Grimlock (G1)


 * Grimlock is an Autobot in Generation 1 and a Maximal in the Beast Wars portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.



"Grimlock hate Optimus Prime.  Grimlock believe leader should show strength by attacking quickly and mercilessly! Prime often reconsider or hesitate, in fear of possible casualties, both Transformer and squishy -- Grimlock say that cowardice! If Grimlock were in charge, war would have been over long ago."

Some Autobots wonder why Grimlock is even on their side. His disposition is much more suited towards the Decepticons. After all, he values power and strength over wisdom and compassion, and furthermore, he doesn't get along with any of the Autobots. It's been hypothesized that Grimlock just hates Megatron more than he hates Optimus. (Which means he must hate him A LOT.)

Grimlock is the leader of the Dinobots, a small but very close team of misfits. It's been said that anyone who enters a battle with the Dinobots usually leaves it feet-first.

(Grimlock's intelligence-level differed greatly between the comic and cartoon, leading to vastly different portrayals. See the entries below for details.)

''French-Canadian name: La Menace ''Italian name:Tiran

Marvel Comics continuity
While the Autobots remained dormant inside Mount St. Hilary, the Ark detected Cybertronian life. Dispatching a probe, the Ark learned that Shockwave had come to Earth and was wandering the Savage Land. The Ark used data gathered from the Savage Land to convert five of the dormant Autobots into the Dinobots. They traveled to fight Shockwave, but all combatants became trapped in a tar pit.

Grimlock was a powerful and arrogant warrior who believed he knew best. He ascended to the post of overall Autobot leader on several occasions, growing in the process and eventually, despite their original conflict, becoming Optimus's hand-picked lieutenant and likely successor. Early on, Blaster was a major thorn in his side, deserting his command. Later, he tended to fight with the straight-laced, logical Prowl.

(Note: Comic Grimlock and the other Dinobots were much more intelligent than their Cartoon counterparts. They weren't Perceptor, mind you, but they had average, functional intellects. When he first appeared in the comic Grimlock spoke normally, but later the Comic adopted the caveman-esque speech of the cartoon, though only for Grimlock himself. The other Dinobots continued to speak normally. This vocal tic was alternately portrayed as a malfunction or an intentional choice by Grimlock, but in either case, he retained his full intelligence.)

Animated continuity

 * Voice Actor: Greg Berger (US), Takurō Kitagawa (Japan)

(Note: In the animated series, Grimlock was more dimwitted than in most other continuities. As the series progressed, he was portrayed increasingly as a comic relief character.)



Cartoon Grimlock, like all the cartoon Dinobots, has a stereotypical "caveman" type personality and intellect level. They originally decide to help the Autobots, for instance, because "them have face like this on chest..." Pre-movie this lack of intelligence is usually coupled together with their great power to make them dangerous wild cards; Post-movie, however, Grimlock and the Dinobots are generally played as just plain dumb for comic relief.

When mysterious tremors shook the Autobot base, Wheeljack's investigation revealed strange objects behind a rock wall. After removing the wall, the Autobots found a cave full of dinosaur bones. The Autobots decided the idea of dinosaurs was interesting and researched the prehistoric beasts. Wheeljack and Ratchet asked Optimus Prime if they could build robot dinosaurs, and Prime agreed this was a good idea. Grimlock, Slag, and Sludge were built and unveiled to the Autobots, but the Dinobots were dimwitted and violent, and they attacked their makers. Grimlock blasted Teletraan I with his fire-breath, damaging it. Optimus Prime decreed that the Dinobots must be destroyed. However, Wheeljack convinced him instead to lock them away, and the trio were herded back into the cave and buried alive.

Later, the Decepticons took over a hydroelectric plant, but when the Autobots arrived to stop them, the Autobots were defeated and captured. Wheeljack, Ratchet, and Bumblebee, left behind at Autobot base to finish repairing Teletraan-I, decided to go against Optimus' orders and release the Dinobots, but not before upgrading their brains to be smarter and more obedient. After the Dinobots are reactivated, Wheeljack asks them to save their friends. Grimlock says he will obey... this time. They successfully attack the Decepticons and free the imprisoned Autobots. Optimus forgives Wheeljack, Ratchet, and Bumblebee for disobeying his orders and welcomes the victorious Dinobots back to the Autobots.

