Menasor

Menasor is the combined form of the five Stunticons: Motormaster, Dead End, Drag Strip, Breakdown and Wildrider, the ground-vehicle team Megatron built specifically to own the roads and to answer Autobot mobility. In "The Key to Vector Sigma, Part 1" Megatron constructs their bodies and travels to Cybertron to have Vector Sigma itself grant them personalities, making Menasor a deliberate weapons programme rather than a battlefield improvisation. He was meant to be the ultimate Decepticon weapon.

Instead he is the clearest illustration of why gestalt technology is a bad idea. Menasor's mind is supposed to fuse five psyches; what it actually fuses is four robots who despise their leader with the leader himself. Motormaster's sheer brutality dominates, Breakdown's paranoia and Dead End's fatalism pull in the opposite direction, and Drag Strip's greedy competitiveness fights all of them. The resulting psychological rift leaves Menasor an unpredictable mass of conflicting impulses, prone to violent tantrums in which he lashes out at whatever is nearest. He is not a weapon to aim, he is a monster to release and then run from.

Despite that, he is effective. His debut in "The Key to Vector Sigma, Part 2" saw his raw aggression drive Superion back until a repaired Omega Supreme intervened. In "Starscream's Brigade" the Stunticons arrived late, indifferent to whether Megatron survived, and only joined once they realised Starscream would not stop at killing him, then Menasor dropped Bruticus with a single punch. In "Trans-Europe Express" Megatron left him behind to finish three Autobots, and only Auggie Cahnay driving a race car off a cliff into his head brought him down.

Immense strength and the most aggressive fighting style of any G1 combiner, armed with Motormaster's sword and cyclone gun. His debut showed he can physically overpower Superion, and he one-punched Bruticus in "Starscream's Brigade". The Scramble City design also lets his limbs be rearranged into any configuration, and the Scramble City OVA has him weaponise this by firing one of his own limbs onto Superion to corrupt the Autobot's formation. His weaknesses are almost entirely mental: the loathing the four limb Stunticons feel for Motormaster and the gulf between Dead End's fatalism and Drag Strip's aggression make his mind chaotically unstable, so he can be goaded, confused or talked apart. Dreamwave dramatised this exactly, with Ultra Magnus simply insulting each Stunticon individually until they bickered themselves out of the combination. He is also head-vulnerable and can be knocked out by a concentrated impact, and his sheer instability makes him as much a danger to nearby Decepticons as to Autobots.

• Motormaster - torso, plus the chest plate, waist armour and mask
• Drag Strip - arm
• Dead End - arm
• Breakdown - leg
• Wildrider - leg
• Note: Menasor is a Scramble City-type combiner, so any of the four Stunticons can occupy any limb socket by design. The cartoon is correspondingly inconsistent about which side each occupies, and the animators often drew the cars clamped onto generic limbs rather than forming them.

• Motormaster: forms the torso and dominates the merged mind with pure brutality; the other four Stunticons' hatred of him is the direct cause of Menasor's instability.
• Breakdown: his chronic paranoia bleeds into the gestalt, one half of the psychological rift that makes Menasor unpredictable.
• Superion: his designated opposite number, created by the Autobots in the same story arc and fought repeatedly.
• Megatron: built the Stunticons as his ultimate weapon and never fully controls them; in "Starscream's Brigade" they debate whether to bother saving him.

Marvel replaces the Vector Sigma origin with a Creation Matrix one. Megatron creates the Stunticons on Earth using a device that taps and diverts the Creation Matrix force while Optimus Prime is using it to animate the Aerialbots, and their designs are lifted from dream images the Matrix sent to Buster Witwicky, images the Decepticons were secretly monitoring. In those visions, seen in "Second Generation!", Menasor's personality problems are made explicit: Superion tricks him into shooting down his own partner Bruticus, and Menasor tries to flee before being hurled into a pit. In reality he does better; in "Heavy Traffic!" he beats Superion with the cyclone gun, though only because the human robot-hunter Circuit Breaker zapped Superion first. Marvel also uses Menasor to explore the mental-bleedover idea from the Autobot side: in "Perchance to Dream", combining exposes Silverbolt's fear of heights to his teammates, and the shame makes Superion fight Menasor savagely enough to endanger civilians. Marvel UK's future timeline keeps him in service into 2008, where Soundwave summons him to break through blast doors during Shockwave's assassination.

Menasor survives the cartoon. After the Decepticons are driven off Cybertron by Unicron's attack he ends up on Chaar with the rest, fighting over energon scraps, and is still around late in season three. In the Japanese Zone continuity he is elevated: Violen Jygar recruits him as one of the Nine Great Demon Generals with the odd rank of Intelligence General, and alongside Overlord and Abominus he destroys the entire planet Feminia and nearly kills Victory Saber.

• Menasor is the smallest of the Scramble City-type Generation One combiners, despite being conceived as the ultimate Decepticon weapon.
• An alternate animation character sheet exists showing Menasor with his limbs in different orientations and an Autobot symbol on his chest, suggesting the Stunticon and Aerialbot factions may originally have been the other way around. That model was used, with the symbol corrected, in the toy commercial introducing both teams.
• The animators frequently misread his model, drawing the four Stunticon cars stuck onto generic blocky limbs extending from Motormaster rather than actually forming the limbs, which defeats the point of a combiner.
• Generation 2 redecos of all five Stunticons were tooled in 1994 but cancelled; only a small run of Breakdown escaped, as the 1994 BotCon exclusive.
• Two later toys named "Menasor" (Legends of Cybertron 2006 and a 2007 SDCC exclusive) were both intended to be Motormaster, but Hasbro could not secure the Motormaster trademark, so the combiner's name was used instead.

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.

• Origin: the cartoon has Megatron build the Stunticon bodies and use Vector Sigma to give them personalities; Marvel has him siphon Creation Matrix energy while Optimus Prime animates the Aerialbots, working from designs dreamed by Buster Witwicky.
• The surviving alternate animation model gives Menasor an Autobot insignia on his chest, hinting the Stunticons and Aerialbots may have been intended as opposite factions at some stage of development.
• Limb assignment is unfixed by design and unfixed in practice: the toy allows any arrangement and the animation contradicts itself.
• Dreamwave says the Stunticons were pre-existing Cybertronians deemed psychotic and locked in stasis, not creations of Megatron at all.
• IDW makes Swindle the creator of Menasor and gives each limb its own retained mind, so the combination fails there for different reasons than in the cartoon.