Vehicle Mode:
Eshewing Soundwave's original, diminutive form, the Deluxe class toy is pretty nondescript in this mode... it's a very boxy car (some say based upon the Totota bB, like Binaltech/Alternators Skids or BT* Broadblast) with very little in the way of detail and rather dull paintwork.
It's molded largely in a flat, matte finish, dark blue plastic with black wheels and dark, smokey translucent grey windows and headlights. This is broken up by pale cyan (which is supposed to represent glowing) stripe work on the sides, bonnet and roof, with a few greenish-gold details on the front and roof as well as a large, gold-ish Decepticon insignial on the bonnet. At both the front and the back, there's a fair amount of shallowly-sculpted detail that was left unpainted, including indicator lights and the strange tape spool/bar graph pattern where the rear window might be. There's even a slot on the rear bumper where a numberplate might go. The sides, meanwhile, have something that looks very much like a cassette design molded into them, with the spools and tape windows picked out in the pale cyan paint. It's almost as if Hasbro were trying to hint at something... But, strangely, the animation model suggests that the rear window becomes the robot's chest.
The wheels are free-rolling, as is to be expected, and there's pretty much nothing else to be said about Soundwave in vehicle mode... other than that his partner, Laserbeak, can be mounted on his roof either in bird mode or in guitar mode via an innocuous slot on the roof.
Robot Mode:
Soundwave's final robot mode in TransFormers Animated is at once very familiar and very different. He retains the approximate appearance of a tape deck in his chest, but his overall proportions are very much squished. As with some of the more extreme design from TFAnimated, he looks a bit like a tiny lycra bodysuit-clad robot wearing some massively oversized armour parts (or some kind of powered suit) because his waist, hips and thighs are miniscule compared to the rest of his body. The arms in particular look as if they were intended for a much larger robot, but a lot of that is due to the large car door panels attached to the outsides of his forearms. Without those, his forearms would look a bit more normal, but their presence is accurate to his animation model. Likewise, his upper arms are simply massive chunks of vehicle mode with the wheels reoriented to resemble shoulder-mounted speakers. The large backpack protrudes up behind his head and features another pair of speakers, though the sculpting for this is simply a pair of barely-raised circles, which are rimmed with the pale cyan paint.
As was typical with TFAnimated figures, there's neither a great deal of sculpted detail - what's there is uniformly pretty shallow - nor a massive amount of paintwork. What paint is there appears quite impressive - the bulk of it additional cyan 'glow' lines on Soundwave's forearms, kneecaps and waist - but it's clear that there's still some missing. In the case of the glow stripes on his shins, there's actually no supporting sculpted detail, so it doesn't look too bad, but the stock figure has unpainted fingers and is missing the gold trim at the elbow end of his forearms as well as on the tops of his thighs (though the sculpted detail for the latter is present, just a little bit too low down on the leg!), while the central part of his wheels should also be gold according to the animation model. There's a vague grey-ish outline around the control buttons on his lower chest, but this should theoretically be black, and extend along the underside of his chest and into the two vertical depressions at either extent of the chest. Additionally, the semicircles on either side of his chest window should feature a couple of black horizontal bars. A lot of this can be fixed by the Reprolabels set, but they've printed their 'glow' features on metallic stock, and I think the existing paintwork is more accurate to the intention of his design. The cyan paint on the waist is done as if it was supposed to extend up the sides of his body into his chest, but that's not the case - less paint could have been used here, as it's only supposed to wrap around his waist then follow the downwardly-angled panels to his groin.
Soundwave isn't packaged with a traditional weapon, as such - his minion Laserbeak transforms into a guitar which can be carries quite convincingly either left- or right-handed thanks to the mostly-symmetrical nature of the body of the instrument, including a 5mm peg on each side which has been sculpted to resemble a dial. It's quite sad that Soundwave didn't feature more in the TV show, because neither one of his minions featured a great deal... The idea behind all of them was pretty cool and deserved a bit more screen time to fully explore what this incarnation of Soundwave and his minions were capable of. Soundwave's hands are sculpted as open and are really just flaps hinged at the wrist, but the way Laserbeak pegs into the inside of his forearm means his orientation can be adjusted to ensure it look as though Soundwave his holding and playing the guitar, with one hand strumming and the other at the fret board. In his robot mode, Laserbeak can peg into the cassette spool slot on the panels on Soundwave's forearms and will perch securely there facing either toward or away from his master, as if his just landed to report the results of his last mission, or is about to embark on the next.
The head sculpt has to be one of the most interesting I've seen for Soundwave, in that it's one of the most cartoonish interpretations ever made, quite featureless compared to many others - there's barely any difference in sculpt depth between the bulk of his forehead and the central crest, for example - but it's still instantly recognisable as Soundwave. The design to me looks like a very small head, sunken into a very large shirt collar and wearing stylised, red-tinted sunglasses. His 'face', such as it is, actually reminds me a lot of Evil the Cat from Earthworm Jim, because his outer 'horns' look like cat ears, and his mouthplate kind of resemble's the feline villain's protruding teeth. While the head sits more or less in line with his shoulder joints, it's quite a way back from his chest but immediately in front of his backpack, giving the impression that it's perhaps a little too far back though, in fact, those proportions are fairly comparable to the Diaclone-derived G1 Autobot cars, and he only really starts to look odd from some angles..
