Fallen Comrades
From Transformers Wiki
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 Do not bring your evil here. | |||||||||
| "Fallen Comrades" | |||||||||
| Season | 1 | ||||||||
| No. in season | 7 | ||||||||
| Production company | Mainframe Entertainment | ||||||||
| Airdate | September 30, 1996 | ||||||||
| Written by | Bob Forward | ||||||||
| Directed by | Steve Ball | ||||||||
| Animation studio | Mainframe Entertainment | ||||||||
| Continuity | Beast Wars continuity | ||||||||
| Packaged with | Tigatron | ||||||||
 Watch this episode on YouTube
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A stasis pod falls in the Northern Sector of the planet and the Maximals and Predacons race to obtain it.
Contents |
Synopsis
A field of debris circles the planet. Among the waste, a stasis pod falls from orbit and enters the atmosphere. Both the Maximals and Predacons watch as it falls into the distant icy Northern Sector. Rather than immediately going for it themselves, Megatron decides to ambush the Maximals' only flier (Optimus Primal) as he goes for the pod.
At the Maximal base, Primal is anxious to retrieve the pod containing a fellow Maximal. He falls for Waspinator and Terrorsaur's trap despite Dinobot's attempt to protect the Maximal leader. However, Dinobot is able to prevent the Predacons from taking Primal out of commission.
Back at the Predacon base, Megatron is disappointed to learn that Optimus Primal has survived, but realizes that the Maximals must now send a ground party to retrieve the stasis pod. This will leave the Maximal base undermanned and vulnerable to attack. Megatron dispatches his fliers to race to the pod, while he, Tarantulas, and Scorponok go to attack the Maximal base.
Meanwhile, Rattrap, Rhinox, and Cheetor run towards the pod. As they go, they remark that while leaving the base with the damaged Optimus Primal and Dinobot may not have been the best idea, it was their only option. Rhinox goes on to say that they need to hurry because, if the pod is damaged, the protoform robot within will be exposed to the planet's dangerous energon fields. Indeed, this seems to be the case when the stasis pod is shown opening, as the protoform's arm reaches from the pod and immediately begins to short out due to the high energon.
As they come to an ice bridge across a crevasse, the Maximal team is met by Waspinator and Terrorsaur. After a fire fight, the Predacons knock out the bridge and the Maximals' best hope of getting to the pod quickly.
Rattrap radios back to the base and informs Dinobot of this development. He accesses Optimus Primal's core consciousness in the CR chamber and informs him. Primal suggests that they send a laser transmission to the pod by bouncing the signal off something.
Outside of the Maximal base, Megatron and the other Predacons observe Dinobot setting up a laser transmitter on top of the base. Megatron offers Dinobot a chance to return to the Predacons by handing over the base. Dinobot responds by shooting Megatron with his eye lasers and is then promptly shot by Tarantulas and Scorponok. Although damaged, Dinobot is able to activate the base's auto-weapons which quickly dispatch the Predacons. Megatron then calls off the assault to join the pursuit of the pod.
With the transmitter in place, Optimus Primal is able to bounce a laser off one of the planet's moons and to the stasis pod. Both the Maximals, the Predacon fliers, and a nearby white tiger witness this development. The pod's DNA scanner comes online and scanning its surroundings.
His regeneration complete, Optimus Primal puts Dinobot in the CR chamber and begins his own flight towards the pod.
Meanwhile, back in the Northern Sector, the Maximal group arrives at the pod to find Waspinator and Terrorsaur struggling to open it. The Maximals warn the Predacons to stop, but soon Megatron arrives and threatens to kill two white tigers if the Maximals do not surrender. They agree, but when Megatron opens the pod to reprogram the protoform into a Predacon, he finds that the pod is empty. It turns out that one of the white tigers was the new Maximal Tigatron! As he and Optimus Primal join the fight the Predacons soon realize that they are out-gunned and retreat.
Primal welcomes Tigatron to the team and thanks him for his help. Tigatron tells his fellow Maximals that his identity circuits were damaged in the pod's landing and that he was not sure who he was until he saw that the Maximals were willing to risk their lives to save the tigers. He declines Optimus Primal's invitation to go back to the base with them, stating that he needs to stay in the wild since he is still more tiger than Maximal. Still, he promises his loyalty to the Maximals as a scout.
The Maximals head back to their base and leave Tigatron with the other white tiger.
