As pointed out by someone on facebook, the bonus digital comics might only apply to orders placed with Hasbro Pulse. The Unicron page is rather vague about it, so it could go either way.

Unicron was on display at NYCC this weekend, showing off the newly announced accessories (with the yellow looking very bright - the Unicron on screen was orange, so I wonder if these hand-painted prototypes are just a little off with the final colours).

From the aggressivecomics website, an interesting interview with Takashi Kunuhiro (Takara Tomy Senior Product Designer), noting that he had originally wanted the Unicron toy to be 100cm tall, but the sheer weight of all of that plastic wouldn't be able to work in planet mode, so it was scaled back to being about 70cm tall.

How did you first hear about this project?
2 years ago when we heard that Unicron has been selected as part of the Haslab project I was ecstatic! Being on the same platform as Star Wars, I felt happy that Transformers in now seen in the same spotlight. My immediate thought was that I wanted to make this at least 100cm in size. But very quickly after, I had a feeling of “this is going to be an extremely complicated project” and as I looked around the room with other senior designers we all felt the same without saying a word.


Where did you even start with the idea of designing this giant toy?

There were a lot of trial and error at the beginning of this project. The biggest setback was how we started our thinking from looking at the previous largest Transformer toy we’ve created and that’s Titan class Fortress Maximus. My first instinct was that Unicron has to be at least twice as big if not more than Fortress Maximus. So I consulted with Ono-san, our senior designer who made the original G1 Fortress 30 years ago and see if there’s anything we can learn from his development of the toy.


So how did the learning of Fortress Maximus apply to Unicron?
I quickly realized that it doesn’t. Not in the slightest bit. Ono-san had a lot of creative liberty within Fortress as long as he can create a big, cool robot that convert into a big base. On the other hand, our Unicron is inspired from the 1986 movie character where he has distinct Robot and Planet mode design.


Then what would you say was the biggest challenge in designing Unicron?
The biggest challenge is to make the planet mode a perfect sphere with absolutely no space/crack from any 360 angle. As if that’s not a challenge enough, Unicron has unique robot features so I knew the conversion steps was going to be extremely complicated to build. Another challenge worth mentioning is that even if I wanted to recycle parts like his horn, the size varies as robot vs planet mode so I couldn’t. Therefore, we ended up with twice as much as parts for Unicron and much heavier toy than Fortress. Speaking of weight, if I made this toy as big as 100 cm like my first instinct, there was no way plastic could hold that much weight to create the Unicron shape.