Ravage

Ravage is the Decepticon who does not need to speak. Where the rest of Megatron's command shouts, schemes and mutinies, Ravage works in silence, and the G1 cartoon leans on that hard: across the entire series he is given exactly one line of dialogue, in "More Than Meets the Eye, Part 3". Everything else is a growl, a hiss or the absence of sound entirely. His profile calls his name synonymous with stealth and notes that his survivors are few, and the show largely honours that by making him the tool Megatron reaches for when a job requires someone to get in unseen and come back with the truth.

His loyalty is the other half of the character, and it is absolute. No Decepticon has a stronger attachment to Megatron; Ravage believes in the cause and treats Megatron as its embodiment, which is why he takes orders from Soundwave without friction and never once figures in the endless Decepticon coup attempts except as the instrument that exposes them. He is one of the first Transformers a human ever encounters, pouncing on workers investigating a wrecked power station in the opening episode, and shortly after is captured in an energy net during Soundwave's infiltration of Teletraan I. The Autobots then use his loyalty against him, deliberately letting him escape with false intelligence about a rocket fuel depot that turns out to be one of Hound's holograms.

The cartoon also enjoys humiliating him, which is part of why he endures. He is chased like a mouse by an ordinary house cat in "Child's Play", stuck in a hamster cage and reduced to running on the wheel, loses a fight to a real jaguar in "Microbots" and has to scare it off with his rocket boosters, and gets shelved under a rack of video cassettes by Spike Witwicky. Deadly, absolutely loyal, and frequently the butt of the joke.

A stealth and reconnaissance specialist who transforms into a microcassette small enough to ride in Soundwave's chest, allowing him to be carried undetected into places no full-sized Decepticon could reach, and to hide inside human cassette recorders and boom boxes to eavesdrop. In jaguar mode he is fast, silent and a genuine physical threat in close quarters, with a pair of shoulder-mounted missiles and hip-mounted rocket boosters for short bursts of flight or leaping. In the Marvel comics he also deploys an electromagnetic shield. His documented weakness is bright light, which temporarily blinds him, a vulnerability that carries all the way through to his Beast-era incarnation. The profile itself notes the second weakness: his absolute loyalty to Megatron can blind him just as effectively.

• Soundwave: his carrier and handler, the Decepticon who deploys and recalls him; the cartoon even shows Soundwave petting him while they watch Megatron fight in "Heavy Metal War".
• Megatron: the object of an unwavering loyalty stronger than any other Decepticon's, which is precisely why Megatron trusts him with counter-intelligence work.
• Laserbeak: his fellow cassette and opposite number, the aerial spy to Ravage's ground infiltrator, frequently deployed together from Soundwave's chest.
• Starscream: in the Marvel comics his natural enemy, having been assigned to spy on the Air Commander and nearly killed for it, after which he shoots Starscream down on Megatron's orders.

The comics Ravage is a completely different proposition: he talks, constantly and articulately, and he has a documented past. In "State Games!" he is revealed as a bodyguard to the Autobot Overlords who ruled Cybertron, who abandoned his dying master to throw in with the gladiator Megatron because he judged Megatron the future. He is also the first Transformer ever given dialogue in Marvel's first Transformers story. His Marvel career is genuinely consequential: Megatron uses him to spy on Starscream, and when Starscream nearly kills him, Ravage drags himself home across the desert to report the betrayal and later shoots Starscream out of the sky on Megatron's orders. He tears Mirage's arm off with his teeth, fights Windcharger to a truce inside the Ark, and in "Time Wars" it is Ravage who talks the nearly catatonic Shockwave into surrendering Cyclonus's body to end the time storm. He then becomes a political operator, joining Starscream and Shockwave's insurgency against Scorponok. Nothing in the cartoon's near-mute assassin prepares you for the scheming, chatty Ravage of Marvel.

The cartoon never kills Ravage. He is still serving Soundwave during the Battle of Autobot City in 2005, ordered along with Rumble, Frenzy and Ratbat to stop Blaster contacting Optimus Prime on Moonbase One, and appears again in 2006 among the beast-formed Transformers gathered against Primacron in "Call of the Primitives". His actual end comes in Beast Wars: granted amnesty and reformatted as a Predacon, he is sent by the Tripredacus Council to capture Megatron, defects back to the Decepticon cause on seeing his original master's recorded message, and is destroyed when Rattrap sabotages his ship in "The Agenda (Part III)", going out shouting "Decepticons forever!". In Marvel he is blown apart by Grimlock while leaping at Optimus Prime during the Decepticon attack on Klo in "End of the Road".

• Ravage began as a Takara Microchange micro-cassette toy, part of the same line that produced Soundwave, which is why he transforms into a microcassette rather than the standard audio cassette the fiction depicts.
• His Japanese name is Jaguar, and Takara stuck with it for decades; the Binaltech version was notable specifically for using the American name Ravage instead.
• Ravage's original box art is the most heavily reused illustration of any Transformer, recycled for his Universe profile, twice in the 1985 back-of-the-box battle scene, in coloring books, repeatedly in the Marvel comics, and recolored wholesale for Howlback's card art.
• Frank Welker performed all of Ravage's growls and snarls, and the Japanese dub kept Welker's vocal effects untouched rather than redubbing them, without crediting him.
• The Young Corgi book Dinobot War establishes that Ravage's cassette mode is labelled as the soundtrack to the musical Cats.
• Ravage's toy was sold carded as a two-pack with Rumble in the US and Europe, while Japanese releases sold him separately with a clear plastic tape case.

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.

• Speech: the cartoon gives Ravage one line in the entire series and otherwise only animal noises, while Marvel and IDW have him speaking fluently from his first appearance.
• Origin: Marvel's "State Games!" makes him an ancient bodyguard to the Autobot Overlords who defected to Megatron; the cartoon offers no backstory at all.
• Fate: the cartoon leaves him alive into 2006 and Beast Wars kills him in the far future, while Marvel destroys him at Grimlock's hands on Klo.
• Scale and mass: his cassette mode is a microcassette on the toy and a standard audio cassette in the fiction, and neither accounts for the mass of a full-sized jaguar.