Smokescreen

Smokescreen is the Autobot who wins by cheating. Where the rest of the Ark's crew are leaders, warriors, healers or scouts, his function is diversionary tactician: conceal the Autobots' real objective, lead the enemy somewhere useless, and do not be precious about the methods. Off the battlefield he trades on a genuinely warm, sociable manner to get close to his own side, then reports back to Optimus Prime with an honest read on troop morale. He joined the Ark crew in their second year on Earth, first glimpsed on the sidelines of a Dinobot training disaster in "Dinobot Island, Part 1"; where he had been until then is never explained.

His kit matches his character. A magnetised smoke cloud blinds optics and scrambles radar and instruments, and circuit-scrambling disruptor beams finish the job while the target stumbles. It worked spectacularly on the Negavator convoy in "Auto Berserk", where he flew Megatron face-first into the weapon he was trying to steal and left the Seekers flying blind, and again in "Microbots" when he blinded a Heart of Cybertron-powered Megatron long enough for the Autobots to bury him. It stopped working in "The Golden Lagoon", when Megatron simply ordered his troops to shoot into the cloud until they hit something.

The gambling is the flaw, and "The Gambler" is built on it. Captured with other Autobots by the profiteer Bosch, Smokescreen talks his way free by demonstrating the override wire he cheats with, then on the casino world of Monacus keeps playing long past the point of winning enough and loses everything when a bystander yanks the wire loose.

Deploys a magnetised smoke cloud that blinds optics, clings to fliers even after they escape it, and jams radar and guidance instruments, paired with circuit-scrambling disruptor beams to disable targets while they are blind. He is fast, persuasive, and carries a built-in override wire that lets him rig games of chance. The smoke is a delaying tactic, not a weapon: it only buys time for others to regroup, an opponent who fires blind into it can still hit him, as Megatron proved at the golden lagoon, and his gambling compulsion is a liability his enemies can exploit.

• Optimus Prime: uses Smokescreen as an informal morale barometer, and calls on him specifically when nothing else will hold Megatron off.
• Prowl: shares the Datsun 280ZX mould and the police-adjacent tactical role, the ordered strategist to Smokescreen's deceiver.
• Beachcomber: singled out for concern in "The Golden Lagoon", where Smokescreen reads the geologist's isolation as a warning sign nobody else notices.
• Bosch and Devcon: the profiteer and the bounty hunter he falls in with on Monacus, the closest thing he has to a supporting cast.

Marvel gives him a completely different arrival: he is one of five Autobots whose minds were encoded onto crystalline containment vessels before the Ark left Cybertron and who are built fresh bodies by Wheeljack and the Mind Bank in "Rock and Roll-Out!", rather than simply turning up unexplained as he does in the cartoon. The comic also plays up his fascination with human spectacle over the cartoon's emphasis on smoke-and-disruptor battlefield work.

Survives the G1 cartoon; his last appearances are in the second season, including "Cosmic Rust", where he catches the disease and is cured by Corrostop. He is absent from The Transformers: The Movie and the third season, having been replaced by Wheeljack in the storyboarded Autobot City casualty shot.

• His alt mode is a Datsun 280ZX Turbo racer based on the real Electramotive car driven by Don Devendorf, redecoed from the Diaclone "Fairlady Z Racing" toy with the Datsun-specific text stripped from the stickers.
• The mould is a redeco and retool of the tooling used the year before for Bluestreak and Prowl, given a much larger front fender and a rear spoiler.
• The "38" on his hood is not a reversed "83": the real car raced under both numbers, 38 being used once, at the 6 Hours of Fuji on 3 October 1982. Hasbro intended to replace the decal with an Autobot insignia, as shown in the box art, instructions and the cartoon, but the final toy kept it.
• In the original storyboards for The Transformers: The Movie it was Smokescreen, not Wheeljack, who lay dead near the launcher at Autobot City; the establishing shot even shows a Smokescreen-coloured corpse.
• Early animation and the 1985 Autobot Cars commercial use an outdated model that renders his red parts a purplish maroon and his grey parts the same shade as his tyres.

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.

• Whether he was ever meant to die at Autobot City: the original storyboards put his corpse where Wheeljack's ended up, and the change is never acknowledged in the finished film.
• His origin differs entirely between continuities, an unexplained mid-series arrival in the cartoon versus a Mind Bank reconstruction from a stored crystalline mind in Marvel.
• Whether the toy's "38" hood decal should be there at all, given the packaging art, instructions and cartoon all replace it with an Autobot insignia.