Prowl

Prowl is the Autobot military strategist, a Datsun 280ZX police car and one of Optimus Prime's closest advisers from the Ark's original crew. His logic centre is described in his tech spec as the most powerful of any Autobot's: he can compute the paths of eight hundred separate moving objects and determine the correct countermove in half a second, which is what makes him the Autobots' analyst of record.

The same rigidity makes him difficult to be around. He is quiet, competent, loyal and almost endlessly patient, and also strict about protocol in a way most of the ranks find stifling. He reacts badly to the unexpected, badly enough that a hard enough surprise can literally scramble his cerebral circuits, which is exactly what happens in "Roll for It" when his battle computer is knocked offline and he has to extend an antenna to patch into Chip Chase's desktop terminal to keep fighting.

He is at his best planning rather than shooting. In "The Ultimate Doom, Part 1" he uses Hound's holograms to build a two-pronged rescue for Sparkplug Witwicky, dropping the main force onto the sunken Decepticon cruiser as a distraction while Cliffjumper, Brawn and Windcharger tunnel underneath. In "The Core" he plants a dominator disk on Scrapper under cover of night. When he does fight he favours acid pellets, melting cattle rustlers' guns in "Dinobot Island, Part 2" and corroding a machine's innards from inside its own scoop in "Day of the Machines."

He dies in 2005. Piloting a supply shuttle from Autobot City to Moonbase One, he is hijacked by Megatron, Starscream and the Constructicons; he very nearly takes Starscream's head off before Scavenger's blast burns through his armour.

A battle computer and logic centre capable of tracking eight hundred moving objects and producing the optimal countermove in half a second; a pair of shoulder-mounted launchers firing wire-guided incendiary missiles; and a semi-automatic rifle firing pellets of highly corrosive acid, his signature weapon. The weakness is built into the same system: a hard enough shock takes his battle computer offline, and events he has not modelled for can leave him processing instead of acting. He is a comparatively light combatant who does better directing a plan than holding a line.

• Optimus Prime: keeps Prowl near at hand for his strategic expertise, though Prime overrules his calls for tactical withdrawal more than once.
• Jazz: his regular field partner from the first oil-rig battle onwards, and temperamentally his opposite.
• Grimlock: open mutual antipathy, Grimlock's chaos infuriates Prowl and Prowl's protocol infuriates Grimlock.
• Chip Chase: the human whose computer he patches into in "Roll for It," after which Prowl calls him a human after his own central processor.

Marvel's Prowl is the same cold logician, introduced with the line that listening to Bluestreak taxes even his endless patience, but he lasts far longer: he is deactivated during Starscream's Underbase rampage rather than at Autobot City, and is later restored by the Last Autobot. The cartoon kills him off in the opening minutes of the 1986 movie and keeps him dead.

Killed by Scavenger aboard the hijacked Autobot shuttle shortly before the Battle of Autobot City in 2005. His body is interred with honour in the Autobot Mausoleum, which is subsequently desecrated and destroyed.

• The toy originated as Takara's Diaclone "Car Robot Police Car Fairlady Z," designed by Koujin Ohno; the same Nissan Fairlady Z mould was retooled for Bluestreak and again, with a larger front fender and rear spoiler, for Smokescreen.
• The Autobot faction symbol appears to be loosely based on Prowl's head design.
• He does not get a normal gunshot death in the 1986 movie; he is shown belching orange smoke from his mouth as he falls.
• Early planning for Beast Wars had Prowl as the Maximal cougar; that concept eventually split into two separate characters, Cheetor and Panther.
• The Bluestreak/Prowl head design was reused as the basis for the head of Natron, the Autobot in the Tyco Electric Racing Set.

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 Japanese Headmasters series shows Prowl alive, an error caused by the Japanese production staff not having seen the movie yet, even though he is listed among the dead in both the English and Japanese versions of "Dark Awakening."
• His Marvel death was not shown on panel in the US series and was only established posthumously in the UK title.
• Later Japanese-authored fiction papers over the Headmasters error with an alternate-timeline Prowl crossing over into the original continuity, which not all sources treat as canonical.