Beast Wars cartoon tells the story of the Maximals and Predacons, time-travelling future Transformers who crash-land on a strange, primitive world. What begins as a simple struggle for energon becomes a desperate battle to protect the future when the planet is revealed to be prehistoric Earth, and the Predacons attempt to change history.

The Beast Machines cartoon carries over all of the surviving characters to Cybertron, where they find the planet overrun with mindless drones controlled by their old foe Megatron. After a protracted war against these "Vehicons", they succeed in reformatting Cybertron into a technorganic world, a balance of the organic and mechanical. Beast Machines continues to play fast and loose with Generation 1 history, although it eschews any explicit comic-based elements and used only cartoon-specific concepts like the Key to Vector Sigma, the Plasma Energy Chamber, and a variant of the Hate Plague.

Hints of a complex universe beyond the cartoon's limited scope meant that most subsequent Beast Wars stories used the cartoon as a springboard. Unlike the pick-and-choose approach common to many Generation 1 reinventions, the two cartoons serve as a concrete, largely immutable springboard for the rest of the continuity, with no less than four separate publishers building separate stories around its events.

Japanese cartoons

• Beast Wars II: Super Lifeform Transformers (1998–1999)
• Super Lifeform Transformers: Beast Wars Neo (1999)

When the Beast Wars cartoon was imported to Japan, a significant gap between seasons one and two led to the creation of two animated series to fill the gap until these later series could be dubbed into Japanese. 1998's Beast Wars II cartoon follows the adventures of Lio Convoy and a team of rookie Maximals who battle Galvatron on the planet Gaia. A year later, Beast Wars Neo took the conflict into outer space as Big Convoy and his team race Magmatron's Predacons to claim powerful Angolmois Capsules scattered across the galaxy.

Though it was not initially clear where these two shows fit into the timeline relative to the American cartoon, the end of Beast Wars II reveals that the series takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth many thousands of years in the future, long after the end of the Beast Machines cartoon, which is set a mere three centuries after the end of the Autobot-Decepticon war. Despite this disconnect, the cast of II briefly cross paths with a time-travelling Optimus Primal in a theatrical OVA.

Relatedly, the 2000 Transformers: Car Robots anime is set in the modern era but features time-traveling characters implicitly from the setting of Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo.

Minor Japanese stories, including Robotmasters, Beast Wars Reborn, and Legends cover the further adventures of Optimus Primal and Megatron as they cross time and space and clarify where all four of these television shows fit within the vast and often-confusing Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity.

3H Productions

• "Ground Zero" (1997)
• Reaching the Omega Point (1998–2000)
• Primeval Dawn (2001–2004)
• Transformers: The Wreckers (2001–2007)
• Transformers: Universe (2003–2004)

3H Productions produced a number of stories set in the Beast Era, with the vast majority occurring after the end of the Beast Wars cartoon series and parallel to the events of Beast Machines. The Wreckers runs alongside Beast Machines, though its contributions to the mythos proved controversial, while the Universe comic series builds on the ending of Beast Machines as heroes and villains from across the multiverse are abducted by Unicron. Ultimately, however, 3H lost the license before they could wrap up any of their plotlines, but Fun Publications concluded the stories in "Wreckers: Finale Part II" and "Revelations Part 2".

2006 IDW Publishing comics

• The Gathering (2006)
• The Ascending (2007)
• The Revisiting (unreleased)
• Beast Wars Sourcebook (2007)
• "Dawn of the Predacus" (2016)
• "The Hot Rod" (2016)
• See also: Beast Wars timeline (IDW)

When Simon Furman took the reins at IDW in 2006, he adapted his pitch for the aborted Shell Game miniseries into what became The Gathering. Set during the third season of the Beast Wars cartoon, this four-issue miniseries returns to prehistoric Earth, pitting Razorbeast against Magmatron and featuring almost every character from the Beast Wars toyline in some capacity. 2007's The Ascending includes the return of 3H-original character Shokaract and many more Japanese-exclusive Beast Wars characters, while the Beast Wars Sourcebook fleshes out some background lore—most notably, it establishes that, in this particular reality, events similar to the Beast Wars II and Neo cartoons took place in the past at some point before the ratification of the Pax Cybertronia.

The continuity lay fallow for almost a decade until 2016's "Dawn of the Predacus", which details the Tripredacus Council's rise to power in the twilight of the Autobot-Decepticon conflict.

