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I just finished Beast Machines, and I'm honestly kind of at a loss for words; I'm just sitting in silent shock. Not that it was so bad, so amazing, or so weird, but just that it was so... Normal.
The Maximals' designs are sometimes nightmare-inducing, sure, but I kinda have to respect it when an entire team of people goes "we made them ugly on purpose" lawl. And yeah there are a very few minor incongruities with BW, like Rhinox and Megatron's motivations/goals, but all things considered even those few things work pretty seamlessly in-context. Goes to Marty Isenberg's credit as a writer then, given he hadn't seen much/any of BW at the time, then. Plus it gave more depth to chars like BA & Silverbolt, rly made me retroactively enjoy them more, since in BW they were a bit onenote.
Watched all at once, it really does just feel in the same vein as any of the Dreamwave/earlyIDW comics, or TFA's more darker bits, or what-have-you; it's just got some weird designs, and also really wanted to ride that Y2K cyberpunk dystopia aesthetic lol.
It's not a terrible directionless insult at all, and it wasn't some foreign high-art student film neither (tho the "we are transformed" in S1 was pushing it lol); it was just a good, well-written action show.
I guess it must have been several times more frustrating back in the day, I would assume? Given you'd have to wait a long time for stuff like Primal's S1 nature obsession to be revealed as intentionally him going too far, etc; maybe it was too serialized for its own good at the time. Nevertheless, I think the fact it's retained such weirdly extreme opinions on both sides today a bit bizarre. I guess people don't want to give it the time of day too much given the designs, that'd make sense... but still, yeah, idk. Fun show, I liked it.
Shoutouts to Strika using her rocket booster feet to skate around exactly like Shadow the Hedgehog in that one scene, lol.
