Bot Reviews: Transformers: Retro Soundwave, with Laserbeak and Ravage

What a rollercoaster ride the Transformers Retro line’s been so far. To recap, Retro is the latest batch of Wal-Mart exclusive reissues of vintage 80’s Transformers figures (but it’s not the Wal-Mart exclusive Vintage line of reissues from a few years ago. Because that’s totally not confusing). The big twist this time is that these 80’s toys have literally been given a fresh coat of paint, in the form of brand-new colorschemes designed to match their appearance on the original animated series. 

The Retro line started really strong by releasing one of the best Transformers ever (my opinion on this is objective truth), a G1 Hot Rod reissue in movie-accurate pink colors, reviewed here. But not all G1 figures were created equal, and the G1 Starscream reissue, reviewed here, was a lot messier. And then the third figure was Hound, reviewed here, who was straight-up overpriced for the tiny, basic thing in the box. After that, I skipped out on the next few releases, which were Starscream’s mold-mates Skywarp and Thundercracker, because one of that tooling was enough, and two of the three original Insecticons, who were overpriced the way Hound was, and decided not to bother with Perceptor, since I’d missed so much of the line already. And I kind of thought that was that. And then they dropped this guy, and his Autobot counterpart.

I don’t have to explain who Soundwave is, there’s no way you don’t know. He’s the one with the cool voice that shot little guys out of his chest, and was Megatron’s cool, collected right-hand man. It’s kind of funny how there’s always been this kind of assumption on the parts of both the toymakers and the fans that his vintage 80’s cassette player alternate mode wouldn’t work in the 21st century, but that hasn’t really been the case. People know what he changes into, and even if they don’t, “guy that shoots out smaller guys” will never not be cool. And because including Soundwave without some of his tapes would be the worst choice (looking at you, Siege Soundwave), this version comes packed with Ravage, the stealthy Jaguar that would later become an agent of the Space KGB in Beast Wars (more on that here), and Laserbeak, the flying spy-in-the-sky who was arguably the most successful Decepticon on the original cartoon when it came to doing their job. Also, the box is a really nice G1-inspired design for the franchise’s 40th anniversary, and has stopped pretending that this line’s entirely dedicated to the ‘86 movie. Regardless of where he’s from, let’s see how this 1984 original holds up 40 years later.

Tape Player Mode

I like it when Transformers come packaged in their alternate modes, like Soundwave does. And, as everyone reading this already knows, his alternate mode’s a minicassette player. Not the kind of thing you’d play standard cassettes on, but a smaller format, used more often for recording audio, fitting his role as a spy. Scale-wise, it’s roughly the same size as the Netflix Voyager (reviewed here), a little narrower, but also a little taller.

It also does a better job of hiding its robot bits, with only the folded-up head being especially egregious, and his arms doing their best to hide around back.

Between the amount of general techie detail sculpted into him, and the fact that I’ve never handled a real one of these in my life, it all blends, anyway. From the front, he’s got sculpted button controls, and “L” and “R” where his speakers go, as well as power and volume controls on either side of him, and a little eject switch up top. 

It’s all very clean, and more importantly, feels good in your hands. It’s just a rock-solid block of plastic that holds together very well, and feels just as nice as any 2024 figure. You can really throw him around, and he feels like you’ll break before he does. This was one of those G1 figures that didn’t have a lot of diecast in him, but there’s a little bit on either side of him uptop, next to his speakers. 

For colors, the big gimmick of the Retro collection is that he doesn’t have his original deco, but is a cartoon-accurate repaint. To be honest, at a glance, he doesn’t look like the kind of intense repaint that Hot Rod or Hound was, because his cartoon deco wasn’t terribly different, so it just looks like Soundwave. 

Not that looking like himself is a bad thing. He’s mostly a mixture of navy blue and light gray, with yellow highlights around his tape door. The door itself is now transparent blue instead of just clear, which I appreciate, because it makes it look less empty when it’s, well, empty. The big Decepticon symbol on it helps, too. One bit of deco that he’s missing is the “Rec/battery” light on his left side, though it wasn’t a part of his show’s simplified design, and was a sticker anyway (Retro figures are entirely sticker-free). On the other hand, a bit of blue paint makes sure the buttons on the front of him are separate, and not just one big blob, like the actual G1 release had them be. Like the rest of the Retro line, the original’s chrome (in this case, mostly limited to those buttons) has been replaced with flat gray, but in this case, it doesn’t look bad, and blends with it nicely.

For features, I’ll start with the small things: He has a clip on the back of him, for securing him to your actual, real life belt. I gave it a whirl, and it feels secure enough, but as a Large Grown Man, I’m not going to test it out by taking it for a walk, or anything. Next, the on-off switch on his right can be flicked, and the volume dial on his left can be spun. 

And, of course, the big one, pressing his eject button makes his cassette door spring open.

It’s fun to just flick it open and close it shut, like someone would flick a lighter, and between that, and the dials on either side of him, he almost feels like some kind of extra-large fidget cube in your hands. Interestingly, side-by-side with Netflix Soundwave, I find that the mechanism for the door feels exactly the same. 40 years later, the same engineering gets re-used.

