The Energon Pub

My almost 2 year old daughter was playing with my Optimal Optimus tonight, and I stopped for a second and thought about G1 Megatron.
I'm weird like that sometimes.
But the thought came from growing up on the simple acceptance that yes, the biggest and baddest 30+ foot tall robot can indeed transform and shrink down to a human sized hand gun.
What? Ya got a problem with that?
At the time, being that young, it really never bothered me. Everything else going on was too darned cool to really notice.
Flash forward 20 years...
Beast Wars comes out of left field. Transformers back from the G2 graveyard you say? It was the best danged thing ever. My now wife, then girlfriend and I would get up early on Sunday mornings (which at the time was our only day to sleep in while working bot night and day jobs) just to watch Beast Wars.
Getting to enjoy Transformers with the hot chick of your dreams?
Priceless.
And then there's my internal dialogue: 'Ok, Optimus Prime is a monkey. This is causing malfunction'.
But the toys were neat and fun to transform, and when it came to the show, it felt like somebody was finally writing this show for me and my age group. Writing for someone who likes these characters and what they're capable of beyond being "just a toy commercial"
Off that rant and back to the home point-
Through all that fanboy reminscing I did tonight came the simple cool aspect of Beast Wars and their complete lack of mass shifting.
No flippin' mass shifting. Nada.
RatTrap- A giant rat
Inferno- A giant ant...bigger than the giant rat.
Black Arachnia- Get me Andre the Giant's shoe 'cuz we got a whopper.
Dinosaurs and modern animals living together, mass hysteria, yet no mass shifting. Optimal Optimus was huge. He absorbed all that G1 vitamin Optimus goodness and he was huge like every G1 TF. And I loved that! But they were all huge, and being probably the most unique TF storyline ever, got away with it. It worked and it was dynamite.
Beautiful stuff.

By god. Somedays I just love being a TF fan. :grin:

you have to use your imagination to appreciate it.

"Black Arachnia- Get me Andre the Giant's shoe 'cuz we got a whopper."

Blackarachnia: It's not something Tarantulas will tell you but we didn't use a normal-sized Black Widow Spider when they gave me my beast mode.

In reality, we used Shelob.

[*insert here*]

Unicron's Head wrote:My almost 2 year old daughter was playing with my Optimal Optimus tonight, and I stopped for a second and thought about G1 Megatron.
I'm weird like that sometimes.
But the thought came from growing up on the simple acceptance that yes, the biggest and baddest 30+ foot tall robot can indeed transform and shrink down to a human sized hand gun.
What? Ya got a problem with that?
At the time, being that young, it really never bothered me. Everything else going on was too darned cool to really notice.
Flash forward 20 years...
Beast Wars comes out of left field. Transformers back from the G2 graveyard you say? It was the best danged thing ever. My now wife, then girlfriend and I would get up early on Sunday mornings (which at the time was our only day to sleep in while working bot night and day jobs) just to watch Beast Wars.
Getting to enjoy Transformers with the hot chick of your dreams?
Priceless.
And then there's my internal dialogue: 'Ok, Optimus Prime is a monkey. This is causing malfunction'.
But the toys were neat and fun to transform, and when it came to the show, it felt like somebody was finally writing this show for me and my age group. Writing for someone who likes these characters and what they're capable of beyond being "just a toy commercial"
Off that rant and back to the home point-
Through all that fanboy reminscing I did tonight came the simple cool aspect of Beast Wars and their complete lack of mass shifting.
No flippin' mass shifting. Nada.
RatTrap- A giant rat
Inferno- A giant ant...bigger than the giant rat.
Black Arachnia- Get me Andre the Giant's shoe 'cuz we got a whopper.
Dinosaurs and modern animals living together, mass hysteria, yet no mass shifting. Optimal Optimus was huge. He absorbed all that G1 vitamin Optimus goodness and he was huge like every G1 TF. And I loved that! But they were all huge, and being probably the most unique TF storyline ever, got away with it. It worked and it was dynamite.
Beautiful stuff.

By god. Somedays I just love being a TF fan.

