pah Starscream was a whinger in the cartoon and a wannabe in both. He is quite cool in the comics but never a leader, as soundwave put it in the G1 Comic "you are a missile with a mouth" (UK continuity ;))

 

Badass he aint, (thats grimlock) duplicious perhaps ;)

maybe not in the G1 cartoons, but G1 Starscream was pretty badass in the comics!

BTW, didn SS destroy the council on cybertron or something? (might be mistaken.)

yeah, he killed the Autobot High Council in War Within vol 3 #1. "You are a missile with a mouth," so very true :tflaugh

I agree w/ BigGrim also...man, why does he have to be so smart???

well you have to remember, and they mentioned this in the DW continuity, before being Aircommander, Starscream was a scientist with Jetfire.

I associated g1 cartoon starscream with Chris Latta, and we all remember how great a leader Cobra Commander was :roll

Not knowing jack about the comics (and considering that BG already did a great job of summarizing Starscream's comics persona)...

 

 

Starscream was a dramatic device used to varying degrees by different writers of the show. In order for the bad guys to have ANY interesting character dynamics whatsoever, you need some dissention in the ranks. And so you have the traditional B-movie "power-hungry second in command guy" character in Starscream. But his personality (to me, anyway), was quite inconsistent from episode to episode. Sometimes he'd be all like "yes, Megatron" without a trace of sarcasm, other times he'd just be the one correcting Megatron's science (those were the times when he was usually right), other times he'd be correcting Megatron's military strategy (which was usually wrong, but then again so was Megatron since he kept getting PWNED), and then there were the times when he was personally challenging Megatron's leadership (which is probably what most of us are thinking about).

 

But all that aside, to me Starscream will never fit the definition of "badass." If you're gonna be the leader of the Decepticons, you have to be the "alpha male", or at least be able to fill that role. Starscream could never challenge Megatron for leadership in a one-on-one contest (and to my knowledge he never did), and so he had to resort to his back-stabbing, secretive, opportunistic attempts to grab power for himself. And really, someone like that just isn't going to be a good leader. If Galvatron hadn't killed him in TF:TM, someone else would have done it within a week.

G1 cartoons did more to ruin Starscream than anything else. "More Than Meets The Eye" had the personalities and the mechanics of the relationships betweent he characters right, but it went south from there. DW comics served to give back to transFormers what was rightfully theirs: an attitude. starScream would never have been allowed to continue in the decepticon ranks, let alone megatron, if they were as incompetent and whiny as they were in the cartoon.

G1 cartoons did more to ruin Starscream than anything else. "More Than Meets The Eye" had the personalities and the mechanics of the relationships betweent he characters right, but it went south from there. DW comics served to give back to transFormers what was rightfully theirs: an attitude. starScream would never have been allowed to continue in the decepticon ranks, let alone megatron, if they were as incompetent and whiny as they were in the cartoon.

The G1 show was what created the character of Starscream. I'm not exactly sure what you mean, unless you're trying to create a new category of GeeWun fanboys ("MTMTE ONLY!!!!"). Anyway, it's not as if they used a delicate touch when introducing the tension between Starscream and Megatron. The guy's first line EVER is "The Autobots would have lost eons ago if I'd been calling the shots." Teh subtle...

 

Anyway, we all know that the cartoon's modus operandi was "everything's back to normal by the end of the show." This totally precludes not only any serious character development, but it also eliminates consequences for characters' actions. Megatron remained Decepticon leader despite his incompetence because he simply was the Decepticon leader. Starscream remained second-in-command despite his desire to overthrow Megatron because he simply was the powerhungry second-in-command. This never changed.

 

And anyway, it was a kids' show from the early 80's. I don't think it was meant to be analyzed this closely.

I associated g1 cartoon starscream with Chris Latta, and we all remember how great a leader Cobra Commander was

 

HAR! I always thought Screamer was a girl when I was little, anyway. :tflaugh

I associated g1 cartoon starscream with Chris Latta, and we all remember how great a leader Cobra Commander was :roll

:rofl

If Galvatron hadn't killed him in TF:TM, someone else would have done it within a week.

Yep, probably by Shockwave and Soundwave.

 

 

And then Unicron would have killed them all.