The powers that be have finally seen fit to put Origin Wheeljack (formerly solicited as "Buzzworthy Wheeljack," though the Buzzworthy sub-line is in fact over and done with) up for pre-order for $34.99 (he's a Voyager). Jacky, what took you so long? I thought you knew the way? Anyway, he went up early this morning, alas, and both Hasbro Pulse and Target.com are now sold out. I'll provide links anyway, just in case they restock:

https://hasbropulse.com/products/transformers-legacy-united-voyager-class-origin-wheeljack

https://www.target.com/p/transformers-origin-wheeljack-legacy-united-voyager-class-action-figure-target-exclusive/-/A-89230403

He ships March 31, 2024 from the Target web site, and April 10th from the Hasbro site.

Also, Legacy Gears went up for pre-order for $24.99. Hasbro Pulse sold out within less than 15 minutes. Like, I was in the middle of ordering him when my shopping cart updated. He went super fast. But, Big Bad Toy Store still has him, expected to ship in July:

https://www.bigbadtoystore.com/Product/VariationDetails/270617

You can also now order Beast Wars Voyager-class Silverbolt frr $35.99 and he ships in April:

https://hasbropulse.com/products/transformers-legacy-united-voyager-class-beast-wars-universe-silverbolt
https://www.bigbadtoystore.com/Product/VariationDetails/270625

Also, Leader-class Triple Changer Sandstorm is $54.99, and ships in June from BBTS and Pulse (he's sold out on Pulse now):

https://www.bigbadtoystore.com/Product/VariationDetails/270623

There's some other stuff, too (Core-class Beast Machines Cheetor, a girlicopter named Shard who is apparently made of death crystals from the G1 season three episode "Chaos," Cyberverse Chromia, etc.) but I don't care about that as much, so you can find the links yourselves. Nyah.

Zob (also got my NECA Evil Rex from Target... yeah, it's an armybuilder, but at $50 I'm only getting one)

> There's some other stuff, too (Core-class Beast Machines Cheetor

I always thought that maybe Beast Machines would grow on me one day.
Nope. Those designs seem even fuglier today. I don't even own the show
on DVD.

Travoltron wrote:

> I always thought that maybe Beast Machines would grow on me one day.
> Nope. Those designs seem even fuglier today. I don't even own the show
> on DVD.

They were sure trying to do something different than Beast Wars, that's for sure. But, I kind of like my robots to look like robots. I'm weird that way.

It would have been a great show if it featured all-original characters. But trying to shoehorn the existing Beast Wars characters into the very specific archetypes Bob Skir was going for was a big mistake. And, honestly, an anti-technology theme makes zero sense in a Transformers show.

Zob (it's certainly not the worst Transformers show ever produced... or even the second- or third- or fourth-worst)

Zobovor wrote:

<snip>

So I pre-ordered Gears and Silverbolt YESTERDAY and Big Bad Toy Store is already sending me pre-ship notifications that they will be on their way soon. That's just about the shortest wait time on a pre-order that I've ever seen. No such luck on Sandstorm.

I'm really glad I decided to order from both Hasbro Pulse and BBTS and then play the usual "whoever ships first gets my money" game. (Yes, I realize that ultimately it's Hasbro getting my money regardless, but the point is that I want new toys, and the faster they get to me, the happier I am.)

Zob (and it still makes zero sense that Hasbro is usually last to ship out their own toys)

Zobovor wrote:

> Travoltron wrote:

>> I always thought that maybe Beast Machines would grow on me one day.
>> Nope. Those designs seem even fuglier today. I don't even own the show
>> on DVD.

> They were sure trying to do something different than Beast Wars, that's for sure. But, I kind of like my robots to look like robots. I'm weird that way.

The Maximal toys were kind of beautiful when they worked. Longhorn, Señor Wasp, and Air Attack Primal were all very nice. No i am not going to look up the wasp’s name. Blackarachnia was close to good. And Snarl, before disintegrating, was also nice.

They did require a huge, well placed paint budget that not all of them got, and nothing could have saved any of the Cheetor toys, Rattrap, Nightscream or Silverbolt. (The Night Slash Cheetor was actually pretty good). And toys like Quickstrike, Geckobot and some others were just bland and felt like they were barely decorated.