Well put. Well put. Beast wars was the most unique TF storyline. Still is. Just like shakespear, it was written for the simpletons, the fans, the adults, the kids, and those who like to think about things.

Don't forget the awesome goodness of "no kibble".
The weapons that they had in robot mode had someplace to be stored when they went to beast mode...you didn't have to worry about setting aside extra parts when you transformed them.

I never really realised that BW had no mass-shifting. I always assumed that they transformed into 'real sized' beasts.

Leonardo wrote:I never really realised that BW had no mass-shifting. I always assumed that they transformed into 'real sized' beasts.

lol U never realized ratrap was nearly as big as cheetor? Or waspinator was as big as cheetor? Or how about how big rampage or depthcharge are lol

I liked the fact that they retained their animal forms, but their animal forms "grew" to match the size of the original robot.

the funny thing is I didn't realize till recently that most of the best wars characters were around human size.
I thought Optimal Optimus was supposed to be huge, then i realized he was around the size of normal transformers.

I agree with you guys and love Beast Wars on one hand but on the other hand I really like the idea of mass shifting because it opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for alt modes. It would be easy to explain how mass shifting could work also.

what about tigartron? In that episode where he as a girl tiger as a friend they are the same size. She was a real tiger who was killed.

nolga supreme wrote:what about tigartron? In that episode where he as a girl tiger as a friend they are the same size. She was a real tiger who was killed.

Most of the bots were acurate size. Some of the others that were huge, like rattrap, airrazor, and all of the bugs were oversized.

But optimus, cheetor, rhinox, tigatron, and many of the others were accurate size.

I'll say this, though...although most of the transformations were mass-shift free, Dinobot's was one that always bugs me. His is the most hard to pull off, but I love it. I never could figure out how big TM2 Megs was supposed to be, though. Sometimes he looked so much bigger than others.

There was some mass shifting though, Dinobot in raptor form was as big as Primal in Monkey form, when he transformed, he was always taller then Primal in height.

Night Striker wrote:There was some mass shifting though, Dinobot in raptor form was as big as Primal in Monkey form, when he transformed, he was always taller then Primal in height.

maybe because of difference in transformation, optimus pretty much just straightens up when he transforms not much of a size difference.

While Dinobot switches around legs and such, which would probably make him a different size in robot mode.

if there is an issue of mass-shifting with dinobot, it is absolutely very minor, possibly due to animation constraints, unlike the improbable transformations of G1 bots, lie megs, soundwave and blaster.

also, BW had it's fair share of kibbleness also. take a look at most of the transmetal toys, most of them are back-heavy due to the kibble.

this is one of the reasons why i loved this show, aside fro tEh excellent storylines. though compared to real-world animals, some of them were definitely oversized, but still, the transformations were purely believable due to the absence of mass-shifting.

besides, probably the reason why the bots in the cybertronian future became human-sized was that mass-shifting consumed way too much energon reserves. heh heh heh.

There was a bit of Massshifting, the insctlegs became shorter on some of em, like Waspinator.

Looking back at Beast Wars, I am surprised at the animation they were able to use for a cartoon at that time.

I also love watching the first episode of Beast machines and seeing the updated cgi version of their beast wars ep 1 beast forms, shows a bit of cgi advancement.

When it first came out i sucked it in because it was transformers (only bought 1 or 2 toyst hough). now that i'm older, i appreciate it WAY more because of the actual story and characters. I remember saying "lol.. optimus prime is a monkey? (naively thinking it WAS original optimus prime)" Now he's one of my favorite characters, story and toy.

I think there was something special about Optimus Primal. He actually become just as loved if not more, than G1 Optimus Prime. The same with Megatron.

Toyotus Superion wrote:I think there was something special about Optimus Primal. He actually become just as loved if not more, than G1 Optimus Prime. The same with Megatron.

true. i guess people (me included) liked him more because he was more fallible, and had some attitude problems, and also had some conflicts with his fellow team mates. he wasn't the "golden boy" that G1 prime was. he was, in essence, more "human" than human.