Beast Wars: Transformers Bosses Ignored Hasbro's Biggest Directive For The Series

In the early 1990s, it seemed like the "Transformers" craze of the 1980s had fizzled out. The first sign of the decline was when "The Transformers" cartoon ended in 1987. The toy line and comic kept chugging along, but then ended early in the 1990s. The last major push of the "Transformers" toy line, Action Masters (Transformers who didn't transform), proved that the franchise was running on fumes. A 1992 reboot, "Transformers: Generation 2," didn't take either.

Obviously, the fortunes of "Transformers" improved from there. The franchise has been going strong for 40+ years; it became a blockbuster movie franchise in 2007 and there's been a plethora of "Transformers" cartoons and comic books since. (The latest news? A cartoon is in development adapting Skybound's recent "Transformers" comics.)

"Beast Wars," a 1996 relaunch that re-themed "Transformers" around animals rather than cars and other vehicles, saved the franchise with another popular cartoon, animated in all-CGI by Mainframe Entertainment.

In an oral history of "Beast Wars" at Retrofied, chronicling its journey from toy line to cartoon, Mainframe's Anthony Gaud said Hasbro provided the team with a "big binder: the rules of the Transformers." One of those rules was to not emulate or reference "The Transformers: The Movie". "Do not do this. Do not. This whole movie was a disaster," Gaud recalled the binder saying. 

He and his team didn't listen.

While beloved by TF fans now, the movie bombed at the box office and got poor reviews upon its 1986 release. It also stirred controversy by killing off characters whose toys had been discontinued, most infamously the beloved hero Optimus Prime. Kids were so upset about Optimus' demise that Hasbro had to bring him back in the third season of the cartoon.

In the pilot episode of "Beast Wars," two spaceships emerge from a "Transwarp" portal and crash-land on an uncivilized world. One ship holds a team of Maximals, led by Optimus Primal (Garry Chalk), and another a band of Predacons, led by Megatron (David Kaye). The Predacons are criminals who stole an artifact called "the Golden Disk," and the Maximals are pursuing them.

The planet they crash on is filled with the mineral Energon, which disrupts Transformers' functions. So both factions take on the forms of local fauna which have built up immunity to Energon radiation. Hence, they call their conflict the Beast Wars.

Despite the presence of terrestrial animals (e.g. Optimus became a gorilla, and Megatron a T. Rex scanned from fossils), the planet wasn't initially confirmed to be Earth. The history of the larger Maximal and Predacon societies was also vague ... at first. Mainframe's Gavin Blair explained to Retrofied that this isolated setting was Hasbro hedging their bets:

"The 'Transformers' people were very much like, 'OK, we're gonna do this thing and it might not work. So we're gonna put it over here in its own little universe' [...] I definitely got the feeling that if the show took off, the show was a hit, and the toys are a hit, then we could connect the two universes together later."

"Beast Wars" did become a hit, and the first season eventually revealed the show was a sequel to "The Transformers." The Maximals and the Predacons were the descendants of the Autobots and the Decepticons, now in a tense peace after the Autobots won "The Great War." The planet is a prehistoric Earth, because Megatron is following instructions that his namesake left on the Golden Disk to change history.

Leaning on "Transformers" history, "Beast Wars" drew on "The Transformers: The Movie" a fair bit. One of the many new characters the movie debuted was Unicron, the planet-sized (and planet-destroying) Transformer. Unicron's shadow hangs over "Beast Wars." (Megatron calls his treacherous minion Tarantulas "Unicron's spawn" as an offhand insult.)

Take "Beast Wars" episode "Possession," when the ghostly Decepticon Starscream guest-appeared. "Possession" directly referenced the events of the movie relevant to Starscream's demise.

To recap: Megatron is critically wounded during his final battle with Optimus Prime. The Decepticons dump their wounded soldiers into space to conserve energy, with Starscream personally casting Megatron out. Drifting through space, the dying Megatron meets Unicron, who offers him a choice — servitude or oblivion. Megatron picks the former and is remade into Unicron's herald: Galvatron. Galvatron seeks vengeance, vaporizing Starscream to remind the Decepticons who's boss. 

In "Beast Wars," Starscream lies to the Predacons that Unicron (seen in a brief cameo) destroyed him while he was defending Galvatron, but Blackarachnia (Venus Terzo) isn't fooled.

In the season 1 finale, aliens called the Vok threaten to destroy Earth. They appear before Optimus Primal in the form of Unicron, a figure of authority and destruction in every Transformer's memory. When Megatron manipulates Optimus into a suicide mission to stop the Vok, he taunts his rival: "You Optimuses do love to sacrifice yourselves, don't you?", referencing Prime's death in the '86 movie.

Comparing "The Transformers" to "Beast Wars" is a good way to understand the differences between '80s and '90s cartoons. While the original show was episodic and written inconsistently, "Beast Wars" wove a serialized mythology and explored character arcs and consequences, including death. In that way, it followed the path of "The Transformers: The Movie," despite the edict from Hasbro bosses.