Bot Reviews: Transformers: Retro Blaster, with Steeljaw.

Blaster’s one of those G1 characters with kind of an odd conceptual history. The idea is that he’s an Autobot rival to Soundwave, between his boombox altmode, and cassete-minion-ejecting feature. But when he was released in the second year of the toyline, he didn’t actually have any cassettes of his own, either packed in or sold separately, rendering his whole gimmick a little bit pointless, unless he stole Soundwave’s minions.

It wasn’t until the third year of the line that he got some Autobot companions, like this Retro release’s pack-in partner, Steeljaw, who’s characterization really begins and ends with “really talented hunter and tracker.”

On the fictional side of things, Blaster was similarly a bot of contrasts. In the cartoon, he was played like a cheerful radio DJ, always ready for action, while delivering strings of of musical and/or broadcasting pun, plus he actually did get to have a big, climactic showdown with Soundwave in a season 2 episode, “Auto-Bop.”

But in Bob Budianski’s Marvel Comics, he was something completely different, a member of the underground resistance on Cybertron, grim, gritty, and fixated on the death of his best friend, Scrounge. His introductory arc was a big “the future bits in the original Terminator” riff, so I’d say he was a bit like Kyle Reese, if Kyle Reese had a special gun he liked to mention a lot.

Budianski must have really liked Blaster, because he basically became the main character of the comic for quite a stretch, with his story leading to him breaking from the Autobots and going rogue, along with Goldbug, after Grimlock took command of them, with disastrous results. I don’t think Blaster ever got to have a big showdown with Soundwave in that universe, though, but if you can’t tell, I’m fond of his Marvel Comics role. Funny enough, the G1 Blaster figure actually just got a reissue a couple years ago, in the Vintage toyline, and like the 1985 original, he didn’t come with any cassettes. But this new Retro version fixes that, by coming with Steeljaw. Me, I’ve never handled a G1 Blaster before, so I was eager to see how he stacks up next to his evil counterpart.

Boombox Mode

Blaster’s altmode is, again, conceptually interesting, because he’s supposed to be a Ghetto Blaster boombox, but at the same time, he’s scaled to play microcassettes instead of full cassettes, which makes him a kind of audio equipment I’m not sure ever really existed. It’s also funny that he’s undersized compared to the real thing, because compared to most Transformers, he’s oversized. I’d heard he was large, but in this mode, he’s basically double the size of Retro Soundwave (reviewed here) in most directions, except from the side, making for quite the substantial rectangular slab of plastic. 

Up close, he’s got a ton of nice detailing on him, like speakers, on/off switches, a row of buttons with “eject, off, and play” written beneath them, even an undersized handle uptop that no one, not even a child’s hands, could hold like an actual handle.

His back side is amusingly plain for contrast, a field of smooth plastic pockmarked with screwholes, copyright info, and a robot head trying its best to hide.

For colors, Blaster’s mostly a bright, cheery red, and light gray, with a bit of darker gray for the details, and a bright yellow tape door. The idea behind this Retro one is that he’s in “cartoon colors,” but like Soundwave, that doesn’t really register as much of a difference here to me (especially since I’ve never owned a standard one).

The biggest differences to me are that he’s got fewer stickers, and more paint apps, and he’s got a nice bit of paintwork on his clear tape door, a pattern of lines, with a circle, and a bit of gray paint. Like the new Soundwave, it makes it so the compartment doesn’t look too empty when there’s nothing in there. 

So, while he’s a slab, Blaster definitely doesn’t have the same density as Soundwave, and actually feels lighter, and a bit more hollow when you pick him up. I think it’s because, as far as I can tell, he doesn’t have any diecast metal in him. That, and apparently the original Microchange toy that was used to create Blaster was a working radio of some kind, so presumably there were electronics in one version of this. He doesn’t feel bad, or cheap, or anything, it’s just interesting compared to his early 80’s compatriots. One bit I’m not fond of, though, is that the chunks in his body that form his robot arms don’t really tab in or anything, they’re just surrounded by stuff that is, so you can poke them with your finger, and they’ll just move around.

They needed a tab or two. That’s really the only thing the Legacy update, reviewed here, has over this one, if we’re going to do a comparison. The modern version holds together better, but it’s also a lot less clean, and a lot smaller. 

