Transformation 16: Beastly Jazz.

18/4/2019

This week, it's looking forwards and back like two halves of Jazz flying away from one another.

First up, my look at Dark Spark finds out what happens when someone comes back from the dead wrong.

Then, it's the rubber duckey of Transformers shows as I discuss Beast Wars!

5 Comments

Simon Hall

22/4/2019 10:35:34 am

I was subscribed to the Titan Comic at least until the Animated title rolled into this one, and it's scrappy AHM reprints...but a lot the stuff I'm reading on your blog I've just plain forgotten about. Evil Jazz being one of them. I dunno what it is with the UK Movie strip, it never gelled with me. I think unlike with the original UK title, where the cartoon was a distinct separate entity to the comics on both sides of the pond,none of what happened in the comics based on the film felt like it would matter. Or had enough of it's own identity to withstand being derailed by whatever the films ended up doing. The artwork also felt too bright and cheerful for films that are not really known for this, so the tone doesn't feel right either.

Megatron Origin... I read that in the recent Hachette collection and I've still no idea what actually happens in it. And the reprint in this issue perfectly captures that! A lot of splash pages and not much happening, with whatever story there is crammed into tiny panels obscured by speech balloons. Hooray!

...and then there's Beast Wars The Ascending. It's a wonder I stuck with the comic.

I loved Beast Wars (still so), but the comics turned out to be a massive let down. There's potential in the parameters of the TV show, but the gubbins mixed in from Beast Wars II and Beast Wars Neo rapidly turned the whole exercise into fanboy navel gazing. Boo.

The TV show is still a gem among children's animated shows and it's a shame that it's never got a full Region 2 DVD release (there's the two discs Sony did which cover the finale of Season 2 and just over half of Season 3, plus Panda's Season 1 release for the German market - has the original English dub as an option, but no end title credits and removes the Dolby 5.1 for ... reasons...). Maybe at 50 odd episodes it was felt as too risky as a cash grab (unlike Beast Machines). I was half hoping Metrodome would snap up the license for it, but I wonder if those sets of late '80s Japanese TF series rather put paid to further releases from them. Still, at least we got endless releases of RiD... Punishment for all those VHS releases, I guess.

Anyway! Yeah, Beast Wars was bloody ace. For all the reasons mentioned in your write up. Everyone of those characters is memorable and I loved how fleshed out they were. Rattrap used to really get under my skin, as he;s such an annoying twerp, but ... that was precisely the point! He's like all those blustery know-it alls you meet in real life. Even now, that character impresses me because there's such a lot going on with him. Him, Tarantuals and Blackarachnia are probably my favourites. And Inferno who is gloriously unhinged. Bit of a shame the Vok turned out to be a bit of damp squib in the end and I still don't like the messy Season 3 opener, but the direction, voice acting and commitment of all involved mean that even the weaker episodes are better than the entire 'geewun' cartoon.

Tim Roll-Pickering link

27/4/2019 12:52:09 pm

Ah Beast Wars.

It was around this time that I found myself drifting back to TFs more fully. Over the past few years I'd picked up the odd back issue of the US comic as and when I spotted them, and never gave up hope of finding the missing US G2 issue (it took until 2003 to locate a copy) but otherwise it wasn't until I stumbled across a collectors' toy stall in the old Croydon markets and then went on the internet that my interest returned.

The screening of Beast Wars in the UK was, to put it mildly, a big mess. In those days we only had five channels (and some parts of the country, including where I went to university, could only get four) and Hasbro or Mainframe had difficulties getting anyone to pick the cartoon. Eventually it wound up with GMTV, who had the breakfast television slot on ITV.

Unfortunately GMTV didn't really know what to do with it and so it wound up initially being run only on bank holidays which are few and far between. To make matters worse, the first episode went out on Good Friday 1998. The Northern Ireland peace talks overran what had been intended as a hard deadline of midnight that morning and by the time GMTV came on there were hopes of an announcement whilst on air. So they moved Beast Wars up in the schedule, annoying people who'd set their timers and awaiting it, and as it turned out the scheduled slot was taken up with stock report padding.

And the presenter of the children's segment was Mr Motivator, normally the presenter of the keep-fit slot. It's hard to convey just how annoying Mr Motivator was - let's just say that in its last years the satirical puppet show Spitting Image made a running gag of his seemingly limitless energy and utterly annoyingness. Oh and there were the cuts. Notoriously the word "Slag" was deemed inappropriate. But sometimes key moments were lost - there was a very noticeable jump in Code of Hero where Dinobot is talking to Rattrap before suddenly being alone in his quarters contemplating, and the Agenda lost some of the most important lines in the whole series explaining it all - and even the show's name was amended, with a freeze frame in the title sequence before the word "Transformers" appeared, almost as though someone was worried associations would damage the brand. When the cuts were for timing it just added to the annoyance with the Mr Motivator segments.

Despite all this the show clearly gained some traction as by the late August bank holiday that year it secured an increase to two episodes. It also had a run during the (perceieved national) autumn half-term, though notably not the spring and summer terms. However all this meant the series was run through at a slow pace and a number of episodes, including most of the second half of the first season, were skipped, presumably because someone at Hasbro UK was concerned that the show would slip to far behind the toy releases. We got the second season in full but again slow with thirteen episodes across six months.

