hroughout the late 1990s and into the 2000s,
Beast Wars cartoon story editors Larry DiTillio and Bob Forward, as well as Mainframe Entertainment Director of Communications Mairi Welman, maintained frequent contact with members of the ''Transformers'' online fandom via the Usenet newsgroup alt.toys.transformers, establishing an interactive relationship between themselves and the early online fandom, in which they provided fans with greater insight about the ins and outs of working on the ''Beast Wars'' cartoon and working in the entertainment business in general.
The following is an archive containing copies of nearly every single post ever made on alt.toys.transformers by Mr. DiTillio, Mr. Forward, and Ms. Welman (any missing posts that were non-retrievable have simply been lost to time), grouped by each thread in which they were originally posted, and with links to the original posts archived by Google Groups provided therein. The screennames used at the time by the three were:
- Larry DiTillio: "DiTillio"
- Bob Forward: "Bob Forward", "BeastBob1", "[email protected]", and (amusingly) "SpamToIgnore"
- Mairi Welman: "Mairi Welman", "Mairi", "mairi", and "mairi welman"
Also included are additional posts made by other users who either quoted some of the aforementioned missing posts, or shared e-mailed messages, interviews, and other commentary from DiTillio, Forward, or Welman.
All spelling and grammatical errors are left as they originally were. The formatting, however, has been polished and cleaned up for better readability, as the formatting of the old Usenet system was messy and inconsistent, leaving several posts in a poor (sometimes illegible) state of presentation. Though, line-spacing has been left mostly unaltered.
Text rendered below in
Italics represents text shared from other sources, such as text quoted from other users' posts, or messages shared from emails.
