Let's see what you can see... This article is in need of images.

The ants come marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah...

No one's quite sure where the Scrapmetal originally come from, or why they look like Transformers. What is known is that they're a dangerous scourge that swarm from planet to planet, devouring everything in their path, and now thousands of them have infested the abandoned Cybertron!

Individual Scrapmetal have only a base animal-level intelligence, and by Cybertron standards are small and weak, easily crushed. However, Scrapmetal are almost never witnessed as individuals, only in large swarms that can overwhelm robots far larger than they through sheer strength of numbers, no matter how many of their own dead they skitter over. They appear to follow the orders of a single (barely) sapient Scrapmetal, physically identical to his kin, but just bright enough to make the swarm really dangerous by giving them direction.

Fiction

Unicron Trilogy cartoon continuity

Cybertron cartoon

SWAAAAAAAAAARM!

The Transformers knew about Scrapmetal as a planet-hopping scourge, and Hot Shot was creeped out by the way they resembled small Transformers. Cybertron

The Scrapmetal were first sighted when the Cybertron Defense Team headed to Cybertron across the space bridge. Watching from the Autobots' base on Earth, Lori was creeped out by them, as they reminded her of spiders. Red Alert recognized them as Scrapmetal. Starscream

Despite unleashing their full (impressive) arsenals, the Defense Team were quickly overwhelmed by the creatures Starscream, prompting Optimus Prime to send Evac, Leobreaker and Override (who was carrying the Omega Lock) across the Space Bridge to assist them. Megatron and a horde of his underlings followed in pursuit, hoping to acquire the Lock and its three Cyber Planet Keys. United The Defense Team, meanwhile, drove off the first wave by themselves anyway. Red Alert believed they may have come from other planets the black hole had destroyed. Cybertron

The Scrapmetal regrouped and returned, badly injuring Crumplezone. Balance One of them subsequently attacked Megatron after his rebirth as a ghostly entity, only to have its shots-and itself-devoured by the shadowy mist surrounding his body. Darkness The Autobots would have to spend a while clearing the pests off God. Family

A red Scrapmetal husk was later rebuilt into a non-sentient drone Warp that was piloted by Coby Hansen and used both in battle and in infiltration of enemy ships. City

Cybertron comic

As the Scrapmetals swarmed over the abandoned Cybertron underneath the Unicron Singularity, several menaced the new arrival Skyfall before being destroyed by the corrupted Dark Scorponok. Other Scrapmetals were co-opted by Nemesis Prime and Ramjet in the service of Unicron himself. Balancing Act, Part 2

The Scrapmetals followed Ramjet into battle when he confronted Skyfall. Balancing Act, Part 3 The Coming Storm: Part 1 Later, Ramjet used the Scrapmetals to attack Primus's spark core chamber. Although Ramjet succeeded, the chamber's defender Downshift destroyed the Scrapmetals following Unicron's herald. Balancing Act, Part 4

Scrapmetals continued to infest Cybertron's infrastructure, prompting Over-Run to try and fix up Vector Sigma to aid him in understanding and repairing the planet. Revelations Part 2

Cybertron toy bios

Once, Scrapmetal were just a breed of Terrorcon, mechanical vermin from Cybertron's lower levels. But the black hole mutated them, and under the command of the power-hungry sentient Scrapmetal, they swarmed the surface of Cybertron! Scrapmetal bio Scrapmetal were perhaps descendants of a three-member race of insect-like Transformers what could produce clone minions. Scrapmetal code bio

Ask Vector Prime

The Praetorian tried to use the corrupted Reconfiguration Matrix to turn all of the robotic life in the Vega Sector into loyal Scrapmetal. He was stopped by the Multiforce. Ask Vector Prime, 2015/06/01

In Primax 208.06 Zeta, Inferno was given command of the Scrapmetal Drones as one of Megatron's Vehicon Generals. Ask Vector Prime, 2015/08/16

Swindle's Spiel

Swindle, Swindle and Swindle had Scrapmetals among their Terrorcon drones for sale. Swindle's Spiel, 2015/10/05

Toys

Cybertron

Stop...

