>>11257274Short answer: financial issues.
Long answer: Hasbro was dealing with a machine gun like failures during the late 80s with several film bombs and restructures , as well as serious decline in new toy purchase across all brands lead to them taking a lot of cost cutting measures. After Rebirth they went right into a "Season 5" which was getting some Jim Henson puppeteers crew together to make some Power Master Optiums Prime props for some live action scenes with a kid actor setting up the episodes with intros and outros with for 23 other episodes from the previous 4 seasons as well as a chopped up version of the film into 5 parts. It was somewhat successful in ratings and sales surprisingly which lead them to do the same idea with GI-Joe having irl Stg. Slaughter setting up several episodes and a chop up of the Joe film. This also is what lead them into doing the Generation two cartoon of just chopping up old episodes with cgi overlaying them, this second attempt at redressing the old episodes didn't land well however and was what lead to the brand getting shelved and overhauled into Beast Wars which the higher ups at Hasbro were much more excited for and poured a bigger budget into.
