Moody

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Beast Machines!

What to say about Beast Machines? One of the most divisive Transformers franchises ever, featuring a drastic new look and feel for both the toys and show. Gone were the Predacons, with the Transformers finally returning to its classic vehicle based routes and introducing a new evil faction: the Vehicons. The Maximal heroes are reformatted into "technorganic" forms that are a merging of machine and biology (what does that mean exactly? It's never really explained).

Fans were not thrilled with the followup to Beast Wars. Character motivations underwent major shifts that didn't seem to match their personalities. The show was darker in both tone and visual style. Especially galling was the conclusion to the show, in which the entirety of Cybertron was reformatted to a technorganic mode, which the show informs us was what the planet was meant to be all along, implying that the G1 characters a lot of us grew up on were somehow lesser for being fully machines. It still remains a contentious one among Transformers devotees.

For my part, it was simply a difficult show to parody. It was heavily serialized, with not nearly as many stand-alone style episodes as the Beast Wars show had. This made it harder to pick and choose funny moments to lampoon. Also, the character designs were wildly exaggerated; Rattrap was no longer even really humanoid, instead looking more like a Segway in robot mode (before the Segway existed!) Applying a chibi style to these designs gave me a massive headache. 

This first strip had to be completely redrawn. My original comic was simply awful and I couldn't bear to merely ink over the old linework. 

And yeah, I hated Prime's new head! I said it.