...caution... (Hasbro version pictured)

...go! ...WAIT, IT'S NOT GREE...gets run through

• Scrapmetal (Scout class, 2005)

• Takara name: Ramble [sic]
• Takara ID number: GD-13
• Takara release date: July 28, 2005
• Accessories: Blade, Cybertron Decepticon Cyber Key
• Cyber Key Code: sf2x (red), s1j5 (yellow)
• Known designers: Takio Ejima (TakaraTomy)

Part of the "Scout"-class price-point, Scrapmetal transforms into a four-legged "spider tank" with a rear-mounted cannon. Inserting a Cyber Planet Key into the back end of the cannon releases a spring-loaded, clear-plastic sawblade-sword from the main chamber of the cannon. This blade can be removed from the assembly and hand-held thanks to its 5 mm post base (indented to prevent it from being placed back into the cannon incorrectly). In robot mode, Scrapmetal's fists can be covered with the tank-mode spikes, or with immobile "pile drivers". The crane-arm can be oriented on either shoulder thanks to the 360-degree swivel of the "shoulderpads" assembly; the default position is on its right shoulder.

This toy was first released in the twelfth wave of the Takara Galaxy Force line. "Ramble" (an almost certain mis-romanization of "Rumble") came in three different decos, all released at the same time: red, yellow, and blue, released in equal numbers of all three decos. The packaging is identical for all three versions, with the included bio card showing all three (as seen at the top of this page).

Hasbro released the red "Scrapmetal" in the sixth wave of Cybertron Scout-class toys. This version has numerous slight deco differences from the Takara red version: most immediately noticeable is the Cyber Key Code printed on the back of its Cyber Key, but it is also missing the red paint on its head and the backs of its arms, most of its red paint detailing is darker, the gray plastic is a metallic gunmetal rather than the Takara version's semi-matte off-gray, while all of the rest of its plastic is just slightly different, being slightly darker and having a more noticeable metal-flake sheen to the dark-gray plastics. (The Hasbro version can also represent the one semi-sentient Scrapmetal as described in the toy's cardback bio.)

Then, Hasbro released the yellow version in the ninth wave of Scouts. This release is almost identical to the original Takara version, with the lighter gray plastic of all three colors and all the same number of paint operations; of course there is the addition of a new Key Code to the back of its Cyber Key, but the Hasbro version also has darker yellow paint on the head and limbs, plus a darker Decepticon symbol.

Hasbro never released a blue Scrapmetal at all, thus driving up demand for Takara's blue version in the West among people keen on army-building.

The two Hasbro Scrapmetal releases, despite sporting the same name with no modifiers (such as prefixes or suffixes), came on individual cardbacks not only depicting the correct colors, but also sporting individual product code numbers.

A slight retool and redeco of the toy was used to make the Coby Sen'yō Ramble. For BotCon 2006, attendees who signed up for the customization class received unpainted, unassembled red Scrapmetal, with their parts still on the manufacturing sprues (including the Coby head), to be made into Universe incarnations of Rumble and Inferno.

• More information on Scrapmetal at TFU.info

Notes

• The Scrapmetals clearly draw inspiration from Generation 1 Rumble, with his piledriver arms and colorswapped counterpart. The toy's original head sculpt, later repurposed for Cobybot and for the BotCon 2006 custom class, is based directly on the G1 toy's head—in the end, the designers at Hasbro felt it looked too heroic, and swapped it for the final insectile design. A chart of preliminary names for Cybertron and Galaxy Force characters gives the Scrapmetals' Hasbro working name as "Rumblor"^[1]—this name also cropped up in the online Cyber Key content for the yellow Scrapmetal toy, which claimed that "Rumblor" was the name for the Scrapmetals in Japan. In actual fact, the toy's Japanese name is Romanized on the Galaxy Force packaging as "Ramble", but the katakana itself is identical to that used for G1 Rumble, so the intention of the name is clear. It's likely that the name "Rumblor" was invented by Hasbro due to their loss of the trademark "Rumble" during the early 2000s, resulting in releases like "Decepticon Rumble" or "Demolition Rumble".
• The on-screen representation of the Scrapmetals depicts them with toy-accurate Decepticon symbols, despite even though they never actually had any affiliation with the faction in the cartoon's story.
• The online content unlocked for Hasbro's release of the yellow Scrapmetal toy talks exclusively about Coby's Scrapmetal. Whether this is because the yellow Scrapmetal release was at one point planned to be a release of the Cobybot itself, or if the copywriter just felt like there wasn't much more to say about the straight redeco, is currently unknown.

Foreign names

• Japanese: Rumble (ランブル Ranburu)^[2]
• Korean: Rumble (럼블 Leombeul)
• Hungarian: Fémroppantó ("Metal-cracker")
• Russian: Metalloed (Металлоед, "Metal-eater")

References

1. ↑ "A mysterious document. 神秘の文書。"—Monzo, Twitter, 2019/04/27
2. ↑ The spelling on the Japanese toys' packaging is . This katakana name is also used for the Generation 1 character, so the actual intention of the name is clear.