Beast Wars: Transformers (franchise)
Beast Wars is a Transformers franchise that began in 1996. Although Transformers had previously been through one rebranding in the form of Generation 2, that change was largely superficial. With the change to Beast Wars, the Transformers brand experienced its first complete reinvention. For the previous 12 years, Transformers had been robots who transformed into various machines, but in Beast Wars the robots transformed into animals -- and not merely robotic animals like the Dinobots, but realistic, "fleshy" animals.
The announcement of this change sent waves of outrage through Transformers fandom, which had only recently become well connected through the Internet, allowing much more rapid dissemination of news and discussion than in the days of paper newsletters.
Behind the scenes, the change in direction was related to organizational changes within Hasbro. Hasbro had recently bought out their rival toy manufacturer, Kenner, and transferred their boys toylines from the Hasbro headquarters in Rhode Island to Kenner's Cincinnati, Ohio offices. Kenner was asked to revitalize the brand with new ideas, and that is exactly what they did.
The Beast Wars franchise featured the following primary components:
The bios for the initial group of toys and the comic packed with the basic Optimus Primal VS Megatron two-pack seemed to establish the line as a continuation of the previous Autobot/Decepticon conflict on present day Earth, with Primal and Megatron representing merely new forms of the original Prime and Megatron. However, when the Beast Wars cartoon established an alternate storyline, setting the characters as distant decendants of the Bots and Cons engaged in a new war while lost in the distant past, the early toyline set-up was quickly abandoned and largely forgotten, but remains an intriguing micro-continuity.
The hugely successful cartoon was produced in Canada by Mainframe Entertainment, but also achieved wide popularity in Japan. Unwilling to wait for Mainframe to finish the second and third seasons of the Beast Wars cartoon, the Japanese produced two stand-in cartoon series, as well as accompanying toy lines:
Dreamwave Productions had plans for a Beast Wars comic book series, but the company declared bankruptcy in 2004, before the first issue was released. Another Beast Wars comic book, The Gathering, was published by IDW in 2006. And as of this writing, IDW is planning another miniseries and a group of guidebooks.
Despite initial misgivings by most longterm Transformers fans, Beast Wars has come to be widely appreciated for the quality of its toys and fiction. It is not at all unusual for a longterm fan, even one who has been with Transformers since its start in 1984, to consider BW to be their favorite Transformers franchise, a situation which would have been nearly unthinkable when the line premiered.