Soundwave's transformation is surprisingly clever, given his size, but perhaps a little over-ambitious for the materials used. I'm particularly impressed by the way the legs and feet form the front of the vehicle - including the windscreen and front section of roof - with the shins flipping round to become the front grille, and the way the robot's chest unfurls and shifts down the torso to become the base of the car - one of the few occasions on a Deluxe class toy where it's separate from the 'doors'. The process can be a bit fussy - particularly tabbing the base into the front section of the car - and the way the door panels peg in isn't entirely intuitive but, once transformed, he's generally pretty solid in either mode.
Where he's not so solid is the ball joints in the knees, which are supplemented by inwardly-swinging joints for transformation. The knees aren't floppy, as such, but are nevertheless the weakest joints on the entire figure and don't necessarily feel quite stable enough to support some poses... though I was able to get him standing perfectly well on one leg, so perhaps they're not as bad as they feel. The range of movemet at the hip is practically unimpeded in any direction, but it does rely wholly on a single ball joint, with any rotation of the leg left up to the ball joint at the knee. One big surprise was the fact that he has ankle tilt - there's an additional joint specifically for this, despite it not being required for transformation - quite a novelty considering the TFAnimated line is pretty much notorious for its fixed-pose feet that make any dramatic posing next to impossible. He also has waist (or, more accurately, mid-torso) articulation due to transformation, and sufficient range of motion in the arms to adopt all manner of rock star poses with his guitar, or to allow Laserbeak to perch on his arm. A big part of this is that, while he has no bicep rotation, he does have a forearm rotation joint just below the elbow. The shoulders are perhaps a little lacking in terms of outward swing, with the joint somewhat restricted by the bulk of the shoulder and the way the joints are arranged, but it's all pretty serviceable. The head, curiously, is on a ball joint... but it may as well have been pinned in place, as the wide, flat base removes all but the slightest of tilts.
Laserbeak:
Just the idea of Soundwave's minions as musical instruments - Ratbat becoming a Keytar for the later Electrostatic Soundwave (aka Soundblaster) release - tickled me in ways I hadn't anticipated, and the execution is surprisingly good considering how simple it is - the bulk of the guitar opens up to form wings and reveal the robot's head, while the instrument's neck compresses into the body to form a tail. One of the wings has a tendency to pop off on mine, since they're only clipped to their joints, but the end result is probably one of my favourites from the TFAnimated line as a whole. I might have preferred larger, fold-out feet to make his bird mode a bit more stable and substantial in and of itself, but its very well designed nonetheless. The only downside was that the stock paint job was terrible, so I added some silver and copper paint almost immediately, to emphasise the strings and the features of the robot's head.
He's also not articulated in any way unless you count the forward swing of his wings... but it's not as if a robot bird should be required to actually flap his wings...
Given how stylised the animation model is, and how variable the QC on TFAnimated toys was, I'd call Soundwave a qualified success. It's mostly let down by the fact that the animation model wasn't really created with toys in mind, and any other issues - variable joint tolerances, miserly paint job, etc. - were basically par for the course with the toyline. It's one of the most imaginative reworkings of the character - you can tell some actual thought went into the whys and wherefores of the robot's design, as well as how to shoehorn in G1 references without it seeming obviously shoehorned... though the choice of vehicle mode seems a little random. The toy plays fast and loose with some of the finer details of the animation model, but that's nothing new and, frankly, if it ends up with a better toy, so much the better.
There's no point getting into how Soundwave fits into the rest of the toyline in terms of scale, because such considerations were completely ignored by the toyline - Bumblebee is one of the larger Deluxes, for example. By and large, I think he works better in vehicle mode but, set alongside figures like Swindle and Blitzwing, he looks about the right size... and it's not as if he had a great deal of interaction with most of other Decepticons outside of the virtual world he created for the Autobots. It was really only by his own declaration that he even was a Decepticon, since his original form was human-made.
It's odd to note that one of the highlights of this figure is his accessory but, in a lot of ways, there's not a lot that's outstanding about Soundwave apart from the ways in which he can interact with Laserbeak in both robot and guitar form, while he and Ratbat were such an original take on Soundwave's minions that they are among the best accessories in the line, and a lot of fun in and of themselves.
As well as the Electrostatic Soundwave (aka Soundblaster) repaint released by both Hasbro and Takara Tomy, a third version was planned as an Activator - Electromagnetic Soundwave, a mostly white version seemingly based on the 'Sonic White' version of the previous year's Music Label Soundwave - but never actually released. I can't say I necessarily approve of that level of swift and cynical repainting of a character like Soundwave but, had they released him as a Deluxe with another new and unique minion that transformed into a different musical instrument, I'd certainly have been tempted. As it stands, I'd bought a second copy and repainted it as my own interpretation of Soundblaster (using fluorescent yellow paint rather than red and silver/gunmetal in place of the gold) before the official version was revealed, and I'm still reasonably keen to obtain the real thing just to get my hands on the Ratbat keytar.
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