> It would have been a great show if it featured all-original characters. But trying to shoehorn the existing Beast Wars characters into the very specific archetypes Bob Skir was going for was a big mistake. And, honestly, an anti-technology theme makes zero sense in a Transformers show.

The show felt like it had too many ideas stuffed into it, and that they were incompatible. It’s a complete mishmash of ideas from the anti-technology, to free-will, to the Allspark, to reprogramming, to duty, to zealotry… plus the leadership shenanigans with Cheetor.
Anti-technology can work in Transformers, if it is about using technology as a crutch to keep from growing — which is what “The Weakest Link” was trying to do. It’s an odd fit for Transformers, and done really badly here. Rattrap makes deals he never would have, and behaves entirely out of character, and then becomes the tech guy next episode or so because the guy with wheels who can go much faster is obviously disabled and disabled people can only be useful in other ways.

> Zob (it's certainly not the worst Transformers show ever produced... or even the second- or third- or fourth-worst)

I don’t know, there were only 3 Machina shows. I’ve attempted to rewatch Beast Machines semi-recently, and I could make a case that any of the other shows is better, even Netflix and Energon.

GustavoWombat wrote:

> They did require a huge, well placed paint budget that not all of them got, and nothing could have saved any of the Cheetor toys, Rattrap, Nightscream or Silverbolt. (The Night Slash Cheetor was actually pretty good).

Now that we're talking about Beast Machines again, I'm remembering all the things I disliked about the show experience. One of them was that the toy designs and the character designs had almost nothing to do with each other. There was no synergy. Remember when everybody thought that Blastcharge was the toy version of Strika? They weren't similar in any way, but we accepted that the toys and characters were going to be wildly different.

They did finally fix it later, and started producing toy designs that actually matched what we were seeing on TV (the Tank Drone, Night Slash Cheetor who was the wrong color, Air Attack Optimus Primal who was technically a Robots in Disguise toy, etc.) but it was too little, too late by that point.

There were lots of toys that didn't appear on TV at all, but I was okay with that, because we'd come to accept that during Beast Wars. It was just a thing that happened.

> The show felt like it had too many ideas stuffed into it, and that they were incompatible. It’s a complete mishmash of ideas from the anti-technology, to free-will, to the Allspark, to reprogramming, to duty, to zealotry… plus the leadership shenanigans with Cheetor.

This brings me to the other thing I disliked about the show experience, and that's Bob Skir's interaction with the fandom. Now, he absolutely didn't deserve the hate or the death threats that he got. But, he did try to gaslight the fandom by lying to us about upcoming plot developments ("Rhinox is dead, deal with it!") and his antagonistic tone really grated on me at times. It was like he was *bothered* by the fact that people had grown attached to the Beast Wars characters and didn't like that their personalities had all been rewritten to suit his new narrative.

I think I would have enjoyed the show a lot more if it had been a media experience contained within a vaccuum, without collecting the toys that looked nothing like the TV characters, and without reading what Bob Skir had to say.

> Anti-technology can work in Transformers, if it is about using technology as a crutch to keep from growing — which is what “The Weakest Link” was trying to do. It’s an odd fit for Transformers, and done really badly here. Rattrap makes deals he never would have, and behaves entirely out of character, and then becomes the tech guy next episode or so because the guy with wheels who can go much faster is obviously disabled and disabled people can only be useful in other ways.

I made much better arguments about this show back when I'd seen episodes recently and the content was still fresh in my mind. But the simple fact is that they did the characters dirty. They changed Rattrap from a cocky hero into a sniveling, traitorous coward. They turned Blackarachnia into a fragile, helpless lovestruck girl instead of the conniving and treacherous schemer whose loyalties you were never quite sure of. Megatron become a one-note villain, losing all his fascinating complexity in favor of his sudden and inexplicable obsession with destroying organic things. Optimus Primal went from being a compassionate, caring leader to a dangerous religious zealot with a blind devotion towards his newfound cause.

I know the apologists for the show liked to say that stress causes characters to behave differently than normal, and that may be true to an extent, but stress doesn't make you grow an entirely different personality and code of ethics.

The best thing about Beast Machines is that they never got a chance to ruin Dinobot or Tarantulas like they did most of the other characters.

