I think its a bit of both; possibly not using Snarl due to the dinobot; but also using the version that has actual fiction then just a toy only character.
I think its a bit of both; possibly not using Snarl due to the dinobot; but also using the version that has actual fiction then just a toy only character.
Having a starring role in two back-to-back comic series doesn't count as "actual fiction"?
I’m mostly surprised they didn’t try to retcon him into the Dinobot somehow.
also that the IDW Beast Wars comics weren’t some kind of fever dream.
also that the IDW Beast Wars comics weren’t some kind of fever dream.
Heh, well, turns out the fandom was mistaken about the Sourcebook implying BW Mutant Soundwave to be G1 Soundwave. All his profile said was that he had previously fought in a war that ended with the signing on the Pax Cybertronia. And according to the IDW BW timeline as laid out by the Sourcebook, the war that the Pax Cybertronia ended was not the G1 Great War fought between the Autobots and Decepticons, but rather a different BW Great War fought between the Maximals and Predacons (as nonsensical as that sounds, see the link for more).
I thought it was just that the Autobots and Decepticons became Maximals and Predacons DURING the great war (in the 300 some-odd year between the arrival on Earth and the start of Beasts Wars.) not that they made peace, upgraded, and then started a new war.
BW is VERY vague about it.
IIRC, we are told:
The Great War ended.
300 Years latter is the Maximal ruled Cybertron of the BW Present.
We are not told:
When the Great War ended (2005? 2023? 4333?)
What planets "Years " we talking about? Cybertrons?
And then latter fiction added the caveat few probably had even thought of "What if they were talking about an entirely different 'Great War' than we were thinking."
-ZacWilliam, they really should have called it Great War II then, even we dumb humans figured that out.
IIRC, we are told:
The Great War ended.
300 Years latter is the Maximal ruled Cybertron of the BW Present.
We are not told:
When the Great War ended (2005? 2023? 4333?)
What planets "Years " we talking about? Cybertrons?
And then latter fiction added the caveat few probably had even thought of "What if they were talking about an entirely different 'Great War' than we were thinking."
-ZacWilliam, they really should have called it Great War II then, even we dumb humans figured that out.
Actually original intent was that the Great War mentioned was a War between Maximal and Predacons; but since it was vague; Fans all assumed it was talking about Autobots and Decepticons; and the writers went "sure, why not?" and ran with that instead.
And this is why the history between the Autobot/Decepticon era and the Maximals/Predacon era is such a vague mess.
The first episode made mention of an event called the "Great War". Bob Forward originally didn't intend for it to mean much beyond "some conflict happened in the past and that's why the Maximals and Predacons presently don't like each other." But then the fandom latched onto the idea of it referring to the Autobot/Decepticon war of G1, and so Forward and DiTillio leaned into that notion, making it official in all references to the "Great War" in the rest of Beast Wars, and even its one mention in Beast Machines.
The first episode even had Optimus say "There has been peace between the Maximals and Predacons for centuries." Combined with the show cementing the Great War as referring to the Autobot/Decepticon war, the idea that there was ever a war between between the Maximals and Predacons (let alone one that was also called the "Great War") is pretty antithetical to the show's intent.
Yet, circa 2005-2009, Ben Yee was given the lucky opportunity to write/co-write some Beast Wars fiction for both Fun Pub and IDW, in which he invented the idea of there having been a separate "Great War" fought between the Maximals and Predacons in the years before Megatron stole the Golden Disk. Specifically, the BotCon 2005 Deathsaurus toy bio, Optimus and Megatron's BotCon 2006 toy bios and their extended "Dawn of Future's Past" profiles, the Fun Pub prose story "The Razor's Edge", the Beast Wars Sourcebook, and the BotCon 2009 Razorclaw toy bios all provided details about this war, and even made Optimus and Megatron veterans of this war (which is just nuts).
