Western Animation / Transformers: Animated

"Heroes are the ones who make the hard choices."

Bumblebee: But we're repair 'bots! We're not programmed for this kind of action!
Optimus Prime: Then consider this an upgrade!

Debuting in December 2007 with a three-episode-long "pilot movie", Animated, despite being an Alternate Continuity, was created to ride the popularity of Transformers (2007) and, as a result, borrows several aspects of the film. Despite severe fan reactions to the character designs and animation style, the show's story and scripting (and a healthy respect to the saga as a whole) have won over many converts in short order.

A long time after the Decepticons were defeated in the Great War, a group of maintenance Autobots (Optimus Prime, Ratchet, Bulkhead, Prowl and Bumblebee) discover the coveted Transformer artifact called "The AllSpark". When they're attacked by the exiled Decepticons, their ship crash-lands on Earth in Detroit. Waking up in The Future, they befriend Sari Sumdac, 7-year-old daughter of Robotics genius Professor Isaac Sumdac, and work to maintain friendly relations with the public. However, the Decepticons aren't far behind.

The animation style of the series is quite unique, being very fluid, simplistic and organic-looking for robot characters. This separates it from the more rugged designs of other parts of the franchise, while also allowing for some really stylistic animesque action scenes.

Other unique aspects of the show include the main Autobot team are not the upper hierarchy of leadership but instead low level maintenance workers, most of their weapons are re-purposed tools and the "Prime" in Optimus' name is a military designation equivalent to a captain and does not make him The Chosen One. The Decepticons are also defined as big and powerful enemies, with most towering over the Autobots; a Great Offscreen War infers the Autobots had only won due to strategy and control of the spacebridge network. Even one 'Con requires the entire team to work together just to contain them, but they are scattered and at odds with each other. Most of the time, Megatron is planning some sort of Evil Plan to avoid detection while still furthering his plans. He is dangerous, but doesn't want to deal with the entire Autobot Elite Guard before he's ready. While the Decepticons are largely violent thugs there is some truth to a belief they are fighting against a caste system that places them at the bottom rung; corruption, prejudice and stagnant social structures can be seen in the Autobot leadership.

To maintain the Decepticons as serious enemies, humans comprise the bulk of the Autobots' enemies for the first two seasons. Some are joke villains who are only petty thieves, but others are legitimate threats through technology or mutations. Other unique features of the show are that the Transformers are very well-known among the community (which hasn't really been done since Generation 1), and there is a noticeable lack of Hero Insurance. The humans are unhappy with the collateral damage, and the Autobots maintain their good graces by repairing the city (after all, they are construction workers.)

The show lasted three seasons and although somewhat cut short on production plans (they were hoping for a fourth season) the last episode was written to serve as a respectable Grand Finale, concluding the overall Myth Arc. Hasbro partnered with Discovery Communications to launch the Hub, the home of the next Transformers series, Prime. Cartoon Network stopped airing the show almost as soon as the finale aired. Plans for Season 4 involved helping Sari gain more development, as Executive Meddling from Hasbro demoted her to a secondary recurring character in Season 3.

The show overall received positive reviews for storytelling and dynamic characterization, but suffered criticism for its initial art style and more Slice of Life adventures. This criticism faded quickly as the show settled into its own tone and built up its own storyline. The show has gone on to become a beloved fandom darling; even more than a decade after its pre-emptive finale, many fans continue to call for a Young Justice style resurrection. Its influence also looms large on later incarnations; in particular, its original characters Bulkhead, Lugnut, Lockdown, and Slipstream enjoy such popularity that they became part of the larger recurring character roster the franchise pulls from.

However, the series got a brief revival/continuation via the Official Fanclub and its Timelines imprint, with an exclusive toyset designed by the series' art director and a comic penned by the series' main writer, and said writer has expressed a desire to continue Season 4 via comics if any publisher is willing. In addition, the Hub itself aired reruns of the series prior to its rebranding as Discovery Family. In 2019, story editor Marty Isenberg pieced together an illustrated outline reading of the Season 4 three-part opener, "Trial of Megatron", by the original voice actors when he was invited to the UK Transformers convention (which was prohibited from being recorded, but was uploaded to YouTube by the convention's channel in August 16, 2021).

See also the character page.

---

This show provides examples of:

A-D

• Abandoned Mine: The Decepticons set up a hidden base in one. It also features prominently in the episode "Nature Calls".
• Abandoned Warehouse: Detroit has quite a few of these due to robots replacing human workers.
  • And being, well, Detroit. They reference the auto industry, with some easy extrapolations to the demise thereof, in the first episode.
  • The main characters also take residence in one of these. Not that it bothers them.
• Aborted Arc: While the show does have a conclusive ending, it does leave more than a few plot threads hanging as a result of the premature cancellation it received. Some of these leftover plot threads include...
  • Meltdown possibly coming back.
  • Where Sari's protoform came from.
  • Where Lockdown, Swindle and the other two Constructicons went.
  • The future plans of Waspinator and Blackarachnia.
• The Ace: Afterburn, in the Titan Magazine adaptation. In two consecutive issues, he leaves Optimus and Bumblebee holding the Idiot Ball, respectively. Turns out he is a sparkless drone Decepticon spy, whom Megatron quickly disposes of.
• Action-Hogging Opening: Strangely subverted with the American opening. Played straight with the Japanese opening.
• Actor Allusion:
  • In "Human Error", Human!Bulkhead is dressed like an American Football player. Likely a reference to Bill Fagerbakke's breakthrough role as Dauber, a college football player on Coach.
  • Sentinel Prime is a walking Shout-Out to The Tick, including his blue coloration, giant chin, and occasional lines like "Energon-y goodness". His character was actually designed after actor Townsend Coleman was cast.
  • Wreck-Gar (voiced by "Weird Al" Yankovic) declares "I Dare to be Stupid!" in one episode. Doubles as a Mythology Gag, as the song was also used as the Junkions' theme in The Transformers: The Movie. In another episode, he pulls out an accordion, an instrument favored by Yankovic.
  • In "Endgame, Part 1," Optimus shouts "Yessssss!"
  • Bill Fagerbakke voices a big lug who's best friends with a little yellow guy.
  • Probably unintentional, but in the Season 3 opener, Megatron fights for control of Omega Supreme while in a digital plane. (For bonus points, in that game, Corey Burton was playing the antagonist of TRON, who he based his Shockwave voice off of in the first place.)
• Adaptational Badass: The Decepticons in general. While individual Autobots can defeat Deceptions on their own in other continuities, it takes a team of Autobots to defeat just one of them here. Many of them also tend to be a head than bots with Optimus Prime's size.
  • Waspinator. In Beast Wars he was pretty much the biggest Butt-Monkey in the history of Transformers. In this series, as Wasp he was one of the Autobot Academy's most promising candidates (despite being an overall Jerkass), before spending years in imprisonment drove him paranoid and crazy. When Blackarachnia transformed him into Waspinator, the resulting transformation is treated as a horrifying thing. Last we see of him, he's snarling his old Catchphrase, "Waspinator has plans..." What was originally a funny line in context is warped to be a sinister Ironic Echo.
  • Megatron. In the original G1 cartoon, nobody feared Megatron. Rather, they just considered him to be the bad guy. He is also the subject of goofy outward monologues that only make his followers quake in fear. This show depicts Megatron as a discount Dracula/Vlad the Impaler; a One-Man Army, feared by everyone who knows who he is, and rarely any of his enemies walk away. Not to mention that he's willing to go way further here than G1 Megatron ever did, as he willingly kills his own soldiers if they betray him (something Starscream learns quickly), he kidnaps the very person who gave him back his body and showed him nothing but kindness and holds him hostage for months, and he's a better manipulator here than he was in G1.
  • Starscream, of sorts. In G1, anyone could pick a fight with Starscream, and they very rarely lost. He is a transparent strategist with poor fighting skills, and his silver tongue is his only positive. In this version, while Starscream occasionally shows signs of cunning, he resorts to using his brute strength first to defeat his enemies. In the first episode, it takes at least five Autobots to defend Detroit against his constant attacks, and at a later point, he incapacitates Ultra Magnus in one go. Starscream is half of what Megatron is regardless, but if it takes half of a race just to arrest him, Starscream has earned his right to be his second-in-command.
• Adaptation Name Change: The All-Spark Almanac II showed a character named Primal Major, whose backstory makes it clear that he's meant to be this continuity's Optimus Primal, but with the name changed.
• Adaptational Sympathy:
  • Optimus Prime, who in most versions before and after this show is depicted as The Stoic, A Father to His Men, and The Comically Serious most of the time, due in part to having undergone Flanderization during the course of the third season of the original series—a take of which almost every Optimus has been depicted as since. While most other stories usually give Prime sympathy by having him be allies and friends with Megatron until their inevitable ideological clashes drove them apart, with a lot of the consequences of the war weighing heavily on him, this Prime had the makings to be a hero, until he was drummed out of the Autobot Academy for an incident that apparently killed a fellow cadet—an incident of which his "buddy" Sentinel Prime let him take the fall for. This leaves Prime, who's now in charge of a ragtag bunch of misfits acting as protectors of the future Detroit, with doubts about his leadership capabilities and whether or not he has what it takes to truly be a hero. Over the course of the series, he would prove this to himself and to others by growing into the hero the world knows him as.
  • This also applies to the show's version of Ratchet, a grizzled war veteran who's a Jerk with a Heart of Gold and suffers from a seriously bad case of PTSD for having fought in a horrific war, lost a patient to seemingly permanent Laser-Guided Amnesia, and essentially being forced to use a Tyke Bomb version of a WMD to end the conflict for good. His grouchy demeanor hides the scars of having gone through all that pain, but he's able to warm up and let go of his demons.
• Adaptational Villainy: Animated Waspinator is much scarier and more villainous than the Chew Toy Waspinator in Beast Wars, who spent a lot of his time being blasted to bits by other robots.
• Adaptational Weapon Swap: The original Ultra Magnus is armed with a rifle and (seldom-used) shoulder rockets. His depiction here lacks both of those weapons and instead has the giant Magnus Hammer, which has influenced later versions of the character.
• Adaptational Wimp: The rank of Prime. In most continuities it designates the Supreme Commander of the Autobots. Here it's a military rank that's held by at least three major characters and is second to Ultra Magnus, Magnus being the rank that denotes the big kahuna this time around.
• Adorably Precocious Child: Cosmos is one of the smartest characters spoken about in the Almanac, and yet he is one of the most adorable characters in the entire roster.
  • Just look at him!
• Aesop Amnesia: Happens frequently. Bumblebee and Sentinel Prime in particular are poster boys for this trope.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • Megatron developed Soundwave to evolve with uses of Sari's key into a new body, but Soundwave unexpectedly became sentient unto himself (though still useful to Megatron's plans). And then there's stuff like Professor Sumdac's malfunctioning police robots, and the nanobots in the pilot, and...
  • One must wonder how Sumdac stays in business if 3/4 of his machines go haywire. On the other hand, owning the patents on the fundamental building blocks of the robot technology that forms the backbone of modern society probably helps.
  • Subverted somewhat with Wreck-Gar, who is pretty much a very impressionable child with ADHD.
• Air-Vent Passageway; Used by Optimus, complete with Shout-Out to Die Hard.
• Airplane Arms: Briefly by Optimus in "Where Is Thy Sting."
• Alien Arts Are Appreciated: Bulkhead winds up with a museum show in one episode, although his "masterpiece" was an accident. Still, his art is a hit with human audiences.
• Aliens in Cardiff: Megatron's head and hand land in Paw Paw, Michigan, though they end up in Detroit.
• Aliens Speaking English: Every Cybertronian in the series speaks English, even in scenes taking place before they first encountered humanity.
• Aliens Steal Cable: Quite literally: Sari (half-alien herself) and Bumblebee use the Key to pirate Master Disaster's illegal street races.
• Almighty Janitor: Eventually taken to near absurd lengths with the main crew. Despite being a lowly maintenance crew, they have A cadet who was on track for the Elite Guard, a vet from the Great War who is bonded to the Autobot's greatest weapon (which happens to be their ship), the most skilled spacebridge engineer in the Autobot ranks, and one of the most skilled Cyberninjas around. Really, everyone but Bumblebee is considered near top of their field, and this is before they Took a Level in Badass.
• Almost Kiss: Blackarachnia and Optimus Prime. However, most of the time she does it, she's trying to distract him.
• All There in the Manual:
  • The Starscream clones are only ever referred to by their personalities (or gender), but their toys are named after the G1 Seekers: Coward Starscream = "Skywarp," Sycophant Starscream = "Sunstorm," Egomaniac Starscream = "Thundercracker". This is because if they gave them proper names in the credits, they would have had to pay Tom Kenny for four more characters. And while he didn't get a toy until long after these three, the Liar Starscream's name was given as "Ramjet" in the Allspark Almanac.
  • A lot of information about the Animated universe not established in the show is given in the Allspark Almanac books.
    • The first installment of The Allspark Almanac reveals intense amounts of detail (and Shout Outs about the show, the setting and the characters).
    • The Allspark Almanac II contains lots of hints of what happened after the series, more details about life on Cybertron (including how protoforms are developed), and more behind-the-scenes information about the show itself.
    • The Complete Allspark Almanac contains all the information of the previous two books (with some minor revisions) as well as The Allspark Addendum and approximately ten pages of new content.
  • The six-issue miniseries "The Arrival" shows events that happened between or during certain episodes of the show. The events of the first issue take place concurrently with the events of the three-part premiere episode "Transform and Roll Out", while the events of issues 2-5 take place sometime between the episodes "Total Meltdown" and "The Thrill of the Hunt", with the sixth and final issue explaining the backstory of Jetfire and Jetstorm.
• Aloof Ally: The Dinobots and the main team of Autobots have a relationship that is adversarial at best. To be fair, only a handful of Autobots were ever actually nice to them (namely Prowl and Bulkhead), while everyone else simply saw them as dangerous and unstable.
• Alternative Foreign Theme Song: The Japanese version used a different opening / ending theme than the American version.
• Ambiguously Related: All members of the Witwicky family from The Transformers make Continuity Cameos in the series, but it is unclear if Sparkplug Witwicky's counterpart is still part of the family due to never being confirmed to be a Witwicky and never being seen with Spike, Carly, Daniel or baby Nancy.
• Amoral Attorney: Implied by Meltdown, whose mutant bat monster used to be his lawyer. On a similar note, the shark monster was his stockbroker.
• Amulet of Concentrated Awesome: Sari's Allspark Key for the first two seasons.
• An Aft Kicking Christmas: "Human Error" takes place during Christmas and has the Autobots get in an epic battle with Soundwave.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Swindle's fate at the end of "SUV: Society of Ultimate Villainy". He's been frozen in his vehicle mode, and Fanzone sends him to be towed away so his parts can be sold at a scrapyard. "Five Servos of Doom" reveals that Swindle is Not Quite Dead, and he gets freed in "Decepticon Air".
  • Blurr ended up crushed into a cube while still active. He doesn't recover from this until the events of the script reading The Return of Blurr.
• And This Is for...: In "Survival of the Fittest", Prowl and Captain Fanzone fight Meltdown's mutated minions while trying to save Sari from his experiments. Fanzone throws one particularly impressive punch with a yell of "And that's for Sari!"
• Androcles' Lion: Grimlock, complete with a thorn in his foot for those who might miss the connection.
• Animal Mecha: The Dinobots, as usual. Soundwave's pets combine this with Instrument of Murder, and then there's Steeljaw and Zaur on Cybertron. Blackarachnia and Waspinator fall into the "actually-part-organic" category.
• Animating Artifact: The AllSpark Key was originally a security keycard owned by Sari Sumdac before the AllSpark transformed it, imbuing it with some of its power, being able to heal and upgrade the Autobots and even some non-sentient Earth machines. It is later revealed that it can also imbue machines with life if under prolonged use, turning Soundwave from a harmless music-making robot into a particularly powerful Decepticon.
• Animesque: From the same folk who worked on Teen Titans, Ben 10 and Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!. And of course, the overseas Mook DLE, Studio 4°C and The Answer Studio^note as well as Ajia-Do and Studio Wanpack (who both went uncredited) and later Diomedea are Japanese-based animation houses...
• Antagonist Title: The human villains Nanosec and Headmaster both make their debuts in the respective episodes "Nanosec" and "Headmaster".
• Anyone Can Die: Starts in the beginning of the third season with Blurr, (sort of) and never looks back.
• Arc Welding: Ratchet's two old friends from the Great War — Arcee and Omega Supreme — are revealed to be closely connected (plotwise) in the third season.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Mixmaster cannot defeat Thundercracker! He is not worthy! He is inferior! And his joke stinks!
• Artistic License – Space: Jetstorm can still create windstorms... in space. Solar wind, perhaps?
• Ascended Extra: While he's got fewer appearances than in the original series, Shockwave manages to do much more notable things in this series.
• Ascended Meme:
  • The portrayal of the Autobot Elite Guard as arrogant and corrupt, and the Decepticons as fighting for their freedom (though the show keeps the Decepticons unambiguously as the bad guys).
  • The 'Punch of Kill Everything' made it into the canon comics (though sadly not the show itself), and shows up in Transformers: War for Cybertron to boot (as both a Leader-class killstreak reward and a Soldier-class melee upgrade).
• Asteroids Monster: Rock Lords (or at least the animalistic space-born ones) can form smaller versions of themselves if shattered.
• Attack Pattern Alpha: 'Omega Formation' is used against Blitzwing in 'Sari, No-One's Home'. It doesn't end well.

