Thoughts on Beast Wars and Beast Machines

As Anthony continues to get more into Transformers with me, we've taken a break from reading the IDW comics to watch some of the classic cartoons he'd never seen before. You can read the comics without any other Transformers familiarity, sure, but I feel like the context helps.

We started at the beginning with the original 1984 cartoon, which is a fun but deeply silly show. I'll always be fond of it in spite of its glaringly obvious flaws—or sometimes because of those flaws, when it's funny. But it's the next two shows from the '90s that I'm more interested in talking about.

This post will contain spoilers for two cartoons from over 25 years ago.

Wars

Beast Wars: Transformers (1996-1999) tells the story of two new warring robot factions descended from the classic Autobots and Decepticons: the heroic Maximals, lead by Optimus Primal (not the same guy as Optimus Prime), and the villainous Predacons, lead by Megatron (no relation). They end up stranded on an unfamiliar planet after a warp accident. It looks a hell of a lot like Earth, and it's populated by Earth animals, but it's also got two moons, weird alien monuments, and tons of crystallized energon (the Transformers' fuel) all over the place, so they can't be certain. In order to survive, they all take on new animal alternate modes based on the local fauna, giving them organic outer shells that protect them from the energon radiation. And so begin the Beast Wars, as the two sides fight over resources, investigate the planets' mysteries, and try to find a way home.

While it's widely beloved among older fans, it's a hard show to get new fans to watch because, well, it looks like this:

I get it. The CGI is dated. It's from the same studio as Reboot, the first fully computer animated half-hour TV series ever made, and the animation in Beast Wars is only a mild upgrade over that. Still, if anything, I find the look of the show very charming in hindsight. It reminds me of the prerendered cutscenes in a PS1 game. The world looks like a Halo 1 map or a vanilla World of Warcraft zone or something. I like all of those things! It probably helps that it's a show about robots and not humans, so the character models don't look too uncanny.

It also helps that, once you look beneath the quality of the assets, you realize that the show is quite well made. While the animation here is a little stiff, the textures are plain, and the environments are sparse, the show is shot and directed really well. There's interesting camera work and staging and dramatic lighting all over the place. In season 2 they even figure out how to do fake focus blur! When I watch clips I keep finding myself thinking about how well choreographed everything is, when it would've been super easy to just have the characters stand around in the middle of a room and talk to each other in endless shot/reverse shot setups from an eye level camera. It's impressive for its time, and honestly it's a better directed show than many modern CGI cartoons.

I'll highlight what I mean about the direction with a random favorite clip of mine from season 3.

This is, obviously, a goofy scene where Optimus Primal glitches out and starts singing randomly and his head gets big. But every time I watch it I just find myself impressed by the action at the start. The way it leads your eye from shot to shot. Rattrap and Rhinox running towards the viewer as they're being shot at, with the immersive low angle camera tilting up as they get closer. The way the camera moves a bit to emphasize Rattrap's motion as he ducks into cover around the crate. Cheetor hopping over the fallen Optimus's arm and using it as cover due to their size difference, a detail that's completely superfluous to anything going on. It's not mind-blowing, but it's an effective little bit of CGI action filmmaking from a time when they were still developing the medium. Someone had to stop and think "hey, I think this would look better if we used the camera like this" at a time when people were still figuring out the very concept of a virtual "camera" in 3D rendered spaces. Several episodes also intentionally evoke the cinematography of classic films, whether it's a Frankenstein sendup to kick off an episode about a mad science experiment or a courageous last stand shot like a spaghetti western. You can tell the animators at Mainframe were eager to experiment with what they could do with this new medium that would've been harder to pull off in 2D.

And I'm not saying I like how the show looks out of pure nostalgia, as I didn't even grow up with Beast Wars. My introduction to Transformers was via the anime series Transformers Armada in 2003. I managed to catch an episode or two of Beast Wars via reruns around 2005 or 2006, but it was already a decade old at that point, and I only watched it in full as an adult another decade after that. After a few episodes, if you go in with an open mind, you get used to the visuals and start to focus instead on the quality of the writing and the excellent voice performances.

To me, Beast Wars is a contender for the title of the best Transformers show ever, only truly rivaled by Animated (the one that looked like Teen Titans) and Prime (the CGI one from the early 2010s). But both of those shows take much of their storytelling framework from Beast Wars, which gives it bonus points in my eyes.

