Transformation Titan 17: Home Sweet Home.

25/4/2019

This week, only Cybertron can save Earth, but has someone already made a deal with the devil?

It's the debut of Stockade, plus a whole new Animated comic, in my look at Return to Cybertron Part 1!

7 Comments

Cheeseeater

27/4/2019 12:25:40 am

Hi, like the blog. I just wanted to say that I've discovered a new Furmanism! "Me, Myself and I"
Said in Titan #16
https://thesolarpool.weebly.com/uploads/8/0/2/4/8024769/titan16comic9_orig.jpg
Also in Max Dinos #5
https://tfwiki.net/mediawiki/images2/7/7c/MaximumDinobots5Monsterbotsmakeanoffer.jpg
AND by Jhiaxus in ReGen #99
Keep with the blog. is very interesting. Bye!

Stuart

27/4/2019 09:07:40 am

Ha, that's a cool find. Thanks.

Will Rigby

27/4/2019 01:50:53 am

You know you can really see the two issues of content, lost when Megatron Origins was shorted to four issues. Still at least James Roberts was able to use the idea of Megatron's mentor for Terminus.

Jon Talpur

1/5/2019 12:10:25 am

The saga of Beast Wars' long and painful introduction to the UK marketplace brings back quite a few memories for me, too! After Generation 2, it's clear that Hasbro's UK operation really lost interest in Transformers, even accounting for the numerous Generation 1 figures they never released over here.

I remember reading about the introduction of the Beast Wars toyline in the U.S. in 1996, but was surprised at how long it took for both the toys and cartoon to finally reach the U.K. Even Europe had the line months before we did; I managed to snag a couple of European-carded "Ani Mutants" figures from Germany in late 1997. I also had satellite TV and recall noticing Beast Wars on one of the German-language channels in 1998, definitely prior to the UK television debut. It's interesting that at least one European country had the figures and TV series before the UK, which didn't require any localisation.

What else can be said about GMTV's ineptitude with regards the Beast Wars TV show? I remember specifically the circumstances of recording the first episode; I made sure I was ready about an hour beforehand, because I didn't trust GMTV even at that stage, and they pulled a good one here. What a way to start the series, by making sure most of the audience missed most of the first episode!

Even once the series made its UK television debut, it was clear something was up. The noticeable removal of the Transformers subtitle from the series being a particular riddle. I can half-remember someone actually contacting GMTV and establishing that they didn't want to be seen to be too obviously broadcasting a series based on toys, which seems like an extraordinarily stupid attitude when you're purchasing broadcasting rights to a toy-based series.

Overall, the action cartoon market (invariably imported series) on British terrestrial TV channels was at that point dying on its feet. By then the main broadcasters had capped the upper limit of the young audiences they were catering to as the perception was that older kids would solely be interested in video games. A good example of a casualty of this thinking was Superman: The Animated Series, which otherwise inexplicably only had 13 of its 54 episodes ever broadcast in the UK, plus the entirety of The New Batman Adventures, which took years to be seen officially over here, and then only on Sky. More relevant to Beast Wars was the axing of ReBoot on CITV during its third season. Again, this is half-remembered, but someone did contact CITV and was told the series was withdrawn due to concerns over violence.

There was even institutional support against such series due to various factors such as this. ReBoot itself had been censured by Ofcom over "To Mend and Defend" due to perceived issues over "violent" content, and it was decreed that that particular episode would never be repeated. And following the infamous Pokemon incident in Japan, Ofcom started cracking down on anything approaching "flashing" imagery, beginning with them instigating a modification to the Toys R Us sponsorship tags on a broadcast of Batman: The Animated Series on Cartoon Network UK. The resultant effect on any relevant scenes on Beast Wars in particular was for GMTV to run such scenes through a filter that slowed the footage down to farcical levels.

Fans were pissed and summarily dismissed by GMTV, who probably at that point thought the series more trouble than it was worth. It all culminated in their butchered version of "The Agenda", with the capper being the removal of the entirety of the second part of the original Megatron's speech from "Part 2". Seriously, the GMTV version of all three parts of "The Agenda" was so bad that someone should preserve it online!

That GMTV ended up dropping the series was in the end akin to a mercy kill, and it at least freed up Universal to release the third season uncut on VHS. That Universal later went back and released the first two seasons in a similar manner indicates that the series must have sold well, serving as another damning indictment for GMTV and their approach to the show.

Oddly enough, the third season of the series had poor broadcast distribution in some other countries too, so the dropping of the show might not solely have been down to GMTV and could also have been the result of a separate distribution deal for those final 13 episodes.

Charles

3/5/2019 02:45:13 pm

I never even saw anything on GMTV after Part 1 of the Metalhunter story and swear I only remember them showing Beast Wars eps during Bank Holidays. A mess.

The videos, them I remember - "OH WOW BEAST WARS" and hunting them down and binging them eagerly, big deal in my teen years. But whose idea was it to not put Optimal Situation on the vids???

Stuart

3/5/2019 02:59:02 pm

I think Op Sit was a store exclusive wasn't it?

Simon Hall

5/5/2019 09:49:12 am

Yeah it was a gift with purchase promo at TRU. The episode is included on a UK DVD release 'Beast Wars Volume 1', which collected 'The Agenda pts 1-3', 'Optimal Situation', 'Changing of the Guard' and ' Cutting Edge'. Although this was an expensive purchase at the time (£16.99) !

Beast Wars slow transition to the UK and Europe (and the rest of the world) isn't too unusual. Generation 2 hadn't done well and Beast Wars was a fairly radical departure from what had gone before. So I can see that it might have been a case of seeing how well the toys did in the US, before sending it around the world. It's worth remembering that 'G1' (hate that term) had continued on in Europe right up until 1993, when G2 launched and it wasn't until 1994 that we started seeing Generation 2 toys in the shops. And also lead to toys released in 1993 under G1 showing up again very quickly on G2 cards in 1995 (your Stormtroopers, Obliterators and so on).

Hasbro also still had regional offices at this time, so local offices also had a say in what got released and when. There was a huge push to promote Beast Wars over here in 1998 - Woolworths in particular had some eye catching displays and some neat beastly 'footprints' on their shop floor which led you to the aisle.

Hasbro began switching to more centralised control and streamlining its operations around 1999-2000, which is one of the reasons why Beast Machines didn't really do much (the plug being pulled due ot poor reception being the big factor, obviously) beyond the initial first wave. You can see this in the concurrent releases in all markets for everything since the original RiD line.

Transformation Titan 17: Home Sweet Home.

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