Beast Wars

Part of what made Beast Wars so good was the fact that it took the time to focus on a small group of characters, compared to the ensemble cast of G1 which, I personally love, but is exactly the reason many "critics" consider it a "toy commercial" and blah blah, Beast Wars having a smaller more focused cast was what allowed it to be more character driven and allow for more character development

>>93163097
Yeah, and Sunbow G1 benefited from having clear voice direction from Wally Burr, so even if characters only got a few lines, it was usually enough to establish their personality.

BW Scorponok waffled back and forth from "genuinely crafty if not as smart as Tarantulas" to "dumb muscle refers to himself in third person". He was easily the least interesting member of the cast, and when you consider that originally they wanted to kill WASPINATOR (they found his vocal mannerisms annoying and time-consuming, which is why they went out of their way to eliminate him from fight scenes ASAP, which in turn led to him becoming a fan-favorite. So all things considered, we got the best possible outcome.

I guess Terrorsaur was a little more defined, but really, we didn't need his piddly ass around when we already had Megatron, Tarantulas and Blackarachnia double and triple crossing each other.

>>93163097
>Beast Wars having a smaller more focused cast was what allowed it to be more character driven and allow for more character development

That might be true of the Maximals, but on the Predacon side, besides Waspinator, Quickstrike and Inferno were constant cannon fodder anyway. Would it have really killed them to keep Terrorsaur to mix things up a bit?

And back to the Maximals, Tigatron spent most of his time away anyway, so why not keep doing what they did in season 1, have him pop in every 3 or 4 eps? Personally, I liked his "Big Cat Little Cat" dynamic with Cheetor, and I would have liked to have seen how he would have interacted with Silverbolt. I feel like they had personalities that would have meshed really well.

I honestly think that those other characters could have stuck around without necessarily being a detriment to the characters who actually got storyarcs.

>>93163188
If only they had killed Waspinator.

>>93162989
Toy sales.

If I recall correctly, they killed off the few Transformers whose toys simply sold less than anybody else in order to make way for new toys.

>>93163358
Even taking that into account, they could have introduced the new toy characters without removing the old ones.

>>93163278
I find it both endearing that you love Terrorsaur so much and also a bit silly, I mean I certainly didn't mourn his death. Tarantulas is my favorite Predacon next to Megs though so maybe I'm just jaded because my character actually served a purpose in the story, but once again I feel like the show wouldn't be what it was if it took the time out to focus on many more characters than it did

>>93163278
You're forgetting, anon, that even if they had the models, animating CGI cost a lot of money, especially in the 90s. So, they had to remove characters for every character that they added.

They write off Terrorsaur, Scorponok, Tigatron and Airazor in time for Quickstrike and Silverbolt, in addition to all the Transmetal models who may as well have been new characters as far as the animation budget was concerned.

Not to mention Rampage was added to the Preds' side later.

Rampage was a better character.

So really, who give a flying fuck about Scorponok?

>>93163588
>You're forgetting, anon, that even if they had the models, animating CGI cost a lot of money, especially in the 90s.
This. Shit, I'm not sure they had software with the processing power to handle animating more than 10 or so Transformable models onscreen at a time.

>>93162989
Scorpinok and Terrasaur's toys didnt sell

>>93163588
>>93163616
That's why I said "rotating cast."

I know all about the limitations of the software, and I know that they could not have too many models on screen all at the same time, but, just for example, we didn't need Quickstrike in every single episode. We could have stuck one of the other guys in an episode here or there

Maybe I'd be less annoyed by it if they characters at least got cool send-offs (like the first Inferno "death" which was supposed to have been permanent), but they didn't.