As for the exact time between the Autobot/Decepticon age and the Maximal/Predacon age, two official timeframes were given between Beast Wars and Beast Machines. The first was in the Beast Wars episode "Dark Designs", in which Blackarachnia said about the Decepticon Shrapnel, "That was a Decepticon from the Great Wars three centuries ago!" This "three centuries" claim is the most commonly known one, the one that most Beast Wars tie-in material from BotCon and IDW have run with... and the one that honestly makes the least amount of sense. We're talking about a race that can live for millions of years, and yet after a measly three centuries do the Autobots and Decepticons go completely extinct and fade into the realm of myth and legend?
And, yes, they were regarded as such by the Maximals and Predacons. The episode "Possession" first established that the 'Bots and 'Cons were not only the "ancestors" of the Maxies and Preds, but specifically their "ancient ancestors". Something "ancient" for a millions-of-years-old people ought to be well over a few centuries old, which brings me the other timeframe, the one given in Beast Machines. In the episode "Sparkwar Pt. II: The Search", Nightscream says of the ancient Autobot city of Iacon, "This city was lost eons ago after the Great War between the Autobots and the Decepticons." That's right, he said "eons ago", which is much more in line with how far removed from the Autobots and Decepticons the Beast Wars and Beast Machines cartoons intended the Maximal and Predacons to be.
When Starscream first showed up in "Possession", the only ones who had ever heard of him (one of the most infamous Decepticons of all time, no less) were Optimus, Dinobot, and Blackarachnia. When Blackarachnia and Silverbolt find the Ark in "The Agenda (Part III)", Silverbolt admits that he thought the Ark was only a legend. Over in Beast Machines, Vector Sigma is confirmed to have evolved into the Oracle at some point in the past, but by the first episode, everyone only remembers the computer by its "Oracle" name and were convinced that its existence was "just a legend." In "The Key", Tankor-Rhinox asks Optimus if he's ever heard of the Key to Vector Sigma, to which Optimus says is just "An old Autobot legend." In "End of the Line", when Megatron hears about Optimus having found the Plasma Energy Chamber, Megatron is in disbelief, yelling "The Plasma Energy Chamber is only a legend!" Even in the Beast Wars production bible, it states that the Maximals' and Predacons' knowledge of their having been descended from the Autobots and Decepticons originates from "Cybertron Mythology".
And a big one that the fandom completely overlooked is the fact that Ravage's reconstruction from Decepticon to Predacon, and his continued existence in the Max/Pred age, was known only as a rumor! This even suggests that the whole notion of the Autobots and Decepticons being downsized into Maximals and Predacons was never an intention by the cartoon itself, and the very concept even originated from outside of the show (see the Notes section of this page, starting with the second bullet point, for more).
And yet, as I said, the "three centuries" claim is the one that got noticed more and was ultimately used by both BotCon and IDW, allowing both to narrow the gap between G1 and Beast Wars in their own ways, all to inject more G1 into Beast Wars instead of allowing Beast Wars to stand tall on its own original lore and merits.
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It works well enough as vague background setting. They could have made it more specific but ultimately, that just wasn't their priority and I mostly agree.
Not sure why I made the mistake of posting this in the wrong thread, but here's a link to the Takara Tomy "Gadep" (AKA "Omega Sentinel/Guardian Robot") at another thread here at the boards :
- https://www.allspark.com/forums/threads/studio-series-2022-first-look.437/post-94012
Here's a comparison pic with some (much cheaper) 3P versions.
- https://www.allspark.com/forums/threads/studio-series-2022-first-look.437/post-94012
Here's a comparison pic with some (much cheaper) 3P versions.
They didn't need to have any access in order to decide to treat all the G1 stuff as relics from a long-forgotten period of history so old and so far back in time from the present that it's all treated as mere mythology and legends that most of the characters initially doubt were ever really true (until they were proven otherwise, that is).
Like, three centuries ago for us is the Old West. Not exactly some long lost era that time forgot.
Yes, but we do live long enough that we could know people that were alive back in the Old West. Transformers can live of millions of years. Compared to us, that's like saying what happened in the 90s is some mythical lost era.
