Transformers: Super Cross
In 2002, Hasbro and Takara began laying the groundwork for a sequel series that would continue the story of Transformers: Armada franchise a runaway success. 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
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 large, aggressive Omnicons. While 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
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. 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. However, due to a confluence of factors, the Energon cartoon established its own origin story for the Omnicons, but a vestige of Archer's original concept appears to have persisted into Dreamwave's Energon comic, in which Over-Run describes the Omnicons of a product of an "evolutionary step".
Large swathes of Super Cross's proposed backstory, which involved Unicron kidnapping Transformers from across space and time, inspired 2003's Transformers: Universes 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.
