Beast Machine Hunters> The First Story Bible part 2

For those of you who came late, Beast Hunters was the original name for what we know as Beast Machines, though Hasbro would use the name in a subline of Transformers Prime because they’re almost as addicted to recycling these days as your average environmentalist. (The ones that aren’t crazy.) In part one we were introduced to some of the concepts they had planned through the original treatment by Marv Wolfman. Some were way too ambitions and others changed by the final product for good and for bad. There were some things that stayed but at this point all they have are plots, not a completed script.

I’ve chosen a word count of around 2000. When I hit that number with both quotes and comments that’s when I’ll stop, not exactly at 2000 but around that count. So last time we only got partway through page 3 of the pdf file. When we last left off the Maximals who survived the Beast Wars arrived to find Megatron got here first, took over, and for some reasons the Maximals can no longer transform while being the only active robots on Cybertron. Let’s see where they planned to go from there versus what the show actually gave us. If you want to read along the link is in part one.

The Maximals panic. Unless they can transform they will soon go into “stasis lock” which causes a Transformer to completely shut down. If the stasis lock continues for too long, the Transformer cannot be revived and its spark dies. Transformation is the Transformer’s equivalent of breathing. Also, as we will learn, transformation is the process they use to learn and to grow as people. Transformation opens them up to change otherwise, as machines, they will grow stagnant and die as a race. To transform is the core of what they are and without it they cease to be in every way possible. We will explore this ability throughout the season as the Maximals have to relearn the ability to transform much the same way as a man who has lost limbs has to relearn to walk using crutches and artificial legs.

Putting way too much mythology into transforming there, Marv. Transforming is just the way a Cybertronian blends into the environment or battles in a different way. The art of transforming in this continuity, assuming it was still tied to G1 as Beast Wars was, wasn’t even something Cybertronians originally came up with. It wasn’t until one of the early Autobot/Decepticon conflicts that the Autobots developed the art for extra battle skills and camouflage, a way to have an advantage against their battle-designed counterparts. (The Quintessons created service and warrior robots, who became Autobot and Decepticon respectively after chasing their former masters off of Cybertron.) Stasis lock as depicted here is accurate but it has nothing to do with transforming. I don’t think I would have found this retcon all that interesting.

Because Megatron’s new henchmen were all re-programmed and rebuilt Maximals, they all have an instinctual understanding of Maximal battle tactics. No matter what the Maximals do, they seemingly are able to counter it. The Maximals have no idea why the new henchmen are able to fight them so efficiently and they will not learn their origins until the end of this season or the beginning of the next. This will remain a mystery that we will return to throughout the season.

I’m not sure Beast Machines ran with that ball very well. The mystery of what was going on was, at least to me, frustrating at times. The end result of what we got really didn’t play into the idea of knowing Maximal battle tactics until we got Obsidian and Strika, two former Maximal warriors who were convinced their duty was protecting Cybertron and since Megatron technically WAS Cybertron they worked for him. The mystery of who Tankor, Jetstorm, and Thrust were got a mercy killing in season one and it was for the best. Also remember Wolfman was expecting to get four seasons out of this. Instead we got two on Fox Kids in the US, with the second subtitled “Battle For The Spark”, while YTV in Canada wanted the whole show at once and thus only had one season.

Black Arachnia is a powerful fighter but she hesitates every time she and Skybolt find themselves together. Still she forces herself away from him and goes back to battling Thrust whose inhuman speed and super-fast weapons, keels all the Maximals off guard.

Good thing these story treatments don’t get points removed for bad punctuation. I don’t have an editor and I’m trying to retype all this by hand because the pdf file is just pictures of the treatment and thus I can’t simply copy/paste. So I’m bound to make a mistake or tvo. Uh, too. Two! I meant two!

Black Arachnia and Skybolt’s relationship provides a lot of fodder for Rattrap and his warped sense of humor. He brings her wilted flowers and says they’re from her new lover, he tries to follow her and blows his cover, etc.

Geez, Marv, season 1 Rattrap wasn’t this big a skidplate! Did your apartment have a rat problem or something?

Cheetor, on the other hand, is jealous He cares for Black Arachnia and is more determined than every to destroy Skybolt.

Those are his typos, not mine. Missing a period before He. I’m pretty sure Skybolt/Jetstorm wasn’t Primus. And he meant “determined than ever”. I’m just noting these so I don’t accidentally fix them down the road like a couple of typos I found while writing this in last week’s post. Cheetor having a crush on Blackarachnia (I just double checked and it’s one word, not two) would actually fit continuity. In season three, when Cheetor entered his “Transmetal 2” form as well as what Rattrap called “cyber puberty” (I didn’t say he wasn’t a jerk, just not as bad as Marv wants to write him), he did develop a crush on Blackarachnia, if only because at the time she was the only girl bot there. Outside of a couple of moments it didn’t really go anywhere because of her relationship with Silverbolt and being the final season, but while this would have had time to explore than dynamic the only way Cheetor would want to actually destroy Skybolt is that he didn’t know one of his old allies was in there.

Hey, we’re finally to page 4! And for those of you not counting along we’re in the 1000s in our word count.

The Maximals barely manage to escape with their steel intact and take to hiding in the ancient Cybertronian catacombs. Rattrap loves catacombs; he is a rat, after all and love to skitter here and there in small, dark spaces.

Not completely inaccurate but exaggerated. Maybe Wolfman wasn’t allowed to watch Beast Wars. The final showrunners weren’t.