Zob (and don't get me started on Rhinox)

For whatever reason, I preordered everything except Gears and Sandstorm, only to return to my computer and find out they'd sold out. Doh!

> I think I would have enjoyed the show a lot more if it had been a media experience contained within a vaccuum, without collecting the toys that looked nothing like the TV characters, and without reading what Bob Skir had to say.

- I'd be interested in reading that - any links to Bob Skir's interactions with the fandom? I remember something circulating about he apparently said that "real heroes don't use guns," though I never saw the original quote or its context.

>> Anti-technology can work in Transformers, if it is about using technology as a crutch to keep from growing — which is what “The Weakest Link” was trying to do. It’s an odd fit for Transformers, and done really badly here. Rattrap makes deals he never would have, and behaves entirely out of character, and then becomes the tech guy next episode or so because the guy with wheels who can go much faster is obviously disabled and disabled people can only be useful in other ways.

- I can't explain it, but despite the way it flew in the face of all established characterization, The Weakest Component is one of my favorite TF eps of all time. The anguish in Rattrap's voice when he plaintively screams out "still want to cut me loose?! You never believed in me...any of you!" Chills.

> I know the apologists for the show liked to say that stress causes characters to behave differently than normal, and that may be true to an extent, but stress doesn't make you grow an entirely different personality and code of ethics.

- The completely different designs, while ugly, helped me disassociate the BM characters from their BW counterparts. They shared the same voices, but so did Armada, Energon, and Cybertron...

CodigoPostal wrote:

> For whatever reason, I preordered everything except Gears and Sandstorm, only to return to my computer and find out they'd sold out. Doh!

Yeah, you really have to jump all over pre-orders for G1 characters as soon as they go live. They're always the first to sell out.

Which is why I find it so puzzling that they're shying away from G1 as a whole right now. During the third livestream of the month, last Thursday, the Hasbro team was talking about how Gears was their FIRST character from G1 to be released this year. We're almost in April!

Obviously, I'm quite biased and I unabashedly love G1. But, speaking strictly from a marketing perspective, in choosing to not sell characters who have proven to be popular, and instead choosing to sell characters who are less popular, Hasbro's just leaving money on the table. If we're looking just at sales, that's bad business.

I like to think that if, say, G1 sold poorly but that Armada was overwhelmingly popular with the nostalgia crowd, I would still arrive at the same conclusion (though more begrudgingly, I would imagine).

The early retail leaks we've seen from 2025 do seem a bit more favorable towards G1, though, so perhaps Hasbro's learned a valuable lesson. They should milk that cash cow until its udders are sore and raw!

Zob (I mean, realistically, the oldskool Transformers fans are only going to be buying toys for 30 to 40 more years, so they will need to shift their customer focus eventually... but let's not put the cart before the horse)

<snip>

And by "Legacy Wave 2," of course, I meant "United Wave 2." The toy line has been called Legacy for so long that I defaulted to the old name accidentally!

Zob (carry on, citizens)

CodigoPostal wrote:

> - I'd be interested in reading that - any links to Bob Skir's interactions with the fandom? I remember something circulating about he apparently said that "real heroes don't use guns," though I never saw the original quote or its context.

So, to be fair, "real heroes don't use guns" is a misattribution and oversimplifcation. What Skir actually said on the subject was this: "Our heroes use their wiles and resourcefulness, plus a few cool weapons. Guns? I've never been a fan of them myself, and do not write heroes who need them. My heroes win by not firing a shot, but rather using cunning. For those who like guns, go read the Punisher."

I think it ties nicely into the anti-technology theme for the Maximals in general. Megatron and his Vehicons used heavy artillery, while the Maximals fought with melee weapons. I don't hate the idea, but it does represent yet another changed premise considering that during Beast Wars, almost every character was armed with a gun. The Maximals were certainly no stranger to guns during the Beast Wars, so for Skir to claim "his heroes" didn't need them was just another way in which he was shaping the narrative to fit his own personal ideals.

>>> Anti-technology can work in Transformers, if it is about using technology as a crutch to keep from growing — which is what “The Weakest Link” was trying to do. It’s an odd fit for Transformers, and done really badly here. Rattrap makes deals he never would have, and behaves entirely out of character, and then becomes the tech guy next episode or so because the guy with wheels who can go much faster is obviously disabled and disabled people can only be useful in other ways.