So you agree that the "three centuries ago" statement was absurdly short for a race that can live for millions of years, and that everything else in the shows better matched the later-given "eons ago" statement.
So you agree that the "three centuries ago" statement was absurdly short for a race that can live for millions of years, and that everything else in the shows better matched the later-given "eons ago" statement.
Mostly, though it could be fair to ask if the Maximal and Predacons have the same life spans. There's nothing to say they don't, but also nothing that really says they do. It is plausible that the Great Upgrade, might come with shorter lifespans; we kinda see this with technology where newer items might be better, but also don't seem to last as long. Now I'm not saying they have human life spans; but still if they only live for thousands or hundreds of years; then you still have some difference in how long it takes for such legends to form. Though that would still put 300 years as being too short; its still something interesting to think about from a writer's perspective imo.
You're right.
The problem isn't with the canon so much as it is the people writing the canon.
Speaking from experience here, most people have no real concept of history's timescale, or what words like "ancient" or even "eon" mean.
I've had students who firmly believed the 1600s is "ancient" and who believe that Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, at most, were a generation apart (three hundred years separates them ftr).
To most laymen history is flat, history is static, and people just don't think too deeply about it. Like Cleopatra living closer to our present than she did the building of the Great Pyramids.
And no disrespect to the Beast Wars writing staff- they produced some of the best fiction this franchise has seen- but I doubt any of them were academic historians.
Which means they took that layman's understanding of our history and applied it to a fictional race where that already fuzzy understanding of human timescales gets even more fuzzy when you consider just how long lived Cybertronians can get.
So terms like "three centuries" and "eons" are thrown around with little care or understanding what these terms mean, or how they impact the broader ideas the writers are trying to get across.
All that really matters is that A REALLY LONG TIME separates the Autobots and Decepticons from the Maximals and Predacons. Good writing, however, calls for both a bit of flourish and some concrete dates so sure let's say "eons" and "three centuries" both of those sound old!
All of this, however, calls into question a bigger issue.
How do we properly convey just how far in the future the Maximals and Predacons have to be for the Autobots and Decepticons to be the realm of myth and legend?
For reference we on Earth have the story of the Seven Sisters- a story that explains the Pleiades Star Cluster. Not to get into the nitty gritty of it but there's compelling evidence that the stories about this cluster of stars go back 100,000 years. That's WELL into the realm of myth and legend, so far back we will never be able to truly know the truth about that story because it's so far beyond written memory.
And yet... 100,000 years is nothing for a Cybertronian. The Great War is usually depicted as lasting six million years or so. In IDW Nova Prime's era was ten million years from our present, and you still have contemporaries of that era out and about and it wasn't noteworthy really.
So if 100,000 years ago is the furthest back we can peak into our own past and see mere embers of stories and legends whose truths are long lost to us... just how long must have passed from the end of the 'Bot and 'Con Great War for those events to be that distant for the Maximals and Predacons? We're talking timescales so long they they potentially cease to have meaning to us as human beings.
I should probably also mention that the "three centuries ago" claim was only mentioned once, in passing, and never mentioned again in either show.
And, interestingly, there have been a number of other timeframes given in media outside of the two American Beast Era cartoons.
The BotCon 1998-2000 storyline "Reaching the Omega Point" introduced an alternate timeline set in the far future of the 32nd Century. One chapter said that this future was 200 years after the time period that the cast of Beast Wars had originally hailed from, which would have put that era in the 30th Century. But then, the 2001-2004 comic series "Transformers: The Wreckers" doubled down on the "three centuries" claim and placed the time of Beast Machines three hundred years after the destruction of Unicron, which the previous Omega Point story "Covenant" stated was in 2005, which then put Beast Machines in the 24th Century instead, retconning the previous 30th Century implication. And then, the second "Transformers: Universe" comic issue's inside-cover recap of Issue #1 stated that Universe (which Issue #1 said took place one year after Beast Machines) took place in the 23rd Century, but we easily can chalk that up to an error.