Where the G1 cartoon crammed its cast full of as many toys characters as it could, resulting in a bloated roster that only snowballed even further out of control with every new wave of figures, the limitations of its CGI budget meant that Beast Wars had to focus on a smaller cast, beginning with only five combatants on each side. (I'd point to its complete lack of human characters as another noteworthy thing about its cast, but frankly the G1 cartoon forgot about Spike and the rest of the humans all the time, so I don't think it's that big of a departure.) This tight focus and a more serialized structure meant that the cast had room for proper character arcs where their relationships grew and changed over time, with some characters even getting the chance to switch sides in the war for personal reasons. This might sound really basic for a kids' show in a post-Avatar, post-Gravity Falls, post-Steven Universe world, but compared to the G1 cartoon this was a huge change, with drama that had genuine emotional payoffs and conflicts that had real stakes since characters could actually die. And sure enough, most of the best Transformers cartoons since have followed this same format, starting with about five characters with distinct personalities on each side and developing them over the course of a serialized narrative, the good guys learning to work together better while the bad guys keep scheming against each other.

The shining example of the character writing quality is fan favorite character Dinobot. I'll waste no time recapping his personal arc, because if you've seen the show you already know why he's the best character, and if you haven't seen it then learning about his internal conflicts and seeing how his arc plays out is half the fun. But lots of characters get their share of development and nuance. Rattrap seems like a selfish coward at first, but over time he gets lots of opportunities to step up as the Maximals' crafty saboteur and he grows to trust his teammates more. Tigatron has a very different perspective on everything as a Transformer born on this planet with no memory of Cybertron, considering himself more tiger than robot. Blackarachnia gets a whole romantic arc that brings into question which side she's on, if anyone's. It all makes for some fun television.

For all its drama and lore, though, Beast Wars wasn't afraid to get silly, with tons of jokes and gags and slapstick humor along the way as the animators figured out how to replicate Looney Tunes in 3D. This was a show that loved to blow its robot characters apart in fights and make them put themselves back together. You could make a drinking game out of the number of times one bot flattens another by dislodging a conveniently placed boulder. Poor Waspinator gets the brunt of this, but that only made him come off as more endearingly helpless and turned him into another fan favorite.

Beast Wars also introduced several concepts that have become cemented in Transformers lore. It invented the idea of the "protoform" as the first stage of Cybertronian life, a sort of blank slate robot made of living metal that then becomes a sentient being with their own personality. But most importantly it introduced the idea that every Transformer has a "spark"—basically a soul, in the form of a glowing ball of energy that they carry in their chest, an idea that would become integral to every other take on Transformers from that point onward. While the G1 cartoon had depicted the Transformers as robots that were built, Beast Wars said they were born.

The height of the show comes in season 2, when we get the climax of Dinobot's arc as well as some big reveals about how exactly the series connects back to G1. (Skip this next paragraph if you care about spoilers, I suppose.)

At the end of season 1, the planet's second moon is revealed to be artificial and gets blown up, which leads to the realization in season 2 that they have, in fact, been on prehistoric Earth this whole time, as Megatron had hoped. See, his namesake, the original Megatron from Generation 1, had left behind secret plans to try and change the course of the war between the Autobots and Decepticons by traveling back in time and changing history on Earth. One option was to wipe out mankind's ancient simian ancestors, preventing the Autobots' human allies from ever existing. The other option was to go find the Ark, the Autobot ship that crash landed and laid dormant on Earth for 4 million years before being disturbed by a volcanic eruption in 1984, and kill the unconscious Optimus Prime. Yes, Beast Wars effectively takes place during that absurd 4 million year timeskip in the first episode of the G1 cartoon. I thought all this stuff ruled when I first watched it, and it still rules now. It's an incredibly fun use of continuity that isn't just fanservice, but rather something that uses the context from past stories to completely reframe the conflict in an exciting way. When we got to "The Agenda" Anthony wanted to watch four episodes in a row because he just had to know what would happen next. From the moment Ravage shows up shit's dialed up to 11.

All that being said, while I have a lot of praise for Beast Wars, it's not a show without its flaws.

The second and third seasons in particular suffer from their shortened length (13 episodes apiece compared to season 1's 26 episodes). It feels like we're constantly cycling through both new characters and new designs for the old characters, none of which ever look as good as the season 1 cast. Early on it felt like some effort went into adapting the action figures into somewhat more natural-looking character designs for the show, but in seasons 2 and 3 it feels like we're just watching the toys fight, with gaudier color schemes that clash with the drab backgrounds and lots of visible alt mode kibble hanging off of everyone. It doesn't help that the Transmetal designs that dominate the back half of the show completely ditch the central gimmick of having the bots turn into realistic-looking animals.