After a meteor surging with unknown energies struck the Earth, Optimus ordered the three Dinobots to guard it. He was so pleased with the Dinobots he asked Ratchet and Wheeljack to build two more. Meanwhile, Megatron was frustrated at the Dinobots' success, and sent Soundwave to probe them for potential weaknesses. Reading the Dinobots' minds, he discovered that Grimlock was arrogant and believed he would make a better leader than the weak Optimus Prime. Megatron decided to use this to his advantage, and approached them himself. He played to Grimlock's jealousy and agreed with him that the strongest should be leader. The Dinobots declared Optimus Prime their enemy.



Realizing the meteorite was due to explode, Optimus left to warn the Dinobots, but they attacked him. Instead of destroying him completely, however, Grimlock carried him to the Decepticons, who had stolen the meteorite during the battle. Megatron was angry that Optimus Prime was not destroyed, and Starscream suggested that despite Grimlock's arrogance, inside he was still compassionate. This enraged Grimlock. They were interrupted by the two new Dinobots, Snarl and Swoop, whom Megatron ordered the original three Dinobots to attack. At the climax of the battle, the meteorite exploded, but Optimus Prime pushed Grimlock out of the way, saving him. Grimlock realized the error of his ways and the Dinobots forced the Decepticons into retreat. Grimlock apologized for his jealousy.

The Decepticons joined forces with Sub-Atlantica and staged a full-scale attack on Washington, D.C.. The Autobots were overwhelmed, forcing Wheeljack to call for the Dinobots' assistance. Grimlock expressed his frustration at being called whenever the Autobots were in over their heads. With their help, the Autobots were able to overturn the Decepticons' advance and plunge the city of Sub-Atlantica, burning, into the sea. This pattern of the Autobots' dependence on the Dinobots repeated when the artificial intelligence TORQ III turned machines against mankind. With every piece of help he and his troops gave, Grimlock was never slow to add a scathing remark about the inabilities of the Autobots. That said, he was not unwilling to admit the failings of his own troops, either, and willingly took them to the time-displaced "Dinobot Island," where they trained in the wilderness and helped stop a Decepticon raid on the prehistoric paradise.

The final straw for Grimlock came when he and the Dinobots were injured in a Decepticon trap at an airfield. Enraged, Grimlock refused to take orders from Optimus Prime any more, and led the Dinobots away from the Ark. When the Autobots began to suffer from Cybertonium deficiency, Spike Witwicky and his girlfriend Carly attempted to persuade the Dinobots - who continued to function perfectly, as they had been built on Earth without Cybertonium - to steal some of the mineral from a Decepticon shipment coming in from Cybertron. Grimlock instead opted to lead the Dinobots to Cybertron itself, where they were captured by Shockwave and put to work in the Cybertonium mines, until Spike and Carly rescued them. Brought back to Earth, the Dinobots agreed to follow Prime's order again - until such time as Grimlock didn't feel like it.



By the Earth year 2005, it seemed apparent that Grimlock had undergone some degree of a personality change, becoming more childish and petulant, rather than brutish and stubborn. Throughout 2006, he regularly participated in missions with his fellow Autobots rather than the other Dinobots, battling on the planets of Chaar, Goo, Dredd and Eurythma. He and Daniel Witwicky were transported to the sorcerous other-dimensional realm of Menonia, where Grimlock was duped into fighting on the side of the tyrannical Quintesson, the Red Wizard, and later, he helped to sniff out the "dinosaur transform static" that implicated Trypticon in the theft of world monuments. Later in the year, when Decepticon leader Galvatron had Cybertron infused with function-inverting anti-electrons, a dose of the particles gave Grimlock super-intelligence. During a mission to Unicron's disembodied head, where the Autobots were outmatched by the new Decepticon Terrorcons, Grimlock used components of Unicron's head to construct the Technobots to battle them. Combined as Computron, the Technobots felt they could not match the Terrorcons, until Grimlock transferred his super-intelligence into Computron, reverting to his old self and allowing the Technobots to claim victory.