> - I can't explain it, but despite the way it flew in the face of all established characterization, The Weakest Component is one of my favorite TF eps of all time. The anguish in Rattrap's voice when he plaintively screams out "still want to cut me loose?! You never believed in me...any of you!" Chills.

Taken by itself, it's not bad writing. It's a powerful episode. But it requires a character like Rattrap to act incredibly out of character. We got to know him for three seasons of Beast Wars, and it's not like G1 where Seaspray or Red Alert got a spotlight episode and then was largely relegated to the background. The cast of Beast Wars was vanishingly small, so by merit of having a tiny cast, the show was able to give us some very strong characterization. Rattrap appeared in, I think, every single episode, and was a major player for many of those episodes. We got to know the character very well.

These characters had a history. They had very strongly established personality traits. And it's not like the writers were a little fuzzy on the details because they decided to pick up on the Beast Wars story a couple of decades after it was originally written. Beast Machines followed Beast Wars as a direct sequel and was produced immediately afterwards. There's really no excuse for getting the characters so badly wrong, except to say that it was done willfully and deliberately.

> - The completely different designs, while ugly, helped me disassociate the BM characters from their BW counterparts. They shared the same voices, but so did Armada, Energon, and Cybertron...

I've become desensitized to the constant reimagining and redesigning of characters after watching it happen for 40 years. But, if you take Beast Machines as a continuation of Beast Wars, it was part of the first established storytelling world to follow G1. We hadn't yet learned that if you don't like what Transformers is right now, just wait a year or two and they'll reinvent it into something else. That precedent hadn't really been established.

Also, we'd already seen Transformers get cancelled once. There was a very real possibility that an absolutely awful TV show and toy line would cause its cancellation yet again. Beast Wars was an example of an innovative toy line and some truly excellent Transformers storytelling. It was top shelf. Beast Wars created some division in the fandom, but it also brought in huge droves of newcomers and revitalized the fandom as we knew it. Beast Wars was just that good.

Moreover, story editors Larry DiTillio and Bob Forward were super cool guys who weren't afraid to interact with the fans. They realized very early on that the fandom cared intensely about Transformers and that inspired them to tie Beast Wars directly to G1 in ways they never would have done otherwise (indeed, Hasbro had instructed them specifically not to). The episode where the Beast Wars characters discover the crashed and dormant Ark and all its Autobot and Decepticon inhabitants was inspired by ideas from the fandom.

But then Beast Machines came along with its ugly character designs, almost no fidelity to the toy line, a story editor who was combative and dishonest. He was curt and dismissive towards the fans, and he seemed to actively dislike the fact that there was an existing Transformers canon. That was not a recipe for success. Looking back, it's honestly a miracle that the brand survived those tumultuous times.

I really don't have super fond memories of Beast Machines. I've got all the toys in a box somewhere, but I don't really have a strong desire to revisit them. I can't think of a single one off the top of my head that I have a hankering to dig out and rediscover. They just weren't great toys.

Zob (and the toy line will never be truly complete until we get Botanica and a Diagnostic Drone)

Zobovor wrote:

> GustavoWombat wrote:

>> They did require a huge, well placed paint budget that not all of them got, and nothing could have saved any of the Cheetor toys, Rattrap, Nightscream or Silverbolt. (The Night Slash Cheetor was actually pretty good).

> Now that we're talking about Beast Machines again, I'm remembering all the things I disliked about the show experience. One of them was that the toy designs and the character designs had almost nothing to do with each other. There was no synergy. Remember when everybody thought that Blastcharge was the toy version of Strika? They weren't similar in any way, but we accepted that the toys and characters were going to be wildly different.

> They did finally fix it later, and started producing toy designs that actually matched what we were seeing on TV (the Tank Drone, Night Slash Cheetor who was the wrong color, Air Attack Optimus Primal who was technically a Robots in Disguise toy, etc.) but it was too little, too late by that point.

I really loved Mega Tankor and Deluxe Jetstorm.

