Another entry into the VS column.  Our last entry came to a close win for Drunken Master over Sho’Nuff.  Our pal the Shogun of Harlem mysteriously disappeared from the wreckage … so perhaps he lives on to prove “Who’s the Mastah?”  On to the new match-up.  Recently I wrote a column on giant robots, so in that theme we’re taking the biggest robot and matching him (it) against the biggest mech of them all.  Sound exciting?

[EDITORS NOTE: as will all my VS columns, I don't do a shred of research until I pick the match-up and from that determine with a complex scientific algorithm who wins.]

Let’s meet our combatants.

On one side the planet-sized transformer.  He’s a robotic version of Galactus and the near destroyer of Cybertron.  He’s the Lord of Darkness and Chaos, which is always a big hit with the chicks.  It’s Unicron the Chaos Bringer.

And on the other side of this interstellar battle is the massive Robotech mecha armed with perhaps the most powerful weapon ever imagined (we’ll debate this below).  He’s part alien superweapon, part human ingenuity.  It’s none other than the SDF-1 Macross.

Unicron: He made his first appearance in the wildly awesome and entertaining The Transformers: the Movie (1986).  I challenge you to find another cartoon movie from the 1980s that can challenge this monumental piece of work.  Unicron was voiced by the legendary Orson Welles, his last role before succumbing to fat-assness.  Orson Welles is perhaps the only white guy ever to challenge James Earl Jones, Barry White, or that Boyz II Men guy in baritone, panty-dropping power.

Here’s his basic premise.  He’s a massive planet-eating … um … planet (see pic below). He’s got a monstrous, toothed sphincter that he places on delicious planets to consume them.  To help steady them, he’s got huge mandibles on either side that pierce the planet surface and hold it just right.  Not pictured is his Red Lobster bib that Unicron uses to keep the planet core, liquid hot mag-ma, off of his clothes.

So Unicron is a planet.  Aha!  Not so fast … in a grandly surprising twist in the last bit of the movie, he transforms (this scene gives me wood) into the largest robot ever and starts tearing Cybertron apart with his bare hands.  He’s got horns, claws, shoulder spikes, vestigial wings.  Hmm, not sure why he needs wings in space, but they look damn cool.

The part that is debatable and truly important to this match-up is Unicron’s size.  So how big is he?  Well, it varies.  He’s appeared in the 1986 animated movie, the subsequent TV cartoons, and then in comics.  Depending on which one you’re looking at Unicron’s diameter as a planet varies from 1,000 to 120,000 kilometers.  I haven’t seen that much variance since a CNN presidential poll.

In the movie, he is able to stand on Cybertron, but he’s large enough that his feet have to adjust to the planet’s curvature as if he’s straddling a bowling ball.  Kinda reminds me of one of those Russian circus bears.

His powers, other than planet eating (that’s a big one … better hold onto that one), is probably something along the lines of super industry.  He resurrected Megatron and created him into a more powerful Galvatron and his other minions into Scourge and Sweeps to serve as his heralds, inside he’s got the biggest processing plant ever which nearly killed Bumblebee and Spike, and I’m sure that somewhere on him he’s got lasers and missiles.

Speaking of his heralds, the toy version of Unicron, which was the smallest incarnation thankfully, came with a small orbital moon with a massive directional cannon that transformed into Dead End.  Sorta like Unicron’s own personal Death Star.

SDF-1 Macrosse: An alien ship crashed into Earth in the year 1999.  Remember that the Japanese Macrosse cartoon ran in 1982 (America Robotech 1985), so that was super future … instead of nine years ago.  This vessel was massive compared to anything that the humans had … approximately 1210 meters long and its technology was a millenia beyond what we puny Earthlings were able to produce.  You know, SDF stands for Super Dimension Fortress.

Here’s the cool part.  Just like big ole Unicron above, the SDF-1 transforms into a super robot.  It starts out looking like an innocuous imperial cruiser, but turns into protoculture awesomeness in just twenty minutes.  Here’s the before picture:

The SDF-1 has a crazy powerful gun, which is called the Reflex Cannon.  It uses what the show mysteriously calls “Super Dimension Energy”.  I believe that these are the same Cosmic Energies that Silver Surfer uses.  Just how powerful are these cannons … one blast takes out several Zentradi destroyers in a line of sight effectiveness.  Not just takes out … but incinerates.  The area effect is 2 miles wide x 60,000 miles long.  That mother takes quite the battery to fire, so its reasonably only going to fire once per pitched battle.

It’s debatable if the Reflex cannons are the most powerful weapon in the science fiction continuum.  The only one that I can even think of to compare it to is the Death Star.  The Death Star was blowing up planets … the Reflex Cannons never really had the opportunity.  Check out this battle sequence and you tell me if this explosion isn’t the same size as the nearby planet.