And on the writing front, it really does feel like the show never finds a way to top the heights of season 2. Season 3 sort of just meanders and looks for ways to fill time until we reach the conclusion. Depth Charge is added as a rival for Rampage, so we get multiple bland episodes where they fight. Cheetor has to start getting more moody and hormonal to show that he's going through robo-puberty, I guess. When he starts hitting on Blackarachnia it turns Silverbolt into more of an overprotective wife guy and sucks all the fun out of his character. For all the hype surrounding the mysterious alien artifacts, the Vok plot doesn't feel like it goes anywhere particularly interesting, aside from how satisfying Tarantulas's ironic fate is. Tigerhawk is weird, a fusion of Tigatron and Airazor where it feels like Airazor's personality is completely overwritten, and then they're just unceremoniously removed from the board in the finale because Hasbro wasn't sure if they were gonna release their toy. And speaking of the finale, the "Covenant of Primus" stuff that attempts to frame the whole show as the result of some holy prophecy feels hamfisted and unfitting. I blame Furman.

But still! I can't hold its weaker third season against Beast Wars too much. Having a weak third and final season is a curse that most Transformers shows suffer from. Overall it's still a highly enjoyable show that pushed the medium of 3D animation forward, raised the bar for Transformers, and introduced a cast of characters that's still beloved to this day. For a CGI cartoon from 1996, it holds up remarkably well. Don't let a kneejerk reaction to the dated art style keep you from watching this if you're a Transformers fan—it's absolutely required viewing.

And then there's the sequel series. Yeah, here's the part y'all were probably waiting for, where you find out what I think about Beast Machines.

Machines

Beast Wars was a surprise hit. By the early '90s, Transformers had petered out into obscurity and was on the verge of death. With nothing left to lose, a new creative team took a chance on an animal-themed series starring a new cast of characters. And it worked. Beast Wars saved Transformers. It expanded the boundaries of what Transformers could be, and proved that you could do a radical new take on the series that would resonate with new audiences and returning fans alike. Naturally, the question after that was how far they could push it. And so, hot on its heels, we got 1999's Beast Machines, by far the most unique take on Transformers ever. It's unlikely to lose that title anytime soon, given how controversial the results were.

People seem to either love or hate this show, with most viewers falling in the latter camp. Either it's an underrated classic and the secret best Transformers cartoon ever, or it's the worst dogshit you've ever seen. Or, y'know, you didn't even bother watching it at all, because of all the people saying it was the worst dogshit they'd ever seen. Personally, despite trying very hard to see the good in this show on this viewing, my feelings remain mixed. Some positives, some negatives. Maybe a lot of negatives. But still some undeniable positives.

The story picks up shortly after the end of Beast Wars. The surviving Maximals are back home on Cybertron, but somehow Megatron has managed to take over the planet, knocking out all of the other Transformers with a virus and replacing them with an army of mindless Vehicon drones. Fleeing from danger, the heroes end up deep inside the planet where they discover "the Oracle," later revealed to be the evolved form of Vector Sigma, the mystical supercomputer at the heart of Cybertron in the G1 cartoon. (Depending on your headcanons it may or may not literally be a tool to talk to their god, Primus.) To counteract Megatron's virus, the Oracle gives the Maximals new "technorganic" bodies. Rather than being robots with faux-organic animal disguises, their technological and organic sides are now "fused at the cellular level." They also learn that Cybertron once supported organic life in its ancient past, and they're given a new mission by the Oracle to free the planet from Megatron's tyranny and restore its organic life, paving the way for a whole new breed of Transformer that has to practice Zen meditation and calmly say "I am transformed" to change modes.

This is obviously weird. While very early development materials for G1 had raised the thought that Cybertron was once a regular planet with organic life, no stories had actually explored that thought. But sure, let's roll with it.

The thing that makes a lot of fans struggle with Beast Machines is how huge of a departure it is from Beast Wars, even though it's a direct sequel that was released only a few months later with tons of overt continuity nods and flashbacks to the previous show. Functionally, it's Beast Wars seasons 4 and 5, but it's absolutely not the same show in spirit.

