Lithone

Lithone exists for about ninety seconds and does more work than most planets in the franchise. The Transformers: The Movie opens on it: a golden, ordered, apparently happy mechanical world whose inhabitants are slim, elegant robots living quiet lives. Then Unicron arrives, opens his face, and eats it. Buildings tear loose from the ground, the population is drawn screaming into the sky, and the audience, most of whom were children expecting the cartoon, understood immediately that the rules had changed.

Two Lithonians escape in a small ship: Kranix and Arblus. Their vessel is caught in the debris field and Arblus dies. Kranix survives, only to turn up later on Quintessa as a prisoner, where he tells Kup and Hot Rod what he saw and is then dropped into the Sharkticon pit for his trouble. Lithone therefore bookends the film's two cruellest sequences, and Kranix's death is the moment the Quintesson trial stops being a joke.

The Lithonians are visually distinct from Cybertronians, more slender and more organic in their movement, and the design was reused in the cartoon for the robotic elders of the Hive on Nebulos in The Rebirth. Nothing else about the planet is ever established: no history, no relationship to Cybertron, no survivors beyond Kranix. It is a world that exists to be destroyed, and it is one of the most efficient pieces of storytelling in G1.

• Lithone's destruction is the first thing in the film and was designed specifically to establish that established characters were not safe.
• The Lithonian character models were reused in the cartoon for the robotic members of the Hive on Nebulos in The Rebirth.
• Kranix is the only named survivor of Lithone and dies in the same film, which means the species is extinct within one movie.
• The name derives from lithos, Greek for stone, in keeping with the film's habit of naming worlds after their material.