From Newsgroup: alt.toys.transformers

Dave's Transformers Studio Series Rant: Leader Class wave 20

Soundwave (Cassette Player)
Buzzsaw (Cassette)
Laserbeak (Cassette)
Ravage (Cassette)

Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Studio/LSoundwave

Soundwave himself is bigger than a lot of current Voyagers, but still kinda small for a Leader, largely because part of the budget went for three minions.
Wavemate is Nemesis Prime, a purple-eyed The Last Knight Optimus Prime. Skipped it...even if it's an entirely new mold, I'm not interested.


CAPSULE

Soundwave: Very good robot mode, altmode is more of a "hide behind the facade" cheat. Would still be a decent Voyager on its own, though.

Buzzsaw: Brand new design unrelated to any previous media appearance,
and it doesn't fit well in Soundwave's chest in "cassette if you're very forgiving" mode due to not taking paint thickness into account. A net minus for the set.

Laserbeak: Basically Buzzsaw with different colors. Still hard to jam into Soundwave's chest.

Ravage: The huge goiters in beast mode are a bit offputting, but once I got past those it's a decent design. Not as good as G1, but I'm not sure they've ever managed a cassette-to-Jaguar Ravage that was better than G1.

Set overall: Mildly recommended unless you really like the looks of the new condors (I'm kinda neutral on them). More of a big Actionmaster with
some minions.


RANT

Packaging: Standard Studio Leader sized window box. The minions are in cassette form along the left side of the inner tray, while Soundwave himself
is in robot mode along the center. The accessories are hidden in the bottom right corner behind the artwork, which shows Buzzsaw just emerging from Soundwave's chest while Laserbeak is behind him and Ravage snarling in
front. The transformation steps cartouche shows a boom box as the alternate mode.
On the back, the minions get renders of both modes in a strip along the left side, Buzzsaw on top and Ravage on the bottom. The bulk of the back has Soundwave in his two modes. The right side scenery is the burning Autobot City, while the screenshot on the back top is of Soundwave launching Ravage from his chest. Nowhere on the box is an indication of the transformation steps of the minions, so I'll pull it from the instructions.


DECEPTICON: SOUNDWAVE

Assortment: G1904/G0374
Altmode: Tape Player
Transformation Difficulty: 28 steps
Previous Name Use: Yes
Previous Mold Use: None
Movie: TFtM (1986)
Scene: Assault on Autobot City

SOUNDWAVE sends his Cassette troops on a spy mission.

Packaging: Five ties hold the robot to the inner tray. The bag of accessories in the lower right has the two "battery" weapons.

