Wheeljack

Wheeljack is the Autobots' chief scientist and, by the series' own framing, his own worst enemy. Roughly half his inventions blow up in his face, and the character model even carries the damage as a running joke. The compulsion is sincere - he builds to give the Autobots an edge - but it makes him simultaneously one of Optimus Prime's greatest assets and one of his biggest problems, since every successful gadget is paid for by another lab reconstruction courtesy of Ratchet.

His defining act is the Dinobots. In "S.O.S. Dinobots" he and Ratchet build them from fossil inspiration, they immediately run amok and wreck Autobot headquarters, and Prime orders the project abandoned. Wheeljack ignores the order and keeps developing intelligence modules for them, which is the only reason the Autobots are not lost when almost the entire force is captured at the Great Falls. He offers to accept whatever punishment Prime hands down; Prime concedes his own judgement was hasty. It is a rare G1 story where insubordination is vindicated on its merits.

The rest of his record is more mixed. "The Immobilizer" is a comprehensive humiliation - Ironhide breaks the device, Spike stands on the remote and freezes Wheeljack with his own invention, and the Decepticons then steal it. He is more reliable outside the lab than in it: a genuinely gifted stunt driver, and the Autobot sent to dig Skyfire out of the Arctic in "Fire on the Mountain", where his geyser-capping device works and he is visibly surprised.

The Autobots' leading engineer and designer, capable of building working artificial life (the Dinobots, with Ratchet), field weapons like the paralysing Wheeljack Instant Immobilizer and the magnetic inducer, force-field generators and specialist tools improvised to fit a crisis. He has bumper-mounted cutting blades, a forearm fire-extinguishing mechanism, shoulder-mounted launchers, and rare-for-an-Autobot flight via solid-fuel rocket jets in his forearms. He is an exceptional stunt driver. Limits: his inventions are unreliable to the point of being a hazard to his own side, he is not confident flying, and he is a middling combatant who is usually the one being repaired.

• Ratchet: his lab partner, co-creator of the Dinobots and the bot who reassembles him after each detonation.
• The Dinobots: his creations, built against orders and repeatedly rebuilt, upgraded and countered by him.
• Optimus Prime: the commander who shut the Dinobot project down and then publicly conceded he had been hasty.
• Ironhide: the old soldier whose impatience with delicate equipment keeps wrecking Wheeljack's work.

Marvel's Wheeljack is the Ark's engineering officer rather than a field scientist, and he mostly stays aboard the ship serving whoever currently commands the Autobots - crucially, the Dinobots there are not his creation, since they predate the crash. He is taken offline during Starscream's Underbase rampage and revived years later by Nucleon in time for the final battle with Unicron.

Killed in 2005 at the Battle of Autobot City in The Transformers: The Movie, his body shown among the dead alongside Windcharger's. He does not return in the G1 cartoon.

• Wheeljack is the first Transformer to appear in the original cartoon, and therefore the first to appear in any Transformers animation.
• His toy came from Diaclone as a Lancia Stratos Turbo, and the alternate mode and colours derive from a real racer sponsored by an airline - a private joke given he is one of the few Autobot cars explicitly able to fly.
• Takara had already produced package art for the Diaclone version; the Transformers release only replaced the upside-down '539' on the chest with an Autobot insignia. That art, not the toy, became the reference for his character model, which is why his model sheet pose is livelier than everyone else's and includes leg details the toy does not have.
• The Marvel comic and the cartoon both swiped that pose directly - two panels of issue 9, and Wheeljack's first transformation sequence in "More than Meets the Eye, Part 1".
• Storyboards for the 1986 film show Smokescreen dead in Wheeljack's place, and older drafts of the script had Wheeljack survive the Battle of Autobot City entirely; he was voiced by Chris Latta, who also played Starscream.

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.

• Film production materials contradict the finished movie: storyboards place Smokescreen's corpse where Wheeljack's appears, and earlier script drafts had him merely knocked unconscious and alive for a later Unicron subplot.
• Japanese continuity treats him as noticeably elderly - Ironhide calls him an old man in the Japanese dub of "Heavy Metal War" - which the English version does not.
• Marvel does not credit him with creating the Dinobots, unlike the cartoon.