And thus begins 1996 and the Beast Wars evolution of the Transformers franchise. The very concept of the brand was reworked; gone were cars, trucks and planes. Now, Transformers hid inside the hides of animals. The relaunched animated series came up with a plausible reason for such an evolution and expanded the Transformers mythology with several big concepts. The toys and mythos reworked the good guys and bad guys from Autobots and Decepticons to heroic Maximals and evil Predacons. Insects and reptiles tended to dominate the bad guy team while mammals represented the Maximals, but that was a light rule at best, as the toyline evolved.
First up is Optimus Primal, leader of the Maximals, though this is not in his most well known incarnation, which would also come out in 1996. This first Optimus is a smaller bat mode version of the character that was bundled together in a two-pack with Megatron, and a pack-in comic book.
