This past weekend, news and rumors have swirled around the Transformers fandom due to a few comments made by Jeffrey Combs, the voice actor of Ratchet from Transformers Prime. At a panel featuring Combs and Tony Todd, he dropped a few details about Season 3 and beyond that caught the ear of the fandom, and did not make them happy. Among what Combs said:
- Season 3 will only be 16 episodes long
- Combs had just finished recording the last episode
- Combs then stated “Season 3 is the last season of this current iteration of the series.”
WHAT?!
This was completely contradictory to other things that had been coming out over the last few days, including news of Hasbro registering a trademark for a toy line and cartoon for something called “Beast Hunters.” This news caught a lot of fans’ attention due to “Beast Hunters” being the working title for what eventually became “Beast Machines”, one of the most polarizing series in Transformers history. The speculation began to grow as to what this could mean, and it all seemed to fit together, until a fan from Peru blew the lid off the whole thing.
According to this thread on the TFW2005 boards, a presentation was recently made by Hasbro to a publishing company in Peru that gave away the details that Beast Hunters will be Season 3 of Transformers Prime, and that the show and toy line has plans to continue through 2015! Also, the current Generations toy line was said to last through 2014. You can view the entire .PDF file of the presentation at the link above, but this is pretty exciting news!
With that said, Jeffrey Combs confirmed yesterday that there will indeed be a Season 4 of Transformers Prime, the 3rd Season will just be shorter. This is due to a few possible reasons. One, almost all Transformers lines go through a rebrand halfway through. With Armada, it was The Unicron Battles, with Energon, it was Powerlinx Battles, and other lines have seen packaging tweaks…heck, even G1 saw a change through the years. We haven’t been used to that recently because the movie lines have been the main line and their packaging remained the same throughout. The second reason could be to leave the show on a cliffhanger that tied the show into the Beast Hunters name. Third, the show could be taking a bit of a hiatus in order to flesh out the concept.
Whatever the reason, I think we Prime fans have a lot to look forward to in the future.
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