• Awesome Backpack: Wreck-Gar's, which was inspired by Harpo Marx. He can pull practically anything from it.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The maintenance Autobots, led by Optimus Prime, chose regular everyday vehicles as a means to disguise themselves in the city. What does Sentinel Prime choose as alternate modes to avoid getting noticed? A massive combat-grade missile truck for Ultra Magnus, and a snow plow (in summer) for himself!
  Bumblebee: No one's gonna notice that!
  • What's clever is that when Sentinel first came to Earth, there was a snowstorm, he didn't stand out and his alt mode was very useful. But when he comes back the next time, it's a blistering summer. He's just far too stubborn to scan something more suitable.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: With bonus Enemy Mine: Megatron and Optimus Prime. "Well, you're the last bot I'd expect to come to my rescue." When Optimus says he isn't, Megatron then grabs Optimus and uses him as a shield.
• Badass Normal: Captain Fanzone is a very capable ally to the Autobots even though he's just a human. Survival of the Fittest should be simple enough. He's also the only human (aside from Sari and Sumdac) willing to explain things about life on Earth (namely laws and government) to the Autobots, and makes it clear that, while he hates machines, he appreciates what they do for Detroit.
• Bag of Holding: Swindle's "personal storage dimension" and Wreck-Gar's backpack, which contains (quite literally) everything and the kitchen sink. The former has a justification, the latter runs on Rule of Funny.
• Band of Brothers: And one sister.
• Bash Brothers: The most literal version is Prowl and Fanzone in "Survival of the Fittest," but the trope is frequently used as, on the whole, one Decepticon is more dangerous than three Autobots.
• Bastard Understudy: Starscream comes close to betraying Megatron and usurping his position as Decepticon leader several times (most notably in the pilot).
• Batman Gambit: Optimus manages to pull one off in "Decepticon Air," in a near-perfect homage to Superman II.
• Battle Butler: Lugnut's near-religious fanatical devotion to Megatron.
• Bedsheet Ghost: Bulkhead's Halloween costume in "Along Came a Spider". Because of how big he is, he has to use a fumigation tent.
• Being Good Sucks: The series both Deconstructs and Reconstructs this trope. In particular, Optimus and Bumblebee's backstories both involve them losing their dignity and status when they take the moral high ground in a crisis. But while the main heroes suffer from the burdens of being paragons, the series ends with them returning to their home planet as heroes — after one of them makes a Heroic Sacrifice to stop the Big Bad.
• Berserk Button: Starscream, true to type, likes to plan out monologues and speeches. Don't interrupt him when he gives them, 'kay?
  Starscream: You interrupted my SPEEEEECH!!
• BFG: Huge guns are the weapons owned by Megatron, Swindle, and Shockwave.
• Big Bad: As usual, Megatron serves as the main villain of the series.
  • Big Bad Ensemble: While Megatron was the overall Big Bad of the series, the writers wanted to minimize his appearance to further emphasize the threat he posed. In addition to Megatron and the Decepticons loyal to him, we had rogue Decepticons like Starscream, Lockdown, Blackarachnia and Swindle, or semi-affiliated ones like Soundwave, running around causing problems, and various human enemies. Among the humans, Meltdown and Porter C. Powell were chief among the Autobots human antagonists.
• Big Brother Instinct: All of the Autobots are protective towards Sari, even more so when she comes to live with them in Season 2.
• Big Good: Ultra Magnus is the highest Autobot authority and is actually honest and compassionate, unlike Sentinel Prime.
• Big "NO!":
  • Done by Sari when she is informed that the Autobots have decided to leave Earth in "Lost and Found".
  • Bulkhead screams "No" when he wakes up and finds his body stolen in "Headmaster".
  • Ratchet does it in the second season finale in response to Omega Supreme sacrificing himself to destroy Megatron's space bridge.
• Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head: In "SUV: Society of Ultimate Villainy", Sari gets back at Powell by reprogramming the Reception Bot to call Powell a boogerhead.
• Bio-Augmentation: The aim of Prometheus Black's company, Biotech Unbound, before things went downhill for him.
• Bird-Poop Gag:
  • The Five-Episode Pilot "Transform and Roll Out" has Prowl get pooed on by some pigeons that perched on his head.
  • "Blast from the Past" ends with Grimlock getting hit by droppings from a pair of birds on a branch above him.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: In Autoboot Camp, at Boot Camp, Longarm was one of two 'bots that treated Bumblebee with any degree of decency. Then we find out his true identity by the end of the episode...
• Bizarrchitecture: Sumdac Tower is shaped like a giant spark plug, and thus is narrower at the bottom than it is near the top.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: This series deconstructs the moral nature of the Autobots and Decepticons, resulting in a less black-and-white depiction than its predecessors. The Decepticons think of themselves as freedom fighters, while Cybertron's rather militaristic government is run by Autobots, for Autobots, and shows signs of corruption and extreme prejudice towards the Decepticons and organic life. That said, the main five Autobots are all unquestionably good guys, and the civilian Autobots seem pretty normal.
• Blofeld Ploy: Played with in the first season finale. Megatron mentions how appropriate it is to have Starscream with him as he takes his revenge on the one responsible for his 50 years as a head. He then aims at Optimus, only to turn around and slag Starscream, who actually was responsible for it but didn't think Megatron knew.
• Blow You Away: Jetstorm and vehicle-mode Safeguard. Optimus whips up a tornado with the Magnus Hammer.
• Boot Camp Episode: In a Flashback Episode, Bumblebee and Bulkhead go through basic training.
• Border-Occupying Decorations: In Japan, the show was aired with a border depicting several of the characters alongside the series logo thanks to the aspect ratio. It's part of the reason the Japanese DVD releases are considered an inferior version, since not only are the live-action Otoboto Family skits cut out (resulting in Orphaned Punchline and Orphaned Setup situations), the aspect ratio still wasn't fixed for the DVD releases.
• Born in the Wrong Century: Captain Fanzone, no doubt. The man (somehow) has a rotary dial cell phone, of a size that marks it as outdated by today's standards, among other things^note There are in fact apps that display a rotary-style dialing screen for making calls.
  • Fanzone's Catchphrase when getting befuddled by anything more complex than that? "This is why I hate machines.''
• Bounty Hunter: Lockdown's main business is to hunt down Autobots for the Decepticons.
• Brain Bleach: Optimus looks to be in dire need of some after Sari explains where little organics come from in the series premiere.
• Break the Cutie: Sari in Season 2. First her dad goes missing, then her dad's company gets taken out of her control by Porter C. Powell who reveals with the subtlety of a brick that she doesn't exist in any form of legal documentation. If it weren't for the Autobots helping her cope with all of this, Sari could very easily have snapped upon the revelation that she was part Cybertronian instead of taking a level in badass.
• Break the Haughty: Sentinel's ordeal in Return of the Headmaster. It doesn't stick. But it's fun to watch.
• Breakout Villain: The Transformers created Lugnut, Lockdown, and Slipstream would all go on to appear in various future Transformers media outside of this continuity. Lockdown even being the main villain of Transformers: Age of Extinction.
• Brick Joke:
  • "Transform And Roll Out" has Optimus making the terrible mistake of asking Sari where babies come from. In "Transwarped," where Sari being robotic is the main source of conflict, Optimus brings up that the situation at hand doesn't really match what Sari told him two seasons ago.
  • "Sound and Fury" begins with Bulkhead and Sari doing a fist bump, which somehow hurts Bulkhead's hand even though he's made of metal. Later in the episode, they do another fist bump, which hurts Sari's hand this time.
• Bring It: The Autobots gladly welcome whatever odds are against them.
• Broken Hero: Optimus Prime, of all people. He's still haunted by his failure to save Elita-1.
• Buffy Speak: Oddly, two of the smartest (in terms of technology) cast members: see Shaped Like Itself. Optimus slips into this once or twice himself, usually when he's trying to understand something new about Earth.
• Butt-Monkey: If you get annoyed at Jerkass Sentinel Prime, just wait five minutes and something nasty will happen to him. Usually it's related to Earth's weather/inhabitants/road structure, but he's also had his body stolen by a human, been humiliated in front of his comrades, screamed like a little girl when encountering organics, failed at driving in the rain, and been wrong in pretty much every arrogant assertion he's made.
  • From Season 2 onward, Starscream also becomes a Butt Monkey in this series. It starts with the infamous "Starscream Death Montage" with Megatron killing him over and over again (with the AllSpark fragment on his head being the only thing keeping him alive). All of his plans always fail and in the finale, his clones (with one heavily implied to represent his self-loathing) betray him for Megatron. He spends the majority of Season 3 as a disembodied head trapped with Megatron aboard Omega Supreme, and just when he finally gets a new body, Megatron blasts him (He recovers). And in the finale, the AllSpark fragment that was keeping him alive is pulled out, thus killing him (although he would have been revived by Slipstream in a scene that was cut for time). And if you count the comic adaptation, he gets humiliated and blackmailed by Professor Princess. One can't help but feel a bit sorry for him.
  • Tutor Bot, as well.
• The Cameo:
  • The busts in Yoketron's dojo are Springer, Devcon, Roadhandler,, Kick-Off, Star Saber, Tap-Out, Heavy Load, Star Upper, Motorarm, Powerhug, Dai Atlas, Sky Garry, Grandus, Road Rocket, and of course, Ultra Magnus.
  • In "This Is Why I Hate Machines", Flareup and Grandus try to squish Captain Fanzone upon his arrival to Cybertron. Steeljaw can be seen in the crowd.
  • Also in "This Is Why I Hate Machines", Tracks is the 'bot that walks by Ratchet and Captain Fanzone outside of Maccadam's after listening to Sentinel's PSA, running off after noticing that the latter is an organic.
  • Though he isn't named onscreen, the hobobot that Ratchet and Fanzone confront in "This Is Why I Hate Machines" is Rattrap (or, er, Rattletrap).
• Camp Straight: Tracks. He's every bit as flamboyant as his G1 counterpart, but has the hots for Botanica according to the AllSpark Almanac books.
• Cannot Tell a Lie: Inverted by Ramjet, the Liar Starscream, who literally always says the opposite of the truth, Opposite Day-style.
• Canon Immigrant:
  • Oil Slick was never intended to be in the show (in fact, he was originally just a sketch someone made in their free time), and was kept to the toyline and the comics. He's since been introduced in the cartoon in a brief but memorable scene. Roughly the same deal with Soundwave's guitar creatures.
  • Inverted with Prowl's samurai armor sidecar; it was created for the show but Hasbro liked the design so much they made a toy version, and Prowl eventually got the armor permanently.
  • Played more straight with Lugnut, Lockdown, and Slipstream. Slipstream's a character in Transformers: War for Cybertron (albeit for multiplayer only); Lockdown got a toy for the Revenge of the Fallen toyline, then was repurposed and used as the basis for a G1 version of the character; and Lugnut appeared in two G1-based comics, one of which took place during the original movie (and, as the TFWiki points out, probably freaked out when Starscream threw Megatron out of Astrotrain).
  • The various versions of The AllSpark Almanac added characters from other versions of the franchise, including later installments, as seen with Scalpel. The Complete AllSpark Almanac has added Knock Out, The Robots in Disguise incarnation of Strongarm, and even Discord. The Complete AllSpark Almanac is also one of the many pieces of Transformers fiction that incorporated the Transformers Aligned Universe (the source universe of said versions of Knock Out and RiD!Strongarm) into the larger Transformers multiverse.
• Canon Discontinuity: Both shorts "Starscream Heckles Megatron" and "Starscream's Fantasy" don't seem to be in line with the show. The Decepticons are in a mine after Megatron came back from the first season finale, but Starscream is with the team despite being rogue throughout the second season. Also, Blackarachnia shows up despite leaving the Decepticons at the start of the show.
• Caped Mecha: Lockdown's space poncho and Alpha Trion's traditional cape. Red Alert's design makes her look like she's wearing a lab coat, but at least that's clearly a part of her alt mode.
• Captain Geographic: The Autobots (Optimus' team, that is). They're far more superhero-esque than they usually are, and seeing as their protectorate is Detroit, former automobile capital of the world and (in the series) current robot manufacturing capital of the world, they seem to fit this trope quite nicely.
• Captain Smooth and Sergeant Rough:
  • Ultra Magnus (Captain Smooth) and Sentinel Prime (Sergeant Rough).
  • Optimus Prime (Captain Smooth) and Ratchet (Sergeant Rough).
• Cardboard Prison:
  • Played straight and averted. The first time Meltdown escapes, he apparently does so without the Detroit Police even hearing about it. The second time, however, he's stuck in a specially-designed cell not even he can melt through and it takes the Dinobots (following Blackarachnia's orders) to get him out. The lower-grade supervillains like the Angry Archer seem to have an easier time of it: Fanzone even points this out in the Almanac.
  • The Decepticons seem to escape with frightening frequency on the ELITE GUARD ship.
• Cassandra Truth: Bulkhead tries to warn Sari about Soundwave's true nature during "Sound and Fury", but she's just not listening.
• Cast of Snowflakes: The human characters have surprisingly diverse appearances, as do many of the Autobots and Decepticons.
• Catchphrase: Captain Fanzone, "This is why I hate machines" (with a couple of variants).
  • How could one not mention "Transform and Roll Out"? Or the even cooler evil variant, "Transform and Rise Up"?
• Cat Scare: Sentinel receives one in "Return of the Headmaster" when a cat spooks him during the investigation of a Decepticon report fabricated by Henry Masterson.
• Chewing the Scenery: Starscream, especially in the first season finale: "You interrupted MY SPEEEEEEEEEEECH!"
• Christmas Episode: "Human Error" takes place during Christmas. Strangely enough, the two-parter initially aired during April.
• Chronically Crashed Car: Captain Fanzone's car always gets trashed.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Wreck-Gar and Random Blitzwing. To quote the latter after being sent flying in "A Bridge Too Close":
  Mayday! Mayday! Let's all dance around the maypole!
• Co-Dragons: Lugnut and Shockwave. When they finally meet, it takes them about ten minutes to start fighting over which of them is the most loyal to Megatron.
  • Thanks partly to Starscream manipulating the (rather dense) Lugnut... and because Megatron wanted Lugnut to be at his most loyal.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The Autobots are bright, primary colors (sans Bulkhead and Prowl) while the Decepticons are muted or secondary colors like gray, purple and green. Dead Cybertronians become a distinct darkish grey, in homage to G1 Optimus Prime's death in The Transformers: The Movie.
• Combat Stilettos: Stiletto, a comic-only human supervillain, uses experimental Sumdac weapons in her heels (she's also a kickboxer). Blackarachnia, for some reason, only gained high heels after becoming part-organic. Sari sort-of lampshades this in Bee in the City by asking who designs a robot with high heels: Flareup doesn't know either, but when she finds him...
• Comic-Book Adaptation: Three: One is a Film Comic that adapted the entirety of the first two seasons, one is an original series of stories published by Titan Magazines and only available in the U.K. (There's also one Animated story in the main Transformers Comic written by Simon Furman), and one is a (most definitely Canon) series called The Arrival, written by the show's head writer, Marty Isenberg, which both tells new stories and what various characters were doing between appearances on the show.
• Combining Mecha:
