Shrapnel

Shrapnel is the most immediately identifiable of the three Insecticons, and not for anything he does. He repeats the last word of his sentences, sentences, a tic that reads as comic at first and curdles fast once you notice what he is usually saying while he does it. Behind the verbal quirk is a genuinely sadistic mind: he is a master of electricity who enjoys watching victims squirm under his touch, and the crackle of shorting circuitry is described as music to him.

He is not a Decepticon in the ordinary chain-of-command sense. He, Kickback and Bombshell came down in their own pod before the Ark crashed, were reformatted by damaged idento-computers into insect forms in what became Demon Swamp, and spent four million years evolving into something semi-separate. When Megatron finds them in "A Plague of Insecticons" the two groups do not even seem to know each other. What follows is an alliance of convenience that never becomes command: the Insecticons work for Megatron when there is food in it, betray him when there is more food elsewhere, and their ability to spawn clone armies is very likely what lets them keep saying no.

Within the trio, Shrapnel usually functions as the leader, alternating with Bombshell while Kickback is left out of the argument. He gets real work in "The Revenge of Bruticus", dismantling the Space Bridge controls and forcing a joint Autobot-Decepticon hunt to get them back, and he supplies the franchise's most quoted Insecticon line in "The Insecticon Syndrome", chewing on the Nova power plant reactor and complaining it is "a little heavy on the protons".

He is memorable because he is funny and repellent at once, a sadist with a speech impediment, and because the show never quite decides whether he is a villain or the punchline.

In stag beetle mode Shrapnel's twin antennae generate electric bursts of up to 40,000 volts and can be tuned precisely enough to seize control of nearly any electrically operated device, from a calculator to a small factory. He flies up to fifty miles. In robot mode, given the right weather, those antennae attract lightning from the sky to boost his own output, which he discharges through his hands. He carries a grenade launcher that fires a thirty-pound steel ball splintering in mid-air into thousands of spikes. Weaknesses: insulating materials like rubber and glass simply defeat his electrical attacks, and like all Insecticons he must consume enormous quantities of organic or artificial energy to function and to sustain his clone swarms, which is exactly the lever Megatron pulls to control him. In "The Insecticon Syndrome" the unstable Nova power he gorges on causes him to explode outright.

• Bombshell: co-leader and rival. The two alternate command of the trio, and Bombshell physically rebuilds Shrapnel with a magnetic insecti-shell after he explodes in "The Insecticon Syndrome".
• Kickback: teammate and permanent third wheel, left out of the leadership question entirely.
• Megatron: never his commander, only his employer. Megatron buys the Insecticons with energy and they betray him the moment a better meal appears.
• Lord Straxus (Marvel): his actual superior in the comics, who values him as an executive officer and still uses his face as a stress ball.

Marvel's Shrapnel is far more dangerous and speaks perfectly normally, with no tic at all. He is one of Lord Straxus's top lieutenants at Darkmount, serving as executive officer, supervising the technicians decoding Soundwave's transmission from Earth and assisting on the Space Bridge project; he personally captures the Autobot spy Scrounge in "The Smelting Pool!". He is rated among the deadliest killers on Cybertron, and it is his torture of an informant that sets Operation: Volcano in motion in "Target: 2006" before Megatron's recall order to Earth wrecks the Autobot trap. After the Hoover Dam battle in "Aerialbots over America!" he serves on Earth permanently and gradually fades into crowd scenes. IDW's Hearts of Steel makes him one end of the steam-locomotive "Insectrain", with scissor blades for wrecking rival trains, and again gives him no speech quirk.

Shrapnel attacks Autobot City in 2005 in The Transformers: The Movie, has a spectacularly bad day, shot by Blitzwing thanks to Kup, knocked into the moat by Hot Rod and run over by Optimus Prime, and is carried back aboard Astrotrain by Thrust. When Astrotrain needs to shed weight en route to Cybertron he is jettisoned into space along with Megatron, Bombshell, Kickback, Skywarp and Thundercracker, and Unicron reformats his body. The usual reading is that Shrapnel and Kickback become Sweeps under Scourge, though the cartoon never confirms which specific new Decepticon was built from which corpse. Insecticons keep appearing in 2006 crowd scenes regardless, explained variously as surviving clones or animation error.

• Like all three Insecticons the toy is a recoloured Diaclone Waruder mech, specifically the Kuwagattler, which is where the opening chest compartments come from. The original Diaclone colours were later revived for an e-Hobby redeco.
• The mould was reused for the Zaptrap drones; in Japan the Insecticons were sold as mail-order items from 1987 to 1988 for 880 yen and two robot points.
• Hasbro later lost the "Shrapnel" trademark, so his 2007 Robot Heroes figure was sold simply as "Insecticon".
• Voiced by Hal Rayle in English. The French dub of the movie changed his gender to female, almost certainly because of the high-pitched voice, and the cartoon dub, done by a different team, did not follow suit.
• Beast Wars paid the tic tribute in "Dark Designs", where a scrambled Waspinator declares he is Shrapnel and adopts the doubled speech pattern, pattern.

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.

• Leadership: the cartoon treats Shrapnel as the trio's usual leader, while other Generation One material names Venom as the official Insecticon leader.
• The speech tic exists only in the cartoon. Marvel, Dreamwave and IDW's Hearts of Steel all have him speak normally.
• Marvel calls the trio Insecticons with insect-derived alt modes while they are still on Cybertron, a planet the US strip presents as having no insect life; the UK material later implies Cybertronian insects do exist via Starscream's rustbug hoop.
• Who he became after Unicron. Sweep is the common answer, but the movie shows only anonymous bodies going in and finished Decepticons coming out.