Ode to Soundwave -or- No Decepticon Left Behind

Here's your fair warning: This is going to be a dorky post. But, since I've had this conversation twice in the last two days (once with Ramya, and she was a trooper about it) I figured it deserves a little exploration.

Okay people born after 1980, this is Soundwave.One of the original bad guys of the Transformers universe, Megatron's right hand man, and general badass. Sure, most transformers turn into cars or planes, but what does Soundwave get to be? A micro-cassette player. This is a little reminiscent of "Big" ("Who wants to play with a building?"), but it was pretty sweet to have a toy robot that turned into something that looked like a properly sized real-world object- even if it didn't actually do anything (the Japanese kids got a version that did play sounds, but I digress). Plus, since he was a tape player he could hold tapes that also transformed into other characters! This spawned a whole new sub-group of the toys that included the ever-popular Rumble, Ravage, and we can't forget Laserbeak. If you can't grasp how awesome this is to a 7-year-old boy, then I can't explain it to you. In any case, he was a staple of the toy line, the comics, the cartoon and my childhood for several years. However, he has recieved suprisingly little love in the new incarnations of Transformers. There have been a few attempts to work him back in over the years, like his odd Cybertron version, but check out the latest:Transforms intoTo be perfectly honest, I love this. He's no longer a tape player (more on that later), but check out the paintjob on the truck! Not only is it an appropriate blue, but the decoration on the side looks like a cassette. Plus, look at the front bumper- it looks like the tape player controls! Brilliant. As a robot, they've clearly gone out of their way to make him look like his generation 1 roots- he has the tape deck/controls on his chest. You even get Laserbeak, who tranforms into a...uh...guitar...that stores on the...roof. Okay, so it's not perfect. But you have to love the way they acknowledge the character's roots. Because if you think about it, parents that are buying truck Soundwave for their kids probably played with tape player Soundwave when they were younger.

It makes me wonder though, do kids today even know what a tape player is? I ponder this, but at the same time I went through childhood getting annoyed everytime an adult mentioned records. They'd always say "I had a record of that. You kids have probably never heard of records- they were like big black CDs." I was born in 1978, okay? We had record players! I had Disney read-along books that came with a record that stuck in the back cover. I remember when the McDonald's menu song came on a record in the Sunday paper. Much like when they released that re-mix of Magic Carpet Ride in the late '90s- I remember several adults saying "You probably don't know this, but this song is actually older than you!" Well, duh, it's Magic Carpet Ride. It came out 10 years before I was born, but it's a classic! I turn on the '60s station on XM and I know most of the songs. Then again, I see high school kids listening to a song from the early '80s and I think "How do they know that song?" This is how it begins.

In any case, this is not the first Transformer to out live his namesake. Back in the day I had one named Camshaft who transformed into a Mazda RX-7. A few years ago when they started up the awesome Binaltech line, they made an RX-8 version that they were marketing as "Meister" in Japan, but naturally they were going to call him Camshaft in the states. The irony here being that the RX-8 has a rotary engine, and therefore has no camshaft. Hasbro/Takara eventually settled on making the RX-8 Jazz and made Camshaft an Acura RSX.

My question is why they couldn't just make Soundwave into a CD player or something. Maybe because they wanted to have a vehicle mode that was more in-line with his robot mode. In the dreadful Transformers movie they even had a main character that turned into a CD boombox, and they didn't call him Soundwave (they settled on Frenzy, who was one of the less-popular tapes). Of course, in finding that link I just read his Wiki entry. It says that the movie character would have been Soundwave, but it evolved too much and the personality resembled Frenzy more closely. This is true, and I give Michael Bay a little credit, but that movie still stunk. By the way, this post is now the #1 result if you Google "Transformers Sucked."

And there you go: More about Soundwave than you ever wanted to know. Good thing I already have a girlfriend.