Thundercracker

Thundercracker is the Decepticon who is quietly unsure he should be one. His Hasbro tech spec is unusually candid about it: contemptuous of anything that cannot fly, but not totally convinced of the Decepticon cause, with those doubts sometimes impeding his effectiveness. That single line has kept fans writing about a character who, in the cartoon itself, mostly stands behind Megatron and complains. He looks down on the grounded as lesser beings and will strafe them purely to satisfy his scorn, yet he also carries a strain of sympathy for the humans the Decepticons terrorise, and it is fear of Megatron and the pull of his peers that keeps burying it.

In the show he is one of Megatron's elite from the moment of the Ark's boarding, and after four million years under Mount St. Hilary he wakes with the rest. In "More Than Meets the Eye, Part 1" it is Thundercracker and Reflector who spot what they take for a potential Autobot and instead make the Decepticons' first contact with human beings in a car. He hates Earth for being flat, and he hates Starscream considerably more. Across the first two seasons his defining behaviour is picking fights with his own Air Commander, almost always taking Megatron's side against Starscream's latest complaint that a plan is a waste of time.

The telling thing is that his disloyalty never goes anywhere. He grumbles, sulks and needles, and at his most treacherous he is willing to let a Decepticon weapon be lost purely so Starscream catches the blame. He never acts. That gap between an interesting written profile and an inert screen presence is exactly what makes Thundercracker the character fans have spent forty years filling in themselves, and it is why later continuities, particularly IDW's, gave him the conscience the cartoon only hinted at.

Flight at up to 1,500 mph in F-15 Eagle mode, and his signature weapon is sound itself: he generates controlled sonic booms audible for 200 miles, capable of shattering structures and disorienting opponents. He carries drone rockets and an incendiary gun, and in robot mode uses the standard Seeker arm-mounted launchers. His documented weaknesses are psychological rather than mechanical. The tech spec states plainly that his doubts about the Decepticon cause sometimes impede his effectiveness, meaning he can hesitate or underperform in combat; he also needs constant reassurance from his fellow Decepticons to stay committed. In the cartoon he shares the Seekers' general vulnerability to being shot down and repaired again by the following episode.

• Skywarp: his close friend and wingmate, the other half of the Starscream trine; Thundercracker is the smarter of the two and knows it, which is one of the few things he is genuinely sure about.
• Starscream: nominally his Air Commander, actually the Decepticon he most despises; he picks fights with Starscream constantly and at his worst hopes to see him blamed for Decepticon losses.
• Megatron: the authority he sides with in every Starscream argument, and the fear that keeps his doubts about the cause buried.
• Unicron: his final relationship, in the most literal sense, as Unicron scavenges his discarded body to build Scourge.

Marvel gives Thundercracker essentially no inner life at all. He is, as the wiki puts it, the one who is not Skywarp: a background Seeker distinguishable from his wingmate mainly by colour. There is no sympathy for humans, no visible doubt about the cause, and no running feud with Starscream. He raids Sparkplug Witwicky's repair shop, defends the Decepticon base against Gears and Spider-Man, strafes Jazz and Sunstreaker with Skywarp, is poisoned along with the rest by Sparkplug's sabotaged fuel, and later falls in battle against Omega Supreme. The Marvel UK material complicates matters by having him revive early from stasis and get displaced into Limbo during the "Target 2006" storyline, to the point that the UK reprint of "Totalled!" had to be edited to remove references to him. His end there is also different: he and Skywarp are killed by the Underbase-empowered Starscream in Tokyo. Post-Marvel, IDW is the continuity that actually built on the tech spec, making Thundercracker a professional soldier disgusted by the pointless slaughter of humans who ultimately stops a nuclear strike on New York.

In the cartoon Thundercracker is badly injured at the Battle of Autobot City in 2005 and is dumped out of Astrotrain along with the other wounded Decepticons to lighten the load. Unicron gathers the floating bodies and uses Thundercracker as raw material to build Scourge, one of Galvatron's new officers, ending Thundercracker as a distinct character. In Marvel he is deactivated in battle with Omega Supreme and held in stasis at Autobot headquarters, is eventually revived, and is finally destroyed alongside Skywarp in Tokyo by an Underbase-powered Starscream in "Dark Star!".

• The Seeker mould began life in Takara's pre-Transformers Diaclone line as the "Jet Robo Acrobat-Type"; Thundercracker, Starscream and Skywarp are the same F-15 Eagle toy in different decos, and the mould was later reused for Dirge, Ramjet, Thrust and Sunstorm.
• By 1986 Thundercracker had left retail shelves and was offered instead as a mail-away in the "Digital Doom on the Highway to Destruction" flier, costing $10 and two robot points.
• He was voiced by John Stephenson, with Wally Burr also filling the role, rather than by Frank Welker who handled Skywarp.
• The Seekers' near-identical animation models produced some of G1's most notorious colour errors, with Skywarp and Thundercracker repeatedly turning up painted in each other's or Starscream's schemes, and duplicate Starscreams appearing in the same shot.
• Thundercracker inexplicably appears in the crowd at Starscream's coronation in The Transformers: The Movie, despite having been jettisoned into space and rebuilt as Scourge earlier in the same film.
• The 1996 Machine Wars toy line gave Thundercracker a green Dassault Rafale body and branded him a "Rebel Warrior", flipping his bio so that he was finally committed to the Decepticon cause but in open revolt against Megatron.

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 tech spec's claim of sympathy for humans has no support in the cartoon or comics; no episode or issue ever actually shows him acting on it.
• Which movie body he became: the film never states it on screen, and the identification of Thundercracker as Scourge is derived from production material and fan consensus rather than dialogue.
• His movie appearance at Starscream's coronation contradicts his own on-screen jettisoning and reformatting earlier in the same film.
• Marvel UK and Marvel US disagree on his status after "Target 2006", to the extent that the UK printing of "Totalled!" was altered to remove him.