  • Any Transformer becomes this against their will when the Headmaster gets his hands on them.
  • Also, in the comics and Season 3, Jetfire and Jetstorm, who merge symmetrical docking-style into Safeguard.
• Composite Character:
  • The show's version of Blackarachnia is a composite of Blackarachnia from Beast Wars and and The Transformers's Elita One. Not to mention her design features certain elements of all of her appearances throughout Beast Wars/Beast Machines.
  • Megatron is a combination of his original cartoon incarnation, his "Super Megatron◊" appearance from the Japanese "Return of Convoy", and his larger and more vicious live-action movie incarnation in design, but with a little dash of his Beast Wars incarnation added in for character.
  • Bumblebee is essentially a combination of G1 Bumblebee and Armada Hot Shot. This is perhaps not surprising given that during development, the show's Kid-Appeal Character was planned to be an incarnation of Hot Shot, until Transformers (2007) thrust characters called Bumblebee back into the spotlight, and the character was reworked into being the first incarnation of Bumblebee to appear in any of the cartoons since The Transformers.
  • Optimus Prime is of course derived from G1 Optimus Prime, but includes elements from his "Return of Convoy" Star Convoy design, Optimus Primal, G1 Orion Pax (Optimus Prime's original form) and Movieverse Optimus Prime, while character-wise borrows from Optimus Primal in being an inexperienced leader leading his Ragtag Bunch of Misfits to Save the World while trying to figure it all out.
  • At the end of the show, Optimus carries the Allspark around in a necklace, looking similar to the Matrix of Leadership. All There in the Manual would expand on this, with Optimus saying that he hopes that this "Allspark Matrix" will be carried by future leaders, making it even clearer that Optimus essentially just invented the Matrix of Leadership.
• Compulsive Liar: Each clone that Starscream makes of himself represents a part of his personality. In the case of Ramjet, everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie, as pointed out by Slipstream.
  Ramjet: What are you talking about? I am the original Starscream.
  Starscream: Liar. I am the original Starscream.
  Ramjet: I never said I was the original Starscream.
  Starscream: Yes, you did just now.
• Concept Art Gallery: All three Almanacs feature concept art of the show.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: The Autobots barely hold off Starscream early on, but are much more effective against the squadron of clones. (The Autobot arsenal now includes stasis cuffs...)
• Continuity Cameo: Spike Witwicky, his wife Carly, their son Daniel, and Spike's father Sparkplug from the Generation 1 cartoon occasionally appear as minor background characters.
• Continuity Porn: The Almanacs are bursting at the seams with references to every corner of the Transformers multiverse.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Sari uses boiling water to kill the space barnacles possessing Bumblebee and Prowl, but isn't scalded by the steam. Maybe her skin is tougher than a normal human's.
• Convenient Color Change: When Mixmaster and Scrapper change their allegiance to the Decepticons, their paint jobs go from traditional construction livery (primarily yellow and gray) to the classic Constructicon colors of green and purple. Their optics also change color, from yellow to red (going from a "neutral" color to the traditional Decepticon optic color).
• Conveyor Belt of Doom: When Megatron takes over the factory equipment in 'Home Is Where the Spark Is', he uses the manipulator arms to pin Bulkhead down on one of these and send him towards a crusher.
• Cool Car: Par for the course with Transformers, but special mentions go to Lockdown, a combination of a few classic muscle cars, and Blurr, whose vehicle mode is reminiscent of the Mach 5.
• Cool Chair: Professor Sumdac used Megatron's hand as a chair in his lab up until the first season finale. Its owner was less than happy.
  • And of course, Bulkhead himself, who can turn his kibble INTO a chair!
• Cool Shades: or rather, optic sensors: Prowl, Soundwave, Jazz, and Grimlock (the first two's even look a bit like Kamina's). Meltdown's shades, however, are actual sunglasses, and are pretty funky.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive:
  • Porter C. Powell is a very smug opportunist who responds to Sari Sumdac's insistence that she's in charge of her father's company due to being Isaac Sumdac's daughter by revealing there's no legal proof of her existence and usurping control of the company while kicking her out of her home. Another particularly vile case happens in the tie-in comic The Arrival in the story "The Insincerest Form of Flattery", where he releases a line of SWAT Vehicles named after Bulkhead without the Autobot's permission and was perfectly fine with selling them even when aware that they were completely unsafe death traps.
  • To a lesser extent, Prometheus Black/Meltdown, who uses his biological experiments to try and find scientific breakthroughs that would make machines obsolete and cares little about the well-being of his test subjects.
• Cranial Processing Unit: These Transformers' mind seems entirely located in their heads, since they are depicted as being able to function without their bodies.
• Crapsack World: Even if it's a hundred years into the future, the main setting is Detroit, a manufacturing hub. It has gone through urban decay and is pretty dull to look at for a main setting in a superhero show.
• Creator Cameo: In "Human Error, Part 1," one of the customers at the burger place is Marty Isenberg.
  • One of the recurring setpieces present in Detroit is a toy store named Wyatt Toys, named after staff member Derrick J. Wyatt.
• Creator Provincialism: Isaac Sumdac grew up in Paw Paw, the same place as Derrick Wyatt.
• Credits Pushback: YTV did this to the second season finale's stinger, making it hard to hear Megatron and Starscream bickering in space. Fans were unamused.
• Creepy Monotone: Soundwave. Perceptor is actually performed by a voice synthesizer. Megatron and Shockwave come close, being more implacable than monotone.
• Cruel Mercy: Optimus didn't spare Megatron because he was feeling kind...
• Cryptic Background Reference:
  • In All There in the Manual, Kup complains that Hot Rod used to have flame decos on his chest, comparing it to that of the Fallen. Unofficial art by Derrick J. Wyatt shows that the Fallen is Wreathed in Flames.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: Word of God states that there is a Church of Primus on Cybertron. Not much is known about the church, though Animated Vector Prime's design brings to mind the uniform of the Pope. Word of God states that it's of the Church of Happyology flavor.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • The main Autobots are a maintenance crew, only a handful of whom have proper combat training and only one of whom has actual experience. The Decepticons are massive, powerful war machines. Do the math.
  • Then you have the three Dinobots against Meltdown's mutants in "Survival of the Fittest". Do that math.
• Custom-Built Host: Megatron is reduced to just his head at the start of the series and convinces Isaac Sumdac, who thinks he is an Autobot, to rebuild him. Isaac finds he cannot build servos for Megatron's new body without a material rare on Earth that will become unstable in the time needed to transport it to the lab, so Megatron tries to take advantage of Sari's careless nature with her Allspark Key by designing a robot toy called Soundwave for her that will become more powerful each time the key is inserted until it can serve as his new body, but it gains sentience and its own agenda instead. Eventually, Isaac finds the remains of Megatron's original body and the plan to build him a new body is scrapped in favor of restoring his old one.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Perceptor may already be a robot, but according to Word of God, he deleted his own personality and capacity for emotion in order to store more information in his processor.
• Damsel in Distress:
  • Arcee is metaphorically Stuffed into the Fridge multiple times.
  • Also, Elita-1.
  • Also, as Blackarachnia she keeps having to be saved from her own attempts at evil schemes. Even the one exception to this rule was retroactively made one (after Megatron Rising, it was the Dinobots who pulled her to the island.) That's three female 'bots (for the price of two) who were quite badass in previous incarnations whose roles have been reduced to "helpless victim who is either saved, or not saved as part of a male 'bot's backstory." You really expect the 2008 series to be more progressive than the 80s/90s ones... but in the writers' favor, there is Sari.
• Dark Action Girl: Slipstream, the Female Starscream, is as treacherous as her progenitor and her fellow trope examples. Blackarachnia sometimes fills this role as well, though she's more often a Femme Fatale.
• Darker and Edgier: Third season. Family-Unfriendly Violence, Family-Unfriendly Death, and Child Soldiers, oh my!
• Dating Catwoman: Optimus and Blackarachnia/Elita-1 are implied to have feelings towards each other even though they are on opposing sides.
• David Versus Goliath: As mentioned below, most Decepticons tower over the Autobots. They also have the might to match, being the biggest threats in the series, usually requiring the entire team to take down a single 'Con.
• Deadline News:
  • A reporter is covering the Robot War that Soundwave started in "Sound and Fury" when his camera starts attacking him. Then we see a News-Bot covering the news a few days later... Fortunately, it is later revealed that he survived, and is shown covering the garbage disputes in Season 2.
• Death Is Gray: In reference to Optimus Prime's death in The Transformers: The Movie, all Transformers fade to gray upon death. This is justified by the concept of Transformers having "electronic paint jobs" that let them change color at will, with the implication that their normal color schemes are such paint jobs that deactivate to reveal their real gray colors underneath when they die. After Blurr is crushed by the disguised Shockwave into a cube and handed off to be disposed of, it's noteworthy that the cube is still Blurr's powder blue coloring, hinting that he's still alive but immobile.
• Death Montage: a now immortal Starscream gets one showing him attempting, and failing, to overthrow Megatron in the episode "Mission Accomplished".
• Decomposite Character: Played straight maybe; we're not quite sure what happened with Skywarp and Cyclonus. In Transformers: Generation 1, Cyclonus may or may not be an upgraded Skywarp (blame error-prone animation for a confusing Transformation Sequence.) The Animated version, however? Skywarp is one of several clones of Starscream, each with one trait of the original taken up to eleven. Skywarp represents his cowardice. As for Cyclonus, he's a brief cameo, but All There in the Manual tells us that his "internal chronometer" is way off, he is seeking someone named Galvatron (that's Megatron's upgraded form in G1 and several other series), and he has some circuitry in common with Starscream, particularly his (now disabled) self-preservation instinct. This hints without saying that Cyclonus is from the future and used to be Skywarp.
• Decon-Recon Switch: Optimus Prime's Dark and Troubled Past, which still affects him to this day, shows what happens if a young hero is too lenient, naive, and innocent for his own good. Displaying too much of those good qualities to people who just don't deserve them means that Optimus leaves himself open to jerks like Sentinel who find a way to take advantage of him and end up ruining his life while they run scot-free. Despite this, Optimus continues to be a good person, and learns on his own how to become the hero everyone was expecting him to be in spite of the odds and losses.
• Decontamination Chamber: Sentinel uses one to pick on the team in "The Elite Guard" by giving them an emergency decontamination in spite of their insistence that the organics they've encountered haven't infected them and are harmless.
• Deflector Shields: Sumdac Tower has an emergency force-field that can cover the entire building - pretty impressive, considering it's one of the few inventions that probably didn't have its roots in Megatron. The Elite Guard ship also has one, and Swindle has a personal version that he purchased from the Vok.
• Deserted Island: North Sister Island, a volcanic island that somehow exists in the middle of Lake Erie. Then it becomes "Dinobot Island" and gets more and more crowded.
• Destructive Saviour: Bulkhead, thanks to his huge size and clumsiness, often causes damage inadvertently.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: Bumblebee's horn plays it in "The Thrill of the Hunt", Ratchet whistles it in the short "Operating Table", and Sari hums it in "Sari, No-One's Home".
• "Die Hard" on an X: "Decepticon Air", complete with Prime doing the "exploding elevator" trick from Die Hard and making snarky comments while doing an Air-Vent Passageway escape.
• Dinosaurs Are Dragons: The Dinobots, as ever, although Professor Sumdac didn't actually have this in mind while designing them. Megatron added the flame breath because he planned on using one of them as a new body and the others as attack drones.
• Dirty Coward: Starscream's cowardly clone Skywarp, even more so than Starscream himself, though the clone lacks even the courage to betray people to ensure his own safety.
• Disco Dan:
  • Meltdown. Not only does he cling to outmoded ideals about human superiority over all machines, he also once speechified about how Prof. Sumdac isn't worthy to "lick the mud off my platform shoes, booga-looga-looga-looz!"
  • A surprising number of other villains, too. Headmaster's all outdated interwebz slang, Slo-Mo's a flapper, Angry Archer's stuck in the Middle Ages, and there were hints that Season 4 would have had a villainous Steampunk commune.
• Distinctive Appearances: Nearly every robot in the series can be identified by their shadow. Especially Blackarachnia.
  • Nearly any. Many Cybertronians share a mold with either Bumblebee or Ratchet, the former moreso.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Blackarachnia pulls this on Bulkhead and Bumblebee during her first appearance on Earth (They'd never seen a female Transformer before) and does it quite often to Optimus Prime (who kinda used to be her ex) afterwards.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: Bulkhead. One noteworthy example occurs in "Home is Where the Spark Is", where he accidentally crushes a robotic drone that he was told to deliver intact.
• Do I Really Sound Like That?: Sari's impression of Optimus Prime in "Along Came a Spider" yields this question from a less than flattered Optimus.
• Don't Call Me "Sir": Ratchet says this to Arcee in a flashback from "The Thrill of the Hunt" in response to her addressing him as "sir".
• Double Aesop: "Velocity" has Bumblebee learn that he has to set a good example for Sari and Sari learning that pirating illegal broadcasts is still wrong even if you're not paying to watch it.
• The Dragon: Starscream at first, and later Lugnut.
  • By the series finale, the latter is literally fighting Shockwave for this position.
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Sentinel Prime Minor in a flashback.
• Drives Like Crazy: Sentinel, although it has more to do with his contempt for human traffic laws (he also can't figure out how to drive in the rain). All of the "Automen" in Human Error, where they have to actually work their vehicle modes from the inside instead of just thinking about it.
• Dub Name Change: In the Japanese version, Bulkhead's name was changed to Ironhide so the main group of Autobots will all correspond to the main group of Transformers Film Series Autobots (except for Prowl - oops). Consequentially, Ironhide's name was changed to "Armorhide".
• Dudley Do-Right Stops to Help: In the first two seasons (before the human characters took a back seat), the Autobots would take breaks from their mission of repairing their ship/contacting Cybertron (season 1) or finding All Spark fragments (season 2) to help stop petty crimes, do construction work, rescue people from car accidents, and generally help Detroit however they could.
• Dumb Muscle: The Dinobots, especially the toddler-like Grimlock. Of course, Swoop and Snarl can't seem to muster up the processor power to speak, either. Lugnut, Scrapper, Mixmaster, and Blackout are also standouts, while Bulkhead is a Genius Ditz, though his lack of general intelligence is played up considerably in the Japanese dub. Omega Supreme was specifically programmed to be all brawn and no brains, so that he wouldn't question his lot in life as a Robot Of Mass Destruction. Blitzwing's Hothead personality leans toward this, as well.