Featured characters
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)
| Maximals | Predacons | Others |
|---|---|---|
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Quotes
"Oh no! Waszzpinator in trouble!"
- —Waspinator's understatement after being flattened by a rock some ten times his size.
"Fear not, Optimus! I shall ensure your funeral is a glorious one, as befits a warrior who died in battle!"
"'Fraid I'll have to miss it, Dinobot; I'm not scrap yet!"
"Hmm, are you certain? It would be a triumphant passage."
- —Dinobot and Optimus, the former perhaps being a little too hopeful.
"No excuses, you pathetic rodent. Keep moving. Dinobot, out."
"HEY! You can just kiss my pink, hairless—"
- —Dinobot and Rattrap share some friendly banter over the comms.
"You win, you depraved wad of stinkin' slag."
- —Rattrap, gracious in defeat.
"Let the trails lead where they may—I will follow."
- —Tigatron gets poetic. This would serve as his motto in "Dawn of Future's Past" and Transformers: Beast Wars Sourcebook.
Notes
Script timeline
- First draft: 2nd February 1996
- Second draft: 26th February 1996
- Finalised: 13th March 1996
Animation and technical errors
- As is the case in many episodes with night scenes, the stars near the horizon are vertically elongated due to a mapping error in the sky backdrop.
- Likewise a repeated error, several stars can be seen through the moon in multiple shots.
- In a couple close shots on Dinobot's head in various scenes, a small gap can be spotted in his 3D model where the upper edge of his neck ends.
- As Dinobot rises back up with the lift in the beginning, his left hand is clipping into his leg.
- When Optimus pushes Dinobot back on the elevator, the latter's head clips halfway into the wall.
- When Primal gets shot, the pistons on his feet are clipping into his shins.
- Dinobot's rotating shield is blown apart by the Predacons' missiles, yet it still has its circular spinning motion blur effect as it falls to the ground.
- After Optimus is shot down, his right shoulder pad is upside down and remains like that for the rest of the scene.
- When the boulder falls on Waspinator, the rock wall he and Terrorsaur were hiding behind is gone. It returns after that.
- When Terrorsaur blasts away the boulder, it has a different texturing than before.
- Immediately after this, Waspinator's missing his wings and abdomen, and the insect leg kibble on his left arm is reduced to a couple stubs, yet the energon surge effect around them is "complete". Then as Terrorsaur drags him through the air, most of his body looks normal again but his wings are still absent.
- While talking to his fliers at their base, Megatron's claw at one point clips into the controls of Waspinator's floating platform.
- Just before Waspinator goes into beast mode before taking off after the pod, the stripes on his thighs are facing the wrong way.
- Scorponok's visor is red when Megatron addresses him and Tarantulas.
- Before the pod opens up by itself to reveal a hand, the outer machinery housing the DNA scanner on the pod's side is missing.
- The moon is horribly pixelated as Waspinator and Terrorsaur fly by.
- Waspinator's thigh textures are, as usual, messed up when he goes into robot mode before destroying the bridge.
- Rattrap's ear clips partially into his back when he notices the fliers.
- When Waspinator and Terrorsaur prepare to destroy the ice bridge, the former loses all of his black stripes for a shot.
- A segment on Rattrap's wrist becomes misaligned with his hand in one shot as he talks to Dinobot via com link.
- Just before Scorponok shoots Dinobot off the Axalon roof, his shoulders are rotated awkwardly to the back, the upper edge of his chest is scrunched up, and most peculiarly, he has his scorpion-legs for nipples. How do they even make that mistake?
- When Rattrap notices the "light show", his front foot is floating above Rhinox's back rather than resting on it.
- Optimus is missing his glowing pupils when he gives his command to the auto-cannons, but strangely, their vague outlines are still there.
- The side section on the pod has an ugly flickering texture on it.
- As they try to open the pod, the antennae on Waspinator's chest clip into its side, and when the Maximals disturb them, Terrorsaur's hand also passes through it. Then, his knee does.
- There's a prominent "weapon cocking" sound after the Maximals surprise Terrorsaur and Waspinator, but no one is actually making any movements.
- When Megatron lands, his tail clips into the snow hill.
- As Megatron's blast sends what he thinks are two tigers tumbling down, the one on the left keeps its front paws in the same flat position as it flips over, causing them to clip through its leg. Also, both have an expression of utter boredom despite their predicament.
- Rhinox's left hand clips into his hip as he says "They're not part of this."