Fun Publications

• "Dawn of Future's Past" (2006)
• "Theft of the Golden Disk" (2007)
• "The Razor's Edge" (2007)

For BotCon 2006, Fun Publications released "Dawn of Future's Past", a short prequel comic to the original Beast Wars cartoon; the following year, "Theft of the Golden Disk" and "The Razor's Edge" provided Megatron and Airazor with some extra backstory.

Several other convention comics—"Descent into Evil" and "A Common Foe"—foreshadow the ascent of the Tripredacus Council and some version of the Beast Wars to come, although neither of these comics lead into any concrete Beast Wars story.

Beast Wars: Uprising

• "Alone Together" (2014)
• Beast Wars: Uprising online prose stories (2015–16)
• "A Change to the Agenda" (2016)

By far the darkest and most radical take on the Beast Wars premise and the first to truly break away from the original cartoon, Fun Publications' Beast Wars Uprising depicts a dystopian Cybertron where the Maximals and Predacons originated as second-class citizens created by the decrepit "Builders" to carry on their conflict. When Lio Convoy defies his creators, he sparks the Grand Uprising, a bloody, protracted rebellion that will reshape Cybertron for generations to come.

Fun Publications would later publish "A Change to the Agenda", which ostensibly ties the entire universe to a "what-if" version of the original Beast Wars cartoon, though this retcon was generally not well received.

2021 IDW Publishing comics

• Transformers: Beast Wars (2021)

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Beast Wars cartoon series, IDW Publishing released an all-new Beast Wars comic entirely divorced from its previous continuity. This all-new comic reimagines the core premise of the original television show along the lines of Marvel Comics' "Ultimate Marvel" universe and adds new characters like Nyx and Skold to the show's core cast.

Minor continuities

Toy bios

• "Optimus Primal vs Megatron!" (1996)

Early waves of the Beast Wars toyline feature bios that place the characters on modern-day Earth, with the assumption that Optimus Primal and Megatron are merely the latest forms of the original Optimus Prime and Megatron. This continuity would be swept under the carpet with the coming of the highly successful Beast Wars cartoon, and future toy bios would hew closer to the show's premise.

Manga

• Beast Wars II: Super Lifeform Transformers (1998)
• Super Lifeform Transformers: Beast Wars Neo (1999)
• Super Lifeform Transformers: Beast Wars Metals (1999–2000)

The Shōji Imaki-penned manga series seem to be based on a version of the first season of the cartoon, but form their own distinct continuity.

Video games

• Beast Wars: Transformers (1997)
• Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals (Nintendo 64, 1999)
• Transformers: Beast Wars Transmetals (PlayStation, 1999)
• Duel Fight Transformers Beast Wars: Beast Warriors' Strongest Decisive Battle (1999)

The first Beast Wars video game is a very loose adaptation of the first season of the original cartoon, which featured the Maximals and Predacons contending with one another and the alien Skriix. The Nintendo 64 and PlayStation Transmetals games are set in alternate timelines to the cartoon, in which all of the Cybertronians had become Transmetals as a result of Megatron altering the past by warning himself of his own defeat; each character's campaign in the Nintendo 64 game featured its own ending, while the PlayStation version only featured two different endings that depended on the faction. Finally, Duel Fight Transformers Beast Wars: Beast Warriors' Strongest Decisive Battle features characters from across the Beast Wars mythos battling for the mysterious Energon Quartz, but doesn't feature much of a plot beyond that.

Shell Game

• "Ain't No Rat" (2004)
• Shell Game was a planned miniseries that would've taken place in the primary cartoon continuity. A teaser for the story saw released in the 2004 Summer Special anthology, but Dreamwave Productions shuttered production before the miniseries began. All was not lost, however, as author Simon Furman would recycle the script into The Gathering for IDW.

Ask Vector Prime

2015's Ask Vector Prime feature name-drops several parallel-universe versions of the Beast Wars stories based on pre-existing media: a reality where the Maximals and Predacons come to Earth in search of Mini-Cons, and encounter a primitive Central American civilization, Fire in the Dark Ask Vector Prime, 2015/08/13, another where the Beast Wars take place in Alpha Q's universe, Ask Vector Prime, 2015/06/03 and another where Starscream fights Megatron's Vehicons. Ask Vector Prime, 2015/08/16