Encyclopedia / Alt-modes / Device
Microcassette Recorder
A dictaphone-sized tape recorder that actually opens and holds its own crew, the most literal 'robot in disguise' Takara ever built.
The machine
What it actually is
The microcassette was introduced by Olympus in 1969, using a tape roughly half the size of a compact cassette and running at 2.4 or 1.2 cm per second. It was never a music format. It was a dictation and surveillance format, standard in offices, newsrooms and, in the popular imagination, in the pockets of spies. By the early 1980s a pocket microcassette recorder was the default object for recording someone, which is why it turns up in every thriller of the period.
Soundwave is the Decepticon communications officer and Megatron's most trusted lieutenant, a monotone eavesdropper who deploys his own subordinates from his chest. The alt mode is not a metaphor for that, it is the mechanism: the chest door opens, a cassette goes in, the cassette is a character. No other Transformer has an alt mode that is this tightly bound to the character's function.
The Microchange original was a genuine working object in spirit if not always in function, sold with headphones with foam earpieces and a cassette that was itself a robot. Hasbro simplified it for Transformers, removing some functionality to hit a price. The toy has a spring-loaded chest door, a die-cast chest and a shoulder cannon, and it remains one of the few G1 toys whose vehicle mode is genuinely convincing at arm's length, because the real object was small enough to model at close to 1:1.
Real-world
Specification
| Make | Generic pocket microcassette recorder (format introduced by Olympus) |
| Model | Microcassette dictation recorder |
| Years | Format introduced 1969, ubiquitous through the 1980s and 1990s |
| Notes | Tape roughly half the width of a compact cassette, running at 2.4 or 1.2 cm/s; a dictation and surveillance format rather than a music one. |
Before Transformers
The Diaclone original
Not Diaclone. Takara Microman 'Microchange' MC-10 MicroCassette Robo 'Cassette Man', 1983, packaged with the Microchange forerunner of Rumble and a set of headphones with foam earpieces.
The part nobody covers properly
Licensing
Nothing to licence. The microcassette recorder is a generic product category rather than a single manufacturer's protected design, and the Microchange toy does not copy a specific model closely enough to raise a question. Soundwave has therefore been reissued more or less freely: Transformers Collection, Commemorative Series, Encore, e-Hobby exclusives, the Soundblaster black redeco, and Masterpiece MP-13 and MP-02 all reproduce the shape without any agreement. The only pressure on the design has been commercial rather than legal: by the 2000s a microcassette recorder was an obsolete object that meant nothing to children, so mainline Soundwaves became Cybertronian vans, jets and boomboxes instead. War for Cybertron and Studio Series brought the recorder back specifically for the nostalgia market. Worth noting for the page: this is the counter-example that proves the rule. Where there is no manufacturer, there is no sticker edit, no lapse and no retooling.
Detail
Trivia
- The Microchange original came with working headphones; Hasbro dropped them.
- Soundwave's cassette-door chest is the only G1 gimmick where the alt mode's real-world function and the character's fictional function are the same thing.
- His voice was created by pitch-shifting through a vocoder, matching the toy's tape-machine identity.
- The