Ironhide

Ironhide is the oldest and toughest Autobot on Optimus Prime's roster, a veteran who has been at Prime's side since long before the Ark launched. The character is built on an obsolescence joke that turns into a virtue: he is yesterday's model, visibly cruder than the Autobot cars around him, and he has outlasted most of them. Gruff, ornery and impatient with discussion for its own sake, he prefers to shoot first and argue afterwards, which makes him the bluntest voice in Prime's command staff and, frequently, the one who is wrong.

His temper is a genuine liability rather than a running gag. In "The Immobilizer" he damages Wheeljack's device by handling it too enthusiastically, then loses the repaired weapon to the Decepticons on his watch and resigns from active duty in disgust - a resignation Prime accepts with visible unease. He spends the rest of the episode redeeming himself off the books, swimming down to Decepticon headquarters to rescue Carly, and finishes it back on duty and watching Spike's date with the closest thing G1 has to paternal pride.

The other side of him is loyalty. In "The Search for Alpha Trion" he takes Inferno and Powerglide to Cybertron after Prime disappears alone, and orders an attack the moment Starscream claims to have melted Prime down. That mission also delivers the rare piece of Ironhide backstory that is not about war, when he reunites with Chromia, his old flame among Elita One's Cybertronian resistance.

The heaviest armour on the early Autobot roster and a hand-to-hand fighter who keeps going after damage that would finish others. His signature weapon generates and sprays liquid of almost any composition - liquid nitrogen most often, but also acids and setting mortar - and his van mode splits, the rear section becoming a weapons platform mounting a missile launcher and a static laser gun. Limits: he is slow, outdated and no match for massed firepower, his liquid weapon is useless against sufficiently powerful opponents, and his temper repeatedly puts him in fights he cannot finish.

• Optimus Prime: his commander of very long standing and effectively his bodyguard; Ironhide's death is the film's first proof that Megatron will not be reasoned with.
• Chromia: his old flame, reunited with him on Cybertron in "The Search for Alpha Trion".
• Spike and Sparkplug Witwicky: the humans he is quietly protective of, standing with Sparkplug to watch Spike's date at the end of "The Immobilizer".
• Wheeljack: whose experimental hardware Ironhide keeps breaking, the show's most reliable friction between old soldier and scientist.

Marvel's Ironhide is a fixture of the early Earth stories, bickering constantly with Huffer, and in the UK epic "Target: 2006" he does something the cartoon version never would: humiliated by Galvatron, he digs Megatron out of a landslide with his bare hands and brokers an Autobot-Decepticon alliance. He is also not killed in 2005 - he is revived with Nucleon in 1990 and fights in the final battle against Unicron.

Killed in The Transformers: The Movie, gunned down defending the shuttle and finished off by Megatron at point-blank range. His grave is later listed aboard the interstellar Autobot Mausoleum, and his remains are destroyed along with it when a Quintesson plot plunges the mausoleum into a red sun.

• Bob Budiansky named him after the TV detective series Ironside, whose lead was likewise a grizzled veteran.
• He and Ratchet share a mould, derived from Takara's Diaclone Onebox Nissan Cherry/Sunny Vanette - a line about human-piloted machines, so the toys have a driver's seat behind a windscreen instead of a head, with a robot face supplied as a sticker.
• Because of that seat, Ironhide's and Ratchet's cartoon and comic character models diverge further from their toys than any other 1984 Autobots; the animators simply gave them proper heads.
• Ironhide was the only Autobot Car that Takara never released at retail in Japan's original Transformers line in any form.
• Peter Cullen voiced Ironhide as well as Optimus Prime; in Canada, French dubs renamed him 'Rhino'.

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.

• The cartoon kills him in 2005; the mainline Marvel comics have him survive the war entirely, with his 2005 shuttle death appearing only in the separate 'movie future' story "The Planet-Eater!".
• His weapon is described as a liquid nitrogen gun in most bios, but the cartoon has it dispense acid, mortar and other substances interchangeably.