Swoop

Swoop was built in the second wave with Snarl, created by Wheeljack expressly to fight the original Dinobots after Megatron manipulated Grimlock, Slag and Sludge into joining the Decepticons in "War of the Dinobots". The two newcomers could only force a stalemate; it took Optimus Prime risking himself to save Grimlock from an exploding meteorite to bring the originals back. Swoop stayed on as the Dinobots' air support and, quietly, as the one member of the team anybody could actually talk to.

He is the friendliest and most outgoing of the five, good-natured, kind and upbeat, and almost nobody knows it. The Dinobots' collective reputation and Swoop's own alt mode, which other Transformers find particularly horrifying to look at, keep others at a distance long before they learn anything about him. Swoop has turned that into a weapon, deliberately using the fear his pteranodon form generates and considering it his single greatest asset. Underneath, the insecurity shows. He is a show-off who needs the reaction, and like every Dinobot he is arrogant, disobedient and openly unimpressed by Optimus Prime's leadership style.

His best moment came out of that decency. When the Dinobots deserted during the Cybertonium crisis in "Desertion of the Dinobots" and Grimlock decided to crush Sparkplug, Spike and Carly for following them, it was Swoop who intervened, on the grounds that he wanted to hear the humans out first. On Cybertron, when Shockwave captured and reprogrammed the rest of the team into mine labour, Swoop was the only one to escape. He found Spike and Carly deep in the planet's organic core, freed his teammates and got the Cybertonium shipment back to Earth.

Swoop is an excellent aerial combatant and the Dinobots' bombardier, transforming into a robotic pteranodon and attacking from above with bombing runs, a thermal sword and two spring-loaded missile launchers, the only Dinobot with two projectile weapons and no conventional gun. On Quintessa he improvised by using Sharkticons themselves as bombs. His most reliably effective asset is psychological: other Transformers find his beast mode genuinely frightening and he plays on it deliberately. The weaknesses are the shared Dinobot slow-wittedness and, specific to him, insecurity. His need to perform makes him reckless in the air, and he badly wants the acceptance the rest of the Autobot ranks will not give him. He is also physically the most fragile of the team, which the notoriously breakable 1985 toy reflects rather too well.

• Grimlock: loyal to him, but the one Dinobot willing to talk him down, as when he stopped Grimlock from killing the Witwickys.
• Optimus Prime: shares the Dinobot disdain for his leadership style while being the least personally hostile of the five.
• Wheeljack: built him as a counter-Dinobot alongside Snarl, which makes their relationship a strange one.
• Spike and Carly Witwicky: teamed with them inside Cybertron to free the reprogrammed Dinobots, the closest thing any Dinobot has to a human friendship on screen.

Marvel rewrites him from the ground up. He was never built to fight the other Dinobots; he was original Ark crew, converted along with the other four by the Ark itself using Savage Land data and sent against Shockwave in "The Last Stand", a battle that ended with all of them sunk in a tar pit for millions of years until Ratchet excavated them. Marvel also gives him a pre-Earth identity the cartoon has no equivalent for: on Cybertron he served in the Autobots' Elite Flying Corps under the name Divebomb, and after disobeying an order from Optimus Prime he was beaten by the Predacon now called Divebomb, who took his name, starting a grudge that ran for years. He was nearly destroyed flying the booby-trapped Guardian droid away from the Ark, then recovered and mind-controlled by Professor Morris, then driven mad along with the rest when his cybo-dendrons burned out during "Dinobot Hunt!". The Earthforce strips give him the team's cleverest moment, engineering the transfer of the dying Snarl's mind into a living stegosaurus, and he personally kills Bludgeon in "Another Time and Place". Marvel's Dinobots also answer to Grimlock as actual Autobot leader.

Swoop comes through G1 intact. He fights Devastator at the Battle of Autobot City in the 1986 movie, is stranded on Quintessa with Hot Rod and Kup and uses Sharkticons as bombs during the escape, and stays with the Dinobots on Cybertron through season three, appearing in "Grimlock's New Brain" and "Call of the Primitives", plus the Japanese Headmasters series. In Marvel he is critically damaged by the Underbase-powered Starscream, rebuilt with Pretender technology and restored with Nucleon at Hydrus Four, and fights on through the Unicron conflict and Generation 2.

• His preliminary names during development were "Wing" and "Divebomb", and Marvel later built a whole backstory around the second one.
• The toy is a converted Diaclone Dinosaur Robo Pteranodon. Whoever drew the animation model worked from the Diaclone toy rather than the Transformers release, which is why cartoon Swoop has a blue chest and gold beak and missiles while the toy's die-cast chest is red.
• Swoop's beak and tail were rounded off from the Diaclone original for safety reasons, and the remoulding left the tail sticker no longer fitting properly.
• He is one of the most fragile G1 toys ever made, and intact examples command a serious premium on the secondary market. In Japan he was the cheapest Dinobot in the Operation Combination mail-away at 1800 yen, against 2300 for the others.
• Michael Bell voiced him in the US cartoon and Yoku Shioya in Japan.
• Thanks to the Robo-Capers strip in the UK comic, Swoop holds the distinction of being the first, and quite possibly only, Transformer to defecate in a licensed and approved presentation.

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: cartoon Swoop is a second-wave Dinobot built on Earth to fight the first three; Marvel Swoop is original Ark crew converted with the rest in one go.
• Prior identity: Marvel's claim that he was once an Elite Flying Corps member named Divebomb who lost the name to a Predacon has no cartoon counterpart, and Dreamwave repeats it without explaining the change.
• Colours: the cartoon model's blue chest comes from the Diaclone toy, while the actual Transformers figure and its box art have a red chest, so no single source agrees on what he looks like.
• Temperament: the toy bio's friendly, outgoing Swoop is only intermittently visible in a cartoon that mostly writes the Dinobots as one snarling block.