That Deluxe Jetstorm mold is one of my favorite molds of all time — particularly the first release, rather than any of the redecos. I loved all the molded detail with an entirely different pattern painted on top. Just complete decorative chaos. And being the color of Kraft Mac&Cheese box and product was fun.

>> The show felt like it had too many ideas stuffed into it, and that they were incompatible. It’s a complete mishmash of ideas from the anti-technology, to free-will, to the Allspark, to reprogramming, to duty, to zealotry… plus the leadership shenanigans with Cheetor.

> This brings me to the other thing I disliked about the show experience, and that's Bob Skir's interaction with the fandom. Now, he absolutely didn't deserve the hate or the death threats that he got. But, he did try to gaslight the fandom by lying to us about upcoming plot developments ("Rhinox is dead, deal with it!") and his antagonistic tone really grated on me at times. It was like he was *bothered* by the fact that people had grown attached to the Beast Wars characters and didn't like that their personalities had all been rewritten to suit his new narrative.

Hasbro really should have insisted he pass everything through a PR flack to make sure he wasn’t insulting fans.

>> Anti-technology can work in Transformers, if it is about using technology as a crutch to keep from growing — which is what “The Weakest Link” was trying to do. It’s an odd fit for Transformers, and done really badly here. Rattrap makes deals he never would have, and behaves entirely out of character, and then becomes the tech guy next episode or so because the guy with wheels who can go much faster is obviously disabled and disabled people can only be useful in other ways.

> I made much better arguments about this show back when I'd seen episodes recently and the content was still fresh in my mind. But the simple fact is that they did the characters dirty. They changed Rattrap from a cocky hero into a sniveling, traitorous coward. They turned Blackarachnia into a fragile, helpless lovestruck girl instead of the conniving and treacherous schemer whose loyalties you were never quite sure of. Megatron become a one-note villain, losing all his fascinating complexity in favor of his sudden and inexplicable obsession with destroying organic things. Optimus Primal went from being a compassionate, caring leader to a dangerous religious zealot with a blind devotion towards his newfound cause.

> Zob (and don't get me started on Rhinox)

Silverbolt made sense — he was reprogrammed, deprogrammed, filled with guilt about what he had done, having a hard time separating what was him and what was the programming because he *enjoyed* being evil.

Rhinox makes sense — he was literally reprogrammed. We even saw this happen once in Beast Wars, and he wasn’t that different. Primal saying “oh, no, we can’t reprogram him back, he made his choice” was insane.

And Blackarachnia didn’t seem that different, and those differences seemed plausible. We only saw her for a few episodes of BW without the Predacon shell program, and those were mostly big event episodes with little characterization, so I can accept her softening some. And she was working behind everyone’s back to rescue Silverbolt, who she thought was inside Thrust, so she’s still being very duplicitous.

The rest of the Maximals only make sense if you want to believe that the Oracle also reprogrammed them. There’s no logic to their changes.

Megatron makes no sense. I think they could have done something to make his hatred of organics to make sense, but they just didn’t. Somewhere between the end of Beast Wars and the start of Beast Machines get got a scar on his face and entirely different motivations. That was a terrible mistake to not bother.

GustavoWombat wrote:

> I really loved Mega Tankor and Deluxe Jetstorm.

My memory is that we got the first batch of toys before the first episode of Beast Machines actually aired, so there was a brief window when toys like Deluxe Primal and Deluxe Jetstorm and Mega Tankor didn't have any media attached to them.

But then the show came out and I was like, "How is THIS supposed to be THAT?!" It's hard to separate one from the other. And, yes, I know the logistical reasons for why it happened (the toys were based on early concept art and the CGI designs ended up going in a very different direction) but that's still a problem. The show existed, at least in part, to sell toys.

> That Deluxe Jetstorm mold is one of my favorite molds of all time — particularly the first release, rather than any of the redecos. I loved all the molded detail with an entirely different pattern painted on top. Just complete decorative chaos. And being the color of Kraft Mac&Cheese box and product was fun.

I sold mine or gave mine away. Somebody asked "does anybody have a Deluxe Jetstorm they don't need?" and I sent it to them. I thought maybe I'd replace it some day, but I never got around to doing it.

