Welcome to my sandbox. Lots of things in progress, may not publish some others awaiting peer review because i always want a second set of eyes before something goes gold.
Wanna update https://tfwiki.net/wiki/Myths#Other because IDW 2019 #28 previews had people think Cliffjumper died again when it was a simulation. WIP obv
Cliffjumper dies in every Transformers series he appears in, or is part of a franchise-wide running gag where he is killed over and over again.
I lived, bitch!
The series premiere of Transformers: Prime is well-remembered for its opening act, in which Starscream brutally kills Cliffjumper. Several years later, Cliffjumper made a prominent appearance in 2018's Bumblebee film, where he is tortured and killed by the Decepticons Shatter and Dropkick. By sheer coincidence, Cliffjumper had recently perished in IDW's concurrent Unicron miniseries; from these data points (sometimes adding in the fate of his mirror-universe self in Shattered Glass and a brief cameo in Siege that leaves his fate uncertain), some fans have extrapolated the idea that Cliffjumper must "always" die in Transformers stories, or that writers have somehow singled him out to die over and over again for the sake of comedy, not unlike the perpetually unlucky Waspinator.
The truth of the matter is a bit more nuanced. Named Transformers characters die all the time—across different works of Transformers fiction, characters named "Wheeljack" and "Blurr" have died just as often as Cliffjumper, and Bumblebee himself has died or otherwise suffered terminal damage onscreen just as often as Cliffjumper! Some of Cliffjumper's deaths were part of climactic "massacre" storylines that killed off dozens of named characters; his appearances in Bumblebee and Siege probably came down to the fact that it was easier to finagle another pre-existing character from their limited pool of robot parts by simply recoloring Bumblebee's pre-existing CGI model, rather than any kind of ulterior commentary on the character.
In contemporary comics, Cliffjumper spent years as the POV character in Fun Publications' Shattered Glass comics; more recently, he got an entire two-part adventure to himself in 2020's Transformers: Galaxies series, where he turned out just fine. However, for a brief moment when the main IDW 2019 comic series released the first few pages of issue number 28 to promote its release, said pages depicted Cliffjumper being hunted down and killed, leading to fans believing he's dead yet again<ref>Transformers News - TFW2005IDW’s Transformers (2019) Comic Series: Issue #28 iTunes Preview</ref> when in the full issue (nay, the same preview page) showed that Deathsaurus was in a virtual reality environment living out a dream fantasy of enacting revenge on Cliffjumper for the events of the Galaxies two-parter by killing him repeatedly. As of 2026, he's received a starring role in Skybound's Energon Universe comics, taking the usual "human ally" role from ... Bumblebee, who died in the very first issue. (See what we mean?)
According to Shawn Kelly, the ILM lead animator for Revenge of the Fallen, Devastator caused a computer to catch fire spontaneously and its insides to melt.<ref>Nickelodeon Magazine, issue 153, published June 2009</ref> One assumes he was exaggerating for the purposes of publicity, as it is improbable for modern computers to actually catch fire under operations for which they are designed, such as rendering an extremely complex model. The special features on the DVD do (indirectly) show one of the computers blowing, with lots of black smoke and the poor animator (and his keyboard) covered in soot. (This was all done as a prank, leading to said animator asking "What the hell, man?") Not quite melting, but still.
According to Shawn Kelly, the ILM lead animator for Revenge of the Fallen, Devastator caused a computer to catch fire spontaneously and its insides to melt<ref>Nickelodeon Magazine, issue 153, published June 2009</ref> during an overnight rendering and no one was in the studio.<ref>https://twitter.com/Shawnimator/status/1816858494882189453</ref> While one assumes he was exaggerating for the purposes of publicity, as it is improbable for modern computers to actually catch fire under operations for which they are designed (such as such as rendering an extremely complex model), ILM visual effects sequence supervisor Todd Vaziri notes that even with massive amounts of RAM the computer was not able to handle rendering the shots. The special features on the ROTF DVD reenacted the incident by pretending to have one of the sequences saved with all the high-resolution textures and calling across the office to have an animator open the scene, leading to a fake mushroom cloud of smoke blow over the cubicle walls as the poor animator walked over, his entire shirt covered in soot from his keyboard exploding, asking them "What the hell?"