The first thing you'll notice is the unconventional new character designs, which look nothing like the cast's old designs and lean into the "technorganic" angle by making all the Maximals cyborg-animal-human hybrids. Optimus looks less like a robot who can turn into a gorilla and more like a cyborg that switches between two different gorilla forms. Blackarachnia has this giant forehead with panels that shift upwards to reveal additional rows of eyes. Rattrap has wheels where his legs should be, and he has this weirdly young-looking face and a helmet thing that just makes him look like a stereotypical newsie to me. The fact that many of them look more organic now also means their faces look more uncanny than their simpler robot faces ever did.

The designs are offputting at first, and they take some getting used to, but I did gradually get used to them. I just had to judge them as their own thing, rather than judging them by the usual aesthetic standards of Transformers. If this was some original series in the vein of Bionicle, or if these were designs for more rival hunters in Metroid Prime or something like that, I'd probably think they were neat. They're all creative and have strong silhouettes, at least. So it's whatever. (The purely mechanical Vehicons, meanwhile, have unambiguously very cool robot designs. No complaints there.)

What's perhaps an even harder pill to swallow for many viewers is the writing, as most characters underwent some pretty drastic changes to support the somber new plot about a struggle between nature and technofascism. I'm personally mixed on this stuff. I can see how there are interesting ideas here, and I can rationalize everything in my head, but the actual execution of the show leaves much to be desired.

Take Megatron, for instance. While he could always pose a serious threat to the Maximals, he was also a goofy, campy villain, known for his trademark "yesssss..." and for enjoying a nice bath with his rubber ducky. He was a sassy guy! One time he made his guys carry him around in a throne while he hunted the Maximals for sport with a shotgun, just to mess with them. One time he put one of his guys on trial and he donned a powdered wig while serving as judge, and even made Inferno act as the court stenographer. One time he got defeated by a fart. One time, he said this:

But Beast Machines reinvents him as a dour technofascist on a crusade against beast modes and free will, seeking to rid all of Transformer-kind of their individual sparks and unite them as a hivemind—one with him as the dominant voice, of course.

The thing is, I can kind of see where this comes from. Megatron never had much respect for free will or individuality, viewing his underlings as completely disposable. Hell, half of the Predacons were originally Maximal protoforms that Megatron had reprogrammed to serve him. So while the hivemind stuff is a bit of a leap, Megatron pivoting to a mindless drone army tracks well enough. His sudden hatred of beast modes is harder to accept, though, when he seemed so cool with them before. His T-rex mode head formed one of his hands in his old robot mode, and he would literally affectionately pet it and brush its teeth while hanging around the base! He also seemed pretty stoked when he got his super powerful new dragon form near the end of the show, which he's now obsessively trying to get rid of. I guess I can think of Megatron as a bit of a grifter and a con man, since he was literally a thief with delusions of grandeur. When his first plan plan didn't work out, I guess maybe he blamed his beast mode for letting him down and went all "RETVRN" and embraced classic Cybertronian vehicle modes, shamefully hiding his own beast mode until he can figure out how to get rid of it.

(One does have to wonder: if Megatron was capable of taking over Cybertron with a virus so easily like this, why didn't he just do that plan first?)

I wanna make it really clear: I don't inherently hate all of the story changes here just because they're different. But if the show wants to get all cerebral and philosophical, I wish it would stop and actually discuss these viewpoints and why Megatron has adopted them more, rather than leaving it up to the audience to meet the show halfway and fill in their own justifications. It's not just that they changed it, it's that it feels like there's a lot of interesting story potential in elaborating on everyone's new motivations, and the show rarely explores any of that.

Megatron also has his underlings, the Vehicon generals, who are given sparks once Megatron concedes that he'll need a few intelligent underlings if he wants to beat the Maximals. Much of the drama of the first season comes from the discovery that two of those sparks once belonged to the Maximals' old friends and trying to rescue them. But the way this plays out, while certainly interesting, is a little baffling.

Yes, it's time for me to bitch about Rhinox.

Rhinox was always one of my favorite Beast Wars characters due to the way he refused to be typecast. Visually, he's the Maximals' big bruiser who turns into a rhino and fights with twin chain guns. But he's also a total softy. He doesn't mess around when he needs to fight, but when not in imminent danger he'd rather slow down and smell the flowers. Okay, so he's a big tough guy with a heart of gold. But then he's also the smartest and most well-read member of the team, pulling double duty as their inventor and their medic. AND whenever the subject of sparks or the Transformer afterlife comes up, we get hints that he's also the most spiritual out of any of them. The guy's got a lot of layers! He's the total package! He probably could've been a team leader, but he's got no desire for power, so he's happy just being the guy everyone else can depend on.

