Starscream

Starscream is the Decepticon Air Commander and the most consistently disloyal second-in-command in television history. He is introduced alongside Megatron in "More Than Meets the Eye" and by Part 3 of that first serial he has already attempted a coup aboard the departing Decepticon cruiser, an attempt that goes so badly it lets the Autobot stowaway Mirage sabotage the ship and drop it back onto Earth. That is the template for eighty episodes: Starscream identifies a genuine flaw in Megatron's plan, announces it at volume, moves against him, and folds the instant the plan requires personal risk.

What makes him work is that he is not merely a joke. He is a legitimately dangerous flier and, in "Countdown to Extinction", a serious enough threat that Megatron has to ally with Optimus Prime to stop him from destroying the planet. Exiled from the Decepticons in "Starscream's Brigade", he does not sulk; he digs up derelict Cybertronian military hardware and builds himself the Combaticons, which is both his most competent act and, since Bruticus promptly turns on him, his most Starscream-ish.

His place in the hierarchy is a kind of institutionalised sedition. Megatron never executes him, Soundwave never stops reporting him, and the arrangement holds because Starscream is useful and because his failures reinforce Megatron's authority. Chris Latta's shrieking, nasal delivery fixes the character permanently: every line sounds like a complaint being filed. He remains the franchise's archetype of the treacherous lieutenant, copied in nearly every Transformers continuity since, and the only G1 character whose defining trait is that he is never quite good enough to win.

Transforms into an F-15 Eagle and is among the fastest Decepticons, capable of high-supersonic flight and precise aerial strikes. His signature weapons are wing-mounted null rays, which jam the flow of electrical impulses in a target and can shut a Transformer down without destroying it, plus cluster bombs and standard aerial ordnance. He is also a competent scientist and engineer, resourceful enough to rebuild derelict Cybertronian war machines into the Combaticons. His tech-spec weaknesses are unusually blunt and are borne out on screen: his airframe cannot take the stress of sustained high-speed manoeuvring, and his courage collapses under pressure, so he abandons fights he is winning. Repeated damage across the series leaves him progressively less reliable in a straight fight.

• Megatron: the central relationship of the series. Starscream is Air Commander, chief strategist and permanent assassin-in-waiting, openly gloating whenever Megatron is presumed dead and instantly grovelling when he is not. Megatron responds with contempt, casual violence and, crucially, never execution, because Starscream is too effective an officer to lose and too incompetent a plotter to fear. It ends in The Transformers: The Movie when Starscream personally jettisons the wounded Megatron from Astrotrain and crowns himself, only for the reformatted Galvatron to vaporise him mid-ceremony.
• Skyfire: his pre-war exploration partner, abandoned in the Arctic and later shot down by Starscream himself once Skyfire sides with the Autobots.
• Soundwave: his natural counterweight, the officer who consistently detects and reports his plotting to Megatron.
• Thundercracker and Skywarp: his Seeker wingmates, nominally under his command and visibly unconvinced by him.

Marvel's Starscream is far more dangerous and far less funny. The treachery is still there, but it is calculating rather than compulsive, and he spends long stretches serving whoever is currently in charge, including Shockwave, with whom he later allies to salvage the Ark. His defining arc is the Underbase saga, where he absorbs a fraction of the Underbase's cosmic power and slaughters a large portion of both armies before the energy tears him apart. Even that is not the end: Megatron recovers his corpse and revives him as a mindless Pretender slave, from which he gradually claws back his own will. The comic also gives him a genuine command role, leading his own splinter faction at points, rather than the cartoon's permanent runner-up status.

In cartoon continuity Starscream jettisons the dying Megatron from Astrotrain, declares himself Decepticon leader, and is disintegrated by Galvatron during his own coronation in The Transformers: The Movie. His spirit survives, and he returns in season three as a ghost in 'Starscream's Ghost' and 'Ghost in the Machine' before being sealed away. In Marvel continuity he is instead destroyed by the Underbase energies, revived by Megatron as a Pretender, and continues on into later stories, a considerably longer run than the cartoon allows him.

• The toy comes from Takara's Diaclone Jet Robo, an F-15 Eagle originally sold with a pilot figure. The same mould was recoloured into Skywarp and Thundercracker and retooled into the 'Coneheads' Ramjet, Thrust and Dirge, which is why so much of the Decepticon air force shares one silhouette.
• Chris Latta gave Starscream the strangled, nasal shriek that defines the character. Latta was simultaneously voicing Cobra Commander on G.I. Joe, and the two performances are audibly cousins.
• His reign as Decepticon leader in the 1986 movie lasts roughly forty seconds, from placing the crown on his head to being disintegrated by Galvatron.
• Season three resurrects him as a ghost, an unusually supernatural device for G1, across 'Starscream's Ghost' and 'Ghost in the Machine'.
• The Marvel comics gave him the single largest body count in G1: the Underbase saga, where a cosmically empowered Starscream kills dozens of Transformers before the energies destroy him.

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.

• Fandom disagrees on whether cartoon Starscream is genuinely competent or purely a comic foil; his performances in 'Countdown to Extinction' and 'Starscream's Brigade' are the usual evidence for the former.
• The toy bio presents him as a serious, arrogant air commander with no hint of the cartoon's shrieking cowardice, and the Marvel version follows the bio far more closely than the show does.
• His ghost's rules are never consistent between 'Starscream's Ghost' and 'Ghost in the Machine', and the two episodes are frequently cited as contradicting each other on what he can possess and why.