Pop open the door, and you’ve got a slot for one of his tapes.

I’ve talked about the original Ravage before, when he was reissued in Kingdom alongside his Beast Wars iteration, but Laserbeak’s a new one. They’re both the same thing in this mode, though: Flat rectangles, the exact 1:1 size of a microcassette, which means they’re a bit larger than the Siege Micromaster versions (and therefore not cross-compatible.)

They’ve both got chunks of diecast metal in their construction, (the red core of Laserbeak, and the grey lower legs on Ravage) making them cold to the touch, and a hair more hefty than you’d expect. Curiously, Laserbeak is the first Retro Transformer to include stickers on him (I think), with large chunks of his red, silver and white bits being pre-applied labels on top of his black plastic, while Ravage is all paint (not that he has a lot, he’s nearly all black.)

Here’s the thing about both of them: Their new color schemes have opted to emphasize their robot (well, animal) forms, so these guys are barely pretending to be cassettes in this mode. Ravage is really clearly a folded up cat, visible head and all, and while Laserbeak is less visibly a bird, he’s very much just a Rectangular Pile of Stuff. Now, there is a little bit of sculptwork to suggest the tape form, in the form of detailed spools in the middle of both of them, with one side of each tape having more realistic “spool” detail, plus there’s sculpting matching the little “window” cassettes would have in between those spools, but without the coloring to help enhance it, the sculpting doesn’t do much.

Granted, even in their original G1 decos, these guys were still only half-hearted cassettes, with Ravage in particular having a bunch of little gaps and holes in him (Laserbeak is more solid), so I guess they decided to just emphasize the other modes this time.

Which makes sense, because for all my aesthetic grousing, popping one of these guys into Soundwave’s cassette door, or ejecting them, still has this fun, immediate tactile feeling, and you can see why it’s a popular feature, even if the cultural context is lost. Tape goes in, tape comes out. Tape goes in, tape comes out. Soundwave is just a big stim toy, really. Just make sure Laserbeak faces the right way, or he’ll jam the tape door a little bit when you pop it out.

Transformation

Oof, this is kinda perfect. You can probably guess how it goes by looking at him, and you’re right. Flip and rotate the legs down, and flick out the feet, then rotate the arms out, and slide the hands out with handy-dandy dials, and then flip the head up and rotate it. This is not a transformation that needs to be iterated on. It’s simple enough, but fun and satisfying to do. The real clever twist involves his accessories, which stash in a slide-out panel beneath his belt clip. If you’ve never noticed, it’s because they’re the size and shape of AA batteries, and are disguised as them.

It’s immensely clever, and a shame none of the current Soundwaves do this. 

As for the cassettes, Ravage is a pretty clear-cut case of flipping out his head and tail, and straightening his limbs. Laserbeak’s a bit more involved, and a lot more fun, as you spread his wings, flip his feet out, and extend his head. Be careful when doing that last bit, though, his head pops out of the track pretty easily, though you can easily pop it back in. The only aspect of all three that hasn’t aged well in terms of transformation, really, is the need to add in previously unused accessories to complete them.

For Soundwave, it’s not too bad, you need to clip a missile onto the end of one of his guns. Ravage and Laserbeak, meanwhile, each have large weapon accessories meant to peg onto them to complete them (with Laserbeak’s even adding some mass to his body), and there’s no real place to stash any of these accessories, so you just have to bag them up, and make sure you don’t lose them.

It’s a very minor situation compared to Retro Starscream’s whole deal, but it still shows how things have advanced since the early 80s.

Robot Mode

Soundwave stands a little bit taller than a modern Voyager, which kind of fits his character as a silent spymaster, since he looms in the back of a lineup quite nicely.

In terms of sculpt, yeah, he’s a Man Composed of Boxes, but these are some instantly iconic boxes, chest-window and all. You see this character, and you know who he is, and it’s a retro-robot design that’s stood the test of time.

You know it’s good when most of the design changes when he arrived in animated form were just tiny tweaks, and proportional adjustments. This means he’s still pretty show-accurate, especially for a G1 guy. Uptop, his headsculpt has the broad strokes of the robot we know and love, but the original toy did detail it up a little bit differently than the show (and later figures) would. It’s less of a box, and taller in shape, plus his mouthplate has multiple layers of armor, instead of just being one piece. 

For colors, again, I don’t immediately read this repaint as a night-and-day difference compared to the G1 original, like I did with the rest of the Retro line, with the big, obvious eye-catching thing just being that his visor is now red, and not yellow. But it is a total repaint, again, with the another obvious thing in this mode just being that he’s missing all of the stickers on his arms and legs. He doesn’t come across as plain without them, though. There’s more than enough yellow and red accents to give him some vibrancy. In particular, I appreciate that his shoulder cannon has the little missiles inside it painted red, a detail the original didn’t manage. He’s even got more color than the Netflix version, thanks to including the red stripes on his forearms and weapons. 