And then in Beast Machines he gets turned into Tankor, a scheming, power-hungry villain who believes in Megatron's technofascist ideals of machine purity while also plotting to overthrow him and take his place as ruler.

Now, in all fairness, Beast Wars had given Rhinox a side like this exactly once... but it was in an episode where he was reprogrammed to be evil by the Predacons. They inverted his personality and made him do the opposite of what he'd normally do. That's the joke. I guess if I read Tankor as the return of that repressed dark side of Rhinox, it kind of makes sense. But the whole point of the conflict with Tankor is supposed to be that he's in his right mind and he simply chose to take Megatron's side. Optimus lets him do that because he knows they shouldn't be forcing anyone to take their side if they're fighting for freedom. (Not that they seem to give a shit about this later, when Blackarachnia forcibly reformats Silverbolt from his Vehicon form into a new technorganic Maximal form so that they can be together again.) If he's been reprogrammed or is otherwise not in his right mind, it completely defeats the purpose. But if he truly is still the same guy, it's wild to me that the most spiritual, nature-loving member of the team wouldn't join them on their quest to save everyone's souls and restore nature. He's literally the character who introduced the concept of sparks!

When I pretend I haven't seen Beast Wars and just judge the show on its own merits, I do think that Tankor makes for a fun third party villain who makes the back half of the first season much more engaging, and I think having someone they trust betray the Maximals and decide to take Megatron's side makes for some interesting drama. But they just don't do all that much with it.

The idea with the Vehicon generals containing the sparks of characters we know is that underneath the new personas they're still completely conscious of their actions... and they like it. They like the power. They like that they have an excuse to be cruel, backed up by a powerful leader who will ensure there are no consequences for it. It reminds me of The Elephant Graveyard's thesis on guys like Joe Rogan, the "new guy" theory, where all these fascist grifters cover up their insecurities by inventing cruel new tough guy personas to hide behind, and then they band together and reinforce each other's delusions. That's the Vehicon generals to me And I find that read interesting, and I like that Beast Machines has enough layers for me to even think about that kind of thing while watching. But it's largely something I have to bring to the table myself, as the show isn't really interested in talking about that stuff, rather merely gesturing at it.

There's also so much drama packed into the idea that the Maximals' former allies would look at their new mission from god to cover Cybertron in plant life and turn everyone into a cyborg, go "that's fucking crazy," and decide to side with Megatron instead. But they just never have those conversations. Instead it's like a switch just got flipped in their heads and they were like "I love fascism and technological purity and hate free will now." Tankor dies and Rhinox's spirit is like "my bad, I was a real dick for a minute there, anyway I'm going to the afterlife bye" and we never hear from him again. No thoughts on why he did what he did. Silverbolt admits he enjoyed being evil as Jetstorm, and then the show just doesn't know what to do with it. He has a big hero moment and we just have to be like oh, I guess he's fine now. Obsidian and Strika are fascinating at first as these genius war hero military strategists who decide to defect to Megatron's side, but then the show barely does anything with them. They arbitrarily switch sides back to the Maximals after Megatron seems to be defeated, and then they switch right back in the same episode, and then they're ejected into space another two episodes after that. None of it matters.

It's a show that gives itself an air of ideological conflict, but the main villain arrived at a completely new ideology off-screen between shows with no explanation, and the main hero just received a random vision from god telling him what he's supposed to do. And then he does it, and everything's great, the end.

(Side note: given the Maximals are the pro-freedom side, it feels very weird that this small team gets to decide that the entire planet needs to be magically transformed and covered in plants because god told them so. Doesn't everyone else get a say in this?)

Really, though, the greatest crime Beast Machines commits is being kinda boring television. Rather than interrogating all those philosophical ideas and leaning into the drama, much of the show boils down to this: The Maximals are in their hideout bickering over what they should do next, since their only modes of interaction now are bickering and bad one-liner quips. (There will be no jokes, only quips.) They decide they should go investigate something somewhere for some arbitrary plot reason. They go to some abandoned place. A bunch of Vehicons show up to attack them as techno music blares in the background. They fight back a bit but have to run away. Rinse and repeat.

