The Energon Pub

In the 1986 movie, Unicron was a giant, planet eating-planet thing. He was huge. As we all know, he was blown to bits by the Matrix, with only his head remained in orbit around Cybertron. But what happened afterwards? I mean, how did he go from a giant planet/robot to a tank in Transformers Cybertron???

Through the fact that those two series don't have the same continuity, I would assume.

Yeah. Exactly that.

Sportimus Prime wrote:In the 1986 movie, Unicron was a giant, planet eating-planet thing. He was huge. As we all know, he was blown to bits by the Matrix, with only his head remained in orbit around Cybertron. But what happened afterwards? I mean, how did he go from a giant planet/robot to a tank in Transformers Cybertron???

As it's been pointed out, they're not even the same continuity - although how Unicron goes from giant planet form to tank form is established in the first TFCC comic arc "Balancing Act", which IDW has collected in TPB form.

Still doesn't help much. I don't have any of the comics.

Well, condensing it, then - a slew of Transformers fiction from the last couple of years has established that Unicron is a multiversal entity, who travels from dimension to dimension, utterly consuming a universe before moving on to the next. His appearances throughout Transformers fiction have been him jumping from reality to reality after his defeat in each.

In the "Transformers: Armada" cartoon, Unicron, disguised as Cybertron's moon, created a race of small robots called "Mini-Cons" which would fuel the Transformers' war, allowing him to feed off of the energies released. At the end of the series, he revealed that he was the moon and transformed to robot mode. However, when Galvatron sacrificed himself to end the war, thereby robbing Unicron of the energy that fed him, he disappeared in a flash of light, apparently having ceased to exist.

Not so. Unicron reappeared at the start of "Transformers: Energon," badly damaged and so depleted of energy that the dormant husk of his body was floating lifelessly in space. From within his form, the soul of an alien that had been an inhabitant of a planet Unicron had previously eaten was able to use Unicron's last reserves of energy to create a body for himself, and began stealing Energon from the Autobots in an effot to recreate what Unicron had destroyed. Megatron - his own seemingly-lifeless body also lying within Unicron - took advantage of this, siphoning off some of the Energon for and creating a new body for himself. Megatron proceeded to take control of Unicron's body, while Alpha Q escaped in his head and teamed up with the Autobots. In a major battle, there was a reaction between the positively-charged Autobots' energon and the negatively-charged Energon within Unicron which caused a rip in reality, leading to a new region of space where all the planet's Unicron had consumed were recreated, and sustained by an "energon sun," which was actually Unicron's head. Megatron managed to get Unicron's body charged up and reunited him with his head, but at that point, Unicron's personality reasserted itself and took control of Megatron. Optimus Prime was able to use the power of Primus to destroy Unicron's body, but his spark continued to exist and possessed Megatron, directing him to a reservoir of "Super Energon" beneath Cybertron's surface, which transformed him into a planet-sized monster. Primus came to the rescue, using that Super Energon to create a new energon sun, into which Megatron plunged himself, preferring to die rather than be controlled by Unicron. At that point, the sun ignited.

What happened next was a bit skewed. Because the Japanese production studio creating the Energon cartoon didn't pay a heck of a lot of attention to Hasbro's intentions for the series, things didn't really line up - because Hasbro intended that the next series, Cybetron, start with a massive black hole threatening Cybertron, which had been created as a result of Unicron's destruction. Now, this couldn't really work in the cartoons, because Unicron's body had been destroyed quite some time before the end of the series, and... no black hole. So, the Collector's Club comics explained that Primus's plan to contain Unicron's spark in the energon sun had failed, and the sun had collapsed into a gigantic black hole. Due to Unicron's multiversal nature, the black hole was a multiversal threat, threatening various dimensions, and disrupting reality all across the timeline. Unicron's spark was trapped at the core of this black hole, and two of his heralds - Ramjet and Nemesis Prime - decided to hasten its destruction of Cybertron by using Nemesis Prime's "Dead Matrix" to destroy Primus, and hence Cybertron, beginning the steady, spiralling death of the universe. They were stopped, natch.

However, the Dead Matrix was stolen from it's holding place by the Cybertron version of Soundwave - Soundwave was a former inhabitant of the long-dead Planet X, who had made a deal with Unicron in his quest for revenge for the destruction of his planet. Soundwave hurled the Dead Matrix into the black hole, which liberated Unicron's spark. His spark then suffused itself into the planet Jhi, darkening the world, and turning it into your typical pit of hideous roiling rage and torture, which in turn fed Unicron,restoring his power and allowing him to create a new body for himself at the planet's core. Jhi was destroyed as Unicron was born again, into his little tank body (because he's still far from being at full power). He and Soundwave watched a fight between the Mini-Cons living on Cybertron's moon, but when - as in the Cybertron animated series - Cybertron itself transformed into Primus, Unicron made himself scarce, and hasn't been seen since.

Thanks!!! That made more sense than what I read on Wiki. So Unicron basically ran away. I'm sure he'll be back someday.

WOW, hell of a summary there...