The Basics On Transformers’ Japanese Beast Wars

I have a bunch of longform videos that don’t work for Saturday Night Showcase but are too long for a Daily Video. I like to keep the Showcase open to narrative videos, show samples and movies, rather than documentary stuff. I also want to get a bunch of buffer articles, something I can post quick when there’s nothing to discuss or for whatever reason I don’t have time to write anything. So far I’m going through buffers way too quickly. I’m also trying to go through my YouTube backlog and a backlog of Daily and Filler Video material, and this is one of those videos, or rather one I would have sitting there a long time. Instead I’m going to use it here.

By now everyone who cares knows that the Transformers toyline began as a series of unrelated transforming robot toys put together into one series. This began a partnership between Hasbro and Takara, now Takara Tomy, with the latter producing Transformers toys and licensing media for the Japanese market, where culture, language, and even the style of alphabet (not letters but kanji and a few other words I think) are far different than the West. Between them and various other countries there has never been, to my knowledge, a year that didn’t feature a Transformers™ toy available for sale somewhere in the world. This included Beast Wars, the idea of Cybertron’s warriors transforming into realistic animals instead of just mechanical ones. It’s a controversial like to the “trukk not munkee” crowd who only want machines but I say why limit yourself. I also like other really out there transformations if they make some kind of sense, either for spying or for some unique ability available to it.

Japan’s Beast Wars, like the rest of their Transformers, is quite different from what we know in the West. Chris McFeely of Transformers: The Basics, having his own need for filler, put together an updated compilation of various episodes following the history of Japan’s take on the Maximals and Predacons. I don’t have anything else to add, so hopefully you find this interesting.