20th Anniversery of the ending of the Unicorn Trillogy

On my Youtube feed there was the ending scene of Transformers: Cybertron and a bunch of thoughts/feelings came back to me. Lets wind the clock back a little bit.

Context: After G1 ended TF was in a little bit of a slump. G2 sadly didn't move the needle (Though I'm a big G2 fan), and Machine Wars was barely a footnote, but we had Beast Wars and for 3 years things were good. It was followed up with Beast Machines which divided the fandom. A third series called Transtech was cancelled.

Hasbro was ready to bring it back to vehicles but we were a year away before Armada was going to hit Toonami. We had a filler series called Transformers: Robots in Disguise or "RID" for short. It was a cool anime with a toyline that had reprints from every other line that came before it. Then we got a message from Hasbro. The next line was to heavily involve "combination and integration." We had no idea what that meant.

2002 was when Armada first aired. It was nice to hear the BW voices of Optimus and Megatron again. The concept of minicon's was introduced that the toys had really cool gimmicks. I can't remember when we learned this was going to be a trilogy, but it was a decent start. The show had errors due to being rushed, but we mostly ignored it (G1 alone had SO MANY"). It also gave us the first game that was really good on the PS2, not to mention the first actually released toy of Unicron.

Up next was Energon, which was meant to celebrate the 20th anniversary. This time, the toys were more about combinations. Armada teased this a little bit, but Energon ran with it. So many of the toys could combine with the others; it was so fun. Given the anniversary, there were a lot of references to G1 that could be a post in itself. While the toyline was great the anime had more issues. The dub I thought was more awkward than Armada and towards the end the show kinda repeated itself.

Then, finally, we got Cybertron. Hasbro had a problem. The Japanese show was not a continuation of Energy but its own series. They did figure out a way to explain why things were the way they were, and it acceptable to us. This is my favorite toyline and anime of the trilogy. I didn't think about it, but when this ended, it ended the trilogy. Which brings me back to the first paragraph.

The final scene was well thought out and written with heart. We just finished a journey through the years. There were some bumps along the way but overall I enjoyed the trilogy. It was bittersweet that final scene. I still get a little teary-eyed watching that last scene. Just wondering if anyone else felt the same.