Blurr

Blurr is the fastest Autobot on land and the fastest talker in the franchise, a data courier built to move information rather than hold ground. John Moschitta Jr., then billed as the world's fastest talker, voiced him, and the writing leans on it constantly: his lines are delivered as a single unbroken stream that other characters have to interrupt to extract any actual content. He is not written as arrogant about it so much as high-strung; the Hasbro profile calls him nervous and highly strung but courageous, loyal and determined to run whatever errand the war needs run.

He debuts in The Transformers: The Movie defending Autobot City, using his speed to raise the alarm when Megatron's force arrives and combining, in tfwiki's phrase, non-stop chatter with non-stop firepower. His failure there is characteristic too: he cannot get the Dinobots aboard the shuttle ("They were impossible impossible impossible!"), hands the job to Kup and Hot Rod, and boards Ultra Magnus's ship instead, which puts him on Junk when Galvatron kills Magnus and takes the Matrix.

Season three gives him courier work and comedy. In "Five Faces of Darkness" he wants to race in the Galactic Olympics and is instead sent with Wheelie to carry Metroplex's transformation cog, a simple delivery that strands them both on Io against the lightpoles and ends with a game of hot potato to get the cog home in time to wake Metroplex against Trypticon. In "The Face of the Nijika" his leg strut is wrecked and, unable to run, he is nearly sacrificed into a molten pool by superstitious locals, only for the heat to reset his leg. "Ghost in the Machine" has him on monitor duty with Springer, correctly identifying every threat and being cut off every time because he will not stop talking.

In vehicle mode he is a Cybertronian racing car that routinely breaks the speed of sound, leaving dust and afterimages; the Targetmaster-era spec puts him at 750 mph with a 1500-mile range, and Forbes once named him the fastest fictional car, ahead of Speed Racer's Mach Five. In robot mode he carries an electro-laser that reverses the polarity of an enemy's microcircuits and leaves them motionless, and his animation model was designed with a proton discharger on his head, turbo electron blasters in the shoulders and photon stun beams in the elbows. His weaknesses are physical and temperamental: his strength and endurance ratings are the lowest of this group, he is long and lean rather than armoured, his speed is useless the moment a leg strut goes, and his Targetmaster partner Haywire is an excitable Nebulan teenager whose impulsiveness makes him an unreliable weapon.

• Wheelie: paired as an unlikely two-bot courier team in "Five Faces of Darkness", stranded together on Io and forced to cooperate to get Metroplex's cog home.
• Kup: the veteran who covers for him, telling Sandstorm in "Fight or Flee" there is nothing wrong with Blurr's timing program, that is just how he is.
• Springer: his usual monitor-duty partner on Cybertron in season three.
• Haywire: his Nebulan Targetmaster partner, whose impulsiveness makes him an unreliable electro-laser.

Marvel used him far more soberly, as one of Fortress Maximus's unit who follows him into exile on Nebulos and serves as the Autobot ambassador to Koraja before being framed into an incident by Zarak, becoming a Targetmaster only when the Nebulan war forces it. The cartoon treats his speed and speech as a running joke; Marvel treats him as a diplomat and courier with a stated age of four million years.

He survives G1, still active through "The Rebirth" as a Targetmaster paired with Haywire and swept into space when plasma energy overcharges the Autobot ship's engines.

• John Moschitta Jr., famous as the fast-talking pitchman, was cast for the speed of his delivery, and no later continuity has managed to write Blurr without the speed-talking gimmick; Budiansky, Shane McCarthy and Zander Cannon all tried.
• In the first draft of The Transformers: The Movie Blurr was already superfast but spoke very slowly, the exact inversion of what shipped.
• Forbes named him the fastest fictional car, beating the Mach Five by over 500 mph.
• A set of his original movie colour models, sold from Ron Friedman's Sunbow collection through Heritage Auctions in 2010, shows an early scheme with lavender parts rather than the blue of the final model and toys.
• His animation model carries built-in weapons that the cartoon almost never uses: a head-mounted proton discharger, shoulder turbo electron blasters and elbow photon stun beams.

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 first-draft movie Blurr was a slow talker with fast legs, the opposite of the shipped character.
• Marvel's Nebulos storyline and the cartoon's "Rebirth" both make him a Targetmaster but by incompatible routes.
• His character model's built-in weapon suite bears almost no relation to what he is shown using on screen.