Robot Mode: While other recent Soundwaves of the cassette-player-style have been solidly "Neo-G1" with the general G1 outline and colors but lots of extra surface detail, this sticks as closely as possible to the animation model. That means a lot of smooth surfaces, and a lack of the details that would have been stickers on the G1 toy. Also, in the case of the gold
colored bits, it avoids metallic and just goes with yellow. Of course,
because they can never seem to ne totally consistent in this regard, there's still metallic silver mixed in with the light gray, such as on the tape deck controls on the pelvis (which are smooth shapes as per the animation design, rather than having details molded or printed on them as on the G1 toy). The hands do have slightly uncurled index fingers, and like Siege the left finger can come close to the button, but it requires bending the very stiff second joint in the elbow. The chest compartment is the same size as the Siege standard, but closed in on the bottom bit so a cassette has to be shoved in
the last few millimeters, as opposed to Siege where you can just lay it in
the tray. There are molded dials/sliders on the backs of the boots, but
these do not show up in altmode, annoyingly. I should note that this is an entirely new mold rather than another tweak of the Siege design, it's just
that when you seek to reproduce G1 Soundwave there's only so many ways you
can make it different.
At 6.75" (17cm) tall it's slightly taller than the Siege versions, and it's mainly in the animation colors of dark blue and light gray with red and yellow accents, but with two shades of silver as well. A light gray slightly pearly plastic is used for the tape ejection button, elbnos, forearms, hips, thighs, ankles, and feet. The tape door is clear light blue. I don't know what the barrel of the rifle is made of, as it's completely painted over. Everything else is dark blue plastic.
There's a regular silver paint on the cannon barrel and the top/sides of the feet. A lighter silver paint is used for the faceplate and helmet vents, pelvis buttons, kneecaps, and the inner faces of the boots plus lower halves
of the shins. Gloss red paint is used on the optics, stripes around the barrels of the weapons and three sides of each wrist. The eight rocket tips
in the shoulder weapons are also gloss red. The border of the tape door and the short stripes on either side are gloss yellow, as are the vents under the kneecaps. A light purple Decepticon symbol is printed on the center of the chest. There's no paint or even molded details on the fronts of the
shoulders.
The neck is a restricted ball joint, the waist is a smooth swivel.
Pinned hinge and swivel universal joint shoulders, plus some transformation hinge panels that can allow for a slightly greater range of motion. Bicep swivels, double hinge elbows (the hinge attached to the forearm is very
stiff), swivel wrists, "mitten" hinge fingers. Pinned hinge and swivel universal hips, with hinged armor panels in front of the hips to get out of
the way, and the entire buttflap on a single hinge. Upper thigh swivels,
hinge knees, ankle tilt hinges, and you can bend the feet up on
transformation struts. The kneecaps are on transformation hinges and will collapse inwards if you push too hard. The tape holder is on a spring and
pops open when you push down on the light gray button atop the left torso.
The hands can hold 5mm pegs, there's a 5mm socket on top of the right torso (intended for the shoulder weapon), and one on either side of the backpack. If you fold the backpack side panels out, two more 5mm sockets
with slots (for a sort of --O-- shape to handle the rifle's shape) are uncovered, and the weapons store there in altmode. There's details on the
top of the backpack "spine" that work as 3mm studs, although I'm not sure that's intentional, it might just be aping details on the animation design. There are thin tabs on the forearms that can be used to stabilize a roosting condor, although the fit is not tight enough to keep it from falling off if jostled.
As usual, he has a pair of "batteries" that become his weapons, although they add raised slots on top (tabs inside the backpack slots go into them)
and I think the designers are losing sight of their origins as batteries that could go into a battery compartment. The shoulder cannon is simply a 40mm long, 14mm diameter (not counting the pegs) cylinder with a battery-type nub
at the back end, a 5mm peg on one side at the midpoint, a raised 2.5mm by 8mm slot on the opposite side from the peg, and an octet of evenly spaced tiny warheads on the flat end. When closed, the hand cannon has the same
dimensions and rough details, although the 5mm peg is flanked by trapezoidal tabs over half of its length, probably to keep the peg from going too far
into the fist. Pushing in on the postive end nub lets you pull out the silver-painted barrel of the gun, which is aligned horizontally rather than
the vertical alignment of the Siege-rise mold. At full length it's 2.5" (6.5cm) long. It doesn't really lock closed, so it rattles a bit in battery mode. The tip is compatible with 3mm socket Fire Blasts, although it gets every so slightly wider with length, so 3D printed ones made of rigid plastic might have trouble staying on.

Transformation: I suppose my big beef with this is that the panels with the volume and tuning dials end up hidden inside. They fold out just to let the feet stow, then fold closed again, with the knees bending in the "normal" direction for transformation rather than G1's backwards. My secondary beef
is that despite all the extra panels and fiddly bits, the altmode really only looks good from the front...even the top doesn't quite work thanks to the "silver and light gray look nothing like each other" issue. And, of course, there's a bunch of tabs that can be difficult to get all in place at the same time between the backs of the boots and the sides of the torso. There's
entire extra hinges on the shoulders that don't seem to be necessary for transformation. I couldn't make them useful for a third mode, but this might be something that got abandoned and they just didn't remove the extra hinge.
Or it's a safety thing to avoid breakage without resorting to Arm Fall Off
Bot powers.
Going back to robot mode, getting the feet out is easy, but the head not so much. You need to remove the batteries first, so you can push the head up from the sides.