Blaster’s big gimmick is, of course, his spring-loaded tape door. In this case, instead of hitting a switch on top of him, you nudge his leftmost button downwards to pop the door open. While it works just as well as Soundwave’s gimmick did, the fact that you have to nudge the button downwards makes it a bit tricky to trigger, so it doesn’t end up having the same “door open, door close” fidget toy energy as Soundwave. 

His other buttons have another little tiny interesting feature. His rightmost “Play” button can also be pushed, and will stay clicked down.

You can then hit the block of central buttons to pop it back up and “stop him from  playing.” It’s not much, but it’s a mundane bit of realism I like on a replica like this. A shame that, unlike Soundwave, a bunch of his other buttons are just sculpted, instead of moveable. There’s an on-off switch on the left that I’d love to be able to flick!

That’s about it for features, but you can also sort of store his gun on the back of him, since its handle fits in some of his screwholes, but it’s obviously not intended, and doesn’t look great. But I was able to use it to lean him back for a couple of these photos!

In the tape deck, we find Blaster’s lone companion, Steeljaw!

A microcassette like Ravage and Laserbeak, an interesting thing about him is that Steeljaw wasn’t a re-release of a Microchange toy, they’d run through those by 1986, but was a Transformers original, and he feels a bit like a do-over of the Ravage design, trying to make him work a little bit better.

In this mode, he’s doing his best to pretend he isn’t a pile of folded-up lion bits. And to his credit, he does a better job of it than Ravage, since he’s a lot less gappy (excepting the two holes for the tape spools, which are supposed to be there), and his head is actually hidden.

He’s still a little bit gappy, though, making him a step down from Laserbeak, who was a more perfect rectangle. But what really helps him pretend to be a microcassette is that his deco is doing the opposite of his Decepticon counterparts, and is trying to sell the tape mode instead of the animal mode. He’s mostly yellow, with a bunch of mostly-horizontal black stripes, some grey paint around the tape’s spools, and a red Autobrand on either side of him. The only deco that isn’t trying to be a cassette tape is the grey that makes up his legs, around the bottom. So, not perfect, but a surprisingly good effort.

And he fits just fine in Blaster’s tape deck, regardless of the way you fit him in, which is about all you can ask him to do. 

Transformation

Oh, this is a good one again. Blaster is just as satisfying to transform as Soundwave, because it’s all about moving big chunks around. In fact, I might even call him more fun, because there’s no partsforming, and there’s a few more steps. You’re folding out the legs, messing with the arms, and flipping up and rotating the head, in abstract

Fun bits include the handle at  the top splitting apart, and then folding into his legs, as well as the way his arms work, spinning them outwards along their shoulder joint, extending his elbows, and then sliding his fists out using the same kind of dial that Soundwave has. It’s just fun! 

Steeljaw’s a bit more involved, and has you fold out his legs, head and tail, followed by a neat trick where you extend his torso out, to help his proportions. I also keep forgetting to do that on the way back to tape mode, and wondering why the tape suddenly looks janky. That’s on me, though. And like the last two minicassettes, Steeljaw’s a partsformer, in that you need to attach two missile pod/wing pieces to his flank to complete him, and they’ve got nowhere to go in any other mode. At least there’s less loose pieces in this whole package than Soundwave. 

Robot Mode

Wow. Okay. So, I knew Blaster was huge, but I didn’t quite realize how huge. This guy’s gigantic. To scale it out, he’s actually a little bit taller than Titans Return Overlord (reviewed here), one of my tallest freestanding non-combining Transformers.

If Blaster was actually portrayed at this size in the cartoon and comics, things would have gone a bit differently.

But at the same time, he doesn’t feel too big? He’s immediately impressive, but not overwhelming. It helps that he’s pretty kibble-free, and is just a humanoid figure made up of boxes. 

Blaster’s proportions are funny, though, because his head’s the same scale as Soundwave, despite his body being much taller, so he looks like a smaller robot in a big Talking Heads-style suit.

One thing I realized is that you extend his legs as part of the transformation to give him more height, and just not extending them slightly normalizes his proportions. But I kinda like him being really tall, and having oddly long legs, so I’ve mostly left them extended.

Scale and proportions aside, Blaster’s another figure that was already pretty animation-accurate, save for his headsculpt, which was shorter and rounder than his animation appearance, and gave him an Optimus Primal-like mouthplate with a hole for his actual mouth in it. His expression’s funny, too, because of the emotion it portrays. Panic? Worry? Resignation? It makes more sense for a traumatized resistance fighter of the comics than the cartoon’s upbeat disc jockey. 

