The Energon Pub

Good evening all!

This question has been bugging me for a while. Why doesn't the transmetal subline for the beast wars toyline have a figure for dinobot?

The Beast Wars toyline shows a lot of creativity with non-show characters in the first few waves.
When we get to the Wave of toys that has Transmetals and Fuzors, the Fuzor subline keeps the creativity, while the transmetal subline seems to play it safe. It limited to the show characters. Scavenger was clearly meant to be a transmetal version of Inferno. The Ultra-class contained two new characters that would show up in season two.
Only a couple of season one show characters are missing.
Blackarachnia and Tigertron would probably have been repaints of Cheetor and Tarantulas, again.
That might have made the cheeta and spider toys shelfwarmers, so I understand why those characters were skipped.
Scorponok is a more interesting case. He might be missing because a transmetal scorponok might compete with fuzor quickstrike, creating to many "scorpion" options on shelfs.
I can also imagine the engineers had a hard time coming up with a good transmetal style transformation for a scorpion in the Deluxe size-class.

I have a hard time finding out why dinobot was skipped. I do understand that in the show his character did not get a transmetal update, but characters like Rhinox, Airazor and Terrorsaur did get Transmetal toys.
The engineering cannot have been the problem, since he did go on to have a Transmetal2 toy.

Does any if you know why Dinobot did not get a new toy in the transmetal subline?

A Transmetal Dinobot toy was planned initially, but didn't proceed further than a concept sketch:



Elements were reused for Transmetal Terrorsaur. It's likely the characters were chosen via a lotery system because the 4 Deluxe Fuzors shared the same assortment, and Dinobot lost out.