The Energon Pub

Could Beast Wars have been better if they re-released it now? I mean, when you look at the CG animation in 1996, it doesnt' really hold up to today's standards, IMO. Don't get me wrong, it's alright, but it's got the same "I can't BELIEVE THIS as cutting edge back in the day" feel that Playstation 1 games such as Tekken have. And don't get me wrong, but episodes did get a little boring seeing the same characters over and over again. I know a lot of people here are fans of character development, but I mean, when you had a new subline come out, it was virtually ignored, such as Fuzors, who we only got 2 of, Beast Mutants whom we got none of, and a few Transmetals such as Rhinox and Waspinator from the toyline never got their upgrades in the cartoon, hell, Terrorsaur and Airazor got killed off IIRC.

I mean, far be it from me, but come on, was there REALLY a need to kill off so many characters when it was only a small cast to begin with?

Don't get me wrong, I like Beast Wars, but I feel that if they did a TV show today, we could have better animation with more characters, and teh like, ya know? I mean, when you look at the toyline, and you look at the cartoon, it just sucks when you realise they only used a very small percentage of toys as characters. I feel the show could have been better if done today. What's your opinion?

Of course it would be better, graphically. Wait until tv shows get to start using the same CGI they use for the 07 movie.

I'm glad they were pretty much forced to have a small cast. That's what made it such a hit for a lot of us I think, well me atleast. It wasn't because they were animals, that's for sure. Story and characters.

Yeah, I guess, but characters like Rattrap, Cheetor, Rhinox and Optimus had a full 3 seasons to develop. They could've added more characters and turned those into background characters for a little while, and introduced new characters.

The characters really shined through in the show, I liked it was a small cast. And the lesser characters were killed off for a reason. Terrorsaur was nothing but a Starscream ripoff, and a bad one at that. And Airrazor... was nothing really special.

Would the show have been better with more characters?
I don't know.
Do I want a new series to find out?
SWEET PRIMUS, YES!!!

I thought the character were pretty well animated, even by today's standards, but the terrains...ehh.

I would them to do that transtech stuff they were planning.
I liked the idea of a technorganic cybertron.

I agree, the characters are well animated and look really good (FAR better then Cybertron or Energon), but the terrains could be better (Beast Machine's shining animation qualities were the backgrounds and shadows)

Thinking about how good Beast Machines looked all those years ago, makes me wonder what a pure cgi cartoon based off that stuff would look like now. Beast Machines was really really nice looking.

The show would look better, but be worse IMO.

There would be different writers, and thus more than likely different focus.

Bet they wouldn't have gotten 3 seasons to focus on only a dozen or so characters, even Armada that started with only 3 main characters ended up with a damn large cast only 2 seasons later.

I'm happy with Beast Wars the way it is, it was ground-breaking at the time, and serves to show how far digital animation has come in only a decade.

Although I would not say no to a the show being made with the same scripts, but with newer animation...

BW was the first tf series I saw, and it will always hold a special place in my heart, so I will try to keep the bias out of this, but no promises.

The show was written with adult themes as well as for kids. There were references thrown in everywhere, even a Terminator one, and the characters were all so very different, it made the show interesting. If they made a bigger cast, we would end up getting filler characters, who have only one or two episodes to shine, like we did in G1. The rest of the time, they would be faceless cannon fodder.

If it was made today, it would be better visually, but it would also reflect TV of today. Pure crap. It would have to follow today's standards, censorship that would severly reduce the greatness of it. Unless they got the same team that worked on it. I would hate to see BW redone today.

They had to kill of characters so they could introduce new ones without the cost of episodes going up, and it showed the consequances of even small scale fighting. I say leave BW alone, let's see what Animated is like, and get series 1,2 and 3 of BW released here in England so I don't have to import from Australia, along with a multi region TV and DVD player.