Wheelie

Wheelie is the odd one out among the 1986 arrivals: an Autobot, a child, and a survivor. He is the sole survivor of a party of intergalactic colonists whose ship crashed on Quintessa, the Quintesson homeworld, and he lived alone in that wilderness long enough for it to define him. His function is listed as Survivalist and his motto is "Only the fierce shall live", which sits strangely against the small orange car and the singsong rhyming speech. The rhyming is the thing everyone remembers and the thing that made him divisive from the day he appeared.

He is introduced in The Transformers: The Movie when the Dinobots, stranded on Quintessa, encounter a feral little robot who ambushes them from cover. Grimlock does not take the offer of help seriously, so Wheelie puts a slingshot round straight between his eyes. It is a small scene that does a lot of work: it establishes that the child is not harmless, and it earns him Grimlock's respect on Grimlock's own terms. He leaves Quintessa with Hot Rod, Kup and the rest and ends up on Cybertron.

In season three he is a working Autobot rather than a mascot. In "Five Faces of Darkness" he and Blurr are handed the job of getting Metroplex's transformation cog to Earth, are shot down by Galvatron and stranded on Io among hostile lipoles, and are pulled out by Marissa Faireborn and Sky Lynx in time for the cog to be fitted and Metroplex to put Trypticon down. He is usually paired with Daniel Witwicky, the closest thing the cast has to a peer.

Transforms into a small futuristic Cybertronian car. His weapon is a slingshot that fires energy pellets, which he uses accurately enough to tag Grimlock between the eyes; his 2009 Universe Legends figure even sculpted it onto his shoulder plate. His real assets are the ones the tech spec cares about: survival skills and sheer endurance learned alone on Quintessa, plus the small size and speed that make him useful for stealth and courier work, which is exactly why he draws the Metroplex cog run. His weaknesses are structural and obvious. He is tiny, lightly armed and physically outmatched by almost any full-size opponent, he relies on ambush and cover rather than firepower, and his compulsive rhyming makes him hard for other Autobots to take seriously.

• Grimlock: mutual respect earned the hard way, with a slingshot round to the face, after which the Dinobot takes the little Autobot seriously.
• Blurr: partnered on the Metroplex cog run and stranded together on Io, a mismatched pairing of the fastest Autobot and the smallest.
• Daniel Witwicky: his closest friend and near-peer, the two of them constantly in trouble together through season three and into the Japanese Headmasters series.
• Hot Rod and Kup: the crew that takes him off Quintessa and back to Cybertron in the movie, effectively adopting him.

The Marvel US book never really used him. His significant comics role is in Simon Furman's Marvel UK future stories, where he stays on Quintessa and works as Rodimus Prime's man on the ground, reporting on local activity and earning his reputation by helping rescue Wreck-Gar and expose the Quintessons in "Space Pirates!". That is a considerably more purposeful character than the cartoon's tagalong. IDW's "Spotlight: Wheelie" rebuilds him from scratch as a genuinely tragic figure: rejected by the Autobots as too small, crash-landed and irradiated on an alien world, losing a limb, and taught to rhyme by an alien named Varta whom the Decepticons then shoot in the face.

In the American cartoon he simply stops appearing after standing sentry in "The Return of Optimus Prime, Part 1", with no ending written for him. The Japanese Headmasters series carries him on to 2011 as a sulking, non-rhyming teenager still attached to Daniel, and the Headmasters manga has him see the Autobots off from Earth. In Marvel UK's future timeline he remains on Quintessa as Rodimus Prime's informant.

• Wheelie is voiced by Frank Welker in English and Kazue Komiya in Japanese. In his first toy commercial Welker used a much deeper, darker voice with no rhyming, sounding nothing like the shrill character in the film.
• His designer Floro Dery dislikes him. Dery has said Wheelie is the Transformers design he most regrets, possibly the only one.
• His 1986 figure was the only entirely new mould among the third series of Mini-Vehicles; every other 1986 Mini-Vehicle was a reissue or redeco.
• The mould was later redecoed as Dion, an old friend of Optimus Prime's, and the 2005 Japanese Transformers Collection reissue changed his face from orange to grey.
• He is called Scooter in some non-movie foreign dubs, Saetta in the Italian movie dub and Tourbillo in French Canada.
• In the Japanese Headmasters series and Dreamwave's "Passive Aggression" he drops the rhyming entirely, which many fans consider an improvement.

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.

• Wheelie is frequently described as a Junkion or as Junkion-adjacent because he arrives in the movie's Junk-planet stretch of the story alongside Wreck-Gar's people. He is not one. Both his tech spec and the fiction make him the sole survivor of a colonist ship that crashed on Quintessa, unconnected to the Junkions.
• "The Return of Optimus Prime, Part 1" contains a plain continuity error: Sky Lynx lists Wheelie among the Autobots shot by Superion, but on screen it was Kup in his place, and Wheelie is replaced by Blaster in Part 2.