> Silverbolt made sense — he was reprogrammed, deprogrammed, filled with guilt about what he had done, having a hard time separating what was him and what was the programming because he *enjoyed* being evil.

Silverbolt is a weird character because he was a Maximal protoform who became a Predacon who became a Maximal who became a Vehicon who became a Maximal. Who knows what his "true" nature even was at that point. Interesting that Quickstrike was also a Maximal by birth, and yet he never had any such problems with being wholly and unabashedly evil. Same with Inferno.

The idea that you can reprogram robots into evil this or good that gets awfully tricky. In some ways it makes them less interesting because it completely robs the characters of their autonomy. I kind of dislike the "shell programs" as a plot device. The way Beast Wars was structured was that a lot of the new characters start out as Maximals (since they're the only ones with stasis pods) but they only become evil if the Predacons find 'em first. That suggests the protoforms are essentially a blank slate that can become whatever you make them.

But the idea of an evil "shell program" that you can remove, that suggests a pro-Maximal bias is always in existence, and that some Predacon programming is required to make an otherwise good Maximal act with malicious intentions. The Maximals saved Blackarachnia because of reasons, but they also should have been trying to save Quickstrike and Inferno, who were also Maximals by birth.

It's really hard to reconcile Beast Wars with Beast Machines because there's strong continuity in some ways (the cast of characters, the voice actors, a good chunk of the back story) but it's also a wildly different show in other ways (the characterization, the different animation style, the new narrative and themes). But, if the Vehicon programming was just another shell program, then that should have been something the Maximals were capable of undoing.

> Megatron makes no sense. I think they could have done something to make his hatred of organics to make sense, but they just didn’t. Somewhere between the end of Beast Wars and the start of Beast Machines get got a scar on his face and entirely different motivations. That was a terrible mistake to not bother.

I just remembered that people in the fandom were calling him Horace, since he was clearly not the same character as Beast Wars Megatron.

Zob (he deserved a better toy, too)

Zobovor wrote:

> GustavoWombat wrote:

>> I really loved Mega Tankor and Deluxe Jetstorm.

>> Silverbolt made sense — he was reprogrammed, deprogrammed, filled with guilt about what he had done, having a hard time separating what was him and what was the programming because he *enjoyed* being evil.

> Silverbolt is a weird character because he was a Maximal protoform who became a Predacon who became a Maximal who became a Vehicon who became a Maximal. Who knows what his "true" nature even was at that point. Interesting that Quickstrike was also a Maximal by birth, and yet he never had any such problems with being wholly and unabashedly evil. Same with Inferno.

Quickstrike never even got a shell program, he just had his activation code changed. He was just a Maximal asshole.

> The idea that you can reprogram robots into evil this or good that gets awfully tricky. In some ways it makes them less interesting because it completely robs the characters of their autonomy.

With the sparks and the shell programs or other computer bits, it's the nature vs. nurture debate, except the nurture can be swapped out. I think there are a lot of interesting stories that could be told with that, and Beast Machines sort of tried to, with Rhinox, but didn't pull it off.

I don't think the writers really thought through what Rhinox's nature was, and how to show that doing evil things, under the influence of the shell program, affected Rhinox's nature. If my memory serves, the Maximals restored Rhinox's memory, but left the shell program intact, leading to smart Tankor. And then dead Tankor in the Allspark somehow still had that shell program?

With pure robots getting reprogrammed, the are a number of different dilemmas, and ways of approaching characters. But, Transformers never really treated the characters like robots in any incarnation. G1 made a point of proving that they were more than just robots in episodes like "Sea Change", and then Beast Wars effectively made the Transformers sparks in shells and then most series since then have run with that idea to one degree or another. Transformers are basically cyborgs with glowy floaty things rather than brains.

> But the idea of an evil "shell program" that you can remove, that suggests a pro-Maximal bias is always in existence, and that some Predacon programming is required to make an otherwise good Maximal act with malicious intentions. The Maximals saved Blackarachnia because of reasons, but they also should have been trying to save Quickstrike and Inferno, who were also Maximals by birth.

I think that the original Predacons on the show were just Predacons -- no shell program of any kind. We know that some Maximals were just shitheads (Quickstrike), so its entirely possible that newly online protoforms have complete free will, and can choose to be Maximals or Predacons, but usually end up succumbing to peer pressure and just being whatever everyone around them is.

