Brawn

Brawn is the Autobots' demolitions expert and, by the tech spec's reckoning, their second strongest member, able to lift 190,000 pounds and knock down a small building with one punch. He is also about the size of a compact off-roader, and he compensates for it with as much bluster as any Autobot has ever managed. The bio says Earth is essentially a hostile environment and he loves it, that he delights in challenges, and that he is sorry for anyone not as tough as he is, which is a polite way of saying he looks down on Autobots who do not fight.

The cartoon backs the boast. In "Fire on the Mountain" he and Trailbreaker uncover the Peru operation, he flies Soundwave into a cliff face, survives a direct hit from Megatron's fusion cannon, then gets hold of the cannon and returns the favour to Megatron's chest, before tackling Megatron and Starscream single-handed at the top of the pyramid. In "Roll for It" he hides in a fissure and boosts Optimus Prime high enough to knock gun-mode Megatron out of Starscream's hand. In "The Ultimate Doom, Part 1" he drills a tunnel under Decepticon Headquarters to get Sparkplug out.

The humour comes from the same place. He rides Shrapnel like a bull in "A Plague of Insecticons" and is kicked off almost immediately; he punches immobilised river water and has to take it back; he carries a complaining Huffer around physically to shut him up. In "Attack of the Autobots" a corrupted Brawn happily demolishes an air force base until Hound restores him.

Rated the second strongest Autobot, capable of lifting roughly 190,000 pounds and demolishing a small building with a single punch, with high resistance to artillery fire; he carries a drill for tunnelling and a blowtorch in his right arm, used to cut Huffer free from the oil rig wreckage. The tech spec names one specific weakness: he is vulnerable to attack by electromagnetic waves. His durability is genuinely extreme on screen, surviving a direct hit from Megatron's fusion cannon in "Fire on the Mountain" and two head shots from Soundwave, which is exactly why his eventual death has been argued over for decades. His judgement is the softer limit, since he charges foes several times his size on principle.

• Huffer: his usual foil, most memorably when Brawn cuts him free of the burning oil rig and, later, simply picks him up to stop him complaining.
• Windcharger: his regular partner on strike missions to Peru and Bali, and the other 1984 Minibot killed at Autobot City.
• Mirage: a strained pairing in Marvel, where Mirage's botched repair job drives Brawn mad and Mirage then fakes his death to save him from Starscream.
• Soundwave: his personal punching bag, kicked into a rocket in "Autobot Spike" and beaten repeatedly across the early episodes.

Marvel gives him a much rougher run, having an electrical feedback drive him insane so that he rampages through a town believing cars are enslaved by humans, then staging a trial by combat with Starscream that Optimus Prime and Mirage rig with a fake death. The cartoon keeps him as a straightforwardly tough, wisecracking heavy whose durability is played for spectacle rather than tragedy.

Brawn is killed at the Battle of Autobot City in The Transformers: The Movie, shot down early in Megatron's assault. Both the April 1985 draft and the finalised script describe him as cut in half by the fusion cannon, and the storyboards agree, though the finished animation shows only a chest wound.

• The toy came from Takara's 1983 Micro Change line, though evidence suggests the mould was originally designed by the defunct American company Knickerbocker for a cancelled toyline called Mysterians.
• The Micro Change version was olive green and the Transformers release forest green, but the olive colour appeared in the 1984 catalogue and the toy's own instructions, and was clearly used as the basis for Brawn's cartoon colour model, which is why the animated character looks the wrong shade.
• Brawn's mould was retooled to create Outback in 1986, except in Mexico, where IGA's Outback was a straight redeco of Brawn.
• "Muscles" is listed as Brawn's nickname in Bob Budiansky's personal comic bible, and was reused decades later as the name of his Headmaster partner in Beast Wars: Uprising.
• He has more confirmed variants than any other 1984 Mini Vehicle, five in total, due to a change in the robot-mode helmet construction, three different company stampings and the 1985 switch from foil insignia to rubsign.

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.

• Whether Brawn actually died. He does not turn grey as most on-screen casualties do, he is omitted from the list of the movie's Autobot dead recited in "Dark Awakening", and he appears alive in the season three episode "Carnage in C-Minor", though that episode's notoriously poor animation makes it almost certainly an error rather than a resurrection.
• The wound's location is inconsistent: fans long described it as a shoulder hit, but a single frame shows the shot connecting with the top of his chest, with a matching exit wound on his back, while the scripts describe him being cut in half.
• His colour is disputed between the olive green of the Micro Change toy and cartoon model and the forest green of the actual Transformers release and package art.