Until they discover great underground temples that were built before the first Transformers came to Cybertron. For the moment, they don’t care about the temples, but use this down time to plan their next moves. They begin to feel the pain of non-transformation sweeping over them.

There is an episode where they find the buried remains of old Iacon, the Autobots’ main city but it wasn’t a regular hang out. Wolfman also seems to be jumping all over the place timewise with his treatment to tell (I’m assuming) Fox Kids or Mainframe why the Blackarachnia/Skybolt dynamic is going on, though he can’t seem to decide who actually has Silverbolt’s spark. Maybe that’s why the leaks from back when the show aired got it wrong?

Black Arachnia, wandering the catacombs alone while trying to sort out why Thrust is affecting here (again, his typo), accidentally discovers deeply buried ancient temple. (Also his typo.) She enters but finds the path inside laden with traps. She barely survives and returns to fetch the others. After a near-deadly journey to its core, they find ORACOM, an ancient hologram oracle-computer. Oracom is silent, refusing to answer their questions. Black Arachnia, still seething because of her private feelings, wants to destroy the useless tool, but Optimus stays her hand. Although he doesn’t know why, Optimus senses knowledge of Oracom that has been buried deep in his programming and is only now clawing its way to the surface.

The Oracom senses the matrix inside Optimus and suddenly hundreds of cables extrude from the Oracom and attach themselves to Optimus. The others try to save him but are easily repelled. The Oracom DOWNLOADS its information into Optimus and we find him seemingly in a strange new place; inside the essence that created the Transformers, although at this point we have no idea where he is. The voices he hears in the Oracom download are the voices of all his Transformer friends; the Oracom speaks to him in voices he already knows.

The Oracle we finally got did none of this. She turned on as soon as Optimus and the others stumbled upon it, recognizing his as a “receptive spark”. The only Matrix Optimus Primal had (Japanese retcons aside) was when he temporarily held Optimus Prime’s spark and the Matrix Of Leadership…database?…came with it.

Oracom download tells him that all Transformers are on the verge of a great odyssey that will either save the universe or destroy it forever. Its words are shrouded in ancient mysticism but it essentially says that which gave them fire needs their fire in return. For there to be a future, the past must be rekindled.

“The seeds of the future lie buried in the past” perhaps? I’ll skip more Rattrap being a jerk towards Blackarachnia and ask how long into the show was this supposed to happen? Hasbro would want them into the new toy bodies fast and it doesn’t sound like they’ve been reformatted into whatever this version of the technorganic bodies would be. In the final show this was the first two episodes.

The others are confused as Optimus becomes “one” with the Oracom. The oracom informs Optimus that when the first robots came to Cybertron, they were not capable of transformation. If the Maximals want to transform again, they are going to have to learn the secrets of the past.

As noted earlier, the pre-Transformers were built on Cybertron and created the art of transformation during the war. It’s totally an artificial process, not native as Transformers Prime and their Beast Hunters indicate with the transforming cog treated like a body part like a human’s kidney or other internal organ. In the show they just went technorganic to fight off the virus, restore the supposed “balance” or organic and technological, and kept them undetected by the drones in beast mode.

When Optimus exits the Oracom he finds that he has somehow touched the Transformers’ ancient past and has been changed by it. Visually, Optimus now has pupils instead of his more robotic eye sockets. This will allow him to facially show more emotions. Optimus is now a sensei for the other Maximals as he understands he has some unspoken purpose in the grand scheme. That is, if Megatron doesn’t destroy it before Optimus can figure out what he is supposed to do. The others will have to join him and be reformatted before they can learn what the Oracom has to teach.

Again, in the show they all got reformatted rather quick, and there was more to it than new eyes. It was a whole new look to sell whole new toys and so they became technorganic, not just robots with better eyes. From here we get the motivations of our quartet.

Black Arachnia is torn between her feelings for Skybolt and her need to save Cybertron. Her feelings for Skybolt and her need to save Cybertron. Her feelings tear her apart which makes here even more ferocious in battle. When she “punishes” herself for her feelings, she takes it out in action and is a nearly unstoppable warrior.

Come on, Marv, I can’t work to keep your typos and try to fix mine at the same time. Multitasking is not one of my skills.

Rattrap wants to abandon Cybertron. What’s this place ever done for us, he asks comically. Besides giving us life, that is. He’s been fighting for so long he deserves time off, he whines. Besides, without their transforming abilities they’ll be caught, like ulp, rats in a trap.

We have gotten a hint that Rattrap did not have the best life on Cybertron before joining the Axalon, and his first assignment gets interrupted by chasing rogue Predacons across time and space. This is the first thing Marv Wolfman has gotten right about Rattrap this whole treatment!

Cheeter, (his typo), who’s explored the surface, is desperate to find his old friends. Optimus can’t stand the thought of Megatron controlling Cybertron.

This is actually an improvement over what we got. Each of the foursome have their own individual motivations, mostly in-line with their previous versions. It would have allowed for each character to have something interesting in their personality. Instead Cheetor becomes the punk kid who takes over from his mentor because he no longer trusts him, we’ll discuss more about Rattrap next time, leaving Optimus Primal and Blackarachnia the only one whose motivations went forward but not in a very interesting way. Optimus Primal wants to save Cybertron from Megatron. That’s not really a stand-out motivation, but it is less questionable than what he would do in Beast Machines with his growing obsession with a technorganic Cybertron.

Next time, Rattrap gets to transform, we meet a new Vehicon, and I just closed the file so I’m not sure what else. Join me next time as we continue to go through this story treatment before getting to the actual production guides for the show we got.