Originally aired September 30, 1996
Screenplay by Bob Forward
A stasis pod, containing the spark-soul of a robot, lands on Earth. Both Maximals and Predacons race to claim the spark as one of their own. – Netflix
One of the greatest quotes on the craft of voice acting can be credited to Orson Welles for his work on the 1986 Transformers: The Movie.
I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that changed from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I’m destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.
Welles passed away less than a week after completing his lines for the film, his life’s work completed. Life is beautiful.
One of the many aspects of toy-based drama that Welles no doubt recognized and admired is the built-in momentum of the cast: you gotta introduce new characters to sell more toys. It’s just that simple. That was true enough in the Transformers movie, swapping out Optimus and Megatron to introduce Rodimus Prime and Galvatron, and in Beast Wars it leads to a pretty solid reusable plot: another blank Maximal “protoform” falls to Earth, and Predacons can reprogram it as evil if the Maximals don’t get to it first.
This prefab plot is set in motion in the first episode when the protoform escape pods are ejected from the crashing Maximal ship, and it forms the backbone of “Fallen Comrades,” with Tigatron as the series’ #1 draft pick. The plot works better than the Energon hunt that stinks up a lot of season one because the stakes don’t need to be explained: whoever gets there first wins a new soldier for their team. Numbers matter, people. Plus, there’s a creepy Re-Animator vibe in the concept of reprogramming a robot in a coma to wake up evil. I can’t really make sense of it when there are guys like Dinobot around, navigating the good/evil morass in a normal, human way, but who am I to argue with a good sci-fi conceit?
I wonder if there would be such a rush to get to the protoform if they knew it would turn out to be Tigatron. He’s not the worst character in the series (that’s a toss-up between Scorponok and Terrorsaur) but he’s painfully bland in voice and personality. I mean, he’s a Smash Bros. clone of Cheetor, so purely from a new toy perspective he’s a waste of space, and he has that annoying in-touch-with-nature personality that comics seem to drop on African or Native American characters. To add insult to injury, he’s a white tiger, something that doesn’t actually exist.
Yes, white tigers exist, but they’re just mutant Bengal tigers, not some separate species of snow tigers that this series seems to think are a real thing. To be fair, I had to look this up to be certain, and I’m glad I did, because Googling it reminded me that Kenny The Mentally Disabled Tiger exists. That really made my evening, because I love this guy.
My main gripe with this episode is that it’s a chase with no consideration whatsoever of the concept of time. The entire episode is based on the Predacons going all Dick Dastardly on the Maximals, first by ambushing Optimus and putting him in the hospital, and then by destroying one of those conspicuous canyon bridges that seem to be the geological mainstay of Beast Wars’ setting. But then everybody, including Optimus, end up at the pod at about the same time anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.
In the interim, there is a fun side-plot with Megatron trying to lure Dinobot back to the Dark Side while Dinobot is watching the base with Optimus crippled inside. Dinobot dishes the series’ best use of robot vulgarity with his counter-offer: “Eat slag!” It’s a perfect robot analog for “shit” and it’s also human vulgarity in places like Britain, where it means “slut.” I wonder if they edited in a new line in other countries, so kids didn’t hear “Eat slut!” in the middle of their Saturday morning Froot Loops.
As much as I like the guy, I really enjoyed seeing Dinobot get blasted in this exchange, because he has to pull a cool combat roll to avoid getting murked. It’s a really good micro moment of solid action direction followed by an even better moment of comedy direction. When Dinobot switches the auto guns online, they slowly open out of a hatch right next to Tarantulas and Scorponok. From the autoguns’ perspective, we see the two dudes stand there frozen for a second before Tarantulas chances a small shuffle, at which point he’s blown away.
Back at the main plot, everything seems like it’s gearing towards the gotcha moment where Tigatron turns out to be one of the very tigers that Megatron was threatening in order to get the Maximals to give him the protoform. I guess it makes sense that the Maximals wouldn’t want a tiger to get hurt, but it seems lazy. Especially since the Maximals just lower their guns rather than throwing them away or something. These details matter!
It’s all a big fuckaround anyway, because Tigatron, like his good brother Kenny, has some damaged circuits that make him unable to integrate with society. So after all this, he’s a committed D-lister who will only pop up now and then.
Side Notes
- Optimus says he’ll have to miss the epic funeral Dinobot is planning, since he’s not quite dead. “Are you certain? It would be a triumphant passage.”
- I really don’t pay attention to sports, so I hope that draft pick analogy made sense. If not, sorry sportsos.
- Tigatron is voiced by Blu Mankuma, which is such a cool name it actually sounds like a way better robot than Tigatron.
- I’m completely lost on the time/distance measurements in this show. The Maximal base, which is in some hot, gorilla-ridden area (Africa?) is “100 clicks” from the stasis pod crash site on Hoth. Is a click a mile? Is it 10 miles? I thought clicks were a time thing, like the equivalent of a second, but Rhinox reads out a countdown in seconds.
Beast Wars in review 