Inferno

Inferno is the Autobots' search-and-rescue specialist, a fire engine who runs toward whatever is burning and worries about the consequences afterward. His ceramic-plated armour and near-total absence of fear make him the bot Optimus Prime sends into collapsing, blazing structures, and he narrates the work in blunt firefighter shorthand while he does it. He arrived in the cartoon without introduction in "The Insecticon Syndrome", rolling out first on Prime's orders, shooting down Laserbeak alongside Jazz, then breaking off mid-battle to pull the crew of a downed helicopter clear and foaming down a burning Ironhide for loading into Prime's trailer.

That pattern is the character. His assigned job is rescue; his instinct is combat, and the Hasbro profile admits Prime's only real complaint about him is that he does not stick to his task. It costs him in "Auto Berserk", where Prime orders him and Red Alert to guard the Negavator bunker and Inferno abandons the post to join the fight outside, leaving Red Alert alone to be buried by rubble and brain-damaged. Inferno spends the rest of the episode chasing his friend down and is the one who finally talks him back from Starscream.

Away from crises he is unexpectedly steady. He douses the Ark when the Dinobots set it alight in "Dinobot Island, Part 1", sprays down time-displaced cowboys in Part 2, plays basketball with Prime and Tracks in "The Master Builders", and fights an endless losing battle against re-igniting fires in "The Revenge of Bruticus". In the odd-couple friendship with Red Alert he is the calm, rational half, which says less about Inferno than about Red Alert. After season two the cartoon effectively drops him.

In vehicle mode he can do everything an Earth fire truck can. In robot mode his strength is among the greatest of the Autobots and his ceramic-plated armoured skin resists temperatures up to 8000 degrees C. His extinguisher rifle sprays flame-suppressing foam and also emits an energy-damping beam that can cancel incoming electromagnetic beam weapons, and by detaching his hands he can fire short-range surface-to-air missiles from his forearms. His limits are equally specific: the tech spec rates him one of the least mobile Autobots in robot mode, his intelligence and skill scores are middling, and his poor discipline is listed as an outright weakness that compromises both his rescue work and the battlefield.

• Red Alert: his closest friend and opposite number, a partnership tfwiki describes as oil and vinegar, with each feeling obliged to keep the other out of trouble; in practice Inferno is the level-headed one.
• Optimus Prime: one of his most reliably obedient soldiers, first to roll out on Prime's order against the Insecticons at the Nova Power Plant, and pitted alongside him in Bosch's rigged gladiatorial match in "The Gambler".
• Hoist and Red Alert: his usual emergency-response detail, the three of them hauling the wounded Dinobots back to base after the airport explosion in "Desertion of the Dinobots, Part 1".
• Grapple: no cartoon relationship, but the two are toy mould-mates, Grapple being a retool and redeco of the Inferno fire-engine tooling.

The cartoon Inferno is a background rescue specialist with one strong showcase episode, while Marvel UK gave him substantially more weight, casting him as a member of the pre-Prime Autobot commando team the Magnificent Six and letting his heat-resistant body carry a trapped child out of a burning New York bank in "Missing in Action". The US Marvel book barely used him at all.

The G1 cartoon simply stops using him after season two, with no death or written exit; he is absent from The Transformers: The Movie after his scene was cut, and later G1-family fiction such as the Japanese Headmasters continuity keeps him alive and in service.

• The toy began life as Takara's Diaclone Car Robot No. 10 Fire Truck Long Ladder Type, credited to Kojin Ono and Shoji Kawamori; the Diaclone version carried a Mitsubishi logo and the word FUSO moulded on the cab front, which was removed for Transformers.
• Inferno's animation model was drawn from a photo of the toy with a missile loaded into its right wrist, so the cartoon Inferno is permanently one-handed, the barrel reinterpreted as a gun or foam nozzle rather than a missile.
• He was written into The Transformers: The Movie covering Ultra Magnus during the evacuation of Autobot City, and Walker Edmiston recorded one line for it, "Good luck, Magnus", but the scene was cut and Inferno remained in the credits despite never appearing.
• His toy bio gives the motto "Where there's smoke, there's me" and then opens the profile with a second quote, "The hotter things get, the better I like it!" Bob Budiansky liked the second line enough to reuse it for fellow fire-truck Autobot Hot Spot, so Marvel UK rewrote Inferno's line into the third person to let Hot Spot keep it.
• In Marvel's comics he appears only in UK-originated stories such as "The Magnificent Six!" and "Missing in Action"; like Red Alert he was never introduced with the rest of the Autobot Cars in the US book.

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 tech spec calls him one of the least mobile Autobots in robot mode, but the cartoon has him playing a competent game of basketball in "The Master Builders" and moving as freely as anyone else in combat.
• His forearm missile launchers are a bio and toy feature; the animation model's single arm-barrel is usually drawn as a plain gun or a foam nozzle instead.
• The motto "The hotter things get, the better I like it!" is attached to both Inferno and Hot Spot across different Hasbro and Marvel UK sources.