Cybertron's Moons

Cybertron is shown with at least two moons throughout the G1 cartoon, neither of which is ever named. They are barren, cratered and apparently worthless, which is precisely why they are available: when the Decepticons complete their conquest of Cybertron by 2005, the moons are the only real estate in the home system the Autobots can still occupy, and they put a staging base on each.

Those bases and the moons themselves last less than a single act of The Transformers: The Movie. Unicron arrives, consumes Moonbase One with Jazz and Cliffjumper, then Moonbase Two with Spike and Bumblebee, and in doing so removes both satellites from the sky. Cybertron ends the film moonless and gnawed, having been directly assaulted by Unicron before the Matrix destroyed him.

What replaces them is one of G1's better grim jokes. Unicron's severed head, blasted apart from within by the opened Matrix, falls into orbit around Cybertron and stays there, a giant metal skull hanging over the planet as a new and considerably worse satellite. It is visible in third-season establishing shots, and it becomes a location in its own right in Ghost in the Machine, when Starscream's disembodied spirit reaches it and reanimates Unicron in exchange for a promise of a new body. Cybertron traded two dead moons for one that talks.

• Neither of Cybertron's G1 moons is ever given a name in any 1980s source.
• Unicron's head replacing the moons he ate is a deliberate visual gag that the third season uses in establishing shots repeatedly.
• Beast Machines later showed a Cybertronian moon with deep gashes in its surface, modelled on Arnaldo Pomodoro's sculpture Sfera con Sfera in the Vatican's Courtyard of the Pinecone.
• In the later Cybertron series the planet's moons are used by Primus as flails against Starscream, which is the most undignified fate any moon in the franchise has had.