Slag

Slag is one of the three original Dinobots, built on Earth after the Autobots uncovered dinosaur fossils near the Ark's volcanic crash site. Wheeljack and Ratchet, impressed by the raw power the prehistoric skeletons suggested, constructed Grimlock, Slag and Sludge to add brute firepower to a force that was being outgunned. The experiment went badly at once. The trio were so destructive and so difficult to control that Optimus Prime ordered the whole Dinobot project shut down. Wheeljack ignored him, quietly building better memory components so the three could be reasoned with, and when the rest of the Autobots were captured at the Great Falls hydroelectric plant it was the Dinobots who broke them out and routed the Decepticons. They were welcomed onto the team on their own terms, which is to say barely.

Of the five, Slag is the one nobody wants to stand next to. His tech spec is unusually blunt about it: enormously strong, disruptive, mean-spirited, and prone to brawling with his own comrades, which is why they seldom come to his aid when he is in trouble. What he shares with the rest of the Dinobots is contempt for authority, and toward Optimus Prime that contempt runs hotter than anyone's except Sludge's. He follows Grimlock because Grimlock can beat him, not because he believes in the chain of command.

That resentment repeatedly cost the Autobots. In "War of the Dinobots" Megatron flattered and manipulated the original three into switching sides while they guarded a meteorite, forcing the Autobots to build Snarl and Swoop specifically to fight them. In "Desertion of the Dinobots" Slag walked out with the rest during the Cybertonium crisis, only to be captured and reprogrammed by Shockwave and put to work in the mines at Cybertron's core. Slag never stopped being a weapon the Autobots could point but never quite own.

In triceratops mode Slag charges, gores and shatters brick buildings with his skull; his mouth-mounted flamethrower throws 3,000-degree-Celsius flames up to eighty feet, hot enough to reduce a Decepticon to a pool of liquid metal, and he carries an electron blaster in beast mode plus a rocket launcher and energo-sword in robot mode. His tech spec rates him 9 for strength and endurance but only 4 for intelligence, and it explicitly frames his aggression as a liability: he brawls with his own comrades so often that they seldom bother to help him when he is in trouble, and a weapon that melts metal at that range is not something an ally wants to be standing near. He is slow, poorly coordinated at speed, and easily goaded, which is exactly how Megatron turned him in "War of the Dinobots" and how Shockwave reprogrammed him on Cybertron.

• Grimlock: follows him without argument because Grimlock can out-fight him, not out of any belief in rank.
• Optimus Prime: the Dinobot who dislikes Prime most intensely, resenting both his authority and his attempt to scrap the Dinobot project.
• Wheeljack and Ratchet: his builders, and Wheeljack in particular kept improving him in defiance of Prime's shutdown order.
• The other Dinobots: brawls with them constantly, and they return the favour by leaving him to fend for himself.

The Marvel origin is completely different and is the single biggest divergence in Dinobot lore. There is no fossil discovery and no Wheeljack workshop. Slag was one of the Ark's original crew, and when the Ark detected Shockwave wandering the Savage Land it converted five dormant Autobots into Dinobots using dinosaur data gathered from that region, then sent them out to fight him. The battle ended with Shockwave and all five Dinobots sinking into a tar pit, where they lay for millions of years until Ratchet dug them out in "Repeat Performance!" and they helped him beat Megatron. Their long submersion had burned out their cybo-dendrons, and they went feral one by one during the "Dinobot Hunt!" storyline. Marvel also writes the Dinobots as far more articulate than the cartoon's monosyllabic versions, and Grimlock actually becomes Autobot leader in "King of the Hill!" after Optimus Prime's death, something the cartoon never allows. The Marvel UK Earthforce strips give Slag a wrinkle with no cartoon parallel: his emotional dampeners fail roughly every four million years and send him into an uncontrollable berserker rage, a secret the Dinobots hide from Prime in "The 4,000,000 Year Itch!".

In the cartoon Slag survives the war. He fights at the Battle of Autobot City in 1986's The Transformers: The Movie, is stranded on Quintessa with Hot Rod and Kup, and remains with the Dinobots on Cybertron through season three, last appearing in "Call of the Primitives". In Marvel continuity he is destroyed along with the other Dinobots by the Underbase-powered Starscream, rebuilt by Ratchet with Pretender technology, restored with Nucleon at Hydrus Four, and fights in the final battle against Unicron.

• The Dinobot toys were not original Transformers designs. Slag and his teammates came from Takara's Diaclone Dinosaur Robo series; Hasbro dropped the Diaclone pilot mini-figure and recoloured the robot torso red to match the team.
• His box quote is the flatly antisocial "I have no need for friends, even less for enemies."
• "Slag" is coarse and offensive slang in the UK, and Hasbro spent years working around it: an Animated toy designed as a G1 Slag homage was released under the name Snarl instead, and Fall of Cybertron settled the matter by renaming the character Slug, which stuck and was eventually applied retroactively to the G1 figure.
• Neil Ross voiced him in the US cartoon, and the performance drifted: the pitch climbed steadily across the series until it reached a comically high register by his final appearance in "Call of the Primitives".
• A version of the 1985 toy shipped in Canada with a red face rather than the standard face colour, one of the better-known G1 variants.

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.

• Origin: the cartoon has him built on Earth by Wheeljack and Ratchet from dinosaur fossils; Marvel has him as original Ark crew reformatted by the Ark itself to fight Shockwave in the Savage Land.
• Creation order: the cartoon splits the Dinobots into an original three (Grimlock, Slag, Sludge) and a later pair (Snarl, Swoop); Marvel creates all five simultaneously.
• Intelligence: the toy bio and cartoon both stress he is not bright, but Marvel writes him as capable of full, tactical speech.
• Name: he is Slag in all G1 material and Slug in everything from Fall of Cybertron onward, with Hasbro also having used "Snarl" on an Animated-era homage toy to dodge the word entirely.