Bluestreak

Bluestreak talks. Constantly, on any subject, at any hour, while the Autobots around him roll their optics. Some of the crew read it as vapidity, or assume he simply likes the sound of his own voice. His friends know better. At the start of the Great War his home city of Praxus was annihilated by the Decepticons and he was the only survivor, and the endless prattle is how he keeps the memory at bay. Hound's assessment is the one that stuck: "There's some demons runnin' loose inside that boy, and sometimes I think they grab hold of him and won't let him go." He hated war before it took everything from him and he hates it still, which makes his willingness to shoulder a weapon that much stranger. He simply has a score to settle.

On the battlefield he is the Ark's marksman, a Datsun 280ZX with shoulder-mounted cannons and the accuracy to use them surgically. In "Roll for It" a single blast damages both Starscream and Thundercracker. In "The Ultimate Doom, Part 2" he shoots Laserbeak's leg out from under a dangling Spike Witwicky without touching the boy. In the pilot he takes to the air against Skywarp and, when Ironhide is shot down over water, abandons the pursuit to drag his friend to safety.

The cartoon also let the chatter carry episodes. He nearly dies to the Rainmakers' acid rain outside Wheeljack's workshop in "Divide and Conquer" before a pep talk from Chip Chase gets him back up to shoot them down; in "Trans-Europe Express" he runs the Europa 2000 and hands the finish to a human driver he had spent the episode resenting.

The Ark's finest gunner: shoulder-mounted cannons and a bolt gun, plus the precision to disable a target without hitting a hostage or to damage two Seekers with one shot. He can operate in the air well enough to dogfight Skywarp. His weaknesses are durability and temperament rather than aim; he is nearly deactivated by acid rain on Cybertron and needs external encouragement to keep going, and his compulsive talking makes him conspicuous and, on occasion, a liability in situations that call for silence.

• Prowl: shares his Datsun 280ZX body and mould, and the two are frequently paired as the pursuit team, as in the aircraft hangar fight in "Roll for It".
• Ironhide: rescued by Bluestreak after being shot into a lake in the pilot, one of the character's earliest and most direct acts of loyalty.
• Hound: the Autobot who articulates what the talking actually is, describing the demons running loose inside him.
• Chip Chase: the human whose pep talk gets Bluestreak back on his feet under acid rain on Cybertron.

Marvel's Bluestreak is a colder figure, one of the crew least sympathetic to humans, who argues for repairing the Ark and abandoning Earth to the Decepticons after the Sparkplug betrayal, and who is motivated by a vow of revenge for his partner Fusion. The cartoon foregrounds the chatter and the trauma behind it and largely drops the misanthropy.

Survives on screen. His last G1 cartoon appearance is in The Transformers: The Movie in 2005, helping Kup shift a roadblock on Lookout Mountain moments before Hot Rod and Daniel crash through it; he is not shown among the dead at Autobot City and simply does not appear thereafter.

• Bob Budiansky named him for the Diaclone toy's blue-sided colour scheme, which appeared in the packaging art and catalogues but never on a released Transformers toy, and built the characterisation as a double pun on the idiom "to talk a blue streak". He originally wrote it as two words, "Blue Streak".
• The "rare blue-sided Bluestreak" is one of the longest-running urban legends in the fandom and has been debunked; the released Transformers toy used a silver deco unique to that line.
• The animation model's black hood and roof come from the second, less common Diaclone Fairlady Z colour scheme, not from the toy Hasbro actually sold.
• His mould was redecoed and retooled into Prowl, and retooled again with a larger front fender and rear spoiler into Smokescreen.
• Hasbro lost the Bluestreak trademark and substituted the name "Silverstreak" on toys and in fiction between 2004 and 2010; the name was reclaimed in 2010 and applied to the character again in 2012.

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.

• The colour and the name: he is grey and silver, not blue, because the name was coined from Diaclone packaging art of a colour scheme never released under the Transformers banner.
• The persistent claim that a blue-sided Bluestreak toy shipped in the original line, which is a debunked urban legend fed by catalogue and instruction-sheet photography.
• Marvel's unsympathetic, revenge-driven Bluestreak sits badly against the cartoon's traumatised talker; the two versions share little beyond the marksmanship.
• The name itself has flipped between Bluestreak and Silverstreak in official fiction for trademark reasons rather than story reasons.