A Horrifying Thought

Earlier today, I watched a certain YouTuber's review of the upcoming War for Cybertron: Kingdom Blackarachnia figure, in which he mentioned that the Beast Wars characters will be appearing in the eventual third and final chapter of the mind-numbingly bad Netflix series.

I don't know why that hadn't occurred to me beforehand - perhaps I'd subconsciously blocked the deeper ramifications from my mind - but, the moment he said it, I had a terrible realisation... It's going to be shit.

Now, in a lot of ways, I don't much care about reboots to the G1 continuity. There was no consistency between the stories in the original TV show (one could hardly say it had a story arc, many episodes seem to have been written from templates that could be adapted to myriad other cartoons, and almost none of the characters behaved the way one might have expected if they paid any attention to the character bios supplied with the toys), let alone between the TV show and the Marvel comics. Furthermore, in the UK, a lot of additional stories were written around the US stories and focussed on less prominent characters as a result (not to mention having vastly superior art for the first few stories). Reboot G1 all you like but, to me, Bob Budiansky's character bios are canon, and the rest of it was - and is - absolute bollocks. At this stage, I try not to pay attention to any of the associated fiction, because most of it is disappointing.

But, with the toyline implying some misguided time paradox crossover between G1 and Beast Wars, I can't help but think now that they're about to piss on one of the best TransFormers TV series in an attempt to shoehorn it into a grander continuity. Let's not forget, they'll only have eight episodes to make some kind of sense of a story where both Optimus Prime and Optimus Primal, as well as both versions of Megatron - the original, and the Predacon who adopted the name in tribute to him - exist in the same place/time.

And let's also remember that, originally, the Maximals and Predacons were smaller, more Energon-efficient robots created for a Cybertron still in the midst of an Energon crisis... They were depicted as effectively Micromaster-sized, but the toys were made to a different scale... Having both groups all in the same scale, toy-wise, is going to play havoc with the concept: Is Optimus Primal now the size of Mighty Joe Young? Is Rattrap the size of a small car?

This all makes me even less keen to continue watching the show... Again, it really feels as though Hasbro needs to hire a writer - and, ideally, not a TV writer - to craft the story behind their next toyline, whatever it might be, and whether or not it's developed into a TV show or movie.