Scourge

Scourge is Galvatron's hunter. Reformatted by Unicron from the wreckage of a dying Decepticon after the battle at Autobot City, he was given command of the Sweeps, a wolf pack of tracker-terminators built to find Autobots and finish them. His scanning gear is his defining feature, capable of picking out a machine or an organism anywhere on a planet, and his bio calls him the most fearsome and implacable hunter-destroyer Unicron created. In the movie that promise is delivered on exactly once and spectacularly: it is Scourge and the Sweeps who tear Ultra Magnus apart on the Planet of Junk and take the Matrix of Leadership off his corpse.

Afterwards the character settles into something more interesting and less impressive. Despite outranking nobody but the Sweeps, he defers habitually to Cyclonus and is generally content taking orders. He grumbles. His Sweeps ignore him routinely, as "Thief in the Night" shows, though they are terrified of Cyclonus. His tech spec is unusually candid that his one real weakness is arrogance, and the fiction bears that out.

His best episode is "The Burden Hardest to Bear". Ordered by Galvatron to destroy the Matrix, Scourge decides instead to install it in his own chest. Decepticon programming cannot process it. He mutates into a swollen grotesque, driven progressively insane by the power while trying to seize the Decepticons, until Hot Rod takes the Matrix back and leaves him at the mercy of a furious Galvatron. That he survives it, as he survives being possessed by Starscream's ghost and openly serving Unicron in "Ghost in the Machine", is the running joke of the character.

Reformatted by Unicron, so like Cyclonus and Galvatron he can tap Unicron's power. He transforms into a Cybertronian hovercraft that handles any terrain and scans for survivors, and his sensor suite is the best in the Decepticon army, described as able to detect a machine or living presence as small as an amoeba in the ocean or a wind-up toy in the Sahara. He carries a disintegrator ray that cuts through solid rock and a laser blaster firing short bursts of intense heat, and he commands the Sweeps, who share his mould and his temperament. His documented weakness is arrogance alone. Two practical failings run alongside it: he is a poor leader whose own Sweeps disregard his orders, and Decepticon programming is fundamentally incompatible with the Matrix, which mutates and unhinges him when he tries to use it. In "The Rebirth" he binary-bonds with the Nebulan Fracas and becomes a Targetmaster.

• Galvatron: an abused subordinate who reads his leader well enough to talk him down by flattery, and who nonetheless gets thrashed for every failure and every attempted initiative.
• Cyclonus: the senior partner in practice, whose lead Scourge takes, a dynamic the Marvel comics reverse entirely and end with Scourge abandoning him to die.
• The Sweeps: his own hunting pack, physically identical to him, who share his grumbling and disregard his orders.
• Unicron: openly loyal to the chaos-bringer during the movie, reminding Galvatron that "we belong to him", and later reminded himself that what Unicron gave he can take away.

Marvel reverses the Cyclonus and Scourge dynamic completely: comics Scourge is the intelligent, calculating brain of the pair and Cyclonus is the blunt instrument. He is also considerably more ruthless about self-preservation. In "Dry Run!" he has a clear shot at the brainwashed Megatron clone that is killing Cyclonus, works out that destroying Megatron in 1988 might erase Galvatron's creation and his own along with it, and simply flees rather than risk it. He and Cyclonus betray Galvatron's location to Death's Head for their own advancement, murder Shockwave under Unicron's control, and openly refuse to keep serving Galvatron. There is none of the cartoon's grumbling comedy.

In the cartoon he survives everything: the Matrix mutation, Unicron's service, Galvatron's rages, and ends the series as a Targetmaster bonded to Fracas, carried off aboard Scorponok at the end of "The Rebirth". The Japanese Headmasters series reduces him and Cyclonus to bumbling comic relief who lose Trypticon by attacking their own ally Sixshot. In Marvel continuity his end is deliberately unresolved: after abandoning Cyclonus and failing to recover his body from a deranged Shockwave, Scourge staggers into the space-time rift in "Time Wars" hoping it will fix things. It does not, and he is never seen again.

• Scourge was voiced by Stan Jones, and by Yutaka Shimaka and later Masaharu Sato in Japan.
• The 1986 toy transforms into a Cybertronic hovercraft despite being labelled a plane in the toy catalogue posters of the era; early releases had the blue centre section painted, later ones used two stickers.
• The 1987 Targetmaster Scourge is a retool of the same mould with widened hand and head holes, replacing his handgun with the Nebulan Fracas.
• In the movie's Decepticon Hall of Heroes, one of the ancient leader statues visibly resembles Scourge, a leftover from the dropped script concept in which the enshrined "Life Sparks" of dead Decepticon leaders were the raw material Unicron used.
• Some releases of the toy included one quarter of a four-part The Transformers: The Movie poster with glow-in-the-dark elements.

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.

• Scourge is usually said to be reformatted from Thundercracker, and this is the near-universal fandom reading, but the movie never states it in dialogue. It is inferred from the animation, from the colour logic (blue Seeker becomes blue lieutenant), and from the 1986 cross-sell catalogues replacing Thundercracker and Skywarp with Scourge and Cyclonus in the Decepticon Planes section.
• Scourge's own tech spec says he was created from "the wreckage of dead Decepticons", plural, which supports the alternative reading that Unicron mixed raw material rather than converting one body into one new warrior, and would make any single-donor answer wrong by definition.
• The number of Sweeps in the movie is inconsistent. Two are created on screen, then a third appears to replace the vanished second Cyclonus, which is one of the main reasons fans argue the movie's visuals are not reliable evidence for who became whom.
• The dropped early-script origin, in which the enshrined "Life Sparks" of ancient Decepticon leaders became Scourge and the new troops, still leaves a trace in the finished film: a statue in the Hall of Heroes that looks like Scourge, predating his creation.