Oh thank god! it’s twenty past one April 2nd BST, which means there’s no timezone where it isn’t past midday april first and i can stop hiding under my duvet and start watching more Beast Wars! (seriously if Donald Trump is a thing there’s literally nothing you could have said yesterday that the cynic in me wouldn’t agree with)

Last Time on Beast Wars!

Anyway, It’s beautiful night, I have nothing better to do, hey baby I think I’m gonna watch Beast Wars Part 2.

We start off pretty much where we left off: Optimus and Dinobot are about to square off for leadership of the Maximals. Naturally Cheetor, Rhinox and Rattrap are concerned that they aren’t getting a say in this but Optimus reassures them everything is fine.

Needless to say more trash talk happens then a battle without humilty but with ample amounts of honour ensues.

At this point the Predacons show up and Megatron decides that it would be advantageous for them if both Optimus and Dinobot met their end in the canyon below.

So they’re handing off the bridge by the virtue of JOHN CENA’s hand feet, only Dinobot starts getting that radiation buildup static effect so he’s like

And then JOHN CENA is like

And Gimili is like

But fortunately nobody has to because Rhinox comes and lifts them up before everyone flees across the now collapsing bridge back to the maximal base, the bridge falls out below Rattrap like Wile E. Kyote but Optimus gives him a hand up so he’s good.

While the Maximals recuperate the Preds notice that some of their stray missiles have blown up a mountain miles away, and they notice this before they actually hit… Somehow. This mountain it turns out is full of Energon crystals which Megatron hopes to use to start another great war back on cybertron.

Oh and by the way our winner for this week’s freezeframe bonus is this shot of Megatron reacting to that:

The Preds march off to the mountain to the sound of a pretty epic drumbeat. Optimus is naturally worried that since his jetpack is still broken and the Predacons are the only ones with flyers that there’s nothing they can do to stop them but Dinobot responds that Megatron won’t send Waspinator and Terrorsaur ahead to start harvesting the crystal because they’re shit. And apparently this is enough to cancel out the whole “trying to kill you and take your job” debacle from earlier so Dinobot’s on the team much to Rattrap’s annoyance.

And then suddenly it’s nighttime. The implication is that they marched through the day but that mountain isn’t big enough to be far away enough to be more than a couple hours march for a bunch of tireless robot animals so I guess Mainframe just wanted to show off their nighttime shaders.

The Maximals also run across this stonehenge looking doohickey, which ends up being rather important later this season.

Then the Predacon flyers attack the Maximals, and Optimus’ jetpack has finished repairing itself so do you know what this means? More action montages!

I would apologise for just leaving you with a bunch of star wars quotes and not actually explaining what’s going on But we don’t have time for that! The climactic battle atop the mountain is about to start and for some reason it’s daytime again.

Because of all the radiation this battle takes place mostly while everone is in beast mode, so here’s some screencaps of animals beating the shit out of each other.

And then Megatron just blows the fucking mountain up in an attempt to kill off the maximals, how very counterproductive.

And as the smoke clears the Maximals ponder whether they can work on going home now that the Predacons are ‘splode, to which Optimus replies “no, we didn’t see the corpse…”

Yeah this episode was full of action sequences that wasn’t sure I could do justice to in prose form so I kinda went overboard on the screencap montages and kinda also glossed over a few of the character subplots for flow’s sake, but I guess that means there’s even more reasons for you to watch it yourself right?

Things also worth noting: Beast Wars has a pretty awesome soundtrack comprised of ample quantities of guitar shredding and tribal drums. unfortunately I can’t really screencap it for you, but what I can do is link you to the first season intro so here’s that. Also voice acting is great across the board. It also doesn’t make the mistake of relying on it’s at the time cutting edge effects to make action interesting, battles aren’t just slugfests of explosions and cheesy one liners, instead there’s pleanty of oldschool tension to make things interesting and keep you invested in what’s gonna happen. I liked how well fights also tied into the various subplots and character arcs going on.

If I had to pick a major gripe with the Beast Wars pilot it’s that the Predacons feel underdeveloped and a little bit arbitrary. While there’s a lot of interpersonal conflict between the Maximals apart from the scene after the crash with Dinobot the Predacons are really just there to all show up out of the blue and shoot at the Maximals till the mountain explodes and they actually have something to do. While I understand Mainframe’s decision to focus on the protagonists early on the lack of scheming both by Megatron and by his minions against him is a stark contrast to how fleshed out and duplicitous they are later in the series.

All in all though I definately enjoyed watching this again for what must be the 5th time now, so with that in mind Beast Wars (Parts 1&2) gets my rating of 4/5: Definately worth a watch!

If you want to watch Beast Wars Legally I highly reccomend checking out the Shoutfactory Complete Series collection DVD set, it’s what I’m watching it on at the moment and you can use VLC to bypass the region lock on it so long as your DVD drive supports that. Or if you want to watch it with commentary tracks from the cast and crew you could try tracking down the madman entertainment releases, I’m sure you can still find those somewhere.