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Guardians
Leader- 1
Voiced by: Lou Richards
The leader of Gobotron's military, the Guardians. Note that he's not part of the civilian government, which Gobotron does have — that would be Zeemon.
- Barrier Warrior: Can project a protective force field around himself and his allies, but it takes a lot of energy and he can only maintain it for a short time.
- Cool Plane: He turns into an F-15 jet.
- The Leader: True to his name, he is the one in charge of the Guardians.
- Stephen Ulysses Perhero: Renegade Rhetoric established in the posts about the fictional "Renegade Victory" two-part episode that his name before becoming a GoBot was Luther Unum.
- We Used to Be Friends: With Cy-Kill when the latter was still a Guardian.
Turbo
Voiced by: Arthur Burghardt
- Boisterous Bruiser: He's the muscle of the Guardians and very jovial.
- Catchphrase: "It's time to go!"
- Interspecies Friendship: Forms a friendship with AJ Foster.
- Red Is Heroic: He is colored red and is one of the good guys.
Scooter
Voiced by: Frank Welker
- Character Development: He starts out as a constantly kvetching coward, but he gradually grows out of it as the series goes on.
- Cowardly Lion: He is completely terrified of fighting the Renegades, but usually pulls through.
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: He forms a close friendship with the Guardians' human ally Nick Burns.
- Holographic Disguise: He has a hologram projector, which he can use to disguise himself as a Renegade.
- Red Is Heroic: He is another Guardian colored red.
- Voice Changeling: A Required Secondary Power to the above-mentioned Holographic Disguise ability. This ends up saving him once when he had foolishly abandoned his holoprojector in favor of a standard blaster (which he wasn't very skilled with).
Zeemon
Voiced by: Frank Welker
One of the elected civilian leaders of Gobotron, explicitly called a politician.
- Aliens Never Invented Democracy: Averted. Gobotron has a democracy.
- The Faceless: His robot form has no proper face, just a windshield.
- Fictional Disability: He lost the ability to convert (transform) after a battle he was involved in long ago. He could have it repaired, but he chose to leave it disabled, as a reminder of the circumstances of the fight.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Can be a little pompous sometimes, but is generally good at his job and respected for it.
Small Foot
Voiced by: B. J. Ward
Renegades
Cy-Kill
Voiced by: Bernard Erhard
- Benevolent Boss: He shows more loyalty to his troops than one might expect from an 80's cartoon villain.
- Big Bad: As leader of the Renegades, he's responsible for just about every conflict the Guardians have to resolve.
- Big Bad Duumvirate: He teams up with Magmar in the Battle of the Rock Lords movie, but ends up betraying him to take the power scepter for himself. The Renegade Rhetoric Facebook posts (which were essentially a quasi-official second season to the cartoon) would later have him reluctantly form another alliance with Magmar in the "Combiner Wars" double-post that served as the series' spiritual Grand Finale.
- Character Blog: He has a Fun Publications-sanctioned Facebook page called Renegade Rhetoric (initially a temporary edition of Ask Vector Prime before continuing as its own separate Facebook page), which consists mainly of creating posts where he describes the events of episodes from a fictional second season of Challenge of the GoBots.
- Evil Sounds Deep: Has a deep voice.
- Evil Laugh: Not manic like Crasher's, but his deep voice still makes it memorable.
- Face–Heel Turn: It is established in "Et Tu, Cy-Kill" that he used to be a Guardian before joining the Renegades.
- Large Ham: His dialogue is really no more over-the-top than most cartoon Big Bads, but Bernard Erhard clearly had a blast milking the lines for everything they were worth.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: It's dubious that a person with "Kill" in their name would be of noble character. His name also sounds like the word "psycho."
- Obviously Evil: The Guardians really shouldn't have been so surprised a guy named Cy-Kill ultimately betrayed them.
- Pet the Dog: A small moment post Face–Heel Turn. When Cy-Kill has Leader 1 on the floor, at his mercy, Cy-Kill apologies and promises to end him quickly. You can hear very sincere remorse in Cyke's voice. He meant it.
- Villainous Friendship: He and Fi-Tor both defected from the Guardians at the same time, and actually regard each other as friends.
- We Used to Be Friends: With Leader 1 when he was still a Guardian, as detailed in the episode "Et Tu, Cy-Kill."
Cop-Tur
Voiced by: Bob Holt (main), Arthur Burghardt ("Quest for New Earth" and GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords)
- Catchphrase: "Sorr-ree," whenever Cy-Kill calls him out on having done something dumb. Which is frequent.