> But, if the Vehicon programming was just another shell program, then that should have been something the Maximals were capable of undoing.

And yet, Optimus ordered Rattrap not to change Tankor back to Rhinox. It's so completely out of character.

>> Megatron makes no sense. I think they could have done something to make his hatred of organics to make sense, but they just didn’t. Somewhere between the end of Beast Wars and the start of Beast Machines get got a scar on his face and entirely different motivations. That was a terrible mistake to not bother.

> I just remembered that people in the fandom were calling him Horace, since he was clearly not the same character as Beast Wars Megatron.

There are ways to make it work, as he's not that far from the Megatron we knew. His goals have changed, but there's a lot of the character unchanged.

Ok, here goes:

- Megatron arrives on Cybertron, encounters the Oracle and discovers that his entire life has been part of a complex plan outside of his control too bring fresh organic material back to Cybertron for the Great Reformatting.

- Megatron has a desperate need to be his own bot, in control of his own destiny, so he wants to foil the plan, and its goals of fresh organics, just to prove his is his own master.

- Megatron also wants to hijack the Great Reformatting itself, so he will end up being on top. To effectively remake the Allspark in the physical world, but with his own personality dominant -- a hive mind. (Look at how he was absorbing sparks in Season 2 -- that might have been his ultimate plan from the beginning)

- Megatron begins his plan. He uses the virus and the drones on an unsuspecting population. No one is prepared.

- The Maximals arrive when he is in a vulnerable part of the plan. He has the population's sparks separated from both their bodies and the Allspark, and he is controlling Cybertron through his control harness and countless drones. There are automated systems shooting everything down. He hasn't worked out how to absorb the other sparks yet, and the drones require too much focus to control, he has to go back to using shell programs to create loyal underlings.

This is all completely made up. In fact, I think Megatron doesn't even know about the Oracle being found by anyone until Tankor discovers it. But, this (or something like it) would allow the character of BW Megatron to adopt the goals and weird hangups around organics of BM Megatron. And then you have his overly dramatic self, simultaneously trying to kill the Maximals and make sure they see him winning.

He's not out of character, so much as his motivations and goals come out of nowhere in the show. He retains all he same character flaws.

- As everything falls down around him, Megatron comes to the horrifying realization that he was never his own master, and that his attempts to rebel against the plan was a necessary part of the plan. It turns out that no one really has free will, because it was all predestined, but it was a big victory for the superficial appearance of free will!

That last bit would be an inevitable conclusion to the story, and really is mostly in BM already, just not mentioned. The show has the Maximals playing their part in a grand predestined plan to save individual sparks and "free will" and there is no effort to resolve that paradox.

I have no theory on how to make BM Optimus Primal fit with BW Optimus Primal. There the very character is wildly different, not just the goals and motivations. Same with Cheetor and Rattrap.

> Zob (he deserved a better toy, too)

I am surprised they didn't bring the TM2 Megatron toy back and give it a Beast Machines deco at some point. Not even remold the wings, just add lots of silver paint, and maybe darken the palette since BM takes place at night.

GustavoWombat wrote:

> I don't think the writers really thought through what Rhinox's nature was, and how to show that doing evil things, under the influence of the shell program, affected Rhinox's nature. If my memory serves, the Maximals restored Rhinox's memory, but left the shell program intact, leading to smart Tankor. And then dead Tankor in the Allspark somehow still had that shell program?

I would have to watch the show again, because I've forgotten some of the details. But it seemed to me that after the Maximals "awakened" Rhinox, then he inhabited the Tankor body, and the Tankor persona seemed to cease to exist.

> With pure robots getting reprogrammed, the are a number of different dilemmas, and ways of approaching characters. But, Transformers never really treated the characters like robots in any incarnation. G1 made a point of proving that they were more than just robots in episodes like "Sea Change", and then Beast Wars effectively made the Transformers sparks in shells and then most series since then have run with that idea to one degree or another. Transformers are basically cyborgs with glowy floaty things rather than brains.