Blaster’s colors are largely the same in this mode, with only tiny adjustments. The biggest new bit of color is his head, which, as a Retro release, has blue toon-style eyes, and pearly white paint on his face and helmet. It’s a good, pleasant set of colors.

I’m really fond of the handfeel in this mode. He’s, again, a man made of solid, chunky bricks. He might not be as dense as Soundwave, or have any diecast, but he has a sort of immediate tactile appeal to him. He’s very grabbable, if that makes sense, and has a kind of knockaround solidity going on. This feels like it was the favorite toy of many kids, something they’d pick up and wave around.

Blaster’s articulation’s limited, more limited than Soundwave, but also a bit curious. Down below, his legs can do the splits, but he doesn’t have any knee joints, or any other rotation. Up top, his shoulders are on swivels that are sort of pseudo-ratcheted, in that there’s no clicks, but they like to rest in specific places. There’s also a tiny bit of outward motion on those shoulders, and between that, and his splits-doing legs, you can rest him in a more neutral, human stance than just ramrod-straight. Going down his arms, while he has no elbows, he does have wrist swivels, if you want him to hold his gun in a funky way. And his neck is also on a swivel, in addition to being able to tilt upwards, thanks to the transformation joint, not that there’s anyone for him to look up to.

And he’s got a wide enough footprint that he can stand just fine, even when his legs are a little bit spread. I do wish he had just a little more jointage, like forward-and-backward leg motion, but hey, it’s G1, it’s impressive he has more than just the shoulders. 

Blaster’s lone accessory is his patented Electro-Scrambler, the special weapon he’d mention at least once an issue in his Marvel appearances. Like him, it’s friggin’ massive, and fits in his hand nicely. It has a very distinctive shape, with a stock, a scope, and a big hole in the middle, just different enough to draw your attention. And the fact that his wrists can rotate lets you just be slightly more expressive with it.

On top of that, his chest-mounted tape deck works just as well, which brings us to his animal companion. 

So, Steeljaw’s a 2d representation of a lion, the same way Ravage was a 2d representation of a panther, meaning he’s got the same issue where he doesn’t look good from the front, and can also be hard to stand up if his feet are posed in any way.

He’s got a good silhouette, at least, and his hip-mounted wing-weapons look good, making him feel almost like a call-forward to Victory Leo.

They’re colored metallic gold, but it’s all paint, and not chrome like the original, which is how it should always be done. Aside from that, his colors are largely the same, save for the baffling choice to color his lion eyes a shade of bright gold that’s almost impossible to make out against his yellow plastic. Well, it’s not baffling, they looked like that on the cartoon, but I wish they’d been a bit less literal here. 

For articulation, though, he manages to slightly improve on Ravage, again. He’s got three joints per leg, and a tail that raises and lowers, same as the black cat, but now, he’s got two joints at his neck, one for his mane, and one for his head, giving him a slight edge. Of course, he still has the problem where it’s hard to get him to stay standing, so it’s not that much of an edge. 

Overall

You know, I think Soundwave’s a little better than this guy, and not just because he comes with two cassettes instead of one. He’s just a tiny bit more full-featured. But also, Blaster is better than I was expecting. He’s got that same chunky, fun handfeel to him, transforming him is legitimately entertaining, and he’s got a timeless gimmick. Steeljaw’s right in the middle when it comes to the three cassette toolings I’ve handled, in that he’s better than Ravage, but still has the same issues, and doesn’t hold a candle to Laserbeak. 

Blaster’s huge size, if you can accept it, is also just entertaining in its own regard. I get a kick out of it, but I could see it being a detriment for you, if you care about scale. Me, it’s G1. Wacky stuff like that was baked in. Beyond that, I wish he had a few more joints to him (mostly after Soundwave surprised me), and that all his buttons actually did stuff, but it’s all minor complaints

So, if you’re only going to get one of the two Cassette Masters, get Soundwave, but Blaster’s also really good, if you can get two, or want the one that it’s less likely you’ve already handled. Once again, this is a bit of a blanket recommendation for the tooling, instead of the Retro version specifically, since it doesn’t feel like there’s a really big difference between this, and previous releases. But me recommending this tooling comes with an extra caveat: Make sure you have a cassettebot or two with him, like this one has (and the Vintage release does not), otherwise, like in 1985, he’ll be missing an important part of his whole functionality.

For over 100 Bot, Non-Bot, and Retro Bot Reviews, click here to view my archive.