E-H

• Easily Forgiven: For once in Transformers. Averted. This Megatron is absolutely intolerant and unforgiving of Starscream's treachery. Starscream spends most of the series ousted from the Decepticons as a result, and the only reason he survives so long is due to an AllSpark fragment implanted in his head that grants immortality.
• Eats Babies: Megatron is such a nightmarish, legendary figure to the Autobots that he's said to eat their protoforms for breakfast. He doesn't, although he doesn't mind using them to build WMDs.
• Eat the Bomb: Snarl swallows a missile in the Dinobots' debut episode, and isn't even fazed.
• Easy Amnesia: Averted, for the most part, with Arcee. After she loses her memory it stays lost for a very, very long time, and it takes quite a while to retrieve them properly in the finale. There was also a scrapped Season 4 idea with this as its main plot point, this time with Cosmos being amnesiac instead of Arcee.
• Enemy Mine: Although they're technically both Autobots, Optimus and Grimlock's fateful team-up played out like this.
• Engineered Public Confession: Done in The Arrival comic story "The Insincerest Form of Flattery" when Sari and Bulkhead use a hidden camera to trick Porter C. Powell into confessing to the public that his line of Bulkhead SWAT vehicles (named after the Autobot without his permission) were completely unsafe and that he was selling them even while aware that they were high-speed death traps. This results in Powell being forced to recall every single Bulkhead vehicle before anyone gets hurt.
• Engrish: The closed captioning for one episode dubbed Shockwave as "Chugway"
• Epic Flail: Bulkhead's main weapon is a chained ball.
  • Don't forget Swoop! His even bursts into flames!
• Equippable Ally: Laserbeak and Ratbat for Soundwave.
• Everyone Knows Morse: Used in "Decepticon Air" when Optimus's Autobot symbol flashes while "telling" Jazz his plan.
  • Justified here, since Optimus is an Elite Guard washout and Jazz is an actual member of the Elite Guard.
• Evil Costume Switch: Shockwave changing his color scheme to his "true" Decepticon colors can be treated as such.
• Evil Counterpart: Oil Slick and Lockdown for Prowl.
• Evil Duo: Lugnut and Blitzwing, with the complication that Blitzwing can go from being Lugnut's straight man to the crazy one at the flip of a switch.
• Evil Gloating: Starscream loves this. Interrupt him at your peril. Naturally, his clone Thundercracker, the Egomaniac, loves it even more.
  • YOU INTERRUPTED MY SPEEEEEEECH!
• Evil Is Bigger: Most of the Decepticons (with a few exceptions, such as Dirt Boss) tower over most of the Autobots, actually taking into account how much bigger having flying alt modes would make them. Emphasis on most of the Autobots. Subverted with the human villains (except Colossus Rhodes), who are much smaller than the Autobots.
• Evil Lawyer Joke: One of Meltdown's genetic experiments (specifically the one that resembles a vampire bat) used to be his lawyer (the shark monster was his stockbroker).
• Evilutionary Biologist: Meltdown's human experiments ended up bizarre, monstrous Mythology Gags of G1 Pretenders.
• Exact Words: Once Megatron's body is restored, he says that it is fitting that Starscream is by his side as he gets his "revenge on the one responsible for [[his]] fifty stellar cycles of helplessness and humiliation." He points his gun at Optimus, who had caused him to crash onto Earth... and then punches Starscream through the chest, the one who weakened him to make him lose that fight against Optimus.
• Expy:
  • Quite a lot of characters are based on one from a previous continuity, this being Transformers. Beast Wars character Rattrap got one in the form of Rattletrap (a combination of the original's Western (Rattrap) and Japanese (Rattle) names). Not exactly a flattering portrayal.
  • Whoever holds this hammer, if they can deal with that now, shall possess the power of the Magnus... One could say the Magnus Hammer is basically an Expy of Mjolnir, and Animated Ultra Magnus is basically Thor for wielding it. Also, the hammer is the symbol of office for the Magnus, since in this continuity the suffix "Magnus" is a military rank, and they must have the hammer in their possession at all times to be considered the Magnus similar to Mjolnir only granting the power of Thor to whom it deems worthy.
  • Several of Sentinel Prime's design elements (he's energetic, mostly blue, with a very prominent chin) are based on The Tick, with whom he shares a voice actor. This was done on purpose after said actor was cast for the role.
  • Omega S.P.R.E.E.M. was a homage to Omega Spreem, an obscure toy from the Generation 1 Action Masters line.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: The mutant space barnacles make eyes appear all over their victims.
• Face Palm: Prowl, to Optimus' idealistic "cogs in the great big Autobot machine" speech.
• Fake Static:
  • Bumblebee attempts to do this in "Megatron Rising" to avoid getting in trouble for defying Optimus's orders.
  • Prowl makes an attempt in "A Fistful of Energon" to avoid being reprimanded for going after Decepticons alone.
  Ratchet: Personally, I've always found Bumblebee's fake static to be a lot more convincing.
• Fallen Hero: Blackarachnia used to be an Autobot named Elita-1.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: Blurr gets trapped in a tunnel and crushed by its closing walls. After which his killer (in disguise) casually hands his cube-sized remains over to the nearest Autobot who has no idea what he just tossed down the disposal chute. Considering the show had no "real" deaths up until this point, this made the emotional impact even worse. In BotCon 2015's script reading Sari finds and reactivates Blurr via the residual AllSpark energy in her body, subverting the trope. Of note is that this story preserves the cartoon's original depiction of no spark being visible, as opposed to the oft-touted "visible spark" concept imagery that was never used. The story occurs in parallel with the Stunti-Con Job story, explaining how Cliffjumper comes to have the cube at the show; Blurr is subsequently fully restored once the Stunticon plot is defeated.
• Fantastic Racism: Aplenty.
  • Meltdown and his henchman don't like machines. Captain Fanzone likes to say he hates machines, but this is really in the context of being old-fashioned and irritable (and a Walking Techbane). He's on good terms with the Autobots, even if they keep messing up his city (to the point that the Autobots call him one of the few humans they fully trust).
  • Sentinel Prime really doesn't like organics. This is actually endemic to the entire Cybertronian population (Optimus' crew, for whatever reason, are far more tolerant even at the start), but Sentinel goes above and beyond. He actually tells Blackarachnia, his old friend Elita-1 turned techno-organic, that she was better off dead before trying to kill her. How bad is this? Even Blackarachnia herself has less hatred for her organic half than Sentinel does, and she spends the entire series trying to purge it. Second-in-command of the Autobot Elite Guard, everybody!
    • Fanzone actually uses this against the Cybertronians when he ends up on Cyberton in one episode. Being a human and all, he's basically a walking bioterrorism weapon.
• Fascists' Bed Time: One of Sentinel's first acts as Magnus is to institute a curfew. What this means for robots who don't exactly 'sleep' is unclear, although they do take 'stasis naps'.
• Fastball Special: Optimus does this with Sentinel Prime to get the latter into melee range of Lugnut. They were in space at the time.
  • Bulkhead tosses Prowl and Bumblebee on more than one occasion. See also the Not Quite Flight example below.
• Fauxtivational Poster: Prowl has one in his room that parodies the famous "Hang in there, baby" cat poster.
• Faux Action Girl: Blackarachnia's evil schemes very often ended with her needing to be rescued as well as, or rather than, her victims.
• Faux Affably Evil: Megatron is very polite and well-spoken for being the fearsome leader of the Decepticons.
• Femme Fatale: Blackarachnia is seductive and manipulates others to do what she wants them to do.
• First-Name Ultimatum: Optimus does this to Sari at the end of "Sari, No One's Home" when he sees that she ate a ton of candy bars while she was home alone.
• Flashback B-Plot: These are spread out across the series with each member of the Spacebridge crew getting an episode or two focused on their past and how they came to join the team.
• Food as Bribe: Mixmaster and Scrapper get recruited into the Decepticons by being given a barrel of oil each, then promised more for their continued service.
• Forced from Their Home: Season 2 opens with Sari Sumdac attempting to run her father's company after he disappeared during the season 1 finale, much to the ire of corporate raider Porter C. Powell. When Powell discovers there's actually no government record proving Sari exists because she's actually a Cybertronian protoform Isaac found eight years prior, he wastes no time not only ousting her from the company, but from her own room, giving it to the villain Headmaster. He even goes so far as to withhold her robot dog and tutor as being Sumdac Systems' property, leaving the girl with no recourse but to spend the season crashing with the Autobots. When Isaac Sumdac returns in season 3, he is absolutely LIVID with Powell and very nearly throws HIM out via the penthouse window.
• Foreshadowing: At the end of the first season, Sari tries interacting with the Allspark and all it shows is a holographic DNA helix surrounding a spark. No explanation is given until the end of the second season but the fans quickly latched onto that as confirmation of some Wild Mass Guessing.
  • When Nanosec acquires the speed suit, he runs around town and robs a few banks to test it out. The next time he runs into Bumblebee, he tells Nanosec the suit makes him look ten years older.
  • In "Return Of The Headmaster" Bumblebee and Bulkhead both casually and correctly guess the show's big plot twist (that Sari is actually a robot) but at the time it just seemed like they were making crap up.
  • In the first episode, Optimus tries to activate a defensive system aboard Teletraan-1 codenamed "Omega", but his command is denied. At the time, it could be written off as a simple Mythology Gag to Omega Supreme among the show's many such gags, but then we see the system activated two seasons later and Teletraan actually is Omega Supreme.
    • The Teletraan-1's Wave-Motion Gun seen in "Lost and Found" looks notably like the cannon on the back of G1 Omega's head, which turns out to be a feature both iterations share when Omega is finally revealed.
• Forgotten Superweapon: Omega Supreme was the Autobots' ship the whole time, which raises the question of why Ratchet didn't reactivate him before the events of the second season finale.
• For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: In the Timelines comic "The Stunti-con Job", the Stunticons pretend to be Autobots disguised as Decepticons for the sake of their traveling stunt show.
• For Science!: Blackarachnia's justification for her Predacon research.
• Four-Fingered Hands: Strika, Scrapper, Grimlock, Oil Slick, and Waspinator - although the last one isn't meant to be anything close to human.
• Freudian Slip: When Starscream learns Lugnut's been hearing Megatron's voice in his head.
  Starscream: Megatron? Did you just say "Megatron"? DID HE JUST SAY "MEGATRON"!? THERE IS NO MEGATRON! Megatron is OFFLINE! TERMINATED! I DID IT MYSE- saw it myself.
• Friendly Enemy: Bulkhead and the Constructicons (other than Dirt Boss) get along famously, and Bulkhead knows that Mixmaster and Scrapper are simply misguided, not evil.
• Friend to All Living Things: Prowl enjoys observing animals.
  • Ironic considering he's the only Autobot who successfully kills another character on screen (Starscream in "Endgame Part 2"), although Jazz helped.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Wasp(inator) used to be an Autobot recruit who ended up kicked out due to being mistaken for a traitor. Now he's a really intimidating enemy who is after Bumblebee for vengeance.
• Fun with Acronyms: The "Fully Automated Rapid Transit System". Hilariously, Word of God swears this was an accident. Bee in the city's "Bi-directional Unified Transit Terminal", on the other hand...
  Sari: "The B-U... Dad, you really need to work on your acronyms."
• Funny Schizophrenia: Blitzwing has his three personalities Icy, Hothead, and Random, who all mainly exist for the sake of some comic relief.
• Furry Confusion: Or 'the robots are sentient? non-sentient?' confusion: Tutor Bot, News Bot.
• The Future: The exact date isn't known, but it's apparently the 22nd century or near to it.
• Gale-Force Sound: Used, briefly, in the rock battle between Optimus Prime and Soundwave, in "Human Error, Part 2".
• Gender Flip: Red Alert is female in this universe. Various other materials set in the same universe have also revealed this also happened to Drag Strip, Nightbeat, and—thanks to a retcon—Sunstreaker.
• Genius Bruiser: Bulkhead, Strika and Megatron are all as cunning as they are strong.
• Genius Ditz: Bulkhead is revealed to be the most qualified space bridge technician in the galaxy in spite of his clumsiness and laid-back attitude.
• Gentle Giant: Bulkhead is very big and also very good-natured.
• Giggling Villain: Professor Princess, and Random Blitzwing, though his is more insane laughter than actual giggling.
• Girlish Pigtails: Sari, of course. After her upgrade, they get smaller but don't vanish entirely. Appropriate, since she's still pretty immature.
• Give Me a Reason: In "Megatron Rising, Part 2", Blackarachnia gets pissed at realizing Sari was lying about her directions to the AlllSpark to waste her time and tells Sari "Give me one excuse" in a way clearly inferring that she's hoping to get Sari to provoke her into harming Sari.
• Glass Cannon: Soundwave has The Power of Rock, but since he's made out of Earth metals without the Unobtainium that Cybertronians have, he can be easily broken apart by a single attack. Retreat!
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • After Sari goes through a fit of Explosive Overclocking, Ratchet manages to bypass the out-of-control circuits... until Megatron returns to Earth having commandeered Omega Supreme. Cue an Oh, Crap! from the whole team:
    Ratchet: ...there's nothing more I can do for her now!
    Optimus Prime: I know, but I may need you to UN-do something.
    Prowl: You're not actually suggesting we unleash an uncontrollable Sari on Omega Supreme, are you?\\Optimus Prime: I'm hoping we won't have to!
  • A much more comedic example comes during Bee in the City. With Optimus and Sari captured by Transtech Sari, Bumblebee is left to ally with a purple Tyrannosaurus, yesssssss and Flare-Up to save them. When trying to come up with ideas, he decides they need BIG help, suggesting they call in Grimlock, or scam Lugnut into helping them out.
    "Joe": Oh please, what do I look like, Scott McNeil?!? ^note David Kaye voices Animated Optimus, Grimlock, and Lugnut, as well as "Joe". Scott McNeil previously voiced Rattrap, Dinobot, Silverbolt, and Waspinator on Beast Wars.
• Good Eyes, Evil Eyes: Alongside the classic red eyes of evil the Decepticons have going on, most Autobots seem to have pupils while most Decepticons don't, giving their eyes a flat, soulless look in comparison.
• Good-Guy Bar: Maccadam's Old Oil House (which first appeared in the UK version of the Marvel comic book) is mentioned in Season 3. It used to be a Truce Zone back before the Decepticons were exiled, and was reportedly the one place not even Megatron himself would bomb during the war. Sentinel has it closed down for being a "subversive gathering place".
• Good is Not Nice: Well, let's see; we've got Wasp being thrown in the Stockades with one piece of questionable evidence, Swindle left paralyzed and our heroes do nothing about it, Sentinel wanting to kill Blackarachnia once he discovers who she really is, and then there's Omega Supreme's entire backstory... The Autobots can almost be as ruthless as the 'Cons at times.
  • Though others might argue that Autobots in this series are more grey than their usual white.
  • Most of the Autobots (excluding those who live on Earth) have an irrational fear of organics. They generally consider themselves to be better than anyone else. Oh yeah, and Omega was built to be a fairly simple-minded bot, who isn't supposed to think about WHAT he's doing.
• Gotta Catch Them All: In the beginning of the second season the All-Spark shatters into umpty-nine pieces each of which affects Future-Detroit's technology as well as the giant robots in different ways. The cast has to find them. The similarity to Inuyasha didn't go unnoticed by the fans.
  • Made all the more funny by the fact that Optimus is voiced by Sesshomaru.
• Grade-School C.E.O.: While temporarily in control of her father's company, Sari plays this role, up until Powell exploits the situation to seize control of Sumdac Industries because Sari refused to authorise research into weapons R&D projects.
• Grand Theft Me: Headmaster uses his Headmaster unit to steal Cybertronians' bodies and control them.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Thrust, the only Starscream clone to neither appear in the show nor have a toy, embodies Starscream's jealousy.
• Grenade Hot Potato: Megatron does this to Starscream during the Death Montage.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Spittor (the Decepticon frog-bot) in "TransWarped" grabs Red Alert with his tongue-tentacle things and spits her at the other Autobots.
  • Optimus beats up Headmaster-Sentinel with his own arm, a year before the movie! Optimus did the same thing to Starscream. He later forces Laserbeak into his altmode and clobbers Soundwave with him in Human Error part 2.
• Grudging "Thank You": Sentinel to Optimus after their run-in with the Headmaster.
  That must have hurt.
  More than you know.
• Grumpy Old Man: Ratchet and Captain Fanzone. Naturally, they are forced to team up in "This Is Why I Hate Machines".
• Hair-Trigger Temper: The third Constructicon, Dirt Boss. To the point of also being The Napoleon.
• Half-Arc Season: The show's episodes consist of lighthearted and self-contained stories as well as ones dealing with serious story arcs such as Megatron deceiving Professor Sumdac into rebuilding him and his attempts to conquer Cybertron using a space bridge after he regains his body.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Sari turns out to be a half-Cybertronian hybrid who was born when a Protoform scanned her father's DNA.
• Hammerspace: Wreck-Gar's trash bin can both produce random objects and make things put in it seemingly disappear. Similarly, Swindle has an in-universe justification: a private transwarp frequency to his personal storage dimension... located in his torso.
  • Post-upgrade Sari uses this for an actual hammer.
• Hate Sink: Sentinel Prime is clearly intended to be despised due to being a highly conceited and insufferable Jerkass.
• Have You Told Anyone Else?: In "TransWarped", Longarm Prime asks Blurr if he told anyone else about his information regarding the true identity of the Decepticon spy. After Blurr says that he didn't, Longarm reveals his true form as the Decepticon Shockwave and has Blurr crushed into a cube to prevent him from informing the other Autobots of his secret.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Wreck-Gar, who has a tendency to do whatever the next person tells him, changes allegiances based on whether the last person who told him what to do was good or bad.
• He Knows Too Much: Blurr was able to piece together that Wasp could not have been the traitor in the Autobot camp, as his voice did not match that of Shockwave, who was hiding under an Autobot alias. He reported this to his boss, Longarm (head of Autobot Intelligence), and told him that a simple voice scan through the data archives could determine the identity of the traitor. Unfortunately for him, he also knew too little, as Longarm was the only 'Bot he had spoken to about this... and Longarm was Shockwave's alias. Shockwave then killed him to silence him, though the script reading "The Return of Blurr" brings the speedy Autobot back.
• Hero Antagonist:
  • Sentinel Prime is often confrontational towards the series' main Autobots, but he's technically still a good guy due to being part of the Autobot Elite Guard.
  • Ultra Magnus is also one to a lesser extent. While he's the head of the Elite Guard and doesn't always agree with the decisions of Optimus' team, he ultimately understands that they know what they're doing and are doing the right thing.
• Heroes Gone Fishing: Bumblebee and Sari can often be found playing videogames, holographic Twister or flying toy planes. "Nature Calls" starts out as a camping trip.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Inverted; Megatron, the Big Bad of the series prominently wields a pair of swords ^note  they form the rotor blades of his helicopter alt-mode . This stands in contrast to the weapons employed by the Autobots, such as Optimus' axe and Ultra Magnus' hammer ^note  Per Word of God, the Autobots were built as a labor force while the Decepticons were created to be military, so it makes sense that Megatron would wield the archetypal weapon of a warrior while the Autobots would use repurposed tools .
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Optimus Prime died in the third episode - less than sixty minutes into the series. He was brought back from the dead less than two minutes later - a new personal record.
  • Omega Supreme died in the second season finale while destroying Megatron's space bridge... but he's Not Quite Dead.
  • Prowl as well, in the third (and most likely final) finale.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Bulkhead occasionally in Season 1, all the Autobots in Season 2.
• Hijacking Cthulhu: At one point, Megatron and Starscream take turns at the wheel of Omega Supreme.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs: A recurring staple of the franchise, but Animated really pushed the envelope with phrases like "risking spark and servo" ^note risking life and limb, "pry it from my cold, offline processor", and insults like "glitch-head" and "crankshaft". See also Unusual Euphemism below.
• Hollywood Law: Powell uses his connections and resources to get Masterson free so he could hire him, despite Masterson threatening to blow up an entire state on live television.
• Homage: Several designs are nods to other Humongous Mecha and even other Transformers series:
  • Starscream's vehicle mode is similar to the YF-19 Alpha One from Macross Plus and Macross 7 (he even looks like the GERWALK mode for a second during his Transformation Sequence).
  • Tutor Bot looks quite a bit like Lord Canti of FLCL.
  • The police drones used by the city look like the ED-209 from Robocop (which is also set in a futuristic Detroit), and Sumdac even makes a reference to it having similar problems with identification.
  • Blurr's vehicle mode looks like the Mach 5. The toy version even has a hidden sawblade that springs out front. On a different note, he also has wheels inspired by Cheetor from the canceled Transtech line. Appropriately, his toy will soon be retooled into an actual TransTech Cheetor toy.
  • Jetfire and Jetstorm, who combine to form Safeguard, bear a marked resemblance in design and combination-style to Hyoryu and Enryu/Choryujin from GaoGaiGar.
  • Spittor's vehicle mode was designed as an homage to Don Figueroa's version of the original Spittor's altmode before the Beast Wars.
  • The Starscream clones are all based on other jets in previous Transformers series and a sly joke towards the repaint/resell methods of Transformer toys; The original Sycophant's color scheme almost exactly matches that of Starscream in The Unicron Trilogy.
  • Dirt Boss also has mind-controlling devices he fires into other Transformers' heads, just like the G1 Insecticon Bombshell.
  • During "Decepticon Air", Sari's hands split apart into many smaller robotic fingers to operate a keyboard quickly, very much like is done by various computer operating cyborgs in Ghost in the Shell. Also, her "palm blast" hands in Transwarped bear a remarkable resemblance to the design of Iron Man's repulsors that was used in the movie.
    • In the same episode, Sunstorm and Ramjet get headpieces that cause them to resemble their G1 counterparts much more closely. According to the Allspark Almanac 2, Dirge and Thrust get coneheads of their own to complete the homage. Of course, Thundercracker, Skywarp, and Starscream don't get boxheads, but whatever.
  • Sari's first upgrade in TransWarped is another homage to Gurren Lagann, namely the way her arms and legs suddenly expand is almost identical to the way the Gurren's do when it combines with Lagann.
  • Optimus, Bulkhead, and Prowl are dead ringers for Hammerstein, Mongrol, and Joe Pineapples (respectively) from ABC Warriors. Blitzwing rather resembles Blackblood.
  • Ultra Magnus' toy received a redeco to become Roadbuster Ultra Magnus, an homage to G1's Roadbuster, who had a nearly identical vehicle mode to Animated Magnus.
  • Mainframe is such an homage to the original G1 character that, like the original (an altmodeless Action Master), he never transforms. The writers say that he does have an altmode, but it's an immobile supercomputer.
• Honest John: Swindle doesn't even bother with a fake name, he's just that honest.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Issac Sumdac thought that Megatron was an Autobot. To be fair, that part wasn't entirely unreasonable since he had no real knowledge of the Decepticons beyond witnessing Starscream battle the Autobots. However, when Megatron starts putting flamethrowers into the Dinobots (who are running amok when this info is made aware) and begs Sumdac not to tell his "Autobot friends", it's baffling that he wouldn't find that even a little suspicious.
• Hostage for MacGuffin: "Transform and Roll Out" at one point has Starscream attempt to force Optimus into surrendering the AllSpark by threatening to kill several humans.
• Hulk Speak: Grimlock has a limited vocabulary and always refers to himself as "Me Grimlock".
• Humans Are Bastards: Soundwave thinks this, since he arrogantly assumes machines are far superior to humans and shouldn't be slaves to humans. Soundwave tries recruiting Bulkhead with this anti-human ideology by pointing out how Sari didn't want to be friends with the latter anymore because she got a cooler toy for her birthday. Though Soundwave tampered with communications to turn Sari and Bulkhead against each other.
• Humans Are White: It does a better job of averting this than previous entries.
• Hunting the Rogue: Wasp is a victim of the Frame-Up variant, as he's set up as a fall guy by Longarm. While a Jerkass Victim, by the time the series begins his mind is pretty much gone and all he wants is revenge on Bumblebee. When he escapes, the Autobots on Cybertron alert Optimus Prime's team on Earth to be on the lookout.
• Hybridization Plot: Prometheus Black's biotechnology company was constantly outperformed by Isaac Sumdac's robotics, and when a last-ditch attempt to sell his technology as a viable alternative failed he went into a rage and accidentally turned himself into the supervillain Meltdown. When he next appears, he's gotten it into his head that biotechnological hybrids might be powerful enough to battle even the likes of the Autobots, and demonstrates with a fish monster and a bat monster created from two of his former employees. He intends to create even more, but is stopped by the Autobots and police captain Fanzone.
• Hypocritical Humour: Wreck-Gar complaining that Sari can't make up her mind in "Human Error" when he himself has a habit of doing whatever he's told regardless of how much it contradicts his previous instructions.