There have been lots and lots of examples of various characters getting reprogrammed, with varying degrees of success. Megatron reprogrammed Bumblebee in "Transport to Oblivion," but Bumblebee talked in an odd monotone when he was conveying the information Megatron wanted. It wasn't a total personality rewrite, just a very specific piece of data that was overwritten, and Ratchet was able to easily undo it.

"Attack of the Autobots" showed how Megatron could sabotage the Autobots' recharging chambers and that any Autobots who used it turned into bad guys. The effects could be reversed with a magnetic attitude exchanger.

Then there's the whole business with the Constructicons. We saw in "The Core" that the Autobots were able to attach dominator disks to the Constructicons, also magnetic, that made them switch sides. However, "The Secret of Omega Supreme," which came later, established that they were originally good guys who got turned bad by a machine of Megatron's called the robo-smasher, and that its effects were permanent. The two episodes are completely at odds with each other.

Bombshell could also reprogram robots if he got a cerebro-shell into their heads, and he took it a step further and was able to give them commands directly. Reprogramming a Transformer seems incredibly easy, usually only requiring a small device that makes physical contact somewhere on their body. It kind of makes sense that they would be easily swayed, or at least the Autobots, since they were consumer products and would need to obey whatever commands were given to them by their owners. The Decepticons, too, I guess, if they were sold by the Quintessons as weapons instead of household servants.

Makes you wonder why the Quintessons managed to get kicked off their own factory planet. You'd think they could have just stuck something magnetic to the leaders of the slave rebellion and called it a day.

I don't think there are any examples of reprogramming that are irrefutably permanent. Prime claims in "The Secret of Omega Supreme" that what was done to the Constructicons was permanent, but we'd already seen the Autobots undo it once.

> I think that the original Predacons on the show were just Predacons -- no shell program of any kind. We know that some Maximals were just shitheads (Quickstrike), so its entirely possible that newly online protoforms have complete free will, and can choose to be Maximals or Predacons, but usually end up succumbing to peer pressure and just being whatever everyone around them is.

Then why bother with the shell program for Blackarachnia at all? If it was sufficient for Tarantulas to go, "Hey, I'm a spider, so I made you a spider too, and I'm a Predacon, so you're a Predacon too" you'd think they would have just done that.

> And yet, Optimus ordered Rattrap not to change Tankor back to Rhinox. It's so completely out of character.

If I were to attribute misanthropic motives to Primal, maybe he was using the "loss" of Rhinox to fuel the campaign against Megatron. "See, we lost Rhinox, and it's all Megatron's fault, so it's more important than ever that we stop him. Nope, Rhinox is gone, so don't even try. No, seriously, don't bother."

> He's not out of character, so much as his motivations and goals come out of nowhere in the show. He retains all he same character flaws.

Yeah, that works for me. It's kind of a shame that the show requires massive amounts of fanwankery to justify the actions and motivations of the various characters, but you honestly did a good job with it.

> I am surprised they didn't bring the TM2 Megatron toy back and give it a Beast Machines deco at some point. Not even remold the wings, just add lots of silver paint, and maybe darken the palette since BM takes place at night.

The only problem is that he would have been wildly out of scale for most of the other Beast Machines toys. They should have given him one of the Ultra Beast slots and made Nightscream a Deluxe instead.

Zob (seriously, there was absolutely no reason for Nightscream to be one of the largest Beast Machines toys)

Zobovor wrote:

> GustavoWombat wrote:

>> I am surprised they didn't bring the TM2 Megatron toy back and give it a Beast Machines deco at some point. Not even remold the wings, just add lots of silver paint, and maybe darken the palette since BM takes place at night.

> The only problem is that he would have been wildly out of scale for most of the other Beast Machines toys. They should have given him one of the Ultra Beast slots and made Nightscream a Deluxe instead.

Scale was never really an issue they cared about, plus I just kind of meant anytime in the last 25 years. Either Hasbro or Takara. It just seems like an obvious thing to do. Even the Legacy toy could get that treatment as one of Takara’s “premium decos” they’ve been doing.

> Zob (seriously, there was absolutely no reason for Nightscream to be one of the largest Beast Machines toys)

They liked to make toys of the most beloved characters larger back then, and everyone loved Nightscream. Ok, everyone hated Nightscream, but he was designed to be the cool, edgy, modern character that cool, edgy modern kids would love.