Transformers: Super Cross
In 2002, Hasbro and Takara began laying the groundwork for a sequel series that would continue the story of the extremely successful Transformers: Armada franchise. Before developing Energon, however, Hasbro originally pitched Transformers: Super Cross (also stylized as Transformers: Super-X), an ambitious sequel that would've taken the nascent Unicron Trilogy in a radically different direction.
Fiction
[edit]Set three to four years after the events of Armada, Super Cross would've begun with a damaged Unicron searching for "All-Sparks", the purest and most powerful sparks, by abducting Cybertronians from across space and time and forcing them to fight within his body. Long-term exposure to Unicron's essence mutates the captive Autobots, Decepticons, and Mini-Cons trapped with in his body in unpredictable ways; while larger Transformers gain new bodies and the ability to combine, the Mini-Cons evolve into the larger, more aggressive Omnicons. Megatron believes that he can harness Unicron's spark to become more powerful, but touching his spark slowly begins mutating him into a monstrous new form.
Subsequent seasons of the proposed television show featured a return to Earth and a reunion with Armada protagonists, Rad, Alexis, and Carlos. Using the All-Spark knowledge stolen from Unicron, both sides summon Transformers from across the multiverse with the purest and most powerful sparks: new arrivals would've included Grimlock, Soundwave, Cheetor, Rattrap, and the members of Team Bullet Train. Eventually, the conflict would've moved back into space, and culminated in a final battle on Cybertron in which the ghostly sparks of "hundreds of classic Transformer characters" would've sacrificed themselves to defeat Unicron.
Cancellation and legacy
[edit]According to Aaron Archer, who brainstormed and wrote the original pitch, Super Cross didn't get far due to its over-complicated plot and the inability to trademark the name. No original designs are known to have been made for the pitch, which instead used leftover Optimus Prime concept art from Armada as a placeholder.<ref>"the art of OP was place holder art left over from Armada concepting. the "infamous " napkin of revelation as its been called came right after this Super cross effort died for being to complex. Additionally Super cross was not able to be trademarked. How did this get out, this pitch didn't live long and I haven't seen it in years."—Aaron Archer on Facebook, 2020/02/24</ref> However, the ideas and concepts it introduced did not go completely unused: both the Omnicons and the idea of using combination as a line-wide gimmick found their way into the finalized Energon franchise. Although due to a confluence of factors the Energon cartoon established its own origin story for the Omnicons, a vestige of Archer's original concept appears to have persisted into Dreamwave's Energon comic, in which Over-Run describes the Omnicons as the product of an "evolutionary step".
Large swathes of the proposed Super Cross premise, which involved Unicron kidnapping Transformers from across space and time, inspired 2003's Transformers: Universe franchise, which used the basic concept to tell a story set in the Generation 1 continuity family at some point after the end of the Beast Machines cartoon. In 2006, the "Balancing Act" series would then link the story of this "Universe War" back to the Unicron Trilogy by explaining its effects on the Cybertron cartoon.
It seems that some details about Super Cross leaked among fandom in late 2001, when a plot summary that sounded like the proposed series was posted by user Kickback on the now-defunct transfandom.com forum. The summary was mistakenly believed to refer to the then-upcoming Armada, about which few-to-no details were known at the time, and while not everything claimed matched what would later be learned about Super Cross, enough did line up (a Hasbro/Takara co-production featuring Transformers from all across the multiverse, including specifically Rattrap and Cheetor, coming together to fight Unicron) that it doesn't appear to have been a total fabrication.<ref>Archive of Armada rumours collected on Seibertron.com.</ref>