I-M

• I Approved This Message: Part of Sentinel's anti-Decepticon propaganda in "This Is Why I Hate Machines". "I'm Sentinel Prime, and I approve of this message."
• Iconic Attribute Adoption Moment:
  • In the second part of the pilot movie, the Autobots have Teletraan I scan the vehicles outside so that they can blend in with what they assume is the cybernetic population, leading to Optimus, Ratchet and Bumblebee receiving their iconic semi-truck, ambulance, and sports car alt-modes.
  • Megatron initially has a body based on his monstrous, spikey look from the first Michael Bay film, including the alt-mode of a Cybertronian jet/spaceship. However, after being reduced to a head, Megatron‘s still functioning, partially repaired head gains a new shape similar to his G1 incarnation’s bucket-like helmet, then when fully repaired by the Allspark key, Megatron adopts a new blocky, G1 inspired body, but with a dual rotor gunship alt-mode.
• "I Know You Are in There Somewhere" Fight:
  • In "Transwarped, Part III," Ratchet to Omega when Starscream's controlling him.
  • Also twice in "Human Error". Done by Sari first to her father and later to the Autobots.
• I Have a Family: The Professor in "Three's a Crowd", when he thinks Bulkhead has turned into a Pointy-Haired Boss (Bulky was just pretending so Dirt Boss wouldn't really go after him).
• I Lied: Megatron to Professor Sumdac when the latter finally learns the truth that he is a Decepticon.
• I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder: Ratchet says in "The Thrill of the Hunt" that he is a medi-bot, not a field commander.
• Impact Silhouette: Bulkhead and Blitzwing often crash through walls and leave behind holes in their shapes.
• Incoming!:
  • From the first part of "Transform and Roll Out"
  Optimus Prime: Would it kill you guys to say something like "Watch out", or, I don't know, "Heads up" or...
  Ratchet: Incoming!
  • "Mission Accomplish" has Optimus yell "Incoming" in response to seeing Starscream fall towards himself and the other Autobots.
• Incredibly Obvious Bomb: How Starscream nearly kills Megatron in the premiere. He tries to do this again during the famous Death Montage, but Megatron catches it and throws it back at him.
• Ineffectual Loner: Prowl keeps trying to be antisocial and self-reliant, but is inevitably beaten down by the power of lessons.
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: The Society of Ultimate Villainy, for the most part. They wouldn't have gone far were it not for Swindle helping them.
• Inhumanable Alien Rights:
  • Powell uses this to get Masterson off the hook for attacking Optimus and Sentinel in "The Return of the Headmaster".
  • Fanzone and the Autobots turn this back on Powell in "Black Friday" when he attempts to get the Autobots arrested for threatening him and damaging a piece of equipment that belonged to him by a technicality. Fanzone not only refuses to arrest the Autobots, but also threatens to arrest Powell if he continues making a scene.
• Initiation Ceremony: Mixmaster and Scrapper get the 'painful' version when they officially join the Decepticons: Megatron literally brands both of them.
• Ink-Suit Actor:
  • In Tara Strong and Carly Witwicky’s◊ case it’s a coincidence, due to the latter being based off a character who was designed decades before the show was produced and back when the former was a still a child.
  • Optimus’s human form◊ from “Human Error”, looks rather similar to his voice actor, David Kaye.
  • Wreck-Gar's facial features were modeled after that of "Weird Al" Yankovic, who voices him.
• Insignia Rip-Off Ritual: After Shockwave frames Wasp in "Autoboot Camp", Sentinel removes his Autobot insignia as Cliffjumper is taking him away.
• Instrument of Murder: Soundwave has an electric guitar that turned into his attack bird Laserbeak. He also has Ratbat, who turns into a keytar.
• Intro Dump: The first scene featuring the main Decepticons mentions their names so we know who they are.
• I Shall Taunt You: Bumblebee uses this against Blitzwing in "Megatron Rising", angering him enough to switch from Icy to Hothead in midair - meaning he transforms from plane to tank and falls out of the sky. "Oh slag! NOT AGAI-"
• Is It Always Like This?: Newcomer Jazz, on being attacked by a mass-produced robot army.
• Island Base: There's one hidden on Dinobot Island: Meltdown moves into it after his first jailbreak, and Blackarachnia finds it during Season 2. According to the Almanac, it's an abandoned government facility.
• I Surrender, Suckers: When Ramjet tells you he's completely disarmed and helpless, he isn't. Sentinel, who'd never met him, didn't pick up on it, but Prowl did.
• Is That a Threat?: This exchange from "This Is Why I Hate Machines".
  Ratchet: Omega Supreme is one of us. An Autobot. Harm one circuit on him and you'll answer to me.
  Sentinel Prime: Are you threatening me? That's treason, soldier! Arrest him!
• It Has Been an Honor: In the first season finale, Optimus tells the team he can't think of anyone he'd rather have by his side as they're about to go into battle. Bumblebee, however, notes he wouldn't mind having the Elite Guard there too.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: When Ratchet and Fanzone end up teleported to Cybertron in "This is Why I Hate Machines", several of the Autobots there react to Fanzone with horror and disgust and refer to the human police officer as "it".
• Jaw Drop: Bulkhead does this twice, and it literally falls off the second time.
• Jerkass: Sentinel Prime is very condescending and assholish through and through. He spends every minute insulting Optimus and the other Autobots and is fantastically racist towards organic beings. Ultra Magnus really is a terrible judge of character.
• Jet Pack: Bumblebee's turbo-boosters (when he's in the air), Prowl's jump jets (especially with the samurai armour), Sari's transforming scooter and Optimus' wing-pack from the finale.
• Jive Turkey: Jazz. "Traffic lights. Solid."
  • Marty Isenberg stated in an interview that he was supposed to sound like a beatnik.
• Job-Stealing Robot: Prometheus Black holds this view of Isaac Sumdac's creations in "Meltdown" (with the crowd at his "man vs. robot" fight agreeing with him). Captain Fanzone is a milder case, as he believes policework is meant for humans rather than robots.
• Journey to the Center of the Mind: Prowl interfaces with Omega Supreme to free him from Megatron's control.
• Keepaway: Five Autobots trying to keep an angry Starscream from the Allspark in "Transform and Roll Out". Lampshaded by Sari.
• Kid-Appeal Character: Bumblebee (duh) and Sari.
  • In "Bee in the City", Bumblebee is mistaken for several other "kid appeal" types across various other Transformers canons; Wheelie, Side Burn, Hot Shot, and Cheetor.
• "Kick Me" Prank: Sari mentions in "Sound and Fury" that she once put a "kick me" sign on Tutorbot's back.
• Kidnapped for Experimentation: Happened at least twice
  • In a season one episode, Meltdown has Swoop kidnap Sari so he can both use her as a test subject and to get revenge on Sumdac.
  • Towards the end of season three, Blackarachnia does this to Wasp, transforming him into Waspinator.
• Killed Off for Real: Starscream and Prowl both die (the former permanently) in the series finale.
• Knight of Cerebus: The show has quite a few, actually, the first was Lockdown, who has his roots with Ratchet, and showed an emotional depth and seriousness that made most people grow to the series, Megatron, who basically threw out all the stops by murdering Starscream the moment he's right next to him, and Shockwave, who outright murdered Blurr, not to mention his generally no nonsense attitude.
  • We forgot Wasp, whose insanity, unlike in Beast Wars, isn't played for laughs.
• Lantern Jaw of Justice: Many of the Transformers, but especially Sentinel Prime, who's a pastiche of The Tick.
• Large and in Charge: Decepticon leader Megatron and Autobot authority figure Ultra Magnus are both much larger than the rest of their comrades.
• Large Ham:
  • Starscream constantly screams his dialogue and rarely speaks subtly.
  • Sentinel Prime transforms into a flexing musclepose.
  • Slightly more subtle, but head!Megatron's magnificent one-liners ("I blame myself", "I suspect it was an inside job", etc.) surely qualify.
• Last Villain Stand: After the destruction of the Omega Supreme knockoffs, the capture of Lugnut and Shockwave, the death of Starscream and Prowl's Heroic Sacrifice, Megatron charges in at Optimus for one last battle. After a swift scuffle, Optimus defeats Megatron, who tells him to end him. Instead, Optimus arrests Megatron and takes him back to Cybertron.
• Laughably Evil: Blitzwing's "Random" persona provides for plenty of laughs because of how nuts he is.
• Lean and Mean: Starscream and Oil Slick are both skinny Decepticons.
• Leet Lingo:
  • The Headmaster, often straying into Totally Radical. "Total OWNAGE, n00b!"
  • Professor Sumdac has since tried to adopt this as his personal catchphrase. Thankfully, he failed.
  • There's something resembling a lampshading here in a dialogue between Headmaster and Optimus Prime:
    Headmaster: I am so leet!
    Optimus Prime: Yeah? Well, I have no idea what that means!
• Left Hanging: Sari's backstory is easily the biggest unresolved issue, although there are a few others (see What Happened to the Mouse?).
• Legion of Doom: The Society of Ultimate Villainy, which is comprised of the most fail-tastic human adversaries plus Swindle, who lives up to his name rather well.
• The Lifestream: The Well of All Sparks is pretty much the Cybertronian afterlife.
• Line-of-Sight Name: There are at least three examples.
  • Grimlock took his name when Megatron was lamenting that his chances at getting free were, "Grim. Locked in this laboratory." "Grim... Lock... Me Grimlock!"
  • When the Constructicons were born from the AllSpark fragments, Scrapper noticed the "Mixmaster" brand on his partner, who decided it was too long and just be called Mix. Scrapper got his name from seeing a sign with "Scrap" written on it, but Mix thought it was too short and also adjusted it.
  • Wreck-Gar took his name from what people were shouting at him. "Worthless-wreck-walking-pile-of-garbage"." Angry Archer thought it was too much and shortened it to Wreck-Gar.
• Little "No": Optimus utters one in "Endgame" when he discovers Prowl is dead.
• The Load:
  • Bumblebee, for all his charm and humor. While he is okay at fighting human supervillains he is utterly useless when fighting Decepticons on his own, as his one weapon (nodes that shoot out beams of electricity) are too weak to even make any of them flinch. Well, until he gets the limiters on them taken off and they become the most powerful weapon on the entire team.
  • Averted with Sari, who is somewhat of a liaison between humans and the Autobots as well as having a key empowered by the AllSpark.
• Loner-Turned-Friend: Prowl.
• Long-Runners: In-universe, the Ninja Gladiator series of video games is over 100 years old. The first game apparently came out in the NES era and evidently its popularity has been extremely long-lived.
• Locked into Strangeness: Isaac Sumdac has a white S-shaped stripe in his hair. He got it when Sari was "born".
• Losing Your Head: As inflicted by the Headmaster on Bulkhead, Sentinel Prime and Starscream. Not to mention Season 1 Megatron, and Waspinator, left in multiple pieces.
• Lots of Luggage: "Nature Calls" had Prowl taking Sari and Bumblebee camping. Bumblebee ends up packing a lot of electronic devices. An incredulous Prowl asks how he managed to store them all.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: The Autobots end up in one of these where they become human thanks to Soundwave in "Human Error".
• Macross Missile Massacre: Blitzwing can pull these off in a pinch. Lugnut can pull off a similar move with a payload of bombs.
• Mad Scientist:
  • Meltdown does experiments on people that turn them into super-powered beings or deformed mutants.
  • The Headmaster invents technology that he uses to steal and control Cybertronians' bodies.
  • Oil Slick is a Decepticon chemist specializing in making poisons.
  • Blackarachnia uses her cunning to try and cure herself of her organic form and is also responsible for Blitzwing being a triple changer.
  • Ratchet seems to view Perceptor, Wheeljack, Mainframe, and Highbrow as this, with a "My God, what have you done?!" type reaction to every little thing they do. Although given how they created Omega Supreme to live the life he did, Ratchet might have a point.
• Magic Skirt: Sari's dress. And thank god, because she's eight.
• Magnetic Plot Device: Pretty much everything important to the series involves the AllSpark and Sari's key in at least some capacity.
  • and they do whatever's most conducive to the story at hand.
  • The writers have explicitly stated they don't plan to give an explanation for its existence for fear of it being uninteresting, too bizarre, or take up much more plot than its worth.
• Magnetism Manipulation: Ratchet has a pair of magnets in his forearms. As a medic, their initial use was loading damaged Autobots onto his sick bay, but they're quite useful in combat. Interestingly, he also had an Electromagnetic Pulse Generator that functioned entirely differently, instantly knocking out any Transformer in its beam. He could also combine his magnetism with teammate Bumblebee's electric Stingers to make an EMP... somehow.
• Make Me Wanna Shout: Starscream eventually develops an eerily appropriate sonic scream ability from the AllSpark fragment in his head. It's never really explained how he does this, and it's never even brought up again after "TransWarped".
• Make Sure He's Dead: After Starscream's first resurrection, Megatron kills him and tells Lugnut to make sure he's off-line. Lugnut confirms that his spark chamber is empty, and they promptly chuck the body into a river. Starscream gets back up anyway thanks to his AllSpark fragment.
• Manipulative Bastard:
  • Megatron manipulates Isaac Sumdac into furthering his agenda and giving him a new body by deceiving him into believing that he is on good terms with the Autobots.
  • Starscream, too. He plays Lugnut and Shockwave like datatrax. In fact, a throwaway line by him in the first episode may indicate that most Decepticons are like this... hence their name (well, those that aren't thuggish muscle anyway).
• Manipulative Editing: Done by Porter C. Powell to Bulkhead in the tie-in comic The Arrival during the story "The Insincerest Form of Flattery", where Powell edits footage of Bulkhead decrying his line of SWAT vehicles named after the Autobot without his permission so that Bulkhead appears to be approving of them.
• Meaningful Echo: "You can trust this face, can't you?" in the pilot. Ratchet and Omega Supreme get their own in the Season 3 premiere - "We do what we must, even if, sometimes, it doesn't make sense."
• The Medic: Ratchet and Red Alert. The instant healing properties of Sari's key often displaced Ratchet's skills and put her in this role.
• Medium Awareness: Slightly played with in the Japanese dub. For a crossover version, Bumblebee jokingly thinks about calling for Rescue Fire when the Autobots are responding to a building fire, and Bulkhead responds that that's a different show in part 3 of "Transform and Roll Out" (considering that Rescue Fire aired in the same timeslot before Animated's debut). Later in that same part, when Optimus was contemplating on getting the AllSpark to safety, Starscream attacks the Bots while yelling that the show's not over yet (truthfully, he could be referring that they weren't victorious yet).
• Merchandise-Driven: Eventually; somewhat averted when the series first debuted, as the toyline was actually delayed several months due to Hasbro wanting to continue pushing merch from the live-action movie. The toy line would catch up, though, and one store-exclusive redeco even got featured late in the third season.
• Merchandising the Monster: After being fired from Sumdac Industries, Porter C. Powell starts selling toys of Soundwave, himself a former toy turned into Megatron's robotic liberator that had previously taken control of all the technology in Detroit to wipe out the human race. Surprisingly, it sells like crazy—even Sumdac himself buys one (though it's more to make up for the fact that the original Soundwave, a birthday gift for his daughter, was designed by Megatron when he was tricking him into thinking he was a friend). Unsurprisingly, when the real Soundwave uses these new toys to take control of the Autobots and cause even more havoc, Powell is bankrupted by the massive refunds he gets hit with.
• Mercy Kill: Megatron asks this from Optimus when he finally defeats the former in battle in the finale episode "Endgame, Part II". Optimus decides a lifelong sentence in stasis would be a harsher punishment.
• Mexican Standoff: The climax of "A Fistful of Energon" has all sides aiming at each other and forced to call it a draw.
• Minion Shipping: Lugnut and Strika are married.
• Misfit Mobilization Moment: The Substitute Autobots consist of reluctant recruits Wreck-Gar, Scrapper, and Snarl.
• Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher: Arcee in the finale, due to Shockwave's hacking.
• Missing Mom: Averted. While Sari initially appears to have one of these, it's eventually revealed that she's actually a robot-human hybrid who was created when Isacc Sumdac's DNA was combined with a protoform, thus no female was involved in her "birth".
• Mistaken Identity: In the second-last episode, Slipstream spots Starscream flying over Detroit, and heads over to shoot him down; when she sees it's Optimus wearing a jet pack built from one of Starscream's old bodies, she flies away while expressing her surprise about flying Autobots.
• The Mole: The Autobot Longarm Prime is really the Decepticon Shockwave in disguise.
• Monster Roommate: In an inversion of this trope, Sari spends most of Season 3 living with the Autobots.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Sky-Byte only appears as a headshot in the AII, and doesn't even get a bio, but slag does he have teeth. It's an even bigger shift than Waspinator.
• Motor Mouth: Blurr, to the nth degree. Notably, this is played differently from his G1 counterpart, who rambled irrelevancies and reiterated himself in a redundant manner; Here, he talks a blue streak at 600 mph.
• Mundane Made Awesome: At the end of "Human Error," Optimus and Soundwave have a guitar duel, done completely seriously.
• My Nayme Is: Played with at episode 1's "next episode" segment in the Japanese dub. Bumblebee complains that "Optimus Prime" is long and hard to remember, and so opts for other names that are all rejected by Optimus: Convoy (traditionally used in Japanese TF series for almost any "Prime"), Opti (sounds more fitting for a cute dog), Opra (plain weird), and Pupu (from "Oputimasu Puraimu", and it's hard not to laugh at it). Bumblebee actually gets Optimus into responding to "Pupu", much to Prime's dismay. It soon degenerates into a "Pupu!" "Optimus Prime!" argument past the sponsor cards.
• Mysterious Past: The pasts of the individual Decepticons are unknown. It's at least been established that the Decepticons were a nationalist subfaction that supported imperialism and got tired of doing the military work for the civilian-oriented Autobots, but everything beyond that remains a mystery. Megatron is said to be have gained support against his predecessor for being a charismatic rhetorician.
• Mythology Gag: Quite a lot, given that this is a Transformers series.
  • Some of them go double meta. Starscream's clones have color schemes similar to the Seekers of G1, but are also a sly dig at the fact that most Seeker toys are repaints of Starscream. The triceratops Dinobot in G1 was named Slag (which became an Unusual Euphemism in Beast Wars and later in this show) and this one is called Snarl. In the show, Scrapper claims to have tried naming him Slag first, but the Dinobot took offense.
    • Slag was a name considered for Snarl, too.
  • Some of the returning voice actors are fairly obvious (Corey Burton reprising Shockwave, Susan Blu reprising Arcee, Judd Nelson reprising Rodimus Prime), but there's a more subtle one with David Kaye voicing Grimlock. David Kaye voicing a Transformer with a T-Rex as its alt-mode seems rather familiar... yeeeeeeesss...
  • Another subtle nod to a previous version was the casting of "Weird Al" Yankovic as Wreck-Gar. In Transformers: The Movie Weird Al's song "Dare to be Stupid" was used as the Junkions theme music.
  • In the Allspark Almanac II, Huffer and Pipes' character bios (as written by one another) both hint at their G1 counterparts' quirks - Pipes says Huffer loves Cybertron and he hopes he never has to find out how he would feel about being anywhere else, while Huffer says Pipes needs a hobby and has to get out in the galaxy; G1 Huffer was a constant bellyacher who hated life on Earth and just wanted to go home, and G1 Pipes was fascinated by Earth culture and technology, having an extensive Kitsch Collection of Earth knicknacks.
    • Also in the second AA, we have Volks' tendency to phrase every sentence he can as a question - a callback to the Generation 1 comics' infamous Death's Head.
  • Several for Beast Wars:
    • Tigatron Stadium - a nod to the Beast Wars character, and to the late, great Tiger Stadium.
    • In "SUV" Swindle mentions picking up a Negatronic forcefield emitter from the Vok on Nexus Zero.
    • After her Robotic Reveal, Sari soon gains a Cybertronian form, meaning she has an organic alt-mode like a beastformer.
    • Blackarachnia, Wasp(inator) and Rattletrap. At the end of Predacons Rising, Blackarachnia is dumped in front of a gorilla, a cheetah, a rhino, and a rat. The way she says "You've got to be kidding," almost makes it sound like she's breaking the fourth wall.
    • The Allspark Almanac II describes several other members of the Omega Sentinels and their bonded partners. Among them is Alpha Supreme, codename Axalon and his companion Primal Major, who is transparently Optimus Primal and looks like this.◊ To complete the reference, Alpha fell into a black hole while in pursuit of fleeing Decepticons, where he and his crew are believed to have ended up trapped in the past.
  • The first we see the Autobots is their job was repairing space bridges, which is sort of a Shout-Out to Transformers: Cybertron to which Optimus Prime's plan was to build new space bridges.
  • Sari eventually becomes (or rather always was) flesh-on-the-outside, robot-on-the-inside, just like the Pretender toys from the late 80's line.
    • Before that, Meltdown's two failed "organic transformer" experiments are expies of actual Decepticon Pretenders from the toyline, comics and Transformers: Super-God Masterforce; the lawyer-turned-bat-thing is based off of Bomb-Burst, while the accountant-turned-shark-thing is based off of Submarauder.
  • Roadhandler is one of Yoketron's old pupils, and was trained in the art of wrestling - this is a reference to the G1 Roadhandler's stint as a professional wrestler in the G1 comics.
  • Both times Soundwave's body is destroyed, he survives as a small core that resembles his G1 self's cassette mode.
    • In "Human Error Part 1", he announces "Autobots inferior. Soundwave superior."
  • In "Transform and Roll Out, Part 2", the Autobots thought the robots and vehicles are the dominant species, just like in the first issue of Marvel Comics' Transformers.
  • Scrapper and Mixmaster are depicted as having a thing for cars, which calls back to Side Burn constantly pursuing and hitting on red cars in Transformers: Robots in Disguise.
  • When voicing Ultra Magnus, Jeff Bennett appears to be doing a fairly accurate impression of the late Robert Stack, who originally voiced the G1 Magnus in The Transformers: The Movie.
  • The one time Megatron fires his fusion cannon before getting his body rebuilt, it makes the exact sound that G1 Megs' cannon made.
  • In Red Alert's profile, it's mentioned that one of her medical achievements was finding a cure for Gold Plastic Syndrome, implied to be a wasting disease on Cybertron.
  • In the G1 series, Shockwave was the only Decepticon who remained on Cybertron. He retains that status in this series, but since the Autobots control Cybertron, Shockwave is reimagined as a double agent posing as an Autobot.
    • Which is itself a reference, to the G1 character Punch, who had a vehicle mode and two robot modes, one of which was supposedly a Decepticon, Counterpunch, just as Shockwave has two robot modes (except in Shockwave's case, the Decepticon is the real personality).
  • When Bumblebee is shown playing Ninja Gladiators, the face in the background is that of TORQ III, an Artificial Intelligence taken over by Megatron in the The Transformers episode "Day of the Machines". This stage is then shown off at a larger scale, complete withTORQ III, in the Allspark Almanac II.
  • In the Allspark Almanac II entry on Ninja Gladiators, one of the Inhumanoids mentioned is Hojoni, a Not Zilla who made a cameo appearance as a movie advertising billboard in the The Transformers episode "Kremzeek!".
  • The comic book story "The Stunti-Con Job" has the Stunticons pose as autobots, which was basically what they did in their debut episode, the two-part "Key to Vector Sigma".
  • The Elite Guard's ship is named Steelhaven, the name of the ship that the autobot Headmasters (and other groups) came to Earth in, in The Marvel Comics series from the eighties.

