Ratchet

Ratchet is the Autobots' Chief Medical Officer, and the G1 cast's clearest example of a character whose job is at odds with the show he is in. If something is broken he can fix it, and he does so constantly - Teletraan I, the Dinobots, Skyfire, half the roster after any given battle. What the tech spec adds is the party animal: an irreverent bedside manner and a dry wit, a bot who would rather be enjoying himself than patching bullet holes.

The tension underneath is that he is not a warrior and knows it, which occasionally slips into believing he is expendable - a belief Optimus Prime has never successfully argued him out of. He is nonetheless dropped into front-line situations with grim regularity, and some of the series' worst outcomes are his responsibility. With Wheeljack he builds the Dinobots in "S.O.S. Dinobots", inspired by fossils found in the Ark's caverns, and the pair spend much of the next two seasons managing the consequences: rebuilding them, installing new brain modules, and in "War of the Dinobots" constructing Swoop and Snarl specifically to fight the originals after Megatron turns them.

His best material is small and human-scale. He forms a prickly working friendship with Sparkplug Witwicky, who assists with repairs and, in "The Ultimate Doom", turns up under Decepticon control insisting on fixing an undamaged Ratchet - a scene that plays as comedy until it becomes sabotage. In "Autobot Spike" he performs the mind transfer that puts Spike into Autobot X, then concludes that the process is better left alone.

The best repair and reconstruction specialist the Autobots have, capable of rebuilding a Transformer from severe damage, restoring Teletraan I, and co-designing entirely new Autobots - the Dinobots are his and Wheeljack's work, brain modules included. His ambulance mode splits, the rear section forming a gun station with a missile launcher and static laser gun. Limits: he is a poor combatant with low firepower, is regularly captured or disabled, and his usefulness collapses without a workshop, tools and materials, as he notes himself when the Autobots run out of fuel.

• Wheeljack: his lab partner and co-creator of the Dinobots, and the Autobot most often in need of putting back together.
• Sparkplug Witwicky: a human mechanic and friendly rival who assists with repairs, sometimes disastrously.
• Optimus Prime: the commander who cannot convince him he is not expendable.
• Megatron: in the Marvel continuity, an antagonist Ratchet is bound to more intimately than any other Autobot, ending in mutual destruction.

Marvel's Ratchet is a far bigger character: after Shockwave wipes out the Autobots he is the last one functioning on Earth, and he retakes the Ark with the help of the Dinobots. His ending is heroic rather than incidental - he sacrifices himself to warp a bombload into Megatron's base and tackles Megatron into the blast - where the cartoon simply has Starscream shoot him during the opening shuttle raid.

Killed by Starscream aboard the Autobot shuttle in 2005 at the start of The Transformers: The Movie. His body was recovered and interred in the interstellar Autobot Mausoleum, which was later destroyed when a Quintesson scheme plunged it into a star.

• Bob Budiansky has said he named Ratchet after Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
• Budiansky's original handwritten character notes, shown in a Shout! Factory DVD interview, refer to Ratchet as 'her' and as the Autobots' 'go-to gal' for repairs; his discarded nicknames were 'Cool Hand Lube' and 'Greasefinger'.
• Budiansky admitted the party-animal side of the profile barely appears in the comics, offering two explanations and preferring the flattering one: the stories were too serious for it - rather than that he simply forgot he had written it.
• His helmet colour has never been settled: white with a black crest in the Sunbow cartoon, red with a white crest in the Marvel comic, with later toys and games splitting the difference as a white helmet with a red crest.
• The toy shares Ironhide's Diaclone Onebox mould and was never a normal retail item in Japan - it was a S.T.A.R.S. mail-away - and in the US it was pulled from shelves after 1985 and offered by mail for $8 and two Robot Points.

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.

• Helmet colours contradict between the cartoon, the Marvel comic and virtually every toy line.
• Early development material treated Ratchet as female, and the French Diaclone release of the same mould, 'Ambulance', was referred to as female in a Joustra pack-in mini-comic.
• The tech-spec party personality is essentially absent from the Marvel comics, something Budiansky himself has acknowledged.