The Intergalactic Highway

So I'm sitting here at work taking a breather from running around making machines that go #ping# actually go #ping# and staring at my wallpaper which is the Dreamwave lithograph of Devastator vs Superion. I then got to thinking about combiners in the Beast Wars era. Although we never got to see any actual combinations in the series, we did get to see the Tripredacus council (who according to action figures would combine into Tripredacus). The toys also indicate that we have Magamatron, Magna Boss and possibly a number of others that the more seasoned professionals could add to this list. I find it interesting that the modern combiners are limited to a trio and I wondered if anyone knew of the Cybertronian reasons why? Could it be to conserve energy? Was in an evolutionary step?

Additionally, I was thinking, what would make the best combination of "scramble City" -esque combiners in the Beast Wars series? What animals/birds/fishies/buggies/amoebas would you think would make an interesting combination? I'll refrain from the Dinobot combiner as this has already been done to death. Be as weird and as whacky as you can be

I honestly have no idea what the reasoning behind that would be. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that three is more than two. I mean it wouldn't have been as interesting if just two 'bots combined to form one big one...and you'd have gotten into symbolism of the union between a man and woman...you know...not really kid stuff. So, three is a nice number that doesn't come with any symbolism. Not to mention three is less than four and five and six and etc. I mean it prevented there from being ten....ten is just ridiculous...even five is just too many to handle. Three is just right. There were three bears, three little pigs, three billy goats gruff, etc....

Well, there have been transformers that were just two robots to combine. In the case of the beast wars era, we didn't see combiners simply for the fact they were too complex to animate in a CG cartoon at the time. Originally they even wanted to include alternate body transformations with Gator Megatron and Bat Primal, the mutant heads, and so on. But it was all just too much work.

As for the toys, it probably had more to do with complexity. Beast wars toys were much more complex then anything Hasbro had made at the time. Balljoint articulation and greater detail then alot of the G1 and G2 figures.. even more importantly.. it wasn't a bunch of molds from other toylines they bought, they had to make all that stuff in house. I imagine they also wanted to keep size down for affordability, since many toys were not selling.. like Inferno and Scavenger toys.

Atleast we got to see the combiners in action in BW the second.. but.. that series is awful. *LOL*