The Beast Machines TV series came to American screens in late 1999, a follow up to the Beast Wars story, it was still produced by Mainframe, but new story editors and head writers were employed. It never proved to be as popular as Beast Wars among fans, mainly due to the more child-orientated writing, and the overall story concepts not meeting many fans' tastes.

The general storyline of the first few episodes followed Optimus Primal, Cheetor, Blackarachnia and Rattrap finding themselves back on Cybertron, with no memory of how they got there, locked in their original beast modes and being chased by huge armies of vehicular transformers. Stumbling upon an ancient (and apparently sentient) relic calling itself the Oracle, they are 'reformatted', their bodies becoming a complete fusion of organic and technological matter. Transforming is now apparently a delicate art that must be mastered for the Maximals. They soon find Megatron, last seen strapped to the Maximals' shuttle at the end of Beast Wars, has somehow taken over the entire planet, imprisoned (or worse) the sparks of practically the entire population and has taken it upon himself to destroy the organic disease that is the Maximals and purify Cybertron with the aid of huge armies of sparkless drones. No reason for his new anti-organic policy is given. The series essentially follows the Maximals' quest to free the sparks and restore the organic to Cybertron (which wasn't there in the first place if you follow the storyline of the original cartoon series or comic).

Beast Machines has not yet been shown in the UK, despite the toyline being in full force and its entire run having been shown in Canada, and almost completed in the US. Chances are, when and if it does come it will be on the UK Fox Kids channel. No videos have been released either. If you have a reasonably fast internet connection, or are just very patient, many episodes of the first series and the entire second series of Beast Machines can be downloaded in Realplayer format from TFExtreme . They are somewhat large, but very high quality, and in my experience, take around 3hrs to download on a 56K modem. A large number of episodes are also available from the Transformers archives, and are of just as high quality, but the process of getting these is somewhat more complicated (and sometimes vaguely infuriating). The video downloads are just about all that us UKers can do rigght now, short of buying recorded videos from someone in the US or Canada.