>>149879002
And then came Beast Hunters. Beast Hunters took something that was already a clusterfuck and somehow made it worst. Hasbro already had plans for what was to come after Prime (by this point they wanted the show done and to try again with a new show especially because of what was happening in Japan), Season 3 was meant to mostly take place on Cybertron and would mostly just wrap up the show (it was meant to end with Airachnid and Megatron teaming up with zombiecons). After which would come the next show which was going to focus on Space Pirates and be kind of like Season 3 of G1/Galaxy Force (this is where the Thundertron toy came from) whereas earth stuff would continue via Unit:E.

Anyway a new design director came in on the toy side and taking a page from the showrunners book said "Fuck You, I want animals". So Beast Hunters became the thing and this caused all sorts of problems. For one thing the show side had no money to accommodate anything the toy side was doing and eventually they just stopped any sort of synergy, deciding each to do their own thing. This is why the initial Optimus Prime and Preadking toys don't look like the show models (also why Predaking doesn't transform for a few episodes, they didn't have enough budget for his robot mode, because the change came last minute).

Now you might be wondering, why was the toy side allowed to make such a radical change if the show side already had plans? Because the toys were not selling. Prime had pretty much the worst toy sales for the brand at the time.

(2/3)