Altmode: Well, it's a cassette player with the classic details (mostly), when viewed from the front. The sides are just the robot shins with the kneecaps shoved in, and the back is a mess. The batteries are kind of
stored, although the tops are visible so they don't actually look like
they're powering anything. The tapedeck buttons from robot mode are mostly hidden in back, with new ones deployed that have symbols and "PLAY" molded on them unlike the smooth ones from robot mode, something the Earth-mode retool
of the Siege mold also did.
Almost 4.5" (11cm) wide, 2.5" (6cm) tall, and 2.25" (5.5cm) deep
including the arms just sort of stuck in back. Mostly blue with light silver on the side chunks and some very light gray plastic still visible on top (the tape door button and some panels and hinges). The control buttons are
painted light silver, as are the side chunks (with their L and R molding for speakers), but oddly some panel bits on top are a darker silver.
There's two 5mm sockets on back (their panels are folded out to form the back now, instead of flanking the spine) that are probably intended for
storing cassette weapons, plus the shoulder cannon socket on top. The 3mm studs at the top of the spine are also still accessible.
It's pretty clear that they really prioritized robot mode here and
focused on just enough to look good from the front in altmode. My Soundwaves generally live in robot mode anyway, but I'm a bit disappointed in this one's mediocre altmode.

Overall: Very good robot mode, but the altmode suffers. If sold on its own as a Voyager it'd be a good deal, though.


DECEPTICON: BUZZSAW
Altmode: Cassette/Condor
Transformation Difficulty: 6 steps

Packaging: Two ties hold the cassette mode to the upper left corner of
the inner tray. The accessories bag has a peg core and two back guns.

Cassette Mode: To be clear, they make no effort at all to make this (or the other two) actually look like an 80s cassette tape in storage mode. This is purely for fitting in Soundwave's chest, much like the BB Movie Core Class minions, it doesn't even try to look like something else. At least the Siege-era ones had a few details that tried to look like a tape on one side. Also, Buzzsaw and Laserbeak are a tiny bit bigger than Siege standard, so
it's harder to get them into the chest compartment.
42mm by 27mm by maybe 9.5mm thick, and I suspect it suffers from a
variant of WIRNIR in which they assume the paint will have zero thickness.
On the side with the condor head, there are some details that look sort of
like cassette reels. The yellow core is so thickly painted that it's hard to tell what plastic makes it up, but I think it's the same light gray (darker than Soundwave's light gray) as the wing roots and the hinges between the two parts of the wing. Everything else is black plastic. The body core is
covered in a thick layer of bright yellow plastic, while the wingtips on the back side (no reels) have silver paint with printed violet Decepticon
symbols.

Transformation: Unfold the wings, fold the feet down, pull the wings
back, then get a knife because the head is stuck in its slot pretty well. Another victim of the paint thickness, I think.

Beast Mode: Weirdly, they didn't even try to get screen-accurate here, despite also not trying that hard to look like a cassette. The wings are straight to the sides and narrow to points. This is neither the classic
hooked wings nor the disc shapes of the MtMtE pre-Earth altmode.
4" (10cm) long wingspan, 1.5" (3.5cm) long, in the same colors as the cassette mode. The only revealed paint is the bird eyes, which are painted yellow but not as thickly as the body.
The head can look up and down, but the neck can't go forwards much. The wings can bend downwards at the midpoint for something like flapping.
There's a pair of tiny holes on the back for the 1.8mm diameter pegs on the back weapons. These are all the same light gray as the wing roots, and
the little thrusters on back add a few millimeters to the overall length.
While I've seen people mounting these on Siege Laserbeak, that's more
"resting atop" than "connected." The peg core between the two guns is not needed by this toy at all, it seems to exist purely to let the weapon store
on Soundwave's back or be held in his hand. These can also be attached in cassette mode.
There's slots in the insteps of the feet that go on those tabs on the forearms, but the foot spacing is different from Siege so the condors can't
sit even a little stably on the wrong Soundwave's arm.

Overall: Kinda disappointing, they could've just redeco'ed the Siege
molds for these guys and done a better job. The weapons are a slight improvement, but everything else is worse.


DECEPTICON: LASERBEAK
Altmode: Cassette/Condor
Transformation Difficulty: 6 steps

This is the same mold as Buzzsaw.

Packaging: Two ties hold the cassette mode in the middle left of the
inner tray. The accessories bag has a peg core and two back guns, identical
to Buzzsaw's. (These can also be used by Siege-era condors.)

Color Swaps: None.

Paint Apps: The body is covered in thick gloss red paint, otherwise identical.

Mold Changes: None.

Other Notes: None.

Overall: See Buzzsaw.


