Gears

Gears is one of the Autobot Mini Vehicles who crash-landed aboard the Ark and woke on Earth in 1984, reformatted by Teletraan I into a red-and-blue pickup truck of no identifiable make. He hates Earth. He says so constantly, comparing the lush green planet unfavourably with the cosy grey metal of Cybertron, and he grumbles about being shipwrecked to a degree that stopped being irritating and became entertaining. That is largely the point. Unlike his fellow Mini Vehicle Huffer, whose gloom is sincere, Gears complains partly as performance, to give the ranks something to laugh at when things are grim. He still gets genuinely depressed.

He is not much of a front-line combatant and rarely features in the Autobots' famous battles, but he does the work. His infrared vision sensors proved decisive in "More than Meets the Eye, Part 2", where by shifting his searchlight wavelength he lit up Ravage's heat trace and stripped the Decepticon of his ability to hide in shadow. He is built for endurance rather than lifting, hauling energon cubes, disabled Autobots and anything else asked of him, and compressed-air bursts from his feet let him briefly fly, which ended badly against Soundwave at the Great Falls in "S.O.S. Dinobots".

The complaining is a mask, and the cartoon confirmed it twice. Outside the ruby crystal mines of Burma he dropped the act entirely to talk an injured Optimus Prime through transforming back to robot mode. In "Changing Gears" Megatron staged a whole false alert just to capture him, because Gears carried a circuit board the Solar Needle needed. Removing it also removed his grouchiness, producing a relentlessly pleasant Gears that horrified the entire crew and prompted Ironhide's line, "What did you do to Gears, you monster? You turned him nice!"

Exceptionally strong in endurance rather than raw lifting, able to carry heavy loads for long periods; fitted with infrared vision sensors that can be tuned to expose heat traces and defeat concealment. In robot mode he vents controlled bursts of compressed air from his feet to launch himself over 100,000 feet and float back down, but he must reserve enough air pressure to slow his descent or the landing kills him. He is no front-line warrior and is easily outmatched in a straight fight, as Soundwave demonstrated by shooting him out of the sky.

• Huffer: fellow Mini Vehicle and the other half of the Ark's complaining double act, though Gears grouses for effect where Huffer means every word.
• Optimus Prime: Gears drops the grumbling entirely when Prime is in danger, which is the clearest evidence the attitude is a front.
• Ironhide: reacts with genuine horror when the Solar Needle procedure leaves Gears pleasant, delivering the episode's best-known line.
• Windcharger and Brawn: his usual patrol partners in season one, the three of them repeatedly deployed and repeatedly outclassed together.

Marvel's Gears is essentially the same grumbler but with a Cybertronian war record the cartoon never gave him, including planting shatter bombs on the last bridge into Iacon during Megatron's assault. The cartoon leans harder on the idea that the complaining is a deliberate morale device, spelling it out in "Changing Gears".

Written into The Transformers: The Movie and then cut: he had a scripted death reaction to Devastator, and an even earlier draft had him blown apart in a Cyclonus carpet-bombing run. With the scene removed he has no on-screen fate, and a bot in his colours on Moonbase One is probably not him.

• The mould debuted in 1983 in Takara's Micro Change line as "Micro Robot 04 4WD Off-Road" in a darker blue, and evidence suggests it was originally designed by the defunct American firm Knickerbocker for the cancelled Mysterians toyline.
• Gears was the only Mini Vehicle Takara never offered at Japanese retail in any form, not even as a mail-away like Cosmos and Warpath.
• The same tooling produced the Malignus Pick-Up and the Autobot Small Foot, and was retooled into Swerve, except in Mexico where Swerve was a straight redeco of Gears.
• The Transformers: The Movie dialogue script gave Gears one line during the Battle of Autobot City, "We're finished! Aaaaahh!", reacting to Devastator. Don Messick recorded it and Gears remains listed in the film's credits, but the scene was cut.
• Early Marvel bio material lists his unused nicknames as "Ox" and "Sourball", and his first Marvel appearance used a more humanoid character model quite unlike both his toy and his final animation model.

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 Gears died at the Battle of Autobot City. His recorded line and credit survive in the finished film but his scene does not, so the cartoon never resolves it.
• Whether the Gears-coloured Autobot glimpsed on Moonbase One in the 1986 film is meant to be him.
• Whether the complaining is genuine misery or a deliberate morale tactic. The tech-spec profile and the cartoon both push the latter; his own dialogue often reads as the former.