N-R

• The Napoleon: Dirt Boss is incredibly short and would rather give orders than take them.
• Nanomachines: Experimental 'microbots' going haywire indirectly wake up the Autobots during the pilot. Powell has them repurposed to consume garbage in "Garbage In, Garbage Out", but the first sample is exposed to Allspark radiation and starts consuming everything: luckily, they can't swim.
• Neck Lift: Raising someone by their neck is done by Blackarachnia to Optimus (after borrowing Bulkhead's strength), Starscream to Bumblebee and Megatron to both Constructicons.
• Neutral No Longer:
  • Scrapper and Mixmaster start out as neutral Cybertronians until Megatron bribes them with oil to side with the Decepticons.
  • Wreck-Gar starts out as unaffiliated, tries to be an Autobot before Ratchet insults him, and briefly joins the Decepticons after a chance encounter with Lugnut. To be fair, Ratchet apologizes to Wreck-Gar about insulting him when he tried to be an Autobot and convinces him to switch back to being a hero.
• Never My Fault: Sentinel blaming Optimus for Elita-1's "death" when it was his own responsibility they went to the organic planet in spite of the journey being forbidden in the first place.
• Never Trust An Opening:
  • The opening to the Japanese dub of Animated suggests that IronArmorhide and Arcee have bigger roles than they actually do in the series. And the humans seen throughout the series? Nowhere in the Opening... not even the Sumdacs.
  • It also has the Autobots and Decepticons battling each other in various locations across the world, which they did do in G1, but not in Animated. It also shows Arcee and Blackarachnia fighting each other, when they never even meet in the show. And then there's that weird, shadowy, robot... guy... thing, wearing a cape at the beginning of the intro. Who the hell is that?!
  • Lockdown is featured as part of the main group of Decepticons (Even in the ending) despite being technically unaffiliated while Lugnut, on the other hand, only appears briefly.
• Never Say "Die": 'Slag' or 'take offline' are generally used instead, with the occasional exception - Bumblebee quotes Rattrap in the premiere ("We're all gonna die, aren't we?"), Starscream threatens that all of Detroit "will perish" in his mission to find the AllSpark, and when Optimus tells Ratchet he has to use his EMP on an overloading Sari, he flat-out says "It could kill her!" Sari herself later mentions that Soundwave "tried to kill me".
• New Powers as the Plot Demands: Sari's key does exactly... Whatever is needed this episode. From repairing offline bots, to unspecified upgrades, to controlling any machine, to tracing pay-per-view signals, to removing AllSpark fragments from speeding trains.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Bumblebee really screws up in "Autoboot Camp" by accusing the innocent Wasp of being a Decepticon spy.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Megatron probably would have beaten the Autobots and gotten the Allspark... had Starscream not placed an explosive on his back and blown his arm clean off.
• Nice Mean And In Between:
  • Jazz, Sentinel Prime and Ultra Magnus. Jazz is a Nice Guy who eventually quits and becomes Team Prime's 11th-Hour Ranger after Sentinel's stunts during "This Is Why I Hate Machines". Meanwhile, Sentinel is a Jerkass Hate Sink who enjoys berating and insulting the heroes. Ultra Magnus is not a total jerk like Sentinel, but he's not as amiable as Jazz.
  • The Constructicons present a villainous example. Scrapper is the most amicable of the three, to the point where Sari is able to recruit him as a temporary Autobot. Meanwhile, Dirt Boss is a napoleonic jerk. Mixmaster isn't as nice as Scrapper, but he's not as much of an asshole as Dirt Boss is.
• Ninja: Prowl, Jazz, Master Yoketron, supposedly Oil Slick and (formerly) Lockdown all practice a Cybertronian equivalent of martial arts.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Besides being robot ninjas, Jazz is also a Soul Brotha, and Prowl and Bumblebee were once turned into zombies. Lockdown has a huge claw for a right hand, making him the "pirate" to Prowl's "ninja", as well as a Bounty Hunter with a skull for a head and an undertaker's tux. To say nothing of the Dinobots, who are Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • Let's not forget that Prowl decided to become the complete opposite of a ninja by getting a Samurai-armor upgrade in "A Fistful of Energon"... which later returns in "Five Servos of Doom" and seems to be a permanent upgrade.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Optimus and Bumblebee would've made it to the Elite Guard if they didn't bother to help their fellow Autobots (Bumblebee for accepting the blame on Bulkhead's behalf for knocking a tower onto Sentinel, and Optimus for taking the heat for Sentinel's idea to go to the restricted planet). Isaac Sumdac spends Season 2 as a prisoner due to helping that poor disembodied robot head in his lab.
• No Gravity for You: In the pilot, Optimus temporarily disables the ship's artificial gravity while fighting Megatron, giving him and the team slightly better odds.
• Nonindicative Name: Due to the "no Autobots fly but Jetfire and Jetstorm" rule, several background Autobots like Sky Garry and Powerglide, both of which get Hand Waved; Sky Garry directs air traffic and Powerglide flew spaceships in the Great War.
• Noodle Incident: The 'unfortunate incident' involving a police drone and Captain Fanzone's wife brought up by Isaac Sumdac in "Total Meltdown" (given the way it's mentioned, it probably wasn't anything too awful).
• The Noseless: Technically speaking, it seems like none of the robots have actual noses, but rather have a nose-like structure that is formed by their helmets. When Bumblebee's is taken by Wasp, at the end of "Where Is Thy Sting?", his full face is shown, with no other facial features outside of his mouth and optics.
• No Power, No Color: In reference to Optimus Prime's death in The Transformers: The Movie, all Transformers fade to gray upon death. This is justified by the concept of Transformers having "electronic paint jobs" that let them change color at will, with the implication that their normal color schemes are such paint jobs that deactivate to reveal their real gray colors underneath when they die. After Blurr is crushed by the disguised Shockwave into a cube and handed off to be disposed of, it's noteworthy that the cube is still Blurr's powder blue coloring, hinting that he's still alive but immobile.
• Nothing Is the Same Anymore: Season 3 has higher stakes than the previous seasons and isn't as lighthearted. There's also Sari being aged up to adolescence after using the AllSpark Key to upgrade herself.
• Not Quite Flight: The Autobots are mostly confined to the ground, but Prowl has his Jetpack and Optimus is surprisingly effective with his grappling hooks when fighting airborne opponents. The most creative example, though, is the multi-stage rocket in "Nanosec" where Bulkhead fires his wrecking ball to launch the duo of Prowl and Bumblebee, Prowl giving Bumblebee a boost with his jump-jets, and Bumblebee using his turbo boosters to get even higher than that, into the upper atmosphere. Who needs jet engines anyway?
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: When most people heard that Waspinator was going to be in Season 3 most fans thought he was going to be comic-relief like his Beast Wars counterpart, not an ex-Jerkass who's been mentally broken past repair, a hulking monster twice the size of Prime, and a completely insane Implacable Man (as, like in Beast Wars, blowing him up just annoys him).
• Odd Couple: Optimus and Grimlock. Prowl and Bumblebee/Bulkhead. Ratchet and Captain Fanzone.
• Officer O'Hara: Wreck-Gar meets an Irish-accented cop while trying to work out who he is in "Garbage In, Garbage Out".
• Official Couple:
  • Lugnut and Strika are apparently married (in the AllSpark Almanac, Lugnut describes Strika as being his consort).
  • The Almanac II also gives us Rattletrap/Botanica and Warpath/Flareup.
• Oh, Crap!: The look of pure abject horror on Optimus Prime's face when the restored Megatron (whom he'd thought dead since the first episode) bursts out of Sumdac Tower is priceless. This is a 'bot who understands exactly how completely and utterly screwed he is.
  • The Elite Guard get a big one when, after insisting for the entire episode that there are no Decepticons on Earth, they face off with Starscream, who is more than willing to show the lot of them a taste of what Optimus has been up against.
    • Ultra Magnus has a pretty good one. After telling the Autobots to stand back, he presumably intended to deal with the situation. As soon as he turns around, Starscream has recovered and is pointing his weapons right in Magnus's face. * blast!*
  • The Decepticons get their own when the Autobot ship transforms into a revived Omega Supreme.
    • And again in "Transwarped" (the Season 3 premiere):
      Starscream: Omega Supreme?!?! ...We're slagged.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Bulkhead continually brings up the fact that Professor Sumdac was, well, deceived into rebuilding Megatron.
• Opposite-Sex Clone: Slipstream is one of Starscream's clones and is also female.
• Organ Theft: Lockdown indulges in the robot equivalent by taking parts from Cybertronians.
• Out of Focus: Captain Fanzone went from a major character in Season 1 to a rarely appearing recurring character by Season 3. Humans in general were pretty much written out of season 3, in an attempt to make the show less about them and more about the titular giant robots, though it's justified, as the Decepticons are beginning to act more and more openly and aggressively, forcing the Autobots to focus their efforts on stopping them.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: In "Mission Accomplished", the Autobots justify their decision to select Fanzone as Sari's new legal guardian in light of her father's disappearance and an order from the Elite Guard to leave Earth by informing Fanzone that he's number one on their list of the humans they trust the most. They then quickly add that the list isn't very long and that it includes Meltdown and Nanosec.
• Panicky Expectant Father: Spike Witwicky goes through this in the episode "Garbage In, Garbage Out", the one episode where he ever gets any dialogue. He is visibly nervous about his wife Carly being ready to give birth and desperately asks for someone to help them get to the hospital. Ratchet is forced by Sari to help the expecting couple out as a way of working on his people skills, but the Autobot's grumpy attitude and the chaos caused by Wreck-Gar only worsen Spike's fear for the safety of his wife and yet-to-be-born child. In the end, they decide to take a cab.
• Parental Bonus: Shout Outs to Airplane!!, Die Hard, Star Trek, Peanuts and so, so many more...
• Parental Substitute: While they mostly act like her older brothers (especially Bumblebee and Bulkhead), the Autobots take Sari's safety very seriously. It becomes more or less official at the start of Season 2 when the 'bots take her in after Sumdac's disappearance. The fact that the interactions the Autobots (namely Optimus) have with Sari regularly sound like the interactions between parents and their children only drives this plot home.
• Percussive Maintenance: Blackout repairs the space bridge he broke after stomping on the ground near it by... stomping on the ground near it again, implied to be an ability of his (that is, causing electronics to fail and being able to reactivate them, hence the name).
• People Puppets: Anyone controlled by a Headmaster unit or Dirt Boss's Headmaster-derived drill bit.
• Personal Gain Hurts: Sari learns time and time again that it isn't always right to use the AllSpark Key to make things go her way.
• Pet the Dog: Sentinel offering Optimus a spot in the Elite Guard in "Decepticon Air". Although it doesn't last long before he's kicking again.
• Pintsized Powerhouse: Both Brawn and Dirt Boss are very strong in spite of being shorter than most Cybertronians.
• The Plan: Megatron pulls one of these off in "Endgame, Part 1,".
• Playing with Fire: One-third of Blitzwing (and occasionally another third), and as of the third season, Hot Shot and Jetfire (duh).
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up: TransWarped: Sari in Season 3, courtesy of the AllSpark Key. Before she was about 8, now she looks about 16.
• Portal Network: The space bridges enable Cybertronians to teleport anywhere.
• Power Copy: Blackarachnia and her previous form, Elita-1 were both able to temporarily download other Cybertronians' abilities.
• Power Incontinence: This happens in "TransWarped" to Sari after the AllSpark Key starts to overload her body.
• Power Trio: The Elite Guard. Ultra Magnus: Superego, Jazz: Ego, Sentinel Prime: Id. Blitzwing arguably forms his own trio, with the calm face being Superego, the angry face being Id, and the crazy face being Ego [by combining the others' traits at random].
  • The Dinobots could count, never being seen separately outside of Human Error, Part II.
• Praetorian Guard: The Elite Guard are powerful soldiers affiliated with Ultra Magnus.
• President Evil: According to the second Allspark Almanac, Cobra Commander is a former president of the United States - his face was even added to Mount Rushmore!
• Pride Before a Fall: "Return of the Headmaster" is all about this for Sentinel.
• Promise Me You Won't X: When Sentinel calls Optimus after his run-in with the Headmaster, he makes him promise not to laugh. Of course, when Optimus sees what's happened...
• Psycho for Hire: Lockdown does jobs for the Decepticons and has a disturbing fondness for stealing his victim's parts so he can add them to his own being.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
  Starscream: [to Megatron] "THIS! IS! ALL!!! YOUR!!! FAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUULT!!!!!"
  Prowl [to Lockdown, much more quietly] "Give. Me. Yoketron's. Helmet."
• Put on a Bus: The plan for Season 4 was for Sari and Bulkhead to take up permanent residence on Cybertron, becoming at best recurring guest characters. Bulkhead would have been replaced on Earth by Ironhide.
• Quirky Miniboss Squad:
  • Team Chaar, appearing in one scene set on the other side of the galaxy which wasn't even very plot-relevant.
  • Also the SUV, although they were only a group for one episode.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Unlike other incarnations where he leads a group of trained warriors, this time Optimus leads a group of bots that were a simple repair crew that just had to be in the right place when the Allspark appeared.
• Raised by Robots: Sari spends most of the second season living and being brought up by the Autobots in their warehouse.
• Random Transportation: Going through a space-bridge with no target co-ordinates can send you just about anywhere, and holding onto a plasmadynamic thruster while someone else is transwarping can send you hurtling around space like a pinball. The Autobots exploit this by attaching one to Omega while he's under Megatron's control, sending him transwarping randomly through space for most of the season.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Bulkhead delivers one to Wasp in "Where Is Thy Sting?".
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Fanzone and Ultra Magnus are both understanding of the Autobots and their good intentions.
• Recurring Extra: The Witwicky family from the Generation 1 cartoon make occasional appearances, most of them being silent background cameos.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: All the Decepticons. In fact, when the Constructicons became Decepticons, their eyes turned red. Blackarachnia's, too.
• Red Herring Mole: Wasp is the Ur-Example in this show, and suffered for it the most. But every one that wasn't Bumblebee, Bulkhead and Sentinel in the flashback was a suspect. An error in an online game on Cartoon Network's website made Ironhide a Deception. Cliffjumper (the red Autobot) was supposed to be the traitor but Hasbro nixed the idea. Turns out the mole was Longarm Prime.
• Reference Overdosed: The Almanacs, again, if not the show itself, have scores of pop culture references, even ones not remotely connected to Transformers.
• Relocating the Explosion:
  • "Nanosec" had Bumblebee take care of an unstable container of destronium by throwing it into space before it blew up.
  • "A Fistful of Energon" has the Autobots do this to get rid of Starscream's prototypes for Sunstorm and Skywarp when they are revealed to be living bombs as part of a plan to destroy the Autobots and Megatron in one fell swoop.
• Remake Cameo: Peter Cullen, the original voice of Optimus Prime, did voiceovers for commercials about the show's series premiere.

