As for this other part...
AllNewSuperRobot wrote:Sabrblade wrote:And, personally, I'd rather they left the old BW cartoon continuity alone if they weren't going to at least have the still-living Bob Forward on hand to address some of that vague stuff, since the old BW cartoon was his and the late Larry DiTillio's baby. They (or at least Bob) deserve to be ones to tell us how Maximal and Predacon society works and such, not some new writer with no ties to their plans.
I've often thought the same. Leave Beast Wars alone. None of that: "well these stories happened in between Fallen Comrades and Double Jeopardy". Bastardise/adapt G1 all you like, but leave the series that actually consistent narratives to the creatives behind them.
I'm kinda mixed on this.
On the one hand, I actually like the extra BW stuff we got way back during the early BotCon years, if just as a guilty pleasure. While not strictly from Forward and DiTillio (though, Forward himself did write both "Visitations" and "Primeval Dawn, Part 1", specifically using the latter to retcon away an error the cartoon's animators made), they came out at a time not only when the cartoon was still around and a big deal but also at a time when the fandom was starving for new Transformers content, comics or otherwise. The BW cartoon had such an erratic, unpredictable airing schedule in its original broadcast run, and there were no more TF comics of any kind available at retail. So the BW/BM-set printed media we got from 3H at the time attempted to fill that void and was well received (at least, at first) because of that. So, I have more of an appreciation for that stuff and what it did for the brand at the time.
But on the other hand, I look at the BW stuff we got from IDW in the mid-2000s and just go "...Why?" The Gathering and The Ascending felt less like an attempt to reignite the spark that made BW awesome and instead just felt like a haphazard attempt to cram as much of the toy-only characters and Japanese characters into the cartoon's world as possible, which did not need to happen at all. Granted, those stories did make me like Razorbeast, but only because he was the only character they focused on enough to make likable. Everything else in those stories just felt like forced fanservice for everything
but the cartoon. When those were all said and done, I was left feeling "What was the point of any of that?"
This is why I'm so glad Jim Sorenson and David Bishop created something wonderfully new and fully detached from the cartoon when they gave us Uprising, and also why I'm cautiously concerned about what John Barber (as good a writer as he is) will be giving us in next year's Beast Wars comics. From the sound of his words in that one interview, it almost kinda sounds like the new comic series might again be set in the BW cartoon's continuity, or it could be a new take on that setting like a reboot or something. We'll just have to wait and see. Expect the worst, hope for the best, brace ourselves either way.