Welcome everyone, this is Ebby of The Demented Ferrets, back with my second blog post and video. Today I’ll be dragging you all along with me through my childhood while I reminisce about one of my favorite shows of all time. Let’s begin.

Many of us have our favorite tv shows that have stuck with us over the years, usually from our childhood. Today, I’d like to talk about a childhood favorite of mine from the Transformers series called Beast Wars (or Beasties, if you watched the show in Canada), released in 1996 and ran until 1999 with three seasons. It was a computerized cartoon using 3d models for everything. When it first released (and through my six-year old eyes), this was mind-blowing. Granted, I grew up somewhat poor, with the most advanced piece of tech we owned being a tv, so I didn’t have access to a computer or video game consoles until my early teen years in the early 2000’s. 

The first episode I watched drew me in and I was instantly hooked. The character designs, 3d world, the music, voice acting: all amazing. I became obsessed with flipping through channels to find similar shows (when Beast Wars wasn’t playing, obviously). I found ReBoot (which I may talk about another time), another show made by the same company: Mainframe Entertainment (currently known as of 2020 as Mainframe Studios), as well as The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, which also incorporated a 3d world at certain points, alongside the traditional hand drawn cartoon animation. A sequel to Beast Wars titled Beast Machines was aired in 1999 until 2000.

Beast Wars: Transformers takes place about 300 years after the war between the Autobots and Decepticons, and directly follows the Transformers: Generation 1 continuity. It begins with a one-on-one space ship battle between the previous wars’ participants: The Maximals (descendants of the Autobots), and the Predacons (descendants of the Decepticons). Both ships emerge from a vortex and during the firefight, crash land on the nearby planet, landing relatively close to one another. The ships scan for lifeforms that the transformers can appropriate in order to both blend in, as well as protect them from the overflow of raw Energon that the mysterious planet is abundant with. The two groups soon meet and all Inferno breaks loose. I won’t spoil much more of the story here.

From this point, I’ll just just say that of all of the characters, Dinobot will always be my favorite, but if I had to go by visual appearance, I would have to go with his Transmetal II form, which made its debut later in the series. I love all of the Transmetal II forms, now that I think of it… Anyway, Dinobot’s voice actor (Scott McNeil) is among my top 5 voice actors, maybe even top 3. In Beast Wars alone, he voiced: Rattrap, Dinobot, Waspinator, Silverbolt, Dinobot’s Clone, Cicadacon (one of the large floating heads, if I remember right) and Transmetal II Dinobot (obviously). In other shows, he has voiced Wolverine in the X-Men animated series, Piccolo in the Ocean Dub of Dragon Ball Z, many, many voices including Koga in Inuyasha, just as many in ReBoot, and many, many others. All of his work is amazing.

I’m going to leave it here while I rewatch the show (as well as its sequel: Beast Machines) for the millionth time, and I implore you to watch it for yourselves.

This has been Ebby of “The Demented Ferrets”, where stupidity is at its finest and level grinds are par for the course.
Until next time…

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