You know the saying in the fandom "If they ain't gray, they're a-okay!"? That has me thinking about whether of not TFTM had as many deaths as we think, but merely went into stasis lock, since a lot of them were not shown turning gray.

1. Brawn: Shot by Starscream. He goes down, but retains his color.
2. Prowl. I believe he really did die.
Transformers Attack On The Shuttle - YouTube
After getting shot by Scavenger, Prowl's head crest, at the 32 second mark, turns gray, and as he falls, the brief glimpse of his head shows that his entire head is gray.
3.Ratchet: Shot several times, but stayed white.
4Ironhide: While we don't see the killing shot connect, I'll say that he turned gray, since not even a TF could survive a point blank shot to the head by a fusion cannon.

Of course, all the above, except Prowl and Ironhide, if they were in status lock, most likely died when the shuttle was shot down by Hot Rod.

5: Windcharger. Huge hole in his chest, but not gray.
6: Wheeljack: Not gray.
7: Optimus Prime. He turned gray. 'Nuff said.
8: Skywarp, Thundercracker, the Insecticons: While they were not shown moving and talking like Megatron during his final moments, they all had their colors, which leads me to believe that they were in status lock, and didn't die until Unicron reformatted them.
9: Starscream: He turned gray, and even if he hadn't, a second later, he turned to dust. Good thing he turned out to have an immortal Spark.

 

There are already plenty of threads about this subject if you search. And they all go the same way. And if grey means dead then how come Optimus was revived? He set the standard and then he broke it. To me turning grey means nothing when it comes to determining if a TF is really dead for good.

 

Actually no.

If you look closely in the sene showing Megatron walking pass Ratchet and Ironhide you can see Ratchet's hand has faded its color.

All these characters survived a crash 4 million years earlier....and that crash was from much higher in the atmosphere.

 

turning gray was for dramatic effect.

It was ment to only be "seen" by the audience, it wasnt something that the characters would see.

Just like the "light show" we saw when Hotrod caught the matrix.

It was for the audience..........but in that explanation its obvious that they intended the "gray" to stand out among the other fallen characters.

As for who's gone for good?

In the tf world theres not really a "gone for good",

 

Since (in the cartoon) the Quintisons built the TFs, their medical science could revive one. Kinda like how, 100 years ago, no heart beat meant dead, but now we can preform CPR, of we get there soon enough.

I never caught that about Ratchet's hand. It's usually red, isnt it.

As for the TFs surviving the crash of the Ark, and my theory that the shuttle crash would have killed them, the Ark didn't have someone shooting into a hole in the side, causing all sorts of internal damage and and who knows what.

 

I heard a rumour that Wheeljack made a live cameo in an episode after the movie.

 

Lots of TFs who died in the movie were in Headmasters, mainly because Japan didn't get the movie until a few years later.

 

Kinda off topic, but that's what I said about Galvatron & Co.'s reformatting a while back and you argued that what we were shown was how it had to have happened.

Gotcha there, sto. 

 

I will say that we don't necessarily have to have seen them turn grey to know that they died. I don't recall ever seeing Ironhide, Rachet, or Prowl turn grey. And they were confirmed dead in the third season.

Also, I don't think that a Transformer coming back from the dead means that they weren't actually dead. Optimus and Starscream were both confirmed to have been definitively dead. But they were both brought back. So personally, I don't take it as meaning that they were never actually dead.

 

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yep, normally red

Still seems to pale in comparison to the crash 4 million years past.

 

That the claim, but its really no excuse.Characters like Ironhide and Prowl were known to be dead yet they still used them.

I think your confusing me with someone else.

And what do you mean about the Galvatron reformating scene?

 

You may not recall it, but Ratchet asnd Prowl did fade in color.

 

The Ark also wasn't boarded by active hostile forces at the time... if any of them survived, the odds that they stayed alive after the initial onslaught are pretty slim.

I sort of interpreted the fade to gray to represent slower deaths, like Optimus eventually dying of his wounds but more sudden, instant deaths cause them to pass before losing their color.

 

It was back in one of the Skywarp/Cyclonus threads. I said that Galvatron, Cyclonus, and Scourge were rebuilt from the pooled parts of Megatron and the other dying Decepticons, with the morph-scan being a flashy, kid-friendly sequence that didn't really happen. You said it had to have happened, because that's what we saw.

Like I said, gotcha.  

 

Yeah, In the Japanese continuity. In an episode of Victory (or was it for more then one episode? I can't remember).

 

Yes, they all died. Wether they turn grey or not has nothing to do with it. The only reason Prime and Starscream went grey was for dramatic effect.

 

They're deader than TFA, Dreamwave and Movie Jazz.

 

Well I meant like the way that Prime and Starscream did. They pretty much went completely black.

 

I maintain that Megatron, Skywarp, Thundercracker and the Insecticons were mortally wounded and would've eventually died had Unicron not reformatted them.