Cheetor

Cheetor is the youngest member of the Axalon crew and the series' point-of-view character for growing up. He starts as a hot-rodding kid with a cheetah beast mode and an attention span to match, the one who charges into the alien construct in "The Web" because it looks interesting and nearly dies for it. Ian James Corlett's season-one performance plays him almost squeaky; when Alec Willows takes over from season two, the voice drops, and the change tracks a genuine character arc rather than covering for it.

What separates Cheetor from the standard cartoon kid sidekick is that Beast Wars actually lets him fail and then lets the failures accumulate. He is repeatedly the one who is too slow, too eager, or too easily manipulated, and the show does not hand him a redemptive win at the end of every episode. His infatuation with Blackarachnia in "Cutting Edge" is played as embarrassing rather than sweet, and she turns him down flat. His resentment at being treated as the kid curdles into real friction with Primal.

The pivot comes in the "Feral Scream" two-parter. Knocked into Megatron's cloning apparatus, Cheetor is upgraded into a Transmetal II body he cannot control, waking to find he has been rampaging as an animal. The story is a straightforward adolescence metaphor and it is played straight enough to land: he has to learn to hold the new power rather than be held by it, and Primal talks him through it rather than fixing it for him.

By the final season he is Primal's de facto second, flying missions alone and taking the fused spark of Tigatron and Airazor as a guide in "Other Victories". The show's last shot of him is a soldier, not a cub.

Cheetah beast mode gives him the fastest ground speed of any Maximal; his robot mode carries a quasar rifle and, after the season-two quantum surge, a Transmetal hover-jet mode. His Transmetal II upgrade adds a prehensile tail-blade, greater strength and a feral secondary state. Limits: he is lightly armoured, consistently outmuscled by Rampage, Inferno or Megatron, and his speed is useless in a straight fight. The Transmetal II body initially controls him rather than the reverse.

• Optimus Primal: mentor and surrogate father; the entire arc is Cheetor earning the right to be spoken to as an equal.
• Tigatron: the older brother figure who teaches him patience and the value of the natural world, and whose loss hits him hardest.
• Rattrap: constant needling that masks genuine affection, the closest the Maximals have to sibling comedy.
• Blackarachnia: an infatuation she rejects outright, after which they settle into a working partnership.

IDW's Beast Wars: The Gathering and The Ascending keep Cheetor essentially as the cartoon left him. The 3H Enterprises and Fun Publications convention comics use him as a senior Maximal officer well after the war. Beast Machines pushes him considerably further, making him openly insubordinate toward Primal, a characterisation many fans read as a step backward from the growth Beast Wars gave him.

Survives the war and leaves Earth with the other Maximals at the end of "Nemesis (Part 2)". In Beast Machines he survives the Cybertron campaign and is one of the last surviving Maximals.

• Two voice actors: Ian James Corlett in season one, Alec Willows from season two onward. Willows also voiced Tarantulas, meaning he played both a Maximal hero and a Predacon mad scientist in the same episodes.
• Cheetor is the second character ever shown transforming on screen in the series, immediately after Dinobot.
• His original 1996 Basic-class toy was one of the small-scale entry points to the Beast Wars line and was reissued repeatedly, including as a BotCon 2006 Dawn of Future's Past exclusive.
• The Transmetal II design was created for the show first and the toy followed, an unusual reversal for a Hasbro-driven property.
• Mainframe's animators used the cheetah run cycle as an early showcase for what CGI could do that traditional cel animation could not, and it appears prominently in the show's own promotional material.

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 voice change between seasons is sometimes explained in-universe as maturation and sometimes treated as a straightforward production recast; the show never comments on it.