Beast Wars Telemocha Series Tigatron

All things considered, mold reuse was not especially common in Beast Wars... at least, not in the sense of repainting one character into another. Even in those cases, it wasn't repainting one species into another. Reusing Cheetor's mold to represent a white tiger - which tend to be native to Bengal, while Tigatron patrolled the arctic zones in the Beast Wars TV series - seems strange, although it's suggested that he was intended to be remolded slightly.

Beast Wars Telemocha Series Cheetor

Every line of TransFormers needs a headstrong, action-hungry kid-appeal character who starts off completely arrogant, insubordinate and consistently bites off more than he can chew, but grows not only to respect his Prime but the rest of his team as well. Lately, that's been the Bumblebee role... but in the Beast Wars, another yellow character fulfilled the same purpose...

Beast Wars Telemocha Series Rhinox

The thing about Beast Wars is that it was so very different from every other iteration of TransFormers that came before it. Here were the same old robots (well, some of them), but they changed into animals rather than vehicles or other mechanical things. Considering the amount of time and effort that went into explaining why the G1 robots turned into vehicles, etc (because their equipment could not identify organic life and so assumed that cars, planes and...er... cassette players... were the dominant form of life because they were so prevalent), it seems strange for a later continuity to contradict this. It'd take one hell of an accompanying storyline to fix this mess...

...Thankfully, that's just what Beast Wars got, courtesy of the awesome Mainframe Entertainment (creators of ReBoot). They explained that The Ark was experiencing technical difficulties when it sent out its probe to scan for life, and that these newer, smaller, more Energon-efficient 'bots could quite easily fabricate organic alternate modes which, as luck would have it, not only served as disguise against the indiginous life, but protected them from overload as a result of spending too much time around the raw Energon that had been seeded on their adoptive homeworld.

Still... Robots that turn into animals? It's a bit weird, innit?

Beast Wars Telemocha Series Waspinator

In all the years of TransFormers, across all the Generations and continuities, there has never been a character that attracted gunfire like Waspinator. He came across as the little guy with big dreams... and yet was blown up by his comrades as often as by his enemies.

Maybe it was the irritating voice (think Peter Lorre, but with a tendency to buzz any 's' sound)... or the delusion that he was far more powerful and competent than he really was... maybe it was just the annoying buzzing around in (giant green) wasp mode. Waspinator escaped very few episodes of Beast Wars unscathed, and frequently ended up strewn across the prehistoric landscape.

I actually skipped on most of Beast Wars the first time round, because I just didn't see the point of TransFormers - alien robots, let's not forget - that turned into animals. Leave it to Mainframe, the company behind the awesome ReBoot, to create one of the most finely judged stories for one of the most outlandish toylines in TransFormers history. When I finally got round to seeing Beast Wars - sporadically on UK kids TV, then via a website that carried decent resolution video files - I was utterly hooked. Each character in the initially small cast was well developed, and carried their own part of the story - a far cry from the random selection of two-dimensional characters that filled out the G1 cartoon. It was the TV series that got me interested in owning more than just Optimus Primal and Megatron, but original Beast Wars toys are hard to find, frequently expensive beyond all reason, and generally poorly decorated.

So when Takara decided to reissue a group of Beast Wars toys, with hugely improved paint jobs, Waspinator was quite high on my 'want' list.