Beast Wars Transformers

Beast Wars: Transformers (Beasties on YTV) is a Transformers toyline released by Hasbro between 1995 and 1999. The toys spawned a full-CG animated series set in the "original" Transformers universe, produced by Mainframe Entertainment of Canada. The series debuted in 1996, as a sequel to the original Transformers cartoon series (which was later rebooted by various limited comic book stories from several companies including Dreamwave comics and IDW.)

Due to a regulation by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, the word "war" cannot be used in the title of any show broadcast by a Canadian station. As a result, the series was renamed Beasties, with the themesong changed to reflect this. Another toy-based series from Mainframe Entertainment, War Planets, also fell under this rule, and was similarly renamed as Shadow Raiders.

The story editors for the Beast Wars TV series were Bob Forward and Larry DiTillio. All three seasons are currently available on DVD in the USA and other Region 1 territories. In Australia, to coincide with the show's tenth anniversary in 2006, Madman Entertainment released all three seasons in Region 4 format. These boxsets are loaded with 'world exclusive' special features, including commentaries and interviews with the voice talent.

The Production Designer for the show, Clyde Klotz, won an Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation in 1997 for his work on Beast Wars, making the series an Emmy award winning show.

Setting and plot
The two main factions of robot Transformers are descendants of the two main factions in the original cartoon series: the Maximals are the descendants of the Autobots and the Predacons are the descendants of the Decepticons. The names were intended to stem from the terms Mammal and Predator but were not necessarily consistent with the alternate forms of the Transformers. (In Beast Machines, the process during which Autobots and Decepticons became Maximals and Predacons is respectively referred to as the "The Great Upgrade".)

The leader of the Predacons team is Megatron. He and his forces are a splinter group on the hunt for powerful crystals known as Energon, to be used in a ploy for power and dominance. They do this with the aid of artifacts known as the Golden Disk and Megatron's stolen ship, the Darkside, which is equipped with a transwarp drive. A Maximal exploration ship, the Axalon, led by Optimus Primal, is sent to stop them. Together the ships plunge through a time/space phenomenon created by the transwarp device during their battle in space, and land on a mysterious planet.

The planet is soon found to be rich in deposits of raw Energon, to the point that it proves to be poisonous to both factions' robot forms, forcing the factions to take on alternate organic forms for protection until their robot forms are needed. Thus the robots take on the beast forms of recognizable animals including mammals, birds, dinosaurs, arachnids and insects.

Before crashing, the Axalon deployed its cargo of “stasis pods” containing Maximal protoforms- Transformer robots with vulnerable and undeveloped physical forms, which are left to orbit the planet as an alternative to possible destruction in the initial crash landing. Throughout the series, stasis pods lose altitude and crash-land on the planet, and the Maximals and Predacons race and fight to acquire them, as protoforms acquired by Megatron's forces can be reprogrammed to become Predacons, as is the case with Blackarachnia and Inferno. The stasis pods were used as a plot device to introduce new characters.

Eventually it is discovered that the Transformers have in fact travelled back in time and landed on ancient Earth. Megatron decides to wipe out human civilization (currently a small group of proto-humans living in a single ravine), take control of the previously-crashed Autobot spaceship the Ark and kill the dormant, original Optimus Prime, Optimus Primal's ancestor. This would win the Beast Wars for the Predacons, alter the timeline, prevent the Autobots from being awakened by humanity in 1984 and ultimately defeating the Decepticons, and leave Megatron the ruler of the universe.

The later plot was developed following the discovery of a message made by the original Megatron for any Decepticons who would uncover it within the Golden Disks. The Predacon Megatron would successfully infiltrate the Ark and destroy the original Optimus, but Optimus Primal took the spark of Prime into his own body in order to protect it (which transformed his body into the Optimal Optimus form) while Rhinox and the other Maximals performed vital repairs on Optimus Prime's body. When the repairs were complete, the timeline was restored to its original state.

Many of the plots involved interaction with artifacts from an unknown alien source. These artifacts were related to a great source of power. Activating an alien beacon destroyed what was originally thought to be Earth's second moon but was revealed be a massive alien transmitter. This sent a signal to the aliens. The energy pulse was so strong that it affected the transformers on the surface of the planet, which lead to deaths of some characters and the re-configuration of others into Transmetals, while the rest were left unchanged.

Beast Wars was the first Transformers series to include deaths in the television episodes (the original 80s series continuity had several characters die in the theatrical movie, but no characters died in the series itself). In the end, of the ten characters that appear in episode one, only six survived the entire series. Notably among them is the character Waspinator, who was blown to pieces or otherwise dismantled in almost every episode of the series, but never officially "died". Even in the sequel series Beast Machines, Waspinator survived, albeit in a new body and identity, as Thrust.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beast_Wars