Music Label Soundwave (Spark Blue Version)

Even at the time, Music Label seemed something of a potentially dangerous folly for Takara Tomy. The sorts of consumer electronics involved still tended to be quite expensive, and including them in transforming robot toys, while pretty cool in theory, was perhaps venturing too far into a niche market. Sure enough, over its two year lifetime, Music Label produced only three unique molds, but two were released in several colourschemes.

Like Convoy, Soundwave - or, to give him his full, tautological mouthful of a title 'TransFormers Music Label Soundwave Playing Audio Player' - was originally released in white, back when Apple's attitude toward the colour of their proprietary media player was "you can have any colour you want, as long as it's white". It didn't take long, however, for a G1 homage to turn up...

Fast Action Battlers Disc Blast Frenzy

Frenzy was easily the most fun character from the first live action TransFormers movie. Small, hyperactive, foul-mouthed and completely bonkers, it seemed that he was always the kind of character who took on more than he could really handle, as if he had something to prove, being so small. He was also one of the most blatant references to the G1 cartoon: First seen on Airforce One he transforms into a portable CD player to escape detection, only to be picked up and taken exactly where he needed to go by one of the stupid humans, exactly as always happened with both Soundwave and Blaster (normally accompanied by similarly stupid human saying "wow, who left this here?".

But Frenzy isn't just an accomplished infiltrator. After hacking into the Airforce One computers (and thereby the entire American military network), Frenzy singlehandedly took on a whole load of the US President's guards, escaped to meet up with Barricade, and flipped off the survivors of his assault. Even getting cut in half wasn't enough to stop him (which doesn't help explain Jazz dying but, hey...). So, considering how spindly his robot mode was, and how unlikely his transformation into a CD player was, how on earth could they possibly make a viable transforming toy out of him?

TransFormers Collection #21 - Broadcast & Steeljaw

Another of Generation 1's MIAs, Blaster got a US release, but never came to the UK. While it was understandable with the likes of Perceptor, it was strange, disappointing and downright annoying that Blaster didn't get an official UK release - he was basically Soundwave's counterpart, and played quite a major role in many of the Marvel UK comics.

That said, while Soundwave had a fairly subdued and complementary colourscheme, Blaster's seems to have been decided upon by a five year old, and was designed to fit his robot mode at the expense of his alternate mode.