Quote Originally Posted by 1orion2many View Post
I disagree with you Gok, I had no interest in the Beast Wars toys until I saw the show. I honestly didn't even think they were Transformers until I saw the show to confirm it.
Okay, but that's your personal anecdote. Some people say that they were first introduced to Transformers (G1) from the cartoon despite the fact that it was already a very strong toy franchise before the 'toon came out (and obviously became much stronger after the cartoon aired).

I remember collecting and playing with BW toys before the cartoon came out - I used to play according to the original toy canon (i.e. the Maximals and Predacons were the Autobots and Decepticons bio-engineered with beast modes!). Then the cartoon came out and made everything way better!

Quote Originally Posted by 1orion2many
The sales may have only been impressive compared to the G2 sales but I don't think they would have been hard to beat. I think they saw an interest in the toys and decided the best form of advertising was using a series based on the BW figures to drive sales.
There were several magazine articles released at the time and in following years that indicated that BW sales were really strong and it was the impressive sales figures that prompted Hasbro to commission the cartoon. It was like G1 repeating itself -- the G1 toys made lots of money (US$1.4 million) when it debuted, and as with G1 the popularity of BW exploded after the cartoon came out. Now I'm not saying that Beast Wars would've made the same amount of money when it debuted, I don't know what the exact amount was, but apparently it was pretty strong - strong enough for Hasbro to invest in an expensive CGI animated cartoon.

Ben Yee's site used to have an article explaining more about this (erm, this was when he was still hosting on his university's server then acweb... don't think he's had it on his site since becoming "BWTF"). I have an old ToyFare Magazine interview with Hasbro about Beast Wars from 1997 or 98 - if you want I can quote some excerpts from that. (obviously I gotta dig it up from my archives at home )