- When Cheetor lowers his gun in surrender, it slides right through his leg.
- During the closeup on Rattrap as Megatron advances toward the pod, his neck tubing is clipping into his torso's inner structure.
- Waspinator is again missing all of his stripes and the yellow details on his face in a handful of shots when he opens up the pod. His teeth are also missing from his robot mouth, behind his mandibles. Furthermore, he has strange but distinct swirly lines both in his robot eyes and the insect eyes on his chest, instead of the usual irregular textures that give his compound eyes a sort of "rainbow" effect.
- As Megatron smiles in victory, his pupils too are missing, only appearing as faint shapes within his eyes.
- When Tigatron maximizes, the fake tiger eyes, nose and ears already appear floating in front of his robot torso before his tiger head actually flips down there.
- As the Maximals open fire, various reflection textures on their body and guns disappear in the vicinity of their blasts.
- In the same shot, the inner green layer of Rhinox's chest is poking through the outer layer near his right pectoral area. Also, the inner rim on his right knee is for some reason gold rather than green.
- When the scene is shown from Optimus' vintage point, the Maximal are shooting at what seem to be irregular shapes in the snow whose position doesn't at all align with the three Preds. As a bonus, their blasts curve and angle down as they fly.
- Waspinator's thighs show incorrectly mapped stripes yet again as he returns to beast mode at the end.
- Megatron's feet sink deep into the snow as he flees. Not an error in itself, though shouldn't he be leaving footprints?
- In several shots near the end of the episode, Tigatron's beast mode legs are yellow/tan instead of white.
Continuity errors
- Despite being flattened by a huge rock, Waspinator doesn't seem to spend any time being repaired and functions normally (for Waspinator, anyway) for the rest of the episode.
- Megatron got to the pod really quickly, despite the other Transformers taking nearly the entire episode to get there. Perhaps he should've just saved himself the trouble and just gone after the pod himself?
- Like previous episodes, the planet's wonky geography seems to be based on Cretaceous period Earth, with the stasis pod landing somewhere in what would be northern Europe. This (somewhat) matches the shots from space shown in "Chain of Command", but doesn't jibe with later revelations about the planet. Either it's an attempt to hide the truth about the planet the Beast Wars are set on, or the writers hadn't yet pegged down the exact time-zone the series was set in. Given that the Axalon and Darksyde are accepted to have crashed somewhere in Africa, everyone must have travelled thousands of miles to reach the pod.
- When Waspinator and Terrorsaur are trying to open Tigatron's stasis pod, the hatch has a large window. Apparently nobody noticed that the protoform was missing until after opening the pod.
Continuity notes
- A Transformer in a repair chamber can still be communicated with by accessing their core consciousness. When Dinobot talks to Primal's, it appears as a holographic floating head.
- This episode marks the first time that the Axalon has fired its weapons since it crashed. The Axalon's self-defence system will get a major upgrade in a couple of episodes time.
- After Rhinox's initial attempts to boost long range communication by building an external communication device back in "The Web", the Maximals appear to have incorporated some improvements to their internal communicators. Although the Stasis Pod itself is out of range, Rattrap manages to communicate with the Maximal base whilst a considerable distance away.
- The Northern Sector is revealed to be 100 klicks north of the Axalon, and 120 kilometers north of the Darksyde. Assuming that the characters meant "north" and not "north-east" or "north-west", and assuming that a 1 klick = 1 kilometer (as it usually does in English), the two bases are, at most, 156 kilometers apart, and possibly as close together as 20 kilometers.
- After the previous episode softened Rattrap from his initial "extremely obnoxious" personality down to a more palatable "slightly obnoxious", this episode marks a shift in Dinobot's behaviour. He volunteers to go out first to check for a potential ambush on Optimus, and then later he asks Primal for advice. He seem to have gained respect for the Maximal leader. (Even when he thinks that Optimus is dead, he talks about holding a "glorious" funeral, rather than attempting to take command.)
- Gadgets and powers:
- Optimus refers to his rockets jets as his "Primal jets". They appear to still function even if he has been knocked unconscious.
- Tigatron has a wrist mounted rocket launcher. It's apparently powered by First Appearance Power-Up Syndrome because he never uses it again after this episode.
- Waspinator still has his eye lasers. Use of other characters having eye lasers will decrease as the series goes on, eventually leaving just Dinobot with them.