Grimlock's greatest victory came when he and a large number of other Transformers with animal transformations were summoned to a world at the centre of the galaxy by the ex-assistant of the ancient genius, Primacron, creator of Unicron. The assistant had assembled these "Primitive" Transformers in the hope that their simple instincts could defeat Primacron's newest creation, Tornedron, but one by one they fell to him, with Grimlock apparently crushed under Trypticon. Grimlock survived, however, and followed Tornedron back to Primacron's lab. When Tornedron turned on his master, like his predecessor, Primacron's complicated plans and equations could not find a way to stop him; Grimlock, on the other hand, randomly flicked a switch which reversed Tornedron's energy polarity, undoing the damage he and done and dissipating. Dancing around over his successful saving of the universe, Grimlock decimated Primacron's lab, dubbing it the smartest thing he'd ever done

The Headmasters
In the year 2011, the Decepticons invaded Cybertron in full force. Grimlock was deployed by Wreck-Gar to fend off the invaders. He was seen fighting alongside his fellow Dinobots as well as the Throttlebots against the invading Decepticons, however, they didn't fair too well against the Decepticon Headmasters, as they are all quickly put to sleep by Mindwipe's hypnosis attack.

Transformers PD-Type
Star Saber recruited Grimlock as backup for a duel with Deathsaurus. Grimlock became bored watching the two of them fight in the sky, but when Star Saber finally succeeded in knocking Deathsaurus to the ground, Grimlock ate his head while Star Saber looked on, pleased at the outcome of his clever plan.

Binaltech
After the Dinobots were defeated and deactivated on Earth, Grimlock was rebuilt using Binaltech technology to save his life. He hates his new Ford Mustang form.

Dreamwave comics continuity
Grimlock displays Patton like leadership rivaling Optimus Prime. He also was a traitor, and the "rebel" of the Autobots.

IDW Beast Wars comics
Grimlock was among the Axalon's protoforms when the ship crashed on Earth. When Razorbeast and Optimus Minor where attempting to "rescue" Megatron from Magmatron, Grimlock showed up and acted as the perfect distraction. Grimlock and Magmatron battled. Magmatron narrowly arose as the victor by use of his triple beast modes. Grimlock was knocked out, but later helped to construct the Maximal's new base.

IDW comics continuity
Grimlock, and the rest of the Dynobots were a close-knit group of hunters, suffering from neither low intelligence nor Grimlock's traditional speech impairment.

After Shockwave destroyed a caché of Energon the Dynobots had been hoarding, causing them severe Energon burns and causing them to feel humiliated, they swore revenge. And so, against orders from Optimus Prime, they followed Shockwave when he left Cybertron to stabilize "Ultra-Energon" deposits he had sent to other worlds as a precaution against the depletion of Cybertron's own Energon reserves.

When Shockwave reached his first destination - Earth, at the end of the last Ice Age - the Dynobots destroyed his ship and took on dinosaur alternate modes with synthetic flesh coatings to protect against the high levels of Energon radiation (see also Beast Wars), Grimlock having rejected the suggestion of a mammoth alternate mode as not at all palatable (but got plenty excited at the notion of a Tyrannosaurus mode).

On transporting down to the planet's surface to confront Shockwave, they gained an initial advantage, as Shockwave's logic was unable to comprehend the effort and risks they had taken for their revenge. However, when Shockwave recognized this weakness shut down his logic processors and operated a "rage" program to enable him to operate on pure instinct, he shrugged off their attacks and beat them severely, ending by burning off their organic coatings. Unable to accept another defeat, Grimlock transformed to robot mode and fought against his immenent stasis lock to no avail.

However, before leaving the Dynobots' ship, he had enabled a "dead man's switch", designed to take Shockwave with them if they were defeated. On entering stasis lock, this failsafe activated, firing on a nearby dormant volcano, causing an eruption which buried Shockwave and the Dynobots under ash and lava.

However, in 2006, Shockwave was discovered by a team of human archelogists. Whether he, Grimlock or the rest of the Dynobots can/will be reactivated remains to be seen.

Generation 1

 * Grimlock (Dinobot, 1984, 1991)
 * Japanese ID number: C-26




 * Grimlock's toy was originally part of Takara's Diaclone Dinosaur Robo series. When Hasbro imported the toy in 1985 for the Transformers line, the blue crotch was changed to red and the Diaclone driver mini-figure was dropped.


 * The original Grimlock changes from a robot into a robotic T-Rex and comes with a red sword, a black double-barreled rifle, and a rocket launcher with three silver rockets.