In terms of construction, this guy’s once again a rock-solid brick, more like Hot Rod, and less like the fragile fiddliness of Starscream and Hound. There’s some good chunkiness here. It may just be that the Microman-derived toolings that were released as Transformers were, quite literally, built differently than the Diaclone-derived ones. The little bit of diecast metal on him has now also migrated to his feet, and provides help with stability that he didn’t even need.

Now, you don’t buy a G1 Transformer for the articulation, but in this guy’s case, he has way more of it than you’d expect for a 1984 original.

Going top to bottom, his neck’s on a swivel, his shoulders are also swivels, with some outward motion thanks to his transformation, and he’s got elbow swivels. Down below, he doesn’t have traditional hips and knees, but can rotate his legs outwards at the hips, and his knees bend reverse to a humans, which is not terribly useful, but he can have a little sit.

Obviously it’s not up to modern action figure standards, it’s not even proper Star-Wars-Standard five points of articulation, but it’s a lot more than a G1 guy would typically have, enough that you can actually get some poses out of him. 

For accessories, Soundwave’s got those two batteries that convert into his weapons. One stays on his shoulder, on a peg that it can swivel on, while the other one’s handheld, and is meant to extend and stretch a little bit out of its battery configuration.

He also comes with three gray, triangular missiles for it, which are on a model kit-like sprue. There’s a little button on his hand weapon that points to it having been a springloaded launcher at one point, but that feature’s since been removed. But the missile itself just reads as the end of a laser cannon to me, so I don’t mind that it doesn’t fire, though you definitely don’t need three copies of it these days. 

Also, for a little unintended extra feature, he happens to have five-millimeter ports underneath his forearms, so you can stash a couple modern guns there, if you want (none of the other ports on him are the right size). 

And, of course, his ejecting tape-slot still works, and can still hold his companions.

So, Ravage and Laserbeak.

Ravage hasn’t aged as well as the rest of this set, mostly because of how flat of a cat he is. Pretty much every update of this character ever has tried to find a way to solve this problem, to different levels of success, with even the animated series adding mass to his design. But here, he’s just two-dimensional, save for his big missile pod accessories.

Speaking of those missiles, I appreciate that they’re painted silver instead of chrome, more chromed accessories should be done this way, I wish Retro Hot Rod’s exhaust pipes had also been colored this way. The rest of him’s mostly solid black, with a bit of red for his eyes, and some light gray for his lower legs, and behind the Decepticon logo on one of his shoulders.

See, the good thing about Ravage is he’s also got a lot of poseability for a G1 figure. Each individual leg has three joints apiece, his head can raise and lower, and so can his tail. But the fact that he’s so flat means it’s challenging to get him to stay standing, unless you have his legs ramrod-straight, or are just very careful with how you pose him. At least he has the same rock-solid stability as Soundwave. This cat’s not breaking any time soon.

Laserbeak, meanwhile, came out a lot better, and wasn’t even especially changed for his appearance in animation. A robot bird that looks a little bit like a jet is always an easy sell, I suppose.

A lot of his mass is added via the silver jet/laser accessories plugged into his body, but it’s cheating for a good cause. For colors, he’s still got a lot going on, thanks to those stickers covering his red-and-black body with shiny silver and red, but he also adds some painted yellow eyes to his hooked beak face. And I went and checked screenshots, he actually doesn’t have a Decepticon logo on his forehead on the show, they didn’t forget it. 

For another great surprise, Laserbeak, again, has plenty of articulation, with two joints in each wing, and two joints in his neck. Granted, he can’t “flap” his wings, but it’s something.

And his bird feet have enough of an imprint that he’s got no trouble standing, and perches on a lot of shoulders and arms really well. I think the weight from the diecast metal in him, and his general solidity, helps, too. As far as cassettes go, he’s a winner.

Overall

Not every Generation One figure holds up 40 years later, especially considering all the advancements in design and engineering that came up in the interim. The Retro line’s been a testament to that. But these guys? These hold up way better than I was even expecting, and even feel well worth the price tag, unlike some of this line’s other releases. They’re solidly built, fun to transform, and have an entertaining team gimmick that’s timeless, even if cassette tapes are an 80’s thing.

The only modern convenience this set doesn’t have is tons of articulation, and even then, they’ve got way more of it than you’d expect from an early 80’s release, and their general charm and personality overcome that, I think. So, to me, regardless of where you stand on the 80’s original versus modern updates, this is a set well worth picking up. I think the only caveat I have here is that, unlike some of the other Retro releases, this toon-accurate repaint isn’t really a big, striking change, beyond Soundwave’s red visor, and the general lack of stickers to apply. This is moreso another shot at owning the original Soundwave, and a couple of cassettes, and this set’s probably going to be hard to find if you didn’t get the initial preorder, like I did. So, consider this less of a recommendation for this specific version, and more of a blanket recommendation for picking up *some* version of G1 Soundwave and friends, whichever one you can get your hands on for a decent price. Just make sure he comes with at least one cassette. Most versions come with either Laserbeak, or his repaint, Buzzsaw, which is the better of the two cassettes here, anyway. 

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