Beast Wars: Transformers (cartoon)

Though reviled by many Transfans when it first hit the airwaves in 1996, the wholly-CGI Beast Wars is now considered by many to be the critical pinnacle of Transformers storytelling. The series opens at an unspecified time and place, where two warring factions of robots have crashed on a strange planet populated by animals like those on Earth. What began as a fairly unassuming adventure cartoon, though, quickly transformed into something more. By the end of the first season's 26 episodes, viewers had been treated to a number of classical Transformers references, such as Unicron and even the reapperance of Starscream, last seen as a ghost in the third season of the original cartoon. These homages, though, would not prepare viewers for the onslaught of continuity and complex, even philosophically deep science-fiction storytelling that the final two seasons of Beast Wars were to bring. So captivating was the scope and depth of this series' stories that many of those that followed paled in comparison.

After Beast Wars ended, the show was picked up by Fox network in their Fox Kids line of shows and renamed as Beast Machines. While fans praised it's return, most fans reacted with strong criticism from it's change in graphical format to the story. While technically considered main canon to Beast Wars, fans tend to ignore the events choosing to believe it's an alternate version to the Beast Wars saga.