Rumble

Rumble is the Decepticons' pocket-sized wrecking ball: a swaggering street punk who spends most of his existence folded into a microcassette inside Soundwave's chest, waiting to be ejected into somebody's face. He is small, roughly the height of a tall human in most cartoon scenes, and he compensates the way small bullies always do, with volume, taunts and a readiness to swing first. Brawn writes him off as a "jerk" and a "sawed-off nerd", which is fair, but underestimating him is a mistake other Autobots keep making.

His place in the hierarchy is peculiar. He is not an officer and never commands anything, yet he is one of Megatron's favourites precisely because he follows orders blindly and hungrily and never asks what the mission is for. Megatron gives him permission to break things; that is the whole relationship. He is likewise fiercely protective of Soundwave, snapping at Hook after the Constructicon calls Soundwave "an uncharismatic bore" during the leadership brawl aboard Astrotrain in The Transformers: The Movie.

In the fiction he is the tool reached for whenever the Decepticons need the ground opened up. He shakes Sherman Dam apart in "More Than Meets the Eye, Part 2" and beats Hound underwater in the same story; he takes on the vastly larger Dinobot Sludge single-handed in "S.O.S. Dinobots" and only loses a piledriver to Sludge's own earth-shaking stomp. In "The Key to Vector Sigma, Part 1" his size lets him steal the cars that become the Stunticons, and he inadvertently inspires Megatron's name for the team.

What makes him memorable is texture rather than plot importance. The rhyming taunts, the mean little laugh, the piledrivers hammering into asphalt, the sheer indignity of a Decepticon who gets carried into battle in a chest cavity: Rumble is the show's best argument that a henchman can be more fun than a general.

Rumble's arms convert into hydraulic pile drivers; rolling drum-like mechanisms in his body transmit intense low-frequency groundwaves through his feet, generating artificial earthquakes his tech spec rates as high as 5.4 on the Richter scale, usually opening fissures under the target. The Decepticons routinely aim this at hydroelectric infrastructure. He also carries a shoulder-mounted concussion blaster and transforms into a microcassette that stows inside Soundwave. His documented weakness is straightforward: his tiny frame severely limits his strength and most full-size Autobots can beat him in a straight physical or artillery fight, so the whole trick is surviving the tremors long enough to get close. In the cartoon his seismic output is tied to his power chip rectifier, which Megatron once removed and used himself.

• Soundwave: his commander and effectively his home. Rumble is loyal past the point of sense and will start a fight with Devastator over an insult to him.
• Frenzy: his bodytype twin, identical in voice, personality and abilities. The cartoon uses them interchangeably and Rumble appears far more often.
• Megatron: not an officer, just a favourite. Megatron indulges his appetite for destruction and once borrowed his power chip rectifier to use the seismic ability himself.
• Hound and Bumblebee: recurring Autobot sparring partners, and two of the few who can reliably handle him one on one.

Marvel's Rumble is a running joke rather than a threat. He cannot even see humans because they are too small in "The New Order", loses a fight to a crowd of unarmed human slave labourers, gets pounded into the sand by Optimus Prime despite three Seekers backing him up in "Chain of Command", and is comprehensively wrecked by Omega Supreme. He is drawn in his toy colours, not the cartoon's. In the black-and-white Earthforce strips he and Ravage side with Shockwave and Starscream against Soundwave during the Decepticon civil war, then slot back into Soundwave's chest once the factions reunite. IDW gives him a genuine backstory instead: he and Frenzy are industrial mining equipment at Outpost C-12 who join Megatron's riot, do time on a prison transport and are later surgically altered to hide inside Soundwave for the attack on the Senate.

Rumble survives the Battle of Autobot City in The Transformers: The Movie, hauling Megatron's fusion cannon during the retreat and helping to shake Devastator apart aboard Astrotrain when the Constructicons make their play for leadership. He is present for Starscream's coronation and Galvatron's arrival. Afterwards he turns up briefly on Chaar with the surviving Decepticons, in one shot mistakenly animated at full Decepticon height, and then effectively vanishes from the series as Ratbat takes over cassette duty for the 2006 season.

• The toy is a redeco of Takara's Microchange Microcassette Robo Micross; Hasbro packed Rumble with Ravage in 1984-1986, Takara packed him with Soundwave, and the same mould also produced Frenzy.
• The cartoon consistently animated Rumble in Frenzy's toy colours, blue and grey, rather than the red and black of his own toy, and vice versa. Fandom shorthand for the argument is RIBFIR.
• The Japanese Headmasters dub swapped the identification to match the toys, treating the red cassette as Rumble.
• Later toys had to be trademarked as "Decepticon Rumble" because the name "Rumble" alone was not clearable.
• The 2006 Alternators Rumble, a licensed Honda Civic Si with spring-loaded piledrivers instead of hands, was bumped from general retail to a Wal-Mart exclusive and was among the last Alternators sold at retail.

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.

• Colours: the toy and Marvel comics make Rumble red and black and Frenzy blue, while the cartoon consistently reverses the two. The Japanese Headmasters dub sides with the toys; most Western fandom grew up with the cartoon version.
• Whether the two are meaningfully distinct characters at all. The cartoon gives them the same voice, personality and abilities and often uses one where the script called for the other; Earthforce's black-and-white art makes several appearances impossible to attribute.
• Seismic scale: the tech spec caps his quakes at 5.4 on the Richter scale, while the cartoon routinely shows him splitting dams and opening city-block fissures.