- Just before Tigatron appears, Cheetor exchanges his usual gut for the gun that is formed out of the rump of his beast mode. Tigatron himself totes his own (white) gut gun. This will repeat in future episodes... Cheetor will normally use his gut gun, only using his rump gun when Tigatron is around and using his gut gun.
Trivia
- You can avoid being shot by Maximal autoguns if you stand perfectly still. Just try not to get so nervous that you shake uncontrollably.
- Talking of the autoguns, they are EXTREMELY weak for ship-mounted weapons, causing no visible damage to Scorponok, Tarantulas or Megatron despite several direct hits. It's possible that the power to the autoguns is much lower than in the first episode because the Axalon's main engine core is damaged (assuming the guns receive their power directly from the engine).
- After the repeated use of cycle in the previous episode, we're back to regular human units of time in this one.
- Tigatron's character model, like his toy, is just barely retooled from Cheetor's, featuring a different head in both modes and being just slightly taller than the latter. Beyond that, their transformation animations and weapons are the same beyond the obvious different fur texturing.
- Later Beast Era stories would retcon Tigatron into being a pre-existing Maximal who had lived on Cybertron, albeit one who had suffered amnesia upon transferring to the Axalon. It doesn't really synch up with the episode itself, though, as none of the Maximals seem to recognize the guy.
- Just prior to its debut in syndication, this episode was made available on DirecTV on a pay-per-view basis beginning on August 19, 1996.
Foreign localization
French
- Title: "Un Ami venu du Ciel" ("A Friend from the Sky")
- Title: "Ami venu du Ciel" (Canada, "Friend from the Sky")
German
Italian
- Title: "Compagni dispersi" ("Missing Comrades")
Japanese
- Title: "Kodoku na Senshi Tigatron" (孤独な戦士タイガトロン, "The Solitary Warrior Tigatron")
- Original airdate: 12 November 1997
- This episode provides a prime example of the excessive adlibbing (a trademark of dubs directed by Yoshikazu Iwanami) subjected to the Japanese dub of Beast Wars. Whereas in the English version, the entire scene where Tarantulas and Scorponok are targetted by the auto-guns is rendered in silent pantomime, in the Japanese dub, the characters talk and make noisy asides throughout the sequence. Scorponok in particular cannot control his verbal tic of repeating orya orya over and over again.
Portuguese
- Title: "Companheiros Caídos" ("Fallen Comrades")
Spanish
- Title: "Camaradas Caidos" ("Fallen Comrades")
Mandarin
- Title: "Xīn Duìyǒu " (新队友, "The New Teammate")
Home video releases
- VHS
1996 — Beast Wars — A Feature Length Beasties Adventure (Alliance Video)
1996 — Robots-Bêtes — Une Adventure Cybernetique (Alliance Video) — French audio only.
1998 — Beast Wars: Super Lifeform Transformers — Lonely Warrior Tigatron (Pioneer LDC) — Japanese audio only.
1998 — Beast Wars / Robots-Bêtes Three pack (Alliance Video) — Available in English or French audio.
2001 — Beast Wars: Transformers — The Beginning: Vol. 1 (Universal)
2002 — Beast Wars: Transformers — Volume 3 (Rhinomation)
1998 — Beast Wars: Transformers — Maximal Edition (Pioneer LDC) — English and Japanese audio.
- DVD
2000 — Beast Wars: Transformers — DVD Box (Pioneer LDC) — English and Japanese audio.
2002 — Beast Wars: Transformers — Volume 2 (Rhinomation)
2003 — Beast Wars: Transformers — The Complete First Season (Rhinomation)
2011 — Beast Wars: Transformers — Season 1 (Shout! Factory)
2011 — Beast Wars: Transformers — The Complete Series (Shout! Factory)
2014 — Beast Wars: Transformers — Chain of Command (Shout! Factory)
2005 — Beast Wars — Classic Episodes — Where the Beasties Began! (Alliance Atlantis) — English and French audio.
2005 — Beast Wars — The Complete First Season (Alliance Atlantis) — English and French audio.
2006 — Beast Wars: Transformers — Season 1 (Madman Entertainment)
2009 — The Transformers: Beast Wars — Complete Collection (Madman Entertainment)
External links
Official uploads (Japanese)
- Beast Wars Again re-airings:
- "The Solitary Warrior Tigatron" on YouTube
- "The Solitary Warrior Tigatron (Part 2)" on YouTube
