Optimus Primal, Cheetor, Rhinox, Airazor – for longtime fans of the Transformers franchise Beast Wars animated TV series, these are well-known Maximal names. Transformers: Rise of the Beasts adapts them to live action for the first time ever, but it also yields a fifth Maximal, and his inclusion in this movie is pretty insanely deep. Someone behind this film is clearly a serious Transformers lore specialist – this particular Maximal is a reference to turn-of-the-millennium Transformers convention fiction.
The gorilla-shaped Optimus Primal (Ron Perlman) leads the Maximals for the most part Rise of the Beasts, but in the opening scene he is second-in-command to a second metal gorilla named Apelinq. That Maximal is surprisingly distinctive, a different design from Optimus Primal’s gorilla model – it has a white mohawk, metal tusks and intimidating blades tucked into its forearms.
Voiced by David Sobolov (who also voiced Battletrap and Rhinox in this movie as well as the original Beast Wars cartoon’s Depth Charge), Apelinq passes the mantle of Maximal leadership to the smaller Optimus Primal so that Apelinq can stop their enemy Transformer Scourge (Peter Dinklage) and get the other Maximals to safety with the Transwarp Key, a McGuffin Scourge wills on behalf of his planet-eating master Unicron (Colman Domingo).
Image: Paramount Pictures
Apelinq’s appearance is a shocking but welcome feature film debut for a character who first appeared as a toy exclusive to BotCon 2000. rise of the beasts’ five credited screenwriters felt that another gorilla character should precede Optimus Primal as leader of the Maximals, Apelinq being an obvious but obscure choice. The original Apelinq was a redeco of 1998 Transmetal Optimus Primal in black, red, and green, and BotCon only produced 1,200 copies of the figure. Being a Transmetal, Apelinq transformed from a hairy, organic robot into a robotic gorilla, but with a third mode of transportation. (In Apelinq’s case, that meant his robot legs partially turned into a surfboard for gorilla mode. The 90s, folks!)
Three hundred years into the future of the Transformers setting, when Maximals rule Cybertron after the end of the Great War, Apelinq was the commander of Cybertron’s legendary do-or-die strike team, the Wreckers. (Those characters appeared in live action in 2011’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon.) But Apelinq’s true passion was scientific research and engineering. He was best known for his Transfer Interlink, an invention that allowed Apelinq to ‘download digital objects into reality’. This was admittedly a more impressive superpower before 3D printers became widespread, but it allowed Apelinq to essentially create weapons out of thin air. In practice, this was mostly an attempt to explain the deployable ‘virtual IWB’ of his toys.
Photo: David Willis for Polygon
Apelinq’s character history was chronicled in multiple toys and additional Transformers convention fiction. He was first thrown back in time from the future to the Beast Wars, where he witnessed the Omega Point, an epic battle with the Unicron-powered Predicon Shokaract. This battle paradoxically disappeared, leaving Apelinq as the only contestant to remember it happening.
He returned to his time, where he ended up on the vehicle-controlled Cybertron seen in 1999 Beast Wars continued series, Beast machines. But instead of joining Optimus Primal’s team of Maximals in their 26-episode effort to rid the planet of Vehicle control, Apelinq was ordered by the Oracle to take his Wreckers off the planet to prevent the evil mobster Cryotek from possessing the Divine Light, an artifact that allows the Predacons to take control of Vector Sigma yourself.
Image: Glen Hallit, Dan Khanna/3H Productions
Along the way, Apelinq merged with Primal Prime (another Optimus Primal toy in various colors), which involved transforming him from beasts and becoming a truck cab for the Matrix-powered guard Sentinel Maximus. Now renamed Hyperlinq, he and Sentinel Maximus were sent across various Transformers continuities at the behest of the Transformers’ creator god Primus himself, which must have made Apelinq/Hyperlinq – a magic-hating, die-hard atheist – a bit.
A variant of Apelinq returned to BotCon in 2014, with a new toy (another Optimus Primal in different colors) and a matching story. This time, the Maximal engineer was the science officer of the Cybertronian Knights, a Wreckers-esque team led by former Cheetor Alpha Trizer. He and the knights fought against the pirate Transformers just like you. Although he wasn’t the same Apelinq as before, he still had his Transfer Interlink, which he used to call up his virtual digiboard. Apelinq’s version out Rise of the Beasts never became Hyperlinq, as far as we know – he seems to die in this movie, though I wouldn’t count him in a franchise where characters are killed and resurrected so often.
Image: Paramount Pictures
In case you’ve been wondering, yes, “Apelinq” was always just a lame pun on the word “Uplink”, with Apelinq’s creator, BotCon organizer Glen Hallit, just putting the “Q” in there so that a name would be continuity when he became ‘Hyperlinq’. And characters say this name out loud! In a theatrical blockbuster, but still!
However, I am sorry to inform everyone that in Rise of the Beasts, while Apelinq is transformed from obscure conventional exclusive into a heroic Maximal commander, at no point does he download anything digital into reality. Not even a virtual digiboard.