Reflector

Reflector is the strangest entry in the early Decepticon roster, and the ambiguity is the character. He is three robots, Spectro, Spyglass and Viewfinder, who speak and act in perfect unison as a single mind, and who fold together into one 35mm camera small enough to sit in Megatron's palm. The cartoon never names the components individually; on screen all three are simply "Reflector", talking over each other with an echoing modulation that makes the plurality audible.

His function is surveillance, and his personality is what surveillance does to someone who enjoys it. He likes to watch: scenery, wildlife, architecture, anything. Above all he likes to watch his own comrades, learn their secrets and profit from them, which puts him in the same blackmailer's niche as Kickback but with better equipment and considerably more self-satisfaction about his own talents.

In the fiction he is a constant presence in the first season and then evaporates. He scouts with Thundercracker immediately after the Decepticons leave the Ark in "More Than Meets the Eye, Part 1", demonstrating zoom-focus and Polaroid-style instant printing. In "Roll for It" he stakes out Doctor Alcazar's laboratory and photographs the security entry code. He also served a less dignified purpose: animators used spare Reflector bodies as generic Decepticons to pad out thin crowd scenes, so at times there are far more than three of him on screen, and in one shot two are absorbed into a third on collision.

He is memorable for exactly that unresolved weirdness, plus the fact that American children could not buy him.

Reflector's three bodies combine into a functioning camera with zoom-focus optics, and he develops and prints photographs internally, Polaroid-style, in the field. This makes him the Decepticons' reconnaissance and intelligence asset in the early Earth campaign, gathering entry codes and target data before raids such as the attack on the Great Falls hydroelectric plant. Each component is armed: the toy supplies Spectro's shutter gun, Viewfinder's lens laser and Spyglass' optic blaster plus a flashcube missile launcher and telephoto lens. The cartoon also implies some form of body duplication, given the surplus Reflector units and one incident of two merging into a third on collision. His weaknesses are structural: split across three comparatively fragile bodies he is a poor combatant, his usefulness collapses if he is spotted, and each component is only slightly shorter than Soundwave in robot mode yet must mass-shift down to hand-held size, an inconsistency the fiction never resolves.

• Megatron: his direct employer in the early Earth campaign, who uses him as both scout and, literally, a hand-held camera.
• Starscream: treats Reflector as expendable, casually assigning a single unit to test the unproven Space Bridge.
• Thundercracker: his partner on the first scouting run after the Decepticons awaken on Earth.
• The Decepticon rank and file: nominally comrades, actually his subject matter, since spying on his own side for leverage is his stated hobby.

Marvel gives Reflector almost nothing. Spectro, Spyglass and Viewfinder appear as individually named characters assisting the Decepticon medic with repairs, and an oddly coloured Viewfinder is seen lying inert on the cavern floor at Mount Saint Hilary after Sparkplug Witwicky's poisoned fuel knocks the Decepticons out in "The Last Stand". They never get an introduction, let alone the unison-speaking gimmick that defines the cartoon version. Dreamwave repositions them entirely as Shockwave's Cybertron-based surveillance operation, monitoring the planet from a central mainframe rather than serving Megatron on Earth, and they are seemingly destroyed by Starscream. IDW splits them again into distinct characters: Viewfinder is impaled and killed in a crash on LV-117 in Spotlight: Wheelie, while Spectro and Spyglass survive only to hijack an escape vessel that Wheelie has sabotaged. All Hail Megatron, by contrast, restores the cartoon's unison-speaking trio.

Reflector simply fades out. Appearances thin through season one as the Decepticon cast expands and Hasbro's decision not to retail the toy filters into the story bible, and his final on-screen moment is a fleeting shot during the Battle of Autobot City in The Transformers: The Movie. He is not killed, jettisoned or reformatted, he is dropped, and unlike the Insecticons he does not return for the 2006 season in any form. The mail-away toy outlived the character on screen by a year or more.

• Reflector was originally the Camera Robo from Takara's Microchange sub-series of New Microman; the main visible difference is that the Microman release reads "MICROX" on the centre unit's decals rather than "REFLECTOR", and the US version had the missile launcher's spring mechanism disabled for safety.
• The toy was never sold at US retail. It was mail-away only, at ten dollars plus two robot points in 1986-1987, long after the character had vanished from the cartoon. Takara sold it as a normal retail item in Japan in 1985.
• The series story bible actively discouraged using him because Hasbro had decided not to sell the toy, which is why his screen time collapses after season one.
• Animators used surplus Reflector bodies as generic Decepticon extras to fill out thin crowd scenes, which is why more than three appear at once in early episodes.
• Voiced by Chris Latta, who also voiced Starscream. The Camera Robo was reportedly designed by mecha designer Shinji Aramaki, later known for Megazone 23 and Genesis Climber Mospeada.
• The 2019 War for Cybertron: Siege update was released as "Refraktor", a single Deluxe figure with a removable chest lens plate, so three purchases are needed to build the camera.

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.

• Singular or plural. The cartoon treats Reflector as one mind in three bodies with no individual names, the toy and Marvel name Spectro, Spyglass and Viewfinder as separate robots, and IDW kills them off individually.
• How many there are. Early episodes show far more Reflector units than three, plus one incident of two merging into a third, which the fiction never explains; the production reason is that animators used him as a generic crowd filler.
• The Space Bridge volunteer in "Divide and Conquer" is not obviously part of the trio, lacks the usual echoing voice modulation, and is addressed by Starscream as "warrior", which may be a description or a name.
• Mass-shifting scale: each component is drawn nearly as tall as Soundwave in robot mode yet the combined camera fits in Megatron's hand.
• Continuity placement: the cartoon has Reflector aboard the Nemesis with Megatron, while Dreamwave has him never leave Cybertron and work for Shockwave instead.