Yeah, I'll take a swing at Prime, Beast Wars, and Animated.
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Beast Wars' pilot cast aren't particularly that memorable for me. Maybe that's 'cause I haven't watched the damn show in four years, but the only characters that were in that first episode that spring to the forefront are Dinobot, Waspinator, Rattrap, Megatron, and Tarantulas. So, out of those characters...Rattrap was an irritating piece of sh*t that was melded from the simplest comedic writing. Waspinator could be considered the same, but for all my disdain for slapstick comedy, which I always single out as a bland way to get a cheap laugh, I actually didn't mind him as a character. Megatron was very entertaining in that show, Dinobot is basically an idol, and Tarantulas was pretty interesting. Still, considering the other six characters were either bad, forgettable, or uninteresting, I'd be hard-pressed to say that I actually prefer the deck we started with in
Beast Wars. The characters that were added later were much more integral.
....Except for Inferno, Quickstrike, Tigatron, and Airrazor......Also, I agree with Kurona. Scorponok and Terrorsaur were wastes of time, and the way they were lazily written out of the show is one of those clumsy Breakdown/Airachnid moments in Beast Wars that I'm surprised nobody complains about. I mean, Scorponok was just a shell with no personality whatsoever, so his death is less...I don't know...nauseating? But Terrorsaur was working on
something of an arc in the first season to my recollection, and I remember kind of watching him and thinking "I wonder where he's going next season". Then that Transmetal crap happened and then it was like,
NOPE, HE DOESN'T HAVE A TOY IN THE NEW WAVE. F*CK HIM AND ANY POTENTIAL FOR STORY HE HAD. WE HAVE TO FOCUS ON THE VOK ARC THAT'S GOING TO WASTE EVEN MORE OF YOUR TIME. WE'RE TALENTED WRITERS. OUR SHOW IS GREAT. PRAISE US.-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alright, alright, enough of that.
Animated's pilot cast was a lot better off. On the Autobots' side, we have a really nice set of characters. All with distinct and stand-out personalities for once. Yay. That said, not all of them were interesting personalities. I mean, I
kinda liked Animated Optimus, but I find that the young guy that aspires to be something amazing stales a little when he's the main character of the show. Bulkhead got pretty interesting later on in the second and third season, and I love Prowl. Animated Ratchet.......eh. I think
Prime won that game considering Prime Ratchet had a far more interesting arc. Animated Bumblebee was even okay too.
On the Decepticons we've got............................Blitzwing. That's about it. Yeahhhh, Animated Decepticons sucked hard. They were mostly these flat, one-dimensional villains with the most standard villain personalities because the
Transformers Animated almost
refused to give equal depth, focus, and development to both sides, which is something both
Prime and
Beast Wars did gracefully. Blackarachnia had an arc that was never resolved 'cause the show got cancelled. But even with that in mind, her writing was lazy as f*ck. She had a token episode each season, and they all followed the same dull, stagnate formula. Blackarachnia does something evil, Optimus gets involved somehow, we're reminded that they have a past relationship together, so that means she might still care about him, she might not, who cares, her plans are foiled, she escapes, see you guys next season where we'll write the same episode but this time with even more Beast Wars references. Pitiful. Anyways, we had a great set of good guys this time around, but the bad guys very literally ruined the parade.
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Transformers Prime had probably the most limited cast of the three series. With
Beast Wars and
Animated we at least had 10 characters to choose from and love/criticize. In
Prime, we had eight. That's okay, though, because this time, we've gone back to the days where both "good" guys and "bad" guys were all just guys by the end of the day and all had some level of depth and some distinct personality. No less is true with the characters that came along after the pilot, which like Beast Wars, I think are the strongest characters. The starter deck, on the other hand....yeah, still kind of limiting. Optimus, Bumblebee, and Bulkhead were all Bland McBoringf*cks. However, let it be known, the character Bumblebee became in
Predacons Rising and ultimately
Robots in Disguise (2015) worked out for the better, and made him one of my favorite Bumblebees. Too bad he sucked in
Prime. So we're just left with Arcee, Ratchet, Megatron, Starscream, and Soundwave....'cause Cliffjumper was literally nothing. I liked Arcee. Megatron was a menacing warlord, but was only ever really that interesting in
Predacons Rising. Prime Starscream is GOD. They even had an interesting take on Soundwave in the series.
Ratchet was the only one that was
both an entertaining and interesting character front-to-back of the show. Starscream started out entertaining (in the sense that he was a menacing character), got interesting around the middle of the first season and into the second, went back to entertaining in the third (this time moreso as comic relief). Even Arcee took a little while to jump up to speed. Ratchet stayed both of those things consistently, with growing out of his disdain for humans as well as becoming less of a detachment from the rest of the team. With every episode you saw this come closer and closer into full fruition until "Deadlock", where it was all tied up well and good. Ratchet is easily the best character of the pilot cast, before other characters debuted and made equal impact.
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So, really, I don't know. Picking just one pilot cast is kind of hard. All of them have their strengths and their weaknesses.
Beast Wars and
Prime both had a mixed bag of great and bland characters in their starter packs, and as those shows went on it became clear that the characters that were added later on were more consistently impactful than what we started with. And with
Animated we started off with a good collection of Autobots that were tainted by f*cking awful Decepticons. I guess I'll just sort this by ratio of good-to-bad characters in each respective starter deck and then choose my "favorite" based on which one's percentage is higher. 'Cause, you know, statistics dictate my life.
Prime - 5/8: 63%Animated - 5/10: 50%Beast Wars - 4/10: 40%Yeah...okay,
Prime I guess. Big shock.
