![]() The sliding on/off switch and rotating volume knob on Soundwave do not correspond with the actual functions of the Walkman or its button placement, but it's quite possible Soundwave was merely meant to strongly evoke the Walkman in shape and color and appearance, rather than serve as a duplicate of its specific design. The cassette drive is off-center on the Walkman, necessitating the addition of another piece to the other side to make it symmetrical (and give Soundwave not one, but two legs to stand on). Obviously, some concessions had to be made in order to turn this into a transformable toy. Soundwave is not a perfect duplicate of this design, but it likely served as a starting point. There is, indeed, a model of the Sony Walkman (model TPS-L2, sold in 1979) that was blue and silver in color, and I think you'll agree it's shockingly familiar: ![]() It makes perfect sense that he would be a reproduction of a cultural phenomenon that would have made him instantly recognizable as a common household object. The Sony brand Walkman was wildly popular in both America and Japan, and it seems that the "Cassette Man" logo on the original Japanese version of Soundwave is a cheeky reference to that. So, it's likely that Soundwave's buttons were actually inspired by this specific design feature.Īs for what Soundwave was actually based on, I strongly suspect the original Microman toy holds the most important clue. However, there were actually portable cassette players from the era that would include arrows on the face of the tape player, to denote the directions the cassette would rewind or fast-forward (handy if you wanted to skip ahead to your favorite song on the tape). If the buttons were on the top of a tape player, the tape would be inserted upside-down. Thus, the buttons to perform tape functions were always close to the bottom, open end of a cassette tape. ![]() The tape head locked in place during playback, and would only disengage when the "stop" button was depressed, causing the spring-loaded mechanism to disengage. The reason for this was that the tape head that actually decoded the magnetic information on the tape was a physical mechanism that had to manually engage, moving closer to the cassette in order to pick up the magnetic tape. Soundwave has a particularly interesting design because all of the buttons that supposedly control his operation are located on the face of the cassette player, rather than on the top or side of the player, which was pretty much the default design for portable cassette players. Therefore, both the Blaster and Soundwave toys are scale representations of audio cassette players, not meant to be microcassette players at all. ![]() There was no such thing as a microcassette boom box in the 1980's, a boom box was an absurdly large and heavy music player you would carry on your shoulder and blast obnoxious rock tunes until your eight "D" cell batteries burned out after a few hours. If that's true, then Blaster must also be a 1:1 scale microcassette player, which is a preposterous notion. Because of this, I think people have naturally assumed that Soundwave must be based on some real-life microcassette player. Soundwave's cassettes were the same size as real-life microcassette tapes, which weren't commonly used for music albums due to their low sound fidelity, but could be commonly found in telephone answering machines and voice-activated dictation recorders. The point is, while it's easy to trace toys like Bluestreak or Sideswipe to the vehicles they were based on, there simply isn't going to be a real-life camera or microscope to which you can point and go, "There, that's Reflector and that's Perceptor." Even the Mini Autobots themselves are role-play items, since they were styled to resemble Takara's super-deformed Penny Racers toys rather than being realistically proportioned vehicles. ![]() The contention was that the robots from the Microchange series were real-life objects that turned into tiny humanoid machines, which is why many of the Transformers characters are "role play" devices like microscopes and guns and cassettes. Where the Diaclone assortment was based mostly on late 1970's or early 1980's vehicles that existed in real life, the Microman assortment was a bit more fanciful. Part of the problem is that G1 is actually a mish-mash of several different Japanese toy lines manufactured by Takara and Bandai and others. In a toy line where pretty much every original Transformers character can be traced back to a specific real-life car or plane or whatever, it may seem strange that nobody's ever been able to identify with certainty the manufacturer or model number that was the basis for Soundwave's design. One of the mysteries that's plagued the Transformers fandom is the specific make and model of cassette player that Soundwave actually turns into. ![]()
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