Rise Of The Beasts could be the first film to take Transformers seriously
Fans once cared about a robot that turns into a gorilla—Creed II director Steven Caple Jr. is making sure they do again
The original 1984 Transformers cartoon (dubbed “Generation 1” or “G1” by fans) was very clearly and obviously created to sell toys. It was, frankly, a genius scheme to reverse-engineer a way to get kids invested in characters by creating a storyline around existing toys imported from various Japanese lines so they would be easier to sell in America. It never really aspired to be anything else, and any legacy that the cartoon itself has today is mostly due to the continued appeal of the toys or the better-than-it-has-any-right-to-be 1986 animated movie.
But that wasn’t the case for its follow-up show, Beast Wars: Transformers, a CG-animated series from 1996 with aspirations that reached far beyond selling toys to impressionable children. It had story arcs, it had character arcs, and it maintained continuity with the G1 cartoon in a way that actually made it seem like it mattered beyond the toys that it sold. To put it simply, Beast Wars took the Transformers brand seriously, and now—after so many years of making Transformers fans suffer—the big live-action movies might be attempting to do the same thing.
Previous Transformers movies had half-hearted gestures toward G1 continuity—Autobots waging their battles to destroy the evil forces of the Decepticons, that sort of thing—but with Transformers: Rise Of The Beasts, director Steven Caple Jr. (Creed II), is diving straight into the Beast Wars legacy. His new film, which opens Friday with a cast that includes Anthony Ramos, original Optimus Prime voice actor Peter Cullen, Pete Davidson, and Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh, introduces a faction of robots called Maximals, who turn into animals instead of cars and trucks and whatnot. They’re led by a gorilla robot called Optimus Primal, and the team includes a rhinoceros robot named Rhinox and a cheetah robot named Cheetor.