The Energon Pub

A rare piece of long lost media has finally been found! Ben Yee of Ben's World of Transformers has uncovered from his archives, and uploaded to YouTube, a complete recording of the original, very first BotCon live script reading from 1998.

This script reading is of the humorous Beast Wars story titled "Visitations", written by Bob Forward and starring:

• Garry Chalk as Onyx Primal and Optimus Primal
• Scott McNeil as Packrat, Vice Grip, Silverbolt, Rattrap, and Waspinator
• Doug Parker as Fractyl
• Susan Blu as Antagony
• David Kaye as Megatron

With music and sound effects performed live by Vince DiCola, and a brief cameo appearance by Ben Yee himself (off-screen in this recording since he was in the audience off to the side from where the camera was pointing).

The story is set during Season 2 of the Beast Wars cartoon (between the episodes "Other Visits" and "Bad Spark") and served as a light-hearted prologue to Simon Furman's big, multi-part epic "Reaching the Omega Point", which would begin the following year at BotCon 1999 (with the prose story "Herald" serving as the direct continuation of this story).

The script itself has been freely available to read online for decades, but no complete recordings of the live onstage performance have ever surfaced until now!

Additionally, this video includes both the preceding and proceeding events that bookended this original performance. Before the main presentation, the four Beast Wars actors read a short fan-written script in which Megatron had called a truce to invite Optimus Primal, Rattrap, and Dinobot over to the Predacon base for a game of poker with himself, Terrorsaur, and Waspinator. And after the main presentation, there was a brief Q&A session between the five voice actors and the audience members.

The video begins with an introduction from Ben Yee himself.