Snarl

Snarl was not part of the original Dinobot experiment. He and Swoop were the second pair, built by Wheeljack for a specific and awkward purpose: to fight the first three. In "War of the Dinobots" Megatron had talked Grimlock, Slag and Sludge into joining the Decepticons while they guarded a mysterious meteorite, and the Autobots needed something that could physically stand up to them. Snarl and Swoop managed a stalemate rather than a win, and the crisis only ended when Optimus Prime saved Grimlock from the exploding meteorite and shamed the originals back onto the Autobot side. Snarl stayed, and folded into the Dinobot unit as its quietest member.

He is an unhappy, unsociable loner. He grudgingly follows Grimlock's orders and does very little else, leaving thinking to others, holding few opinions and voicing fewer, and his silence only deepens his isolation. He hates the ungainly stegosaur form he was given, and he hates Earth, which he sees mainly as the reason he may never see Cybertron again. The one thing that lifts it is combat. Only in battle does the ache lift, and for that reason Snarl throws himself into fighting harder than any of the other four.

He took his lumps for it. During the Constructicons' assault on the Ark in "Heavy Metal War" he helped drive the intruders out, only for the newly combined Devastator to kick him over a lava flow. He deserted with the rest of the Dinobots in "Desertion of the Dinobots", was reprogrammed by Shockwave into mine labour on Cybertron, and by season three had become slightly more talkative, enough to be the one who realised something was wrong with the resurrected Optimus Prime in "Dark Awakening".

Snarl transforms into a robotic stegosaurus armoured in gold vacuum-metallised plates that absorb solar energy and convert it into physical strength, which makes him formidable in daylight and progressively weaker without it. He wields an energo sword, an electron cannon and a three-shot rocket pod in robot mode, can fire lasers from his sword, and in "Heavy Metal War" demonstrates the ability to shoot lasers from his nostrils in beast mode; in Marvel's Earthforce he discharges solar energy directly from his spinal plates. The weaknesses are structural. He is dependent on sunlight for his power output, slow-witted and disinclined to think tactically, and his hatred of Earth and of his own stegosaur form corrodes his morale. He is also physically clumsy: Devastator kicked him off a ledge and over a lava river without much difficulty.

• Grimlock: obeys him grudgingly and without enthusiasm, which is as close to loyalty as Snarl gets.
• Optimus Prime: shares the Dinobot dislike of his leadership, though Snarl's real grievance is with Earth and his own alt mode rather than with Prime personally.
• Wheeljack: built him as a countermeasure to the Dinobots Wheeljack had already built, which is an uncomfortable thing to be.
• Sludge: his most regular pairing in season three, the two of them left on guard duty together on Cybertron.

Marvel never builds Snarl second, or on Earth. He was one of the Ark's original crew, rebuilt into a Dinobot by the Ark itself alongside Grimlock, Slag, Sludge and Swoop and sent to the Savage Land to fight Shockwave in "The Last Stand". Shockwave had the upper hand until Snarl smashed the mountainside out from under him, dropping everyone into a tar pit where they lay for millions of years until Ratchet dug them out. Like the others he went mad afterwards as his cybo-dendrons burned out during "Dinobot Hunt!". The Marvel UK Earthforce strips then give Snarl a long-running health arc with no cartoon equivalent: he contracts Corrodia Gravis, a wasting rust disease, and the only compatible donor for a systems boost is Starscream, forcing the Dinobots to save the Decepticon's life from the Mayhem Attack Squad to buy the treatment. When the disease returns and his body is beyond repair, Swoop transfers Snarl's mind into a living stegosaurus in the Savage Land, where he is left in a human paleontologist's care until a new body can be built. Marvel's Dinobots also serve Grimlock as Autobot leader outright.

In the cartoon Snarl survives. He is conspicuously absent from the Battle of Autobot City in the 1986 movie but turns up in its aftermath, and remains with the Dinobots on Cybertron through season three, appearing in "Grimlock's New Brain", "Call of the Primitives" and "Dark Awakening", plus the Japanese Headmasters series. In Marvel continuity he is critically damaged by the Underbase-powered Starscream, rebuilt with Pretender technology and then restored with Nucleon at Hydrus Four, and fights against Unicron on Cybertron. In the separate Earthforce timeline his mind ends up housed in a living stegosaurus.

• His preliminary name during development was "Stegobot".
• The toy originated in Takara's Diaclone Dinosaur Robo line. Hasbro dropped the Diaclone driver mini-figure and repainted the robot mode's black torso red so he would match the rest of the Dinobot team.
• Snarl is the only original Dinobot to get an Action Master figure, released in 1990 with a transforming animal partner named Tyrannitron, making him the only carded returning-character Autobot Action Master in the US line to get an animal partner instead of a giant accessory.
• The Generation 2 line put the mould through three colours: a silver re-release without the missile launcher, then green, then red. The red is the most common; green and silver command more on the secondary market.
• Hal Rayle voiced him in the US cartoon; Ken Shiroyama in Japan.
• The Beast Machines-era Dinobot Striker's toy bio hints he is one of the original G1 Dinobots, and his stegosaur mode and energy-absorbing spinal plates point squarely at Snarl.

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 and creation order: the cartoon builds him second, on Earth, as a weapon against the first three Dinobots; Marvel creates all five at once from Ark crew.
• Solar dependence: his power source is established by the toy bio and used in Marvel's Earthforce, but the cartoon never dramatises it as a limitation.
• Fate: Marvel UK's Earthforce leaves his mind in an organic stegosaurus, which cannot be reconciled with the main Marvel continuity where he fights Unicron in his own body.
• Personality: the toy bio's profoundly unhappy, near-silent loner is barely visible in a cartoon that mostly treats him as interchangeable Dinobot muscle.