Beast Wars NEO is a Japanese Transformers spinoff from 1999 - 2000, made to bridge the gap between the Japanese airings of the first and second seasons of Beast Wars. It's a sequel series to Beast Wars II - the updated story starts with the battle between Maximal and Predacon factions for possession of an energy source called Angolmois. The lone Big Convoy is assigned the task of being teacher to a group of young recruits against Magmatron's group. By the end of the series, however, both forces unite to oppose the wrath of the dark god Unicron.
Tropes:
- Action-Hogging Opening: The second opener
to the series has a lot more action in it than the rest of the series. - Big Bad: Magmatron, although by the midway point, his Predacons cede that role to the Blendtrons.
- Bird-Poop Gag: In "Hardhead is Hardheaded", Hardhead at one point gets hit in the head with bird droppings.
- Camp Gay: Dead End has touches on it.
- Cerebus Syndrome: While still light-hearted like the first series, the show gets more serious when the Blentrons debuts.
- Clothing Appendage: The episode "Attack! Randy" features a family of mammalian aliens with markings on their fur that resemble articles of clothing. The dad's marking looks like a tie, the mom's marking looks like an apron and the baby's marking looks like a bib.
- Detachment Combat: Magmatron can break into 3 distinct forms when going beast-mode; a Giganotosaurus, Elasmosaurus and a Quetzalcoatlus.
- Flying Brick: Big Convoy has a fearsome reputation among both Maximals and Predacons as one of the single strongest Transformers ever to exist, basically being a one-man army with the raw firepower to match. The flipside of this argument is he is debateably antisocial, as he feels he doesn't NEED to work with others, which as the show demonstrates, technically isn't wrong.
- Good Animals, Evil Animals: The bad guys become dinosaurs and the like, while the good guys transform into everything else.
- I Work Alone: Played with. At the start of the show, Big Convoy is appointed as the leader of a group of Maximal cadets. Big Convoy initially turns down the assignment, preferring to work alone due to his raw strength, but relents when he learns the order was given by Vector Sigma itself. Throughout the show, Big Convoy is shown to be aloof and uncomfortable in a leadership position, in an inversion of the typical Optimus Prime-type character usually seen leading the protagonists. This goes as far as forcing Vector Sigma to turn him into a mouthpiece for its episode words of wisdom whenever they are needed, something Big Convoy regards with contempt. Despite this, Big Convoy eventually grows closer to his cadets, eventually no longer needing Vector Sigma to act as a leader in his stead.
- Heel–Face Turn: Magmatron's Predacons become allies of the Maximals to combat Unicron, and they remain so until the end of the series.
- Land, Sea, Sky: Magmatron has his units Landsaur, Skysaur, and Seasaur.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: The Blendtrons/Fuzors are painfully aware of this being chimeras of a sort:
- Rartorarta, a lionfish/hornet hybrid
- Elephorca an elephant/orca hybrid
- Drancron a dragonfly/lizard hybrid
- Improbable Weapon User / Bifurcated Weapon / Wave-Motion Gun: Break with his Anchor-Shot (shoots little anchors), Cohrada with Hand Vute (vacuum shockwave), Mach Kick with Tail Tomahawk (ax/whip hybrid), and Longrack who, as a giraffe, is the strongest member with his Crush Arm attack (super strength).
- May It Never Happen Again: It's eventually revealed that some time after Unicron's original defeat in Transformers: The Movie, both Autobots and Decepticons under Optimus Prime and Galvatron respectively called a truce to move his remains to a place called the Triple Z Point. note The Legends manga further expands on these events: when Unicron's head was brought to the Triple Z Point where much of the wreckage of his original body had already been moved, his worshippers arrived and sacrificed themselves en masse to recreate his physical body, resulting in a desperate battle between the combined Autobot-Decepticon army and the reforming Unicron. In the aftermath, not only was Unicron's life force spread out at random throughout the galaxy and his remains left to rot, both sides agreed that the Triple Z Point was completely off limits out of fear that if Unicron revived once, he might do so again. It's telling that even by the time of Neo (several thousand years after the events of The Movie), the Triple Z Point has been left undisturbed. That's how terrified everyone was of the possibility of Unicron reviving.
- Palette Swap: Most of the later Maximals and Predacons are actually redecos of some American toys.
- Talking Animal: Like most series under the Beast Wars lineage, and particularly similar to its predecessor Beast Wars II, the show features characters who transform into cartoonish and very expressive animals, which exhibit a much wider range of facial emotions than their robot modes. The Maximals in particular tend to spend most of their time in beast mode, presumably due to the aforementioned expression range, with the exception of Big Convoy whom rarely transforms. The Predacons meanwhile, despite possessing dinosaur-modeled beast modes, rarely transform into them, though there are one-off exceptions from time to time.
- Tinkle in the Eye: In "Attack! Randy", DNAVI gets peed on in the face by the baby alien the Predacons hold hostage.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Unicron absorbs the Blendtrons into himself upon his resurrection.
