Cliffjumper

Cliffjumper is the Autobots' shortest fuse. His tech spec motto is "Let me at 'em", and the bio credits him with unequalled eagerness and daring while noting, in the same breath, that his recklessness leads to actual blow-outs and to situations he cannot handle. He is one of the fastest Autobots and often uses that speed deliberately to draw fire away from others, which is the honourable side of the same impulse that gets him swatted aside by Megatron and Starscream within minutes of each other in "Transport to Oblivion".

His carelessness has consequences from the first episode. In "More than Meets the Eye, Part 1" he invites himself onto Hound's recon mission, takes a shot he misses, and gets Hound wrecked in a ravine for it. He fires on a rock formation he mistakes for a Decepticon and nearly buries Optimus Prime and Ironhide in the avalanche. In "Changing Gears" he hurls himself bodily into an energy field to short it out, over everyone's objections, and it works.

The episode that defines him is "Traitor". Convinced that Mirage is a Decepticon sympathiser on very thin evidence, he keeps up the accusation after Optimus Prime orders him to drop it, shadows Mirage to the Decepticon power station, and is nearly proved right when Bombshell's cerebro-shell turns Mirage into a genuine liability. When the truth comes out he collapses across Mirage's body and asks Ratchet to repair him for not trusting a comrade, which is about as close to introspection as he gets. He is not stupid, and he apologises when he is wrong, but he never once slows down.

One of the fastest Autobots, often deliberately using his speed to pull enemy fire off slower comrades, and armed with glass gas, which embrittles metal on contact so it shatters like glass. The limits are stark: he finds Earth terrain a hindrance, his recklessness causes literal blow-outs, and the glass gas is far from a universal answer. Megatron simply shrugs it off in "Heavy Metal War", Devastator disperses the burst with a sweep of his arm in "The Master Builders", and Nightbird plugs the nozzle in "Enter the Nightbird". He is also small and lightly built, and is repeatedly swatted aside by heavier Decepticons without landing a meaningful hit.

• Mirage: the running antagonism that drives "Traitor", though it began with Cliffjumper genuinely complimenting Mirage's fighting in "More than Meets the Eye, Part 2".
• Hound: the scout whose first mission he ruins and who refuses to hold it against him; the two work together comfortably afterwards.
• Optimus Prime: repeatedly has to physically restrain or lecture him, over collateral damage, over Nightbird, and over the Mirage accusations.
• Jazz: captured alongside him at the Optimus Prime memorial in "Starscream's Brigade" and stripped of his energy absorber to build the Combaticons.

Marvel makes his glass gas look genuinely fearsome, having him single-handedly drive off Starscream and Thundercracker with it in the very first issue, whereas the cartoon uses it mostly as a punchline that Megatron, Devastator and Nightbird all neutralise. The cartoon also gives him the paranoid, accusatory streak that peaks in "Traitor", a trait Marvel never really develops.

Like the rest of the 1984 cast he is written out of the cartoon after the second season and does not feature in the post-movie episodes. In the Marvel-derived Classics continuity he was crippled during Starscream's Underbase rampage, shipped to Cybertron and left on life support for fifteen years, then briefly flatlined again on waking when he learned the war had ended without him.

• His pre-production name was "Blow-Out", used in a 1984 Marvel Age article announcing the comic and, oddly, once in the storybook The Great Car Rally, where he is called Cliffjumper everywhere else.
• The toy is a Micro Change "MC-04" super-deformed Porsche 924, closer in detail to the Carrera GTR racecar than the Turbo. Despite the common belief, it is not a redeco of Bumblebee; it is an entirely separate mould that happens to use the same transformation scheme.
• Both Cliffjumper and Bumblebee were sold in red and yellow during the line's first two years, a deliberate move that former Hasbro R&D vice-president George Dunsay said was intended to make the range look bigger.
• A yellow Micro Change Familia 1500XG was also sold on Cliffjumper cards in 1984 in tiny numbers. Fans treated it as a separate character, "Bumper", rather than a Cliffjumper variant, and it was officially recognised as its own character decades later.
• In his sole Ladybird Books appearance, "Laserbeak's Fury", he is coloured yellow to match the toy's other colour variant.

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.

• Toy colour versus screen colour: he was sold in both red and yellow, and the Ladybird book colours him yellow, while the cartoon and comics are firmly red.
• The effectiveness of glass gas varies wildly between the Marvel comic, where it routs Seekers, and the cartoon, where it is repeatedly shrugged off.
• Fandom long treated his toy as a Bumblebee redeco, which the mould tooling contradicts.