Blitzwing

Blitzwing is the other half of the 1985 Triple Changer pair, and by far the nastier one. His bio is blunt about it: he is loud, he thinks he has a sense of humour, and what he finds funny is usually cruel. Obnoxious, belligerent and brash, he makes even other Decepticons uneasy, which leaves him something of an outsider in his own faction. His single best line, from "Triple Takeover", tells you everything: "Tell me what's on your mind, or I'll splatter it on the wall and see for myself!"

For all that menace, his judgement is dreadful. Having helped Astrotrain depose Megatron and Starscream, his personal plan for finishing the Autobots was to kidnap a human football coach on the assumption that the man was a master strategist, then have the Constructicons build a maze around his stadium base. It worked well enough to make several Autobots crash into each other before the Constructicons demanded a cut of the leadership and Megatron arrived to end the whole thing embarrassingly fast. In "Prime Target" he and Astrotrain go to ally with the big-game hunter Lord Chumley and end up his captives, told to their faces that Chumley would rather have the help of an aardvark.

His arc is the great irony of the character. He gets away with actually betraying Megatron, then is branded a traitor while being completely loyal to Galvatron. In "Five Faces of Darkness" he alone refuses the Quintessons' bribe, alone greets the returning Galvatron, and alone works out that the Quintessons intend to exterminate all Transformers. Galvatron banishes him for it.

Triple Changer: robot, MiG-25 fighter jet and Mitsubishi Type 74 assault tank. The tech spec argues the rapid shift is what makes him lethal, since opponents who prepare for one form are rarely ready for the second. He carries a gyro-blaster rifle and an electron scimitar, and his jet mode has enough internal volume to carry Stunticons, as seen in "Cosmic Rust". His documented weakness is a tendency for his circuits to scramble, leaving him jammed in mid-transformation between forms. The fiction adds a second, larger weakness the card never mentions: he is a poor tactician who consistently picks terrible plans, and in the Marvel comics his scimitar loses badly to Grimlock's energo-sword.

• Astrotrain: co-conspirator in "Triple Takeover" whom he never quite trusts, needling and abandoning him constantly; in Marvel UK's "Manoeuvres!" the pair leave Octane in a live-fire range out of sheer irritation.
• Galvatron: total loyalty repaid with banishment, after Galvatron reads his warning about the Quintessons as a bid for the Decepticon Matrix of Leadership.
• Rodimus Prime: rare cross-faction respect; Blitzwing declines Rodimus's offer of a place among the Autobots but says openly that he respects him.
• Grimlock: in Marvel's "Totaled!" Grimlock's energo-sword leaves Blitzwing in two pieces on the lunar surface, and in Dreamwave he is effectively Grimlock's punching bag.

Marvel's Blitzwing has none of the cartoon's slapstick. He is introduced in "Target 2006" as one of the most feared and deadly killers on Cybertron and a priority target for the Wreckers in Operation: Volcano, saved from an ambush only by Megatron abruptly recalling the team to Earth. He is a straightforward blade-wielding brutalist: cut in half by Grimlock on the Moon in "Totaled!", then returning the favour by slicing Horri-Bull through the midsection in "Cold War!". He never turns on the Decepticons and is never banished; there is no principled outsider arc at all. IDW's Blitzwing is a MiG-31 and a T-72, a nervous mid-ranker who covers for Astrotrain and gets flattened by Optimus Prime's Roller drone.

In the cartoon Galvatron banishes him permanently in "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 5"; he declines Rodimus Prime's invitation to join the Autobots and afterwards only turns up in background crowd shots, almost certainly production carelessness. The Japanese Headmasters series simply restores him to the Decepticon ranks with no explanation. In Marvel continuity he is destroyed in Buenos Aires with the other Triple Changers by the Underbase-powered Starscream in "Dark Star!".

• Blitzwing is the only Transformers Triple Changer with a previous Diaclone release, which is why his alt modes are a real MiG-25 and a real Type 74 tank rather than a Cybertronian design.
• His earliest Diaclone sculpt had a strange faceless head; the mould was later returned to Diaclone colours and reissued in 2005 as the e-Hobby exclusive Overcharge.
• The US toy had its spring-loaded missile launchers severely weakened for safety; the Japanese releases kept the full-strength mechanism.
• He was voiced by Ed Gilbert in English and Keiichi Nanba in Japanese.
• The original script for "Five Faces of Darkness" had Rodimus repeat his offer after Blitzwing's banishment, with Blitzwing saying he would think it over, and the later episode "Starscream's Ghost" was originally written for Blitzwing before being rewritten around the new Triple Changer Octane, which is why Octane's sudden friendliness with the Autobots is never explained.

Where the cartoon, the Marvel comics and the toy bios disagree, or where a popular claim does not hold up. We record these rather than smoothing them over.

• Blitzwing's status after his banishment is contradictory: he is exiled forever in "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 5" yet reappears in later Decepticon crowd scenes such as "Fight or Flee", generally treated by fans as animation error rather than story, and the Japanese Headmasters series has him back in the ranks from the first episode onward with no explanation.