Optimus Prime

Optimus Prime is the commander of the Autobot forces and the moral centre of Generation 1, a figure defined less by firepower than by the weight he carries. The cartoon gives him a civilian origin: in "War Dawn" he is Orion Pax, a naive dock worker on Cybertron who is duped and gutted by Megatron, then rebuilt by Alpha Trion into a battle-hardened frame and handed the Matrix of Leadership. That beginning matters, because it explains a leader who never quite stops thinking like a bystander who was pulled into a war.

On Earth he is the Autobots' strategist, front-line fighter and conscience, usually the last to shoot and the first to shield a human. His compassion is written into his own tech spec as his only real weakness, and the Decepticons exploit it constantly. In "Divide and Conquer" he takes a fatal-grade wound shielding human workers and spends most of the episode dying on a table while his troops scramble for a replacement cosmitron. In "A Prime Problem" Megatron builds a clone of him that the Autobots cannot tell apart, and it is only the clone's contempt for Spike's safety that exposes it, a neat demonstration that Prime is identified by his ethics rather than his abilities.

He is not infallible. He accepts Megatron's rigged terms in "Heavy Metal War" and loses, he is repeatedly outmanoeuvred, and his refusal to finish an enemy prolongs the war. The cartoon's writers also leaned on him hard: he dies, returns as a Quintesson-controlled corpse, and is resurrected again, to the point that dying became part of the character's furniture. What holds it together is Peter Cullen's performance, which plays authority as gentleness rather than volume.

Immensely strong for his size and a capable hand-to-hand fighter, armed with an ion blaster and, in the cartoon, an energon axe; his trailer converts into a combat deck and repair bay and he deploys the drone Roller for scouting. He carries the Matrix of Leadership, which stores the wisdom of past Autobot leaders and is used as a weapon of last resort against the Hate Plague. Limits: he is slow and lacks any real stealth, his separated components can be attacked independently, single internal parts such as the cosmitron are catastrophic failure points, and his refusal to press an advantage repeatedly costs the Autobots the win.

• Megatron: his exact opposite and lifelong nemesis, the two leaders repeatedly settling the war by single combat.
• Elita One: originally Ariel, his partner before the war, rebuilt by Alpha Trion from Prime's own schematics.
• Ironhide: his oldest soldier and de facto bodyguard, the bluntest voice in his command staff.
• Hot Rod / Rodimus Prime: the successor who takes the Matrix from his dying hands in 1986 and never stops being measured against him.

Marvel's Optimus Prime has no Orion Pax phase; he was a gladiatorial champion for Iacon who rose fast through the Autobot ranks, and he personally chose to crash the Ark into Earth, a decision he carries as guilt. He also dies very differently, allowing himself to be destroyed after breaking his own moral code inside a video game, surviving as a mind on a floppy disk and returning as a Powermaster bonded to the Nebulan Hi-Q.

Killed by Megatron at the Battle of Autobot City in The Transformers: The Movie (2005), passing the Matrix to Ultra Magnus; briefly reanimated as a Quintesson puppet in "Dark Awakening" before restoring the Matrix and apparently dying again. Fully resurrected in the season three story "The Return of Optimus Prime", he cures the Hate Plague and remains in command through "The Rebirth".

• Bob Budiansky credits comics writer Denny O'Neil with naming Optimus Prime before Budiansky joined the project; 'optimus' is Latin for 'best'.
• His Japanese name is Convoy, taken from the toy's pre-Transformers Diaclone identity 'Battle Convoy', reportedly because 'Optimus Prime' was considered hard for Japanese children to say. Takara Tomy only began using 'Optimus Prime' for the G1 character after the 2007 live-action film.
• 'Orion Pax' combines the Greek huntsman Orion with the Latin 'pax', meaning peace, and his early cartoon design appears to be based on a discarded Ultra Magnus concept.
• An early Marvel-style profile listed his official nicknames as 'Autobot Commander', 'Chief', 'Big Boss' and 'Roller' - the last of which is also literally part of him.
• Peter Cullen voiced both Optimus Prime and Ironhide in the same series, giving the Autobot leader and his oldest soldier the same actor.

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.

• Origin: the cartoon makes him the civilian Orion Pax rebuilt by Alpha Trion; Marvel makes him a gladiator who rose through the ranks with no rebuild.
• Death and resurrection: the cartoon kills and revives him repeatedly across 1986-87, while Marvel's death (issue 24) and Powermaster return are an entirely separate sequence of events.
• Production accounts have long attributed his season three resurrection to the reaction to his on-screen death, but the causal chain is anecdotal rather than documented.