- Co-Dragons: He and Crasher are the two main minions of Cy-Kill.
- Dumb Muscle: He's a very dim brute.
- Evil Sounds Deep: Has a very low, grumbly voice, sounding like a frog who ate nothing but coffee grounds.
- Fuuma Shuriken: He uses his rotor blades as a weapon in robot mode.
- Villainous Friendship: With Crasher.
Crasher
Voiced by: Marilyn Lightstone
- Ax-Crazy: She is the most violent of the Renegades.
- Breakout Character: These days, she's usually considered the most popular character from the series. The Transformers franchise eventually introduced a Decepticon named Fracture based on her.
- Card-Carrying Villain: Doesn't even try to hide how much she enjoys mindless destruction.
- Co-Dragons: Shares the position of main lackey to Cy-Kill with Cop-Tur.
- Dark Action Girl: A badass female warrior with a psychotic streak.
- Evil Laugh: Her laugh sounds absolutely crazy. Cy-Kill calls it charming.
- The Hyena: If there's wicked cackling to be done, it's coming from Crasher.
- Shockwave Stomp: Her signature attack is to stomp the ground, sending a crackling stream of energy along the ground at her opponent.
- Villainous Crush: Carries a little torch for Leader-1.
- Villainous Friendship: With Cop-Tur.
Fi-Tor
Voiced by: Kelly Ward
- The Dragon: He is Cy-Kill's official second-in-command, even though he doesn't appear as often as Crasher and Cop-Tur do.
- Face–Heel Turn: Like Cy-Kill, he used to be a Guardian.
- Space Fighter: His alt-mode.
- Token Competent Minion: While Crasher and Cop-Tur are tough opponents and usually serve as Cy-Kill's primary minions, both tend to suffer severe drawbacks. Crasher is too violent and can easily get distracted in her efforts to cause mayhem and her destructive stomp can't really be controlled beyond giving it a general direction. Her eagerness to use said power has been used to bait her into destroying technology that was necessary to Cy-Kill's plans. For his part, Cop-Tur is almost the definition of Dumb Muscle and can quickly find himself out of his depth when "hitting it" no longer works. In contrast, while Fi-Tor ultimately did fail to keep the Guardians from capturing the Renegade stronghold, he'd been placed in charge to keep the Guardians occupied while Cy-Kill assembled his Zod Armada, and after the pilot movie was usually the Renegade that could be counted on to adapt plans and mission parameters as the situation changed. Basically while the lion's share of the Renegades (including their former leader) were cannon fodder, Fi-Tor could be a strategist.
- Villainous Friendship: With Cy-Kill.
- Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: He actually does believe in his cause, and he can drift into Villainous Valor upon occasion.
Dr. Go
Voiced by: Philip L. Clarke
- Adaptational Name Change: His toy was named "Herr Fiend." Presumably this is why he was given a German accent.
- Evil Genius: He invents devices for Cy-Kill's schemes.
- Herr Doktor: He's the Renegades' Mad Scientist and he speaks in a German accent.
- High-Class Glass: He has a monocle.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Not his name in the show, but the name his toy was packaged under: Herr Fiend.
- Non-Action Guy: He's almost never shown fighting, and two episodes have him be easily neutralized by Scooter and the kids.
- You Don't Look Like You: His appearance in the Rock Lords movie has his eyes placed in his windshield rather than his headlights, is missing his monocle and has him miscolored as Professor Von Joy.
Bug Bite
- Adaptational Heroism: He's significantly more noble in the Go Bots comic, even becoming Road Ranger's second in command when he united the GoBots and chose to free the Earth from Gobotron.
- Ascended Extra: He was just a one shot character in the cartoon, he's become the single most prominent GoBot in Transformers lore.
- The Dragon: To Gunnyr.
Zero
The former leader of the Renegades before Cy-Kill seized control. He eventually broke away to form his own third faction.
- Eviler than Thou: It's hard to say that he's actually more evil than Cy-Kill, since Cyke attempts all manner of mass murder on a regular basis; but personality-wise, where Cy-Kill at least comes across as Affably Evil to his own troops, everything about Zero communicates that he is truly a nasty piece of work. No wonder the Renegades were so willing to switch their loyalty to Cy-Kill.
- The Resenter: He did not like serving under Cy-Kill one bit, and eventually left to form his own army.
