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As Michael Bay’s latest apocalyptic giant robot extravaganza is hitting home screens, it may be worth taking a look back at one of the stranger, but ultimately most surprising, incarnations of the long-running Transformers franchise. All year long, Shout! Factory has been reissuing full-series DVD collections of animated Transformers programs, most recently the less well-known Transformers Beast Machines.
Beast Machines follows up on the previous series, Transformers Beast Wars, which saw the descendents of the more familiar Autobots and Decepticons being thrown back in time to a prehistoric Earth, where they traded in their vehicle transformations for animal forms, now referred to as Maximals and Predacons. Returning home to Cybertron after the events of that series, the Maximals find their home world nearly deserted, save for a newly empowered Megatron and his army of drones.
For anyone who grew up on the original animated series or was introduced to the concept through the big-budget movies, the whole premise of giant robots shape-shifting into talking mammals, insects, dinosaurs, and other critters just seems wrong for both practical and thematic reasons. The abrupt change was not well received by fans, but both series have grown in reputation over time, thanks in large part to the quality of animation and the more developed and complex storylines.
As with Beast Wars, Canadian studio Mainframe Entertainment handled the series development, having found success with their previous computer-animated series, ReBoot. Their work on Beast Machines refined many of the character models and provided both a deeper level of detail and smoother action. At the time, Mainframe was delivering some of the best series animation around. After 15 years, it does look a bit dated, but not so much as to distract from any overall enjoyment.
What really sets Beast Machines apart from the many other Transformers series can be found in the quality of the storytelling. Story editor Bob Skir and comic book veteran Marv Wolfman designed the series as a single story spread out over two seasons and 26 episodes, featuring dynamic character arcs and an underpinning theme of reconciling natural organic life with technological development. It maintains a darker tone than most children’s shows, but it also manages to avoid tilting too much into mature themes and overwrought violence (an approach the film series could benefit from).
There are a few slow spots in the series progression, and some of the humor doesn’t land as well as it could, but, overall, Beast Machines strikes the right balance between adventure and drama while providing material for younger and older viewers alike. If you can get past the fact that Optimus Primal turns into a gorilla rather than semi truck, there’s a much deeper and more rewarding experience to be found here than in all four of the live-action installments. With fewer explosions and mercifully no annoying humans, it’s a Transformers series that turns toys into real characters—one of the best feats of transformation the franchise has ever achieved.
DVD Review:
Shout! Factory tends to go minimal with their Transformers series sets, but this one contains a couple of commentary tracks and interviews with the show’s creators that are definitely worth checking out. The commentary from Skir and Wolfman offers a fascinating look into how they approached the series and the many ways they hoped to differentiate it from previous installments.
