Takara Tomy Designer Hisashi Yuki @TOYROBOYUKI shared a very interesting bit of history on his SNS account recently for the Beast Wars Neo Big Convoy character. Originally, they wanted to maintain the Lion model from Lio Convoy. However, this idea was scrapped when a Woolly Mammoth beast mode was chosen for the Neo Big Convoy Maximal Leader instead. See the images of the first Mammoth sketches below with translated comments from Yuki san.
To celebrate the start of the BW Neo release, here's a rough sketch of Big Sensei's earliest image. This was the first rough sketch after it was decided that the beast mode would be a mammoth. Compared to Lion, he is heavily armed, has a robotic head and two horns, and we can see that the design was made without wavering from the beginning until the final version.
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An extremely early rough plan by Big Sensei from over 20 years ago.
When the beast motif was decided to be a mammoth, there were doodles left over from consideration of how to lay out the motif and gimmick in robot mode, as well as how to store the matrix parts in anticipation of the final showdown with Unicron.
Could this be a hint they are working on a new Big Convoy for Transformers: Age Of The Primes? With no rumors yet, we will have to wait and see if / what they have planned.
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