Waspinator

Waspinator is the joke that outlasted everyone. Scott McNeil gives him a buzzing, third-person, put-upon delivery, and the show's running gag is that he is destroyed in almost every episode he appears in and reassembled off screen. "Waspinator have plan" and "Universe hates Waspinator" became the most quoted lines in the series, and the character is by some distance the fandom's favourite Predacon.

The gag works because the show is willing to let it be bleak. Waspinator is not incompetent so much as expendable, and everybody in the cast treats him that way. Megatron sends him first into every dangerous situation. Inferno bullies him. Rattrap uses him as target practice. In "The Low Road" a crippled Rattrap still beats him. He is blown apart, dropped in lava, shot down, dismantled and used as spare parts, and he keeps coming back because nobody can be bothered to finish the job properly.

He also gets more genuine plot than the gag suggests. In "Possession" the disembodied spark of Starscream takes over his body and immediately proves to be a far more capable commander, which gives Waspinator the odd distinction of being the vessel through which G1 continuity first physically enters the show. In "Aftermath" he is the one who works out, alongside Dinobot, that they are on prehistoric Earth.

And he is the only character who gets an unambiguously happy ending. In "Nemesis (Part 1)" he quits the Predacons outright, having simply had enough. In the final scene of "Nemesis (Part 2)" the surviving proto-humans elect him their leader, and he declares that he is finally happy. The joke gets the last word.

Wasp beast mode with flight and a stinger capable of firing energy blasts; robot mode retains flight and carries hand-mounted blasters. Genuinely quick in the air. Limits: structurally fragile to a degree that is played as comedy, with the lowest survivability of any character in the series; poor tactically, easily intimidated, and treated by his own commander as a disposable first wave.

• Megatron: a commander who uses him as an expendable first wave and never pretends otherwise.
• Inferno: a fellow Predacon trooper who bullies him relentlessly and outranks him in Megatron's regard.
• Rattrap: his opposite number on the Maximal side, and the character who most consistently destroys him.
• Starscream: possesses his body in "Possession" and proves a far better commander while wearing it.

IDW's Beast Wars comics and Fun Publications material both use him largely as comic relief in line with the show. Transformers: Animated's Waspinator is an unrelated character, a mutated Bumblebee-era Autobot named Wasp, though the writers deliberately gave him a similar speech pattern as a nod. No significant divergence within Beast Wars itself.

Survives the entire war, quits the Predacons in "Nemesis (Part 1)", and is elected leader of the surviving proto-humans in the final scene of the series. He reappears in Beast Machines.

• Voiced by Scott McNeil, who has said the buzzing third-person delivery was improvised and that Waspinator's popularity took the production entirely by surprise.
• Waspinator is the third character shown transforming on screen in the series, after Dinobot and Cheetor.
• The character's constant destruction was partly a production convenience: reusing an existing model being blown apart was cheaper than animating new characters, and the CGI pipeline at Mainframe made damage states reusable.
• His original 1996 Basic-class toy was one of the line's cheapest figures, which is part of why the character was written as expendable in the first place.
• He returns in Beast Machines as one of the few Beast Wars survivors, and later Transformers continuities have repeatedly nodded to the "universe hates Waspinator" running gag.