In IDW's 2006-2008 Beast Wars comics, it never actually stated how far in the future the home-time of the Beast Wars cast is. But when "Dawn of the Predacus" came out in 2016, author John-Paul Bove tweeted that that story was set "30 years after the Battle for Autobot City, 300 years before the Beast Wars", placing that story in 2035, and the Beast Era once again in the 24th Century.
Meanwhile, over in Japan, Beast Wars Second was originally meant to take place in the same future time period that the cast of the American Beast Wars cartoon hailed from, and it was set on a post-apocalyptic Earth that humanity disappeared from "several tens of thousands of years ago". With all the "myth and legend" talk from the BW and BM cartoons, the "several tens of thousands of years ago" statement actually kinda works rather well with Nightscream's "eons ago" statement (which, admittedly, didn't come until about two years after Beast Wars Second). Even the "three centuries ago" statement doesn't actually contradict this since that line was actually omitted from the Japanese dub of Beast Wars, replaced instead with a pop culture joke.
However, when the big Japanese G1/BW timeline was first put together and organized in the mid-2000s, the makers of that timeline did take to heart the "three centuries ago" statement from the English version, and thus moved Beast Wars Second to "several tens of thousands of years" after Beast Machines. They also likely did this because the Beast Wars II movie revered Optimus Primal and BW Megatron as legendary figures of history, which would only make sense if the events of Beast Machines were a part of Beast Wars II's distant past (they wouldn't know about the events of Beast Wars since that was kind of a secret war unrecorded by Cybertronian history). The likely reason the movie treated the BW leaders like historic celebrities is due to Takara initially thinking they were the same Optimus and Megatron of G1 (like how their earliest toys were treated as such by Hasbro before the cartoon came along and changed that). But then Beast Wars Metals hit Japan and made it clear that that wasn't the case. So in order for the movie to make sense, the time in which Optimus Primal and Beast Megatron existed on Cybertron had to be in the far past before Beast Wars Second (they could have instead just not included the movie in the timeline since it fits in about as well as your average Dragon Ball Z movie fits into that series, but they chose to shoehorn the movie in anyway).
Not to mention the other contradictions in Beast Wars Neo that prevented both it and BWII from taking place before Beast Machines. Namely, the fact that Episode 1 of Neo showed the Maximals and Predacons to be engaged in all-out war with each other when Episode 1 of Beast Wars already stated the Maximals and Predacons were still at peace with each other on Cybertron and had been "for centuries", and "The Agenda" three-parter introduced the Pax Cybertronia and reiterated the Cold War-esque peace between the two factions. And then there's Neo's portrayal of Vector Sigma as a well known public figure on Cybertron who governs it as the highest authority on the planet, while Beast Machines instead depicted Vector Sigma as having long ago become the Oracle and faded in obscurity as a lost and forgotten legend. Those two contradictions are far more difficult to reconcile, and thus likely factored in further to the decision to relocate BWII and Neo to occurring long after Beast Machines instead of right before it.
And, interestingly, there have been a number of other timeframes given in media outside of the two American Beast Era cartoons.
The BotCon 1998-2000 storyline "Reaching the Omega Point" introduced an alternate timeline set in the far future of the 32nd Century. One chapter said that this future was 200 years after the time period that the cast of Beast Wars had originally hailed from, which would have put that era in the 30th Century. But then, the 2001-2004 comic series "Transformers: The Wreckers" doubled down on the "three centuries" claim and placed the time of Beast Machines three hundred years after the destruction of Unicron, which the previous Omega Point story "Covenant" stated was in 2005, which then put Beast Machines in the 24th Century instead, retconning the previous 30th Century implication. And then, the second "Transformers: Universe" comic issue's inside-cover recap of Issue #1 stated that Universe (which Issue #1 said took place one year after Beast Machines) took place in the 23rd Century, but we easily can chalk that up to an error.