So many of the storylines get dragged out to the point of exhaustion, even though it's only a 26-episode show. The amnesia the Maximals start the show with feels pointless when the memories they lost would've explained so little. Rattrap spends the first handful of episodes feeling like dead weight on the team and acting like way more of a coward than before, until he just randomly realizes that his tail is a universal USB that can hack anything, and I guess feeling useful again makes him revert to his old personality. Blackarachnia, once the fun bad girl, is now just another sarcastic complainer like everyone else on the team. Her arc focuses entirely on wanting to get her boyfriend back. The part of the show where she thinks Thrust is Silverbolt and keeps trying to win him back feels like an eternity. Then after she realizes that it was Jetstorm that was Silverbolt and forcibly gives him a new technorganic form he becomes a brooding asshole, so she's just sad about that until he gets over himself at the end of the show and they can live happily ever after. She has nothing else going on. Season 2 does the plot beat of the Maximals thinking Megatron is defeated only for him to pop up in an unfamiliar body twice. So much of it is just so dull. It's no wonder I dozed off a bit during "Spark of Darkness" the first time I binged the series a decade ago.

Honestly, my feelings towards Beast Machines are very similar to my feelings towards Brian Ruckley's run on the rebooted IDW comics a few years back, or "IDW2" as it was dubbed by fans. Yes, it has lots of interesting ideas and gestures at mature themes and nuanced political conflicts. It does new things with the setting that future stories could stand to take notes from. I respect it on that level. But none of that matters to me when the character writing and plotting don't click with me. I'm not reading a wiki entry on the worldbuilding, I'm trying to engage with a story about characters, and if it doesn't make me care about any of the characters then I'm just not going to connect with it.

Still... for all my complaints, I don't completely hate Beast Machines. I think I got a little more out of it on this viewing than I did the first time through. I even stayed awake this time!

At a time when Transformers is becoming increasingly homogenized as a brand, there's value in going back to a take that tried something different, even if it doesn't completely work for me. It at least gave me interesting thematic material to mull over, which is more than I can say for most of these shows. Like Beast Wars before it, it's quite well made for the time. It's well shot and directed, with lots of moody lighting to amplify the cyberpunk tone and a noticeable bump in animation quality over its predecessor. It further fleshed out Beast Wars' ideas about the Transformer life cycle. I like when they travel through the different vertical strata of ancient Cybertronian societies that were built on top of each other. The idea of a plant-based Transformer like Botanica is cool and should be revisited more. The unconventional Vehicon designs are fun. The final battle between Optimus and Megatron is great. It's funny to think about how Thrust is literally just Waspinator putting on a tough guy act. Jetstorm was a fun villain. He's such an asshole. I like that his plane mode has bird-like neck articulation. And the idea of a technorganic Cybertron covered in cyborg plant life is an interesting one that I wouldn't mind seeing explored again, since the followup series TransTech never got made. There is stuff to appreciate here, especially when separating it in your mind from Beast Wars and just treating it as some weird cult classic sci-fi cartoon from the turn of the millennium.

Frankly, even if I don't love it, it's also far from the worst Transformers cartoon ever made. It's probably not even bottom five. It's still better made than the 1984 cartoon, even if I get more entertainment value out of G1's shenanigans. I'd rewatch this in a heartbeat over Energon, and while I liked Armada and Cybertron as a kid I'd probably find way more to criticize with those if I went back and rewatched them as an adult. It's still better than those last few disappointing seasons of EarthSpark. In the decade since I watched Beast Machines we've also gotten six whole seasons of absolute bottom-of-the-barrel trash masquerading as more "dark and mature" takes on the franchise with Machinima's Combiner Wars, Titans Return, and Power of the Primes cartoons and the later War for Cybertron Trilogy series the same team was somehow allowed to make for Netflix. Now THOSE are shows I wouldn't tell my worst enemy to watch. Did you know that there's a Transformers cartoon with MatPat on the voice cast? And that it sucks complete ass?

Beast Machines is a very flawed and often dull show, and I disagree with the assertion that it's a secret masterpiece, but it's watchable. It's not without its value as a piece of Transformers history. Fans should check it out and form their own opinions on it, rather than taking the claim that it's skippable trash at face value and letting it fade into obscurity.

Also, either Hasbro or a third party toy company should throw Beast Machines fans a bone and make new figures of these designs already. The originals never even looked that much like the show designs. Come onnnnn. I'd at least buy the Vehicons.