- The Starscream: Played With. While he's the closest thing to this archetype in the series, unlike Starscream, he successfully does something about his situation and leaves to form his own army.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Sadly, after the show makes a pretty big deal of Zero forming a "Third Column," it's the last we hear of him in the series.
Scorp and Vamp
Scorp
Vamp
Voiced by: Paul Eiding (Scorp), Marilyn Schreffler (Vamp)
Two "monster-style" ancient renegades tasked with protecting the Human Popsicle Master Renegade.- Beware My Stinger Tail: Scorp's alt-mode is a scorpion monster, and his robot mode keeps the stinger tail.
- Non-Standard Character Design: Designed with a monster-themed motif, rather than transforming into standard vehicles.
- Really 700 Years Old: While this trope probably doesn't apply to most GoBots (they regard ancient Egypt as legitimately a very long time ago), these two really are that old, dating back to the first generation of Gobots to be cyborgized.
- Villainous Friendship: With Pincher, a similarly-designed modern Renegade who ended up being the first outsider to contact them in millenia.
Zod
Not a Renegade per se, but a purely robotic Mechanical Monster used by them. Zods are not cyborgs like the Gobots themselves, and as non-sentient machines can be mass-produced. That said, after the Five-Episode Pilot, we only ever see the Renegades using one of them at a time.
- The Juggernaut: Zods really are ridiculously tough opponents. Leader-One gets absolutely mauled by one early on in the series.
- Mecha-Mooks: They're nonsentient machines, so if you actually can destroy one, nobody's going to mourn it. A whole armada of them gets blown up in episode 5.
Other Characters
Matt Hunter
Voiced by: Morgan Paull
An astronaut who becomes one of the Guardians' first and most prominent human contacts on Earth.
- Big Brother Mentor: He acts as an older brother figure to Nick and AJ.
- Porn Stache: Matt sports a big ol' 1980's moustache.
Nick Burns
Voiced by: Sparky Marcus (series), Ike Eisenmann (GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords)
- Heterosexual Life-Partners: He forms a close friendship with Scooter.
A.J. Foster
Voiced by: Candy Brown ("Battle for Gobotron"), Leslie Speights (main series and GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords)
Zebediah Braxis
Voiced by: René Auberjonois
- Butt-Monkey: He tends to get humiliated on a regular basis. He deserves it, too. Sadly, over time, this takes its toll.
- Expy: Clearly based on Dr. Zachary Smith from Lost in Space, but without Dr. Smith's hidden heart of gold.
- Mad Scientist: He's a demented scientist who uses his genius to aid the Renegades.
- The Quisling: He is willing to betray humanity by siding with the Renegades.
- Sanity Slippage: While he was always treasonous, by his last appearance, he's gone stark raving mad.
General Newcastle
Voiced by: Brock Peters
- The Brigadier: The leader of Earth's military forces, and a good and sensible guy.
Anya Turgonova
Voiced by: Gail Matthius
A scientist from behind the Iron Curtain who periodically works with the heroes. It is left deliberately ambiguous which country she's actually from.- Ambiguously Brown: Asian features with a European-sounding name, she's presumably of mixed ancestry (which is entirely plausible if she's Russian).
- Dirty Commies: Averted, which is impressive for The '80s. Although the political situation makes for friction early on, she's definitely one of the good guys.
The Last Engineer
Voiced by: Richard Dysart
The scientist who "created the Gobot form" as a way for Gobotron's inhabitants to survive the ruination of their world. Like his evil counterpart the Master Renegade, he also ended up in suspended animation and never became a full Gobot himself, but he does have clearly visible bionic bits. The Master Renegade
Voiced by: Peter Renaday
The founder of the Renegade faction, way back before the disaster that destroyed Gobotron's biosphere. He survived it by going into suspended animation, and so is still a humanoid rather than a cyborg. Wrecks
Voiced by: Bill Martin
A Gobot who is a leader among the poor and dispossessed aliens who live in squalor on the few remaining semi-habitable bits of Old Gobotron, beneath the City Planet.- Heroic Neutral: Rough around the edges, but a good guy. Still, he doesn't give a flip about the fight between the Guardians and the Renegades. He and his people have their own problems.
- King of the Homeless: A leader among the poor wretches of Old Gobotron.
- Wrong Side of the Tracks: Old Gobotron is an absolutely miserable slum. It's notable that one of the only true on-screen deaths in the series is an alien who dies in this episode.