In addition to the big daddy, its got four 1,780mm rail cannons, 8 beam cannons, and an innumerable amount of missile launchers, laser cannons, and defensive systems such as the pinpoint missile barrier.  And if that was not enough …

When the humies got it, we made it more suitable to our tastes and attached a semi-submersible aircraft carrier on one side (the Prometheus) and a  semi-submersible assault landing vehicle on the other (the Daedalus), which could detach from the main ship and fight on their own in the water.  On these bad boys, we’ve decked them out with 212 VF-1 Valkyrie veritech fighters, 120 QF-3000E Ghost drones, and 587 Destroids (ground assault super mecha).

One cool tactic that the SDF-1 uses against enemy warships is to punch the Daedalus into the opposing hull, open its landing hatches to reveal it’s rows of Destroids which unleash a fury of high explosive missiles.  The enemy ship is left like a 90 year old man with irritable bowl syndrome.  Check this out:

The ship was built by an alien genius and scientist Zor, who in equivalent terms to us was a giant, but not necessarily a Zentradi, a Robotech master, or even an Invid.  His ship was advanced and powerful even in comparison to those interstellar civilizations.  So they sent over a huge war fleet of Zentradi clones to get it back.  And thus the Robotech wars have begun.

The Results: Of course, this one is happening in the dead of space.  We’ll give Unicron a little advantage and say that the SDF-1 is not near Earth and the Alaska-based Grand Cannon (which destroyed nearly 4 million Zentradi battle cruisers in one shot).  I knew Sarah Palin was up to something!

This one is tough because of the size comparison.  Using the most conservative size estimate, Unicron is 1000 kilometers in diameter.  Let’s compare his head to the SDF-1 in the image below:

At best the SDF-1 is essentially hair lice and I actually spotted the SDF-1 a few pixels just for viewability.  But … in the cartoon an Autobot flies through Unicron’s eye with just about enough room to fit.  With that size comparison, the SDF-1 is actually comparable in size.  Of course, I’m not assuming that Transformers obeys any of the laws of physics or mass as illustrated in the Megatron gun conundrum.

So Unicron is a hell of a lot bigger.  But he really doesn’t have any missile weapons, at least any that are shown in his arsenal.  In a showdown of heralds (Galvatron et al vs. a fleet of veritech and destroids), the old Decepticons would get handled.  The Transformers are outnumbered 100:1 roughly.

The only question remains then … could the SDF-1 destory Unicron?

I’m convinced that the Death Star could blow up Unicron.  Afterall, it did blow up Alderaan in one blast.  It’s not like Grand Moff Tarkin ordered another pass to clean up the big fragments.  There were no fragments.  There was just space dust.  But the SDF-1?  That brings us back to the central debate.

Here’s the verdict.  The SDF-1 wins over Unicron for the following three reasons:

1. Firepower: With the destructive power of the Reflex Cannons, this battle is over with just a little bit of accuracy.  I’ve checked and the cannons can fire about every two minutes assuming that there isn’t a malfunction with the main firing system … which unfortunately is actually quite common.  At 60,000 mile range that’s quite a few shots at Unicron’s head, solar plexis, and groin for the kill.

If it couldn’t get Unicron with its Reflex Cannons, then the SDF-1 has another trick up its sleeve.  In the video I posted above, the SDF-1 generates a massive explosion that is able to destroy Dolza’s massive asteroid base without any problems with a combination of missiles and Reflex weapons.  It protects itself by activating a super powerful force field, hiding inside of it like a cocoon.  It flew into the center of the hull and released a barrage of explosive awesomeness.  I did some fact checking and Dolza’s flagship is 1,500 kilometers in diameter.  AHA!

Remember what Ronald Quincy said in Armageddon:

Imagine a firecracker in the palm of your hand. You set it off, what happens? You burn your hand, right? You close your fist around the same firecracker, and set it off. Your wife’s gonna be opening your ketchup bottles the rest of your life.

So reflex cannons or not, the SDF-1 has a chance.

2. The Matrix: Not Neo.  Not Morpheus.  Unicron was destroyed by perhaps the least cool Transformer leader, Rodimus Prime.  He did it by opening up the Autobot Matrix of Leadership and letting its super powers free inside of Unicron’s skull while 80s synthesizer rock rages in the background.  I still get chills on that scene, despite it being Judd Nelson.  What does this have to do with Robotech?

The SDF-1 is powered by a unique energy form, one that the rest of the galaxy in all of their power is desperate to recover.  It’s called the protoculture MATRIX.  Hmm, coincidence … I think not.  I think karma is on the side of the SDF-1.

3. Lynn Minmay: The secret weapon.  Should everything else fail, the humies will load this tramp into a torpedo shell and fire her at Unicron.  With her annoying whining, terrible songs, and whorish nature, she’s truly the bringer of chaos and destruction.

Hey, don’t hate me, I’ve got my boy Rick Hunter’s back from this two-timin’, no good sloot.

And there you have it.  The SDF-1 wins the battle for mechanized supremacy.  In their futures, Unicron looks forward to a showdown with Galactus and the SDF-1 with the Death Star.  Best of luck.

What’s your take on it?