 * Grimlock was later reissued in the European/Australian-exclusive Classics series (not to be confused with the 2006 Classics line).


 * Grimlock (Classic Pretender, 1989)


 * Released in 1989, this simplified and slightly-modified version of Grimlock transforms into a robotic T-Rex whose tail becomes a handgun. He came with a large human Pretender shell with a rather knight-like armor theme, with a helmet and large cannon.


 * His human shell looks a lot like Ed Asner. (Actually it also rather strongly resembles his voice actor from the cartoon Greg Berger.)


 * Grimlock (Legends, 1989)


 * A K-Mart exclusive in its Hasbro release, this version of Grimlock is simply the inner robot of his Classic Pretender form without the shell or its accessories, leaving him only his tail/gun. In Japan, he was only available in a boxed "Hero Set" with the other three Legends toys, but with a silver face rather than the Hasbro version's orange.


 * Grimlock (Action Master, 1990)


 * Part of the initial assortment of non-transforming Action Master figures, Grimlock's design combines his cartoon model with extra toy-based detailing. He came with the Anti-Tank Cannon "partner" machine which Grimlock could ride, or be unfolded to form a really big "long range mortar launcher."

Generation 2

 * Grimlock (Dinobot, 1992)


 * Grimlock's original toy was redecoed for release in Generation 2, this time lacking the missile launcher accessory. He was available in three different colors; the first --and rarest-- in his original silver (the easiest way to spot if this is a G2 or original is by the "Autobot" tampograph on his leg), then in a medium turquoise-blue, and finally (and most commonly) in a dark blue.


 * (Note: Grimlock outranked Optimus Prime in the G2 toyline! (Prime had a rank of 9.)

Beast Wars

 * Grimlock (Deluxe, 1997)


 * Beast Wars Grimlock is a redeco of Dinobot in gray and gold with black spots, transforming into a "raptor" of some variety. His tail becomes a sword and a rotate-blade. He was slightly retooled to have space for an "energon chip" rubsign.


 * This mold is also used by Dinobots Grimlock, and was retooled to make Dinotron, Hardhead and Thrustor.

Beast Machines

 * T-Wrecks may have been intended to be a new form for Grimlock, based on the references in his tech spec bio to his Beast Wars "Attack Specialist" function and other hints. However, T-Wrecks' appearances in the Universe: The Wreckers comics suggests he is a new, unrelated character.

Alternators

 * Grimlock (2005)


 * Alternators Grimlock transforms into a silver 1:24 Ford Mustang with opening doors, hood, and trunk. His engine transforms into a double-barreled gun, and he also carries an orange sword which can attach to the underside of his vehicle mode.  The toy is one of the most-complained-about Alternators toys, due to its notoriously finicky transformation (with many small steps that must be performed in exactly the right order) and to several pieces which have a tendency to pop off with relatively small amounts of force.


 * This mold was remolded into Alternators Wheeljack.

Universe

 * The Grimlock toy released in Energon was originally created by Hasbro for release as a special new-mold addition for the Universe toyline and was intended to represent Generation 1 Grimlock. However, it wasn't and it didn't.

Classics

 * Grimlock (Deluxe, 2006)


 * Classics Grimlock, a gray and gold Tyrannosaurus rex, is a reimagined form of his original toy. His dinosaur mode's sculpt is based heavily upon TakaraTomy's Zoids Genosaurer toy, and features articulated jaws, some neck and arm movement, posable legs and a segmented, articulated tail.


 * In robot mode, his tail detaches to become a sword/whip. His bayonet blaster can be deployed in either mode, and fires a clear red projectile. Both weapons can be stored on his back when not used.


 * As with most Classics toys, Grimlock features a heat-sensitive rubsign, placed on the left side of the tyrannosaurus torso/his left leg.

Titanium Series

 * Grimlock (3" Robot Masters, 2006)


 * Titanium Grimlock is a non-transforming, three inch die-cast metal figurine based on his toy and comic/cartoon model. He has very limited articulation, in his neck, waist and shoulders. Grimlock is posed squatting and/or dancing.

Attacktix

 * Grimlock (Booster, 2007)


 * Attacktix Grimlock is depicted in his Tyrannosarus mode, and has a sculpt based heavily upon his original G1 toy.