DECEPTICON: RAVAGE
Altmode: Cassette/Panther
Transformation Difficulty: 12 steps

Packaging: The cassette mode is held in the lower left of the inner tray by two ties. The accessories bag has the entire tail (yeah, it's not part of the cassette itself) and the hip rockets (which go on the tail piece).

Cassette Mode: As with the condors, the front side has molded bits that sort of look like cassette reels, but there's zero attempt to otherwise do cassette patterning here. It fits in the chest okay, possibly because there isn't as much paint on this and what paint there is (silver) isn't as thick
as the gloss yellow and red on the condors.
Mostly black plastic, although there's two different types of black.
You can sort of tell them apart under normal light, but under UV light some
of the bits near the front shoulders glow dull light green while the rest doesn't glow or glow slightly blue (not sure these are intentionally
different or just batch variation). The beast lower limb pieces are light
gray (same as the condor gray bits). The tail chunk and hip rockets are all black plastic, mostly the glows-green sort, but the tail itself is more of a very dark gray that is lighter gray under UV. Lots of different black plastics.
There's silver paint on most of what will be the front upper legs with printed purple Decepticon symbols on the outer faces. No other paint in this mode, and no connection points. You can't attach the tail to the cassette.

Transformation: Well, they tried to make this interesting. There's a torso twist in the middle in addition to the usual way the legs fold down and straighten, plus the head is actually two halves that fold together side by side (which means the neck can't look up and down). The tail piece has to
just sort of jam into a gap over the rear hip transformation hinges rather
than having a proper slot. There's also a hinge to bend between the abdomen and hips, so the overall look is more sinuous, so they tried to get something more cat-like going on here. The fact that this leaves the head stuck
looking up as if talking to Soundwave also kinda makes it look like he's
asking to be fed.

Beast Mode: You know, I'm starting to think that there's no way to do better than the G1 design here. Every other "thing shaped like a cassette
that turns into a robot cat" version of Ravage has been worse. At least the Prime Wars "kinda a phone" version had the excuse of trying to be a triple- changer. If you can overlook the thick neck that bulges out due to transformation hinges, it's not too bad, though. One of the sorta-tape-
reel details ends up on the chest and the other on the top of the butt.
A little more than 2.5" (just shy of 7cm) from snout to tail tip in
black, silver, and light gray. The only paint that wasn't visible in
cassette mode is the red on the eyes. The Decepticon symbols end up on the outer faces of the upper forelegs.
Most of the joints are just for transformation and you need to leave
them in a particular position or things look bad. The front hips are swivels and the ankles (digitigrade, so backwards knees) are hinged and you can get
two reasonable positions out of them: looking up more at a taller bot, or slightly crouched in prep to jump up on a taller bot. With one leg in each position it's hard to get all four feet on the surface at once, but it adds another display option, and the restricted transformation ball joint between chest and abdomen helps twist things the little bit needed for stability.
The tail hinge can move between straight back and straight down (for when reporting bad news, I guess), and the hip rockets are pegged in place so they can rotate up or down.
The 5mm peg on the tail chunk is even more nonsensical than on the
condor twins, it actually makes things look worse. The instructions offer absolutely zero guidance on the matter, perhaps they realized that the "have Soundwave hold it" idea was too stupid to own up to? It takes some fiddling and opening up the mitten hinge, but the tail can be held as something resembling a credible weapon while the condor weapons store on the back.
http://www.dvandom.com/images/RavageButtGun.JPG
The hip rockets attach to 3mm sockets on the butt piece via 3mm pegs.
If the pegs had been on the butt and the sockets on the rockets, they could
at least attach to Soundwave's back, but newp. The rockets are painted
silver everywhere except the pegs, there is no other paint on the butt piece.

Overall: I mean, it's better than the Siege version in beast mode, but that's not a high bar to clear. It gave a very bad first impression, but managed to partially claw back as I fiddled with it more. I still don't
think it's as good as the G1 design, though.


Set Overall: A bit disappointing. They put a lot of work into making
the robot mode look very close to the animation model, but then the altmode
is more of a facade, and the new designs for the condors seem to come out of nowhere. Ravage is okay, I guess. If this was just Soundwave as a Voyager, it'd be a good enough deal. But at the 2026 Leader price, it's kinda
mediocre.


Dave Van Domelen, needs to make room in SoundTown now.

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