At first I really liked the soundwave sd players and then I realized how horribly out of date and cludged together the concept actually was. He might be an mp3 player, but he looks like a cassette player, which doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense. I would like to see this done properly, as in a complete re-design of soundwave into a mp3 player that actually looks like an mp3 player.
It could be done to. The key would be to use the guts of a small, sd-based mp3 player (like a sansa) but base the design off one of the larger hd-based ones, giving plenty of room for robot limbs in the guts. My money would be on basing it on the first gen zune. It's large and blocky, so the robot mode could resemble his original form, unlike some players (cough, cough ipod) it has plent of manly colors available, and it has plenty of natural seams on the device, which would make the mp3-mode's look a little less "mp3 player cut into 14 pieces" looking. In leu of cassette helpers, the player's accessories could transform into helper bots. Ravage could transform out of the dock, rumble and/or frenzy could tranform from a car kit (think the cigarette lighter adaptor) and laserbeak could transform from either the remote, or better yet, the actual sd card! (You'd use a MICRO sd card and have the full-sized adaptor do the transforming, re-routing all the leads so that it actually works, of course.) Making the helpers out of different accessories would help to make their robot modes a little less forced. (Rumble and frenzy always looked ok, but laserbeak was a tad fat for a bird and ravage was the flattest cat in history.)
Blaster could be updated as well. Far more easily actually... take a jvc kaboom box, or something similar and hack away. Heck make it more current and have blaster transform into a x-m radio home unit!
That would fix the scale issue as well, which always bothered me about those two toys in paticular. You see a lot of people are confused as to what soundwave actually transformed into. He did NOT transform into a cassette player, he transformed into a mirco cassette recorder, similar to the kinds still used in colleges today. Now granted the design was kinda sketchy, with the control buttons on the face instead of the top, but the fact that he was supposed to be a micro recorder is evident by the words "micro cassette" written on the front of the toy and the lack of any visible speakers or headphone jack. It was a very clever design because real MC's from the era were the same scale as the helper bots. Then they went and ruined it by making blaster use the same size cassettes! Since blaster obviously looked like a boom box, everyone (including the writers on the show) assumed they both used full sized cassettes and thus totally ruined soundwave! Soundwave should fit in your hand, while blaster should be the size of a full-fledged 80's boom box. While I understand the reason they shrunk the toy (a 3 foot tall transformer would be a little much) I still resent the fact that the helper bots were re-hashed for each toy, with rumble and frenzy having autobot re-paints, making people confused on the scale.
Eh sorry about that... one of my toy nerd pet-peeves.
Anyway, I really wish some kit-bashers would go ahead and make a true soundwave mp3 player design. If somebody would do a good enough job I'd even fit in the working mp3 guts and hack the firmware for a decepticon theme.
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Topic: Transformers. Was: It's Omega Prime! (Read 10484 times)