Just to add to the annoyances were reports that "GMTV2" or something on digital television was running the whole series on a much more regular basis. Digital television was very new back then and the cost (plus existing equipment requirements for installation) meant a lot of the Transformers fanbase was unable to get it so it felt like a deliberate lock out.

GMTV did not get the third season and so the last screenings were three first season episodes (two repeats, one new one) on bank holidays between Christmas and New Year at the end of 1999. They had a different, far more likeable and serious presenter whose name I forget, but it proved a false dawn. In 2000 a video company released the remaining episodes, though some deal seemed to mean that Optimal Situation was tied to a toy promotion or something. Other releases from earlier seasons followed.

However this wasn't the only way to see the series. The internet was growing at the time, albeit constrained by the limitations of modems. However I started university in 1998 and the Ethernet LAN (or whatever) system meant much faster internet connections than were available through phonelines - so much so that there was heavy demand from Computer Science students to get accommodation on campus in most years (living with three of them off campus one year may have helped me get back on for the next). So even in the 1990s it was possible to watch some television shows on demand through the net as filesharing took off (South Park had a huge fanbase for this) though there all manner of constraints such as the need to download the whole file first, the limited memory on my laptop harddrive and, in my time off campus, the difficulty of transferring files (the 1.44 MB floppy disk was still the only universal writeable portable format but far below what was needed, with Zip Discs and CD burners in competition with many, including nearly ever computer on campus, sitting back and waiting for a single high capacity format to win out, so the wh

Tim Roll-Pickering link

28/4/2019 12:53:29 pm

Hmm that got cut off a bit. So here's the last paragaph in full:

But this wasn't the only way to see the series. The internet was growing at the time, albeit constrained by the limitations of modems. However I started university in 1998 and the Ethernet LAN (or whatever) system meant much faster internet connections than were available through phonelines - so much so that there was heavy demand from Computer Science students to get accommodation on campus in most years (living with three of them off campus one year may have helped me get back on for the next). So even in the 1990s it was possible to watch some television shows on demand through the net as filesharing took off (South Park had a huge fanbase for this) though there all manner of constraints such as the need to download the whole file first, the limited memory on my laptop harddrive and, in my time off campus, the difficulty of transferring files (the 1.44 MB floppy disk was still the only universal writeable portable format but far below what was needed, with Zip Discs and CD burners in competition with many, including nearly ever computer on campus, sitting back and waiting for a single high capacity format to win out, so the whole campus had just one public PC with a Zip drive. Despite all these limitations I got to see the whole of the third series not too long after it went out in the states, as well as catching up on some first season episodes I missed.

As for the show itself, I'll put that in another post...

Tim Roll-Pickering link

28/4/2019 09:17:47 pm

As for the BW cartoon itself...

I wasn't aware of Larry DiTillio had worked on Babylon 5 but suddenly it makes a lot of sense. Beast Wars was certainly light years beyond the cartoons of my childhood, with far more character development, narrative continuity and thoughtful plots, even if it did have some "gimmick of the week" episodes and light humour. And both shows were pioneering with CGI.

Being set on a primitive world with no way of getting home also gave the series a strong edge. Not only was the cast limited but this also meant both sides were in a desperate fight for survival. Each character had a clear role and personality that helped drive episodes and their own personal journeys (and notably the show went out of its way to ensure newer characters were not simply the same personality types as older toys). Truly this was light years beyond the original cartoon.

Coming onto the internet around the time the show started over here, it was interesting to see how some fans had taken the series as a clear successor to the cartoon universe but others were starting to see that it drew on multiple G1 continuities. Here we didn't get "Possession" so the biggest link to the cartoon was lost and mentions of Primus were telling. It was interesting back then to see the early stages of the debate as to which is the "true origin" of the TFs that should be followed, and attempts to merge the Primus and Quintesson stories that seemed to work until people remembered they also needed to reconcile Unicron the dark god with the creation of Primacron. Eventually people accepted Beast Wars was its own blend.

Finally the screen TFs got a strong, indepth story that wasn't constantly sidetracked by a whole of heap of toys having to be introduced every so many episodes, although the deaths of Scorponok and Terrorsaur were a bit messy (and I could never understand how they got away with killing off a character just as he got a new toy). The CGI also made it feel incredibly modern and even all these years later it still looks amazing. This was the franchise coming of age onscreen.

John D. link

24/5/2019 03:41:26 pm

Interesting to see all the beast wars love on here. I suppose I never took the cartoon very seriously and much preferred the comics storyline. I really like the 1986 movies, for all its flaws, but I don't think I have even watched any cartoon episodes beyond that. I stumbled across beatlst wars a few times on "good morning TV" on channel 3/ITV (I was a big Big Breakfast fan, on the other CHANNEL, channel 4 - as Tom had mentioned, in the UK we had 4 to choose from). I thought the cgi was intriguing but still cheap looking. I gathered it was surprisingly to do with transformers, though as mentioned gmtv seemed at pain to distance it. I was in my late teens by this point anyway and not the target audience.

Transformation 16: Beastly Jazz.

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