Kup

Kup is the old soldier of the 1986 cast, a battered pickup truck with a thousand adventures behind him and ten thousand tall tales drawn from them. He hands out advice whether or not it is wanted, and his stories drift and lose pieces between retellings because his memory chips are as old as the rest of him. The Dinobots love them. Almost nobody else does, and Kup takes the impatience of younger Autobots as disrespect. His running gag is established immediately in The Transformers: The Movie, when he tells Hot Rod that Quintessa reminds him of the Niter slave mine on Golgonath Seven and Hot Rod snaps back that every place reminds him of somewhere else.

The stories are not empty, though, and that is the point of the character. Thrown into the Sharkticon pit on Quintessa, Kup tears the tail off a Sharkticon and uses it as a mace, and he and Hot Rod fight their way clear by driving in a circle until the water becomes a whirlpool. On Junk he talks television with Wreck-Gar. When Hot Rod becomes Rodimus Prime, Kup tells him he always knew he had it in him.

Season three makes him Cybertron's chief of security and gives him one story that belongs to him alone. In "Chaos" he is forced back to the planet Dread to face the creature that has haunted him, walks into the mines through swarms of shrikebats, taunts Chaos to the surface, frees the slaves and turns the Decepticons' own death-crystal cannon on the monster. He also lets a crippled shuttle land in "Five Faces of Darkness, Part 4" because he will not risk the humans he believes are aboard, and the shuttle turns out to be a Quintesson trap that takes down Cybertron's power grid.

He is a seasoned combat veteran with high strength, endurance and courage and a skill rating well above most of the 1986 cast, armed with an old-style musket laser that fires bursts of metal-corrosive acid out to about five miles. His experience is itself the weapon: he knows the universal greeting, defuses the Junkions with it, and reads situations the younger Autobots misjudge. The limits are age and design. His vehicle mode is squarish and old-fashioned next to the sleeker later models, with a low speed rating, his intelligence and firepower scores are the weakest part of his spec, and his recall is unreliable enough that his own stories change between tellings. Becoming a Targetmaster with Recoil lowered most of his stats rather than raising them.

• Hot Rod / Rodimus Prime: the core mentorship of the 1986 material; Kup is the elder who lectures, protects and eventually validates him, described in Hasbro's own profile as the Falstaff to Hot Rod's Prince Hal.
• The Dinobots: the only Autobots who genuinely enjoy his war stories, which is why he is fond of them.
• Recoil: his Nebulan Targetmaster partner, an old-style musket laser and a former all-world prismaball player.
• Blurr and Arcee: his usual season-three field team, and in "Fight or Flee" he defends Blurr's speed-talking to a bemused Sandstorm with "that's just the way he is".

The cartoon Kup arrives already grizzled and never explains himself, whereas Marvel gave him an actual arc, opening with a Kup suffering combat fatigue who had retired himself from the war and only re-enlisted after rescuing Hot Rod and Blurr from the Tyroxians in "Kup's Story!", and later making him a Targetmaster on Nebulos and an adviser to Optimus Prime himself.

He survives the whole of G1: still serving through "The Rebirth", and in Marvel UK's future timeline he is one of the Autobots still fighting on Earth in 2009 and time-travelling with Rodimus Prime.

• In Ron Friedman's 1984 first draft of the movie the grizzled veteran role belonged to a character called Tanker, who wore an eyepatch over a missing optic and turned into a Sherman tank.
• Like the rest of the movie cast he has an early Floro Dery model that was revised by Japanese artists; the early version fed the toy design and the Marvel comics, and "Chaos" deliberately reuses it in flashback to depict a younger Kup.
• AKOM always used the early design as a colour reference regardless of which model they were drawing, so Kup's boots and hip pouches turn grey instead of grey-green in AKOM-animated episodes.
• His name is short for pickup truck, and Hasbro's profile spells the joke out; his Japanese name is Cher, as in tea-cher.
• Most of his tech spec numbers drop when he becomes a Targetmaster, including, oddly, his firepower.
• Don Figueroa designed Kup's Cybertronian alt mode for War Within off an animation error in "Starscream's Ghost" in which Kup drives backwards.

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 cartoon never acknowledges the Marvel backstory of a Kup broken by combat fatigue who had quit the war; on screen he has always been in it.
• His tech spec intelligence rating of 5 sits awkwardly with a character whose entire function is being the wisest bot in the room.
• In one cartoon continuity he becomes a Targetmaster partnered with Recoil on Nebulos; in the cartoon's own "Rebirth" version of events the Nebulos material plays out very differently from Marvel's.