In IDW's 2006-2008 Beast Wars comics, it never actually stated how far in the future the home-time of the Beast Wars cast is. But when "Dawn of the Predacus" came out in 2016, author John-Paul Bove tweeted that that story was set "30 years after the Battle for Autobot City, 300 years before the Beast Wars", placing that story in 2035, and the Beast Era once again in the 24th Century.
Meanwhile, over in Japan, Beast Wars Second was originally meant to take place in the same future time period that the cast of the American Beast Wars cartoon hailed from, and it was set on a post-apocalyptic Earth that humanity disappeared from "several tens of thousands of years ago". With all the "myth and legend" talk from the BW and BM cartoons, the "several tens of thousands of years ago" statement actually kinda works rather well with Nightscream's "eons ago" statement (which, admittedly, didn't come until about two years after Beast Wars Second). Even the "three centuries ago" statement doesn't actually contradict this since that line was actually omitted from the Japanese dub of Beast Wars, replaced instead with a pop culture joke.
However, when the big Japanese G1/BW timeline was first put together and organized in the mid-2000s, the makers of that timeline did take to heart the "three centuries ago" statement from the English version, and thus moved Beast Wars Second to "several tens of thousands of years" after Beast Machines. They also likely did this because the Beast Wars II movie revered Optimus Primal and BW Megatron as legendary figures of history, which would only make sense if the events of Beast Machines were a part of Beast Wars II's distant past (they wouldn't know about the events of Beast Wars since that was kind of a secret war unrecorded by Cybertronian history). The likely reason the movie treated the BW leaders like historic celebrities is due to Takara initially thinking they were the same Optimus and Megatron of G1 (like how their earliest toys were treated as such by Hasbro before the cartoon came along and changed that). But then Beast Wars Metals hit Japan and made it clear that that wasn't the case. So in order for the movie to make sense, the time in which Optimus Primal and Beast Megatron existed on Cybertron had to be in the far past before Beast Wars Second (they could have instead just not included the movie in the timeline since it fits in about as well as your average Dragon Ball Z movie fits into that series, but they chose to shoehorn the movie in anyway).
Not to mention the other contradictions in Beast Wars Neo that prevented both it and BWII from taking place before Beast Machines. Namely, the fact that Episode 1 of Neo showed the Maximals and Predacons to be engaged in all-out war with each other when Episode 1 of Beast Wars already stated the Maximals and Predacons were still at peace with each other on Cybertron and had been "for centuries", and "The Agenda" three-parter introduced the Pax Cybertronia and reiterated the Cold War-esque peace between the two factions. And then there's Neo's portrayal of Vector Sigma as a well known public figure on Cybertron who governs it as the highest authority on the planet, while Beast Machines instead depicted Vector Sigma as having long ago become the Oracle and faded in obscurity as a lost and forgotten legend. Those two contradictions are far more difficult to reconcile, and thus likely factored in further to the decision to relocate BWII and Neo to occurring long after Beast Machines instead of right before it.
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This is just my view, I would say that the Great War was Autobot v Decepticon, when a peace treaty was evenly signed, and the two factions began evolving into Maximals & Predacons, they entered into a cold war state where the Predacons were plotting to start the war anew and retake Cybertron from the Maximals, everything that happened in BW & BM is simply a side story as BW Megatron was a rouge agent and Ravage was sent to capture him along with the Predacons and the intention was to bring him back to the present day because the ruling Council of Predacons, didn't want rouge elements that they cannot control messing up their plans, so the reason they not attacked was they were gathering their strength and likely stock piling enegron, thou I expect Megatron, once taking over Cybertron, likely sent the vrius that cippled everyone on Cybertron to where the Predacons were based and I expect the home world of the Predacons was the planet Char which had likely been developed by the Predacons, yet their dream and goal is to reclaim Cybertron from their oppressors the Maximals!
I'm not sure why you bothered cross-posting it with the 3P versions; they're literally half the size of the official toy, so it makes sense they're half the price.