• Rescue Equipment Attack:
  • Ratchet is a Combat Medic who uses his medic tools as weapons. His main "weapons" are two electromagnets whose primary function is to transport bots. And his second "weapon" is an EMP-generator which basically a Cybertronian's analog of anesthetics (which can cause Laser-Guided Amnesia if overdosed). Lockdown realized that very quickly.
  • Optimus Prime, whose alt mode is a fire truck, is able to use foam to attack enemies (generally blinding them in order to leave them open for follow-up attacks or to allow a retreat). Also inverted in that his primary weapon is his axe, which is actually meant (and sometimes used) for breaking down walls and hacking down doors for rescue and evacuation purposes.
• Rescue Romance: Both subtext-y robot romances, Optimus/Blackarachnia and Ratchet/Arcee, make heavy use of the males saving and failing to save the helpless females.
• Resistance Is Futile: Said word for word by Soundwave in '"Human Error".
• The Reveal: Sari is a human/Cybertronian hybrid.
• Right Behind Me: In "TransWarped", Henry Masterson speaks ill of the Autobots, then turns around to see Optimus Prime standing behind him.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Meltdown asserts that Isaac Sumdac merely got lucky with his success in robotics. He's right, but he probably didn't realize that Sumdac's "luck" consisted of being the one to find Megatron's disembodied, offline head.
• Robo Family: Jetfire and Jetstorm refer to each other as brothers due to being 'born' from a mitotic spark.
• Robot Dog: Sparkplug is a robot dog that Sari keeps as a pet.
• Robot Superhero: Animated takes this theme further than any series prior. The Autobots are made the official superheroes of Detroit; stopping normal crime and fighting human supervillains, at least until the Decepticons start overshadowing them in threat.
• Robot War: Soundwave keeps trying to start one, and it's just not happening.
• Robotic Reveal: In the Season 2 finale, Sari's arm is injured, revealing a metal joint and circuitry. The following season reveals that she is a Cybertronian protoform Isaac found that copied his DNA when he touched it and took a Human alt-mode.
• Rogues Gallery: Of mostly humans, allowing the Decepticons to stay that much more threatening by their lack of overuse.
• Rollerblade Good: Optimus and Bumblebee have wheels on their feet which they can use this way. Sari has actual rollerblades, and later gets laser-skates with her upgrade.

S-Z

• Sadistic Choice:
  • Starscream does this in the pilot by making Optimus choose between recovering the AllSpark or saving the humans he's endangering.
  • Bumblebee also does this to Nanosec in the villain's debut episode by making him choose between retrieving the container of destronium from him at the cost of aging even more or letting him get away with the destronium so that using the suit wouldn't continue aging him.
• Sassy Secretary: Or rather, a robot programmed to sound and act like one.
• Sapient Ship: Though most of the cast qualifies as Sapient (Inorganic) Vehicles, it turns out that their ship is really Omega Supreme, war hero and savior apparent. For whatever reason, his offline body was used for Space Bridge repair (almost certainly because of his friend Ratchet; Sentinel Prime was under the impression that Omega had been dismantled after the war), and they later brought him back on-line.
  • According to the second Almanac, the Elite Guard's ship "Steelhaven" is actually Sigma Supreme, the only other intact Omega Sentinel, given the same treatment^note The ship's name is another Mythology Gag, being the name of the ship used by the G1 headmasters in the 1980's Marvel Comics series.
• Say My Name:
  • Megatron's reaction when he finds out it was Starscream who set him up the bomb in the premiere.
  • Megatron never remembers Optimus' name, so in the Grand Finale, the Autobot leader does this for himself:
    "My name is OPTIMUS PRIME!"
    • This plays Book Ends with the battle with Starscream in the series premiere, where Optimus says the same thing to Starscream.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The writers took the worker's revolution aspect of the Autobots from the original series & played it to its logical conclusion.
• Screams Like a Little Girl:
  • Bumblebee screams like a girl in "Along Came A Spider" when he first sees Blackarachnia.
  • SENTINEL PRIME. Supposedly, they even got a woman to voice the scream.
  • Grandus, one of the biggest transformers in the entire series. Although admittedly he appears to be in full on wimp mode all the time.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Jazz, having enough of Sentinel's attitude, follows Ratchet to Earth to join Optimus' crew in "This Is Why I Hate Machines."
• Screw Yourself: Okay, he never gets that far, this being a kid's show, but there was definitely something suggestive about the way Starscream asked Slipstream what part of him she represented. She wasn't interested.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Megatron spends Season 1 as a disembodied head trapped in Professor Sumdac's lab until he is freed by his lackeys during the season finale.
• Secret Public Identity: Unlike later shows, here the Autobots make no effort to hide themselves from the general public, instead being fairly open with the humans about why they are there and doing good deeds for the city as a show of good will (such as catching super villains in season 1).
• Send in the Clones: Starscream is able to create clones of himself, each of which embodies part of his personality. One is a coward, one is an egomaniac, one is a pathological liar, one's a suck-up...and one is a girl.
  Starscream: So, which part of me do you come from?
  Slipstream: Don't ask!
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: Starscream uses clones as a form of Trojan horse... twice.
• Series Fauxnale: "Endgame" is an interesting example; while the writers had planned a Season 4, it ends the series on a fairly conclusive note, with Prowl's Heroic Sacrifice, Megatron finally remembering Optimus' name, the Allspark being restored, and the Autobots capturing the remaining Decepticons and returning to Cybertron, where they are hailed as heroes. However, due to Season 4's cancellation, Endgame became the true series finale; thus, it's an instance of a Series Fauxnale actually serving its intended purpose of wrapping up the show satisfyingly in case of a cancellation.
• Sesquipedalian Smith: Prometheus Black. His first name is rather sophisticated when compared to his more mundane surname.
• Shaking the Rump: The short "Starscream Heckles Megatron" consists of Starscream making fun of Megatron behind his back while he's giving a speech to the other Decepticons and acting innocent whenever Megatron turns around. The mocking gesture Starscream performs when Megatron catches him red-handed is shaking his butt.
• Shapeshifter Guilt Trip: Shockwave does this to Bumblebee and Bulkhead, asking if they're really willing to take down their old friend Longarm. They totally fall for it. Psych.
• Shaped Like Itself: Bulkhead is as gentle as a... really gentle thing (and then there's the page quote Professor Sumdac gave us for Technological Pacifist).
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Ratchet doesn't have many good memories about the war, notably in his flashback episode "The Thrill of the Hunt". Further elaborated on in his Sequel Flashback in TransWarped.
• She's a Man in Japan: Flareup and Strika were gender-flipped in the Latin American dub of the third season. Slipstream is more ambiguous, but she has the same VA as Starscream in Italian, and a very grave voice in Latin American.
• Shockwave Clap: Bulkhead can cause this just by clapping, as seen in the "Mime Time" short.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: The Headmaster is the only human supervillain to appear in Season 3. Not even Meltdown, who was still alive and actually a threat, is heard from again.
• Shout-Out: The show runs on these; now has their own page.
• Shy Finger-Twiddling:
  • By Bulkhead, of all bots.
  • Bumblebee in "Nature Calls", after Prowl asks him where he found room for so much stuff in his car mode.
• Silent Bob: Mayor Edsel is able to get his point across even though he never speaks. His eyebrow is apparently expressive.
• Silent Partner:
  • Snarl and Swoop, with Grimlock doing the talking.
  • Also, Wheeljack for Perceptor.
• The Sixth Ranger: Jazz joins the Earthbound Autobots towards the end of Season 3; a literal example since his addition to the team brings it up to six members.
• Slumber Party: In "Home is Where the Spark is", Sari goes to the base and her and the Autobots have a slumber party complete with a ghost story.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Egomaniac Starscream/Thundercracker, whose name is appropriate since the original Thundercracker had a bit of an air superiority complex himself.
• Smug Snake: Porter C. Powell, he talks a big game but he is also willing to throw an 8 year old out onto the streets. The only thing keeping the Autobots from squishing him is their own morality, and he is consciously aware of that. Grimlock's morality, on the other hand...
• The Smurfette Principle: Sari is the only female among the good guys for the majority of the series.
  • On a smaller scale, Starscream's female clone (named Slipstream, according to Word of God) is the only female in a flock of five.
  • The Allspark Almanacs have added a few more girls, but they also include the Omega Sentinel roster - out of twelve "Greek-letter-Supremes", only Kappa Supreme was confirmed female, and she was assigned to a rearguard action for most of her lifespan.
• Social Services Does Not Exist: Despite her father being a famous businessman, no-one notices that Sari doesn't legally exist until Powell does some digging. Afterwards, no-one seems to mind her living with the Autobots - of course, it'd be one brave social worker who tried to stand up to five protective transforming mechas.
  • It could be possible that having no legal records, it would be impossible for a social worker to be assigned to Sari's adoption case, since there is nothing to examine. As Sari was kept in seclusion for most of her life, she was truly off the radar.
• Something Else Also Rises: Blackarachnia caressing Swoop's face causes him to lift his flail and swing it around energetically.
  • Doing the same to Grimlock causes flames to erupt from his neck/collar.
• Soul Brotha: Jazz follows the archetype at least in spirit. While he's very badass and certainly has the attitude of a cool black man, he's still an alien robot and therefore has no real ethnicity.
• Southern-Fried Private: Bulkhead went to boot camp straight from the energon farm, and Hot Shot and Ironhide both have distinct Southern accents.
• Space Cadet Academy: The series has an Autobot Academy, informally referred to as "Autoboot Camp", where young bots get trained for duty. Bulkhead, Bumblebee and Wasp were all in the same class. Bulkhead and Bee graduated, while Wasp was caught for a crime and expelled, leaving him very embittered.
• Space Is Noisy: A stasis-cuffed Starscream actually calls attention to this in "A Fistful of Energon": "You call this a fight? I'll rust before someone wins, and I'm in a vacuum!"
• Space "X": Transformers already had space bridges, but now we have space barnacles and Lockdown's Space Poncho (at least, that's what the Allspark Almanac calls it).
• Spinning Paper: Three in the course of a night during 'Three's A Crowd'. Either it's just a gag, or the Autobots spent a long time trying to get Lugnut out of that crater.
• Split Personality: Blitzwing has three, and...
  • Personality Powers: ...a different power for each, as well as different vehicle modes.
  • Technically, he has two powers and two alt-forms; one of his personalities alternates between both interchangeably and uncontrollably.
• Spoiler Opening: The Japanese opening, while very pretty, spoils most of the major subplots of Season 2.
• Steven Ulysses Perhero:
  • Nanosec (Nino Sexton) and Headmaster (Henry Masterson). Also Angry Archer (A. A. Archer) and Professor Princess (Penny Princess, Ph.D.).
  • And comics-only villains Stiletto (Stella Healy) and Crossroads (Roland Cross).
  • While this isn't technically canon, Slo-Mo's design was based on TFA team member Samantha Lomow.
• The Starscream: Starscream is dealt with as a traitor deserves—the next time Megatron sees him after Starscream blows him up in the pilot, Megs blows him up. When that fails, he blows him up again. The only reason Starscream lived to see Season Two is because he got an AllSpark fragment that made him unkillable.
• The Stoic: Prowl shows much less emotion than the other Autobots.
• Stoners Are Funny: Beachcomber is revealed in the second Almanac to indulge in many Cybertronian drugs. He is also portrayed by many fans to be very nice and occasionally forgets what he's talking about, resulting in many an odd conversation.
• Stuffed into a Locker: Wasp and Ironhide do this to Bumblebee in 'Autoboot Camp'... after removing his legs and putting them where he couldn't get to them even if he was outside.
• Super Mode/Powered Armor:
  • An upgraded Sari gets it in "TransWarped".
  • While not powered per se, Prowl later permanently retains a duplicate of his one-shot samurai armor upgrades.
  • The new Allspark Almanac Volume 2 reveals that Optimus would've gotten an upgrade had there been a season 4. ^note See it here◊.
• Sword over Head: Optimus's finishing blow against Megatron in "Endgame". But with a hammer.
• Synthetic Voice Actor: Perceptor has one of these, and it sounds a lot like Stephen Hawking's.
• TV Head Robot: Tutor Bot has a monitor for a head.
• Take My Hand!: Bumblebee to Sari in the pilot.
• Take Our Word for It: What did Sari tell Optimus about where babies come from? All we know is that it was apparently enough to traumatize Optimus Prime.
• Take That!: Someone on the writing staff clearly wasn't a fan of the Bush Administration:
  • The title of the Season 2 episode, ''Mission Accomplished'', whose plot concerns the Elite Guard (incorrectly) believing the Decepticon presence on Earth is over.
  • After Shockwave offlines Ultra Magnus and Sentinel takes his place, Sentinel starts producing thinly-veiled propaganda that ends with him declaring "I'm Sentinel Prime and I approve this message".
• Taking the Bullet: Bumblebee does this at least twice: he takes a blast from Starscream for Sari and a dose of Meltdown's acid for Bulkhead.
• The Talk: Sari gives it to Optimus in "Transform and Roll Out". 'How is it you're able to make these new, smaller organics?'
  • Spun into a Brick Joke at the beginning of season 3, where Sari's "birth" is revealed.
• Tearful Smile: Sari after Optimus's revival in "Transform and Roll Out".
• Technopath: Post-Upgrade Sari in Season 3 can control machines.
• Technological Pacifist: Professor Sumdac insists that his company does not make weapons.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Starscream and Megatron wind up stuck in the aftermath of season 2. They are forced to work together throughout the season 3 opener and neither Decepticon does much to hide their contempt from the other.
• Tempting Fate:
  Starscream: (flying through the sky) Things can't possibly get any worse!
  (Megatron, Lugnut, and Blitzwing appear before him)
  Starscream: (Beat) ... I stand corrected. (retreats)
  Megatron: STARSCREAM!!!!
  Starscream: Sorry! You must've mistaken me for some other talking harrier jet!
• Terrible Trio: Megatron has Lugnut and Blitzwing for this until he picked up the Constructicons later down the line.
• That's an Order!: Optimus often used this phrase in early episodes, since his team was so disobedient back then.
• The Cloud Cuckoo Lander Was Right: In "Return of The Headmaster", when Sari wonders why there is no record of her, Bulkhead suggests that "Maybe she came here in some kind of egg, and crashed on Professor Sumdac's doorstep". He's not so far from the truth.
• The Rat: Rattletrap will squeal on anyone to save his own skin.
• There Should Be a Law: Played for laughs: Ratchet finds the idea of us selling spare parts on the open market disturbing. Of course, from his perspective, it must be like seeing internal organs on display in a shop window (and his experience with Lockdown doesn't help).
  Ratchet: "It's primitive... it's barbaric... there ought to be a law against it!"
  Optimus Prime: "...It's just an auto parts supply store, Ratchet."
• They Would Cut You Up: Blackarachnia joined the Decepticons for fear of ending up on a lab table on Cybertron if she returned to the Autobots.
• That Liar Lies: Endgame, part 1: While Megatron facepalms at Lugnut and Shockwave's squabbling, you can just hear Shockwave yelling 'Liar, lying liar!' Seriously.
• The Easy Way or the Hard Way: Optimus to Lockdown in "The Thrill of the Hunt" (when he thought Lockdown was just a crazy human in a muscle car).
• Theme Twin Naming: Jetfire and Jetstorm. Also, while they're not technically twins, Wasp and Bumblebee share a chassis model.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Bulkhead's succinct summary after the unexpected birth of Dirt Boss.
  Mixmaster: What the scrap is that?
  Bulkhead: If I had to guess: a forklift, a Headmaster Unit, an AllSpark fragment, and a whole lotta trouble.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Optimus Prime refuses to kill Megatron with the Magnus Hammer.
  • Only because that would apparently be the easy way out. Which Megatron doen't deserve.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: How Optimus survives his first fight with Megatron.
• Title Drop:
  • The three-part premiere episode "Transform and Roll Out" has Optimus actually say "Transform and roll out" on two occasions.
  • Yoketron does this in "Five Servos of Doom" when he mentions the episode's title while training Prowl to dodge several attacks.
• Token Mini-Moe: Sari is the one main character who is a little girl. Somewhat less in season 3, where her upgrade makes her age up into an adolescent.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Sari eventually learns that she's half-Cybertronian.
• Tonight, Someone Dies: Sort of. The DVD Commentary for a second season episode has one person asking if anyone really dies, and another one responds that no one does until season three... And in the last episode of the series, Starscream and Prowl are both killed off. Can't say they aren't honest.
  • Can't they?
• Too Fast to Stop: Bumblebee's first go with the turbo-boosters in "Nanosec" results in his speed going out of control and being unable to slow down or stop.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Prowl has gone through a specific character arc for him to complete his "cyber-ninja" training.
  • Optimus Prime has had to dig in his heels in order to properly face off against Megatron.
  • Bumblebee received a literal upgrade to his previously worthless stingers (which nicely explained how they were so powerful in flashback).
• Took A Level In Jerk Ass: Resident Jerkass Sentinel Prime actually used to be somewhat of a nicer guy. Of course that was before Elita-1 was thought to have been killed when Optimus failed to save her. But then just as we can sympathize with his attitude (almost), he takes an even bigger one by telling Blackarachnia/Elita-1 that it would have been better if she had died, rather than turn into a techno-organic.
• Toyless Toyline Character: Quite a few, both human and robot. Some of the most noteworthy examples include Cyclonus, Brawn, Strika, and Red Alert.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The Japanese intro shows Ratchet fighting Longarm, not even in his true Shockwave form.
• Trainstopping: "Mission Accomplished". On top of it being out of control, Starscream had planted an unstable AllSpark fragment on it.
• Troubled Backstory Flashback: Each of the core Autobots has one or more that explain how they ended up where they were when they discovered the Allspark as well as explain their outlooks on things.
• Truly Single Parent: Isaac Sumdac, since Sari is seemingly an Opposite-Sex Clone by way of a Cybertronian protoform.
• Tuckerization: The Angry Archer (named after and resembling Hasbro designer Aaron Archer), Slo-Mo (named after and resembling Hasbro executive Samantha Lomow), Yoketron (named after Hideaki Yoke, a designer for the Diaclone and Microman toylines the original Transformers series was based off of)
• Twinkle Smile: Starscream, although it only shows up in his full Transformation Sequence.
• Twitchy Eye: Occasionally, Megatron gets tired of Lugnut's fawning and is shown with a twitchy eye.
• Unexplained Recovery:
  • At the beginning of the episode "Nature Calls", a familiar-looking construction worker is attacked by the Monster of the Week, and is implied to have died. He still shows up again. However, this could be writer miscommunication: Sparkplug 1.0 has a different voice actor and completely different speech pattern from Sparkplug 2.0.
  • They pull this again the third season: A flashback has an appearance by a character named Warpath. However, he actually had already appeared in a smaller role in another flashback a couple of episodes earlier, namely a dismembered body in the middle of a battlefield◊. Despite this, he's still in a crowd shot set in modern-day Cybertron.
• Universal Universe Time: Par for the course with Transformers, Cybertronions always refer to lengths of time as cycles. Solar Cycle for a day, Mega Cycle for a month (year?), etc.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: Sentinel
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Their introductory scene together and later interactions greatly implied there was some between Optimus and Elita-1/Blackarachnia, despite the latter dating Sentinel at the time. That probably explains why Blackarachnia had far more emotional baggage with Optimus and held him more accountable for what happened, even though it was hers and Sentinel's idea to go to Archa Seven in the first place.
• Unusual Euphemism: Par for the Transformers course. "What a glitch-head!" "Slag yeah."
  • "It's a no-processor-er!"
  • And "exhaust port."
• Unknown Rival: Unlike most Transformers continuities, Megatron barely knows who Optimus is. Prime finally angers Megatron enough to say his name in "Endgame, Part II." Conveniently, that would turn out to be the last episode in the series, meaning we wouldn't get to see them become the destined Arch-Enemies they were meant to be.
• Verbal Tic: Wreck-Gar starts nearly every sentence with "I am Wreck-Gar!" after he obtains his name.
  • Getting there in the Japanese dub. Bumblebee with "Ikimasu~!" ("Here I go!", "Let's go!", or almost any variations), Bulkhead Ironhide's "Dosukoi!" (spoken by sumo wrestlers), "De aru!" for Prowl (literally, "to be" in formal speech) and Hey! and Man! for the angry face of an American accented Blitzwing.
• Vile Villain, Laughable Lackey: Megatron is cold and calculating, and is treated with the utmost seriousness. However, he's surrounded by people like the comically sycophantic Lugnut, or the comically unstable Blitzwing, or the comically hammy Starscream.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left:
  • The main Decepticons do this less often than in previous shows, but Lockdown and Soundwave still manage it, with the result being that they're both still on the loose by the end.
  • The Headmaster's debut episode has him get away in the end. The heroes don't bother going after them because they have to deal with the imminent overload of the fusion core he started.
• Villain of Another Story: Most of Team Chaar qualify. They only have cameos, from minor roles in the comics to the Transwarped opening fight, but their backstory establishes them as some of the most influential Decepticons. Strika was one of the Highest Commanding officer, and leads many of Megatron's spread out troops as well as the mission to get him back. Blackout was the most powerful Decepticon in the war, having destroyed several Omega Sentinels before being brought down in the Con's last stand. Oil Slick was responsible for the Cosmic Rust epidemic that killed soldiers on both sides and featured as the Big Bad in Ratchet's backstory "Bots of Science." Finally theres Cyclonus, who never speaks and nobody knows where he came from. The medic, Scalpel, theorizes that he may be from the Future and his existence foreshadows the emergence of Galvatron and the possible coming of Unicron.
• Villainous Breakdown: Megatron starts to lose it just a little bit in the season 3 finale. "Then destroy the Autobots. Destroy the city. DESTROY ANYTHING THAT'S NOT ME!"
• Villainous Glutton:
  • Though not fat, Starscream's toy-only clone Dirge is the living representation of the former's greed, and as such is an accomplished glutton who always wants more of everything, energon goodies included.
  • Spittor can also digest his victims if he chooses - and Oil Slick claims that once you get past the slobbering freak and his weird tentacles, you discover a much more disgusting creature on the inside.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Porter C. Powell, again. Soundwave's attempted conquest of the world is forgotten quickly enough for Powell to sell toys of him, although he spent most of it controlling machines from underground.
• The Virus: Space barnacles, once they've been... altered (either by Megatron's body or Allspark energy) are shown to be highly infectious on some non-sentient robots as well as Bumblebee and Prowl in "Nature Calls".
• Voluntary Shapeshifting:
  • Aside from the eponymous Transforming Mecha, Decepticon spy Shockwave (not to be confused with Soundwave) has Autobot and Decepticon variations of his robot and vehicle forms.
  • Colossus Rhodes, who's rather Bane-ish, transforming from a frail and gaunt man into a muscular giant.
• Voodoo Shark: Defied by the creators, who don't plan on giving the Allspark a concrete origin for fear it would be one of these. Wyatt is happy to share his thoughts on Cybertron's origins on Formspring, but he's keeping it vague.
• The Walls Are Closing In: In the first episode of the third season, Blurr falls victim to this. Sadly, he is transformed into a cube, though he eventually gets better in the events of "The Return of Blurr".
• Weak, but Skilled: Contrary to tradition, the Autobots in this series are almost all smaller and weaker than their Decepticon counterparts. Most of the main cast of this series are armed with tools intended for non-combat purposes instead of weapons. As such defeating even one Decepticon requires a great deal of teamwork and tactical thinking.
• We Hardly Knew Ye:
  • Blurr. Poor Blurr. He cameoed in "Velocity", was formally introduced in the Season 2 finale "A Bridge Too Close" and was compacted into a cube in the Season 3 opener "Transwarped".
  • Rodimus also gets a raw deal. He only had 4 lines, and only appeared for 4 minutes before being infected with cosmic rust.
• Wham Episode: "A Bridge Too Close" and "Transwarped" both reveal that Sari isn't completely human and is actually half-Cybertronian.
• Wham Line: Naturally, with all the plot twists, there are a handful. One of the most notable, in the last few seconds of the last standalone episode, "This Is Why I Hate Machines":
  Arcee^note  who is supposed to be a braindead amnesiac : Ratchet...
• What Happened to the Mouse?: The fate of quite a few secondary characters, most of them villains. Slipstream, for instance, isn't seen or mentioned for most of season three, then appears briefly in the penultimate episode when Optimus tests out his jetpack... and then flies off again.
  • Although to their credit, the writers are using the Allspark Almanacs to explain what happened to characters after their last appearance or in between appearances.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Several times, but the most surprising example is Sentinel calling Optimus out for not telling him about Blackarachnia. "'Cause I wouldn't wanna be, I don't know, PREPARED FOR THIS OR ANYTHING!" Optimus actually tried to warn him several times, but Sentinel being Sentinel...
• What Were You Thinking?: Professor Sumdac when Bulkhead actually makes Megatron's space bridge work in the second season finale. Bulkhead gives the snappy reply of "This coming from the guy who rebuilt Megatron."
• Where It All Began:
  • The Season 1 finale ends with a battle against Megatron, whose brawl with the Autobots fifty years ago was what indirectly brought them to Earth in the first place.
  • Also happens in the Season 3 premiere (in the exact same place, no less) and provides the page quote.
• Where's the Fun in That?:
  Ratchet: "Why didn't you just use the EMP?"
  Prowl: "Where's the fun in that?"
• Whole-Plot Reference: Season 2 finale "A Bridge Too Close", very nearly at least, to The Bridge on the River Kwai (!). The Decepticons capture Bulkhead, when they discover that despite appearances, he's the preeminent space bridge expert in the galaxy, and press-gang him into building them a space bridge back to Cybertron. He does so out of spite for those who doubted his expertise on the subject, many of whom were his own allies. The ending differs in that nobody dies, permanently at least; the Decepticons are prevented from using the space bridge to take Cybertron.
  • Decepticon Air is one big love letter to, well, Con Air
• Who Would Be Stupid Enough?: This happens to Bumblebee at least twice in Season 1, and again in Season 3 - not to mention Sentinel in 'This is Why I Hate Machines'.
• Why Are You Looking at Me Like That?: Done by Bumblebee in "Transform and Roll Out" when the Autobots decide they need someone small to get the job done.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?:
  • Elita-1's "death" left Optimus with a phobia of spiders and Sentinel of anything organic. Cybertronians in general are wary of organics in this continuity (due to a bad past experience, according to Word of God), but Sentinel is that much worse about it.
  • Whilst he isn't exactly afraid of them (he just doesn't like them), Fanzone makes a pretty direct homage to the Trope Namer in "The Elite Guard" when the Elite Guard arrive on Earth:
    Fanzone: Robots. Why did it have to be robots?
• Why We Need Garbagemen: "Garbage In, Garbage Out" takes place during a contract dispute between Sumdac Systems (which builds and maintains the city's trash collection robots) and the city of Detroit, resulting in the robots malfunctioning (as depicted in the trope image) and garbage piling up all over town.
• With Due Respect: Such an exchange is given in "The Elite Guard" when it is explained to Jazz that Sari isn't a threat and that Sentinel's claims of all organic life being dangerous isn't worth scrap.
  Jazz: But Sentinel-
  Bumblebee: Is a glitch-head. All due respect.
• With Friends Like These...: Sentinel was pretty arrogant and self-centered even when he was on good terms with Optimus.
  • Sari also asks "With heroes like these, who needs Decepticons?" in Human Error Part 2 seeing how her Substitute Autobots team is seriously unqualified to tackle down the real Autobots controlled by Soundwave.
• Would Hurt a Child: Blackarachnia and Soundwave. The former drops Sari off a building to distract Optimus and later threatens to kill her if she doesn't give up the Allspark's location. The latter blasts her with Laserbeak and brainwashes her own family into attacking her. Megatron, of all Bots, simply brushes her out of his way when she stands in front of all the Allspark. He most likely thought she was just beneath him.
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: The Angry Archer talks like he's in a play by Shakespeare.
• Yes-Man: Sunstorm and his predecessor #2716057; It's unclear whether they're at all sincere in their constant praise, or if they're just working an angle and trying to butter everyone up.
  • This is a Starscream clone we're talking about. Of course he's working an angle and trying to butter everyone up.
  • Lugnut, however, plays it straight in the mold of Inferno.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Prowl and clone #2716057.
• You Can Run, but You Can't Hide: Bumblebee went for the flipped-around version against Lockdown. Of course, he was biting off a lot more than he could chew.
• You Do Not Want To Know: Slipstream's (i.e. the female Starscream clone) response to Starscream about which part of his personality she represents is "Don't ask".
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In "Endgame, Part 1," Megatron says this to Starscream before blasting him to smithereens. He survives, but not for long.
• You Look Like You've Seen a Ghost: Starscream to Megatron in Season 2, after his resurrection but before he figured out it was an Allspark chunk keeping him online. "Well maybe you HAVE!"
• You Monster!: Scrapper to Sari after she uses the factory equipment to pummel him and Mixmaster in "Sari, No One's Home".
• You're Insane!: "Survival of the Fittest" has Captain Fanzone tell Meltdown that he's nuttier than a fruitcake.
• You're Not My Father: Sari to Isaac after her Robotic Reveal. He actually is her biological father (sort of), but by the time she learns this she's already accepted him again.
• You Shall Not Pass!: In the first season finale, with Megatron rising with a new body and the Decepticons closing in on the Allspark, Optimus tells his crew that this is where they stand and fight. This results in Bulkhead tackling the bruiser Lugnut in the air.
• You Talk Too Much!:
  • Bulkhead to Lugnut in "Megatron Rising".
  • Prowl also complains Bumblebee talks for too long in "Black Friday". One can assume Prowl would much rather prefer the Michael Bay-verse Bumblebee.

---

Megatron: "You're a persistent little Autobot!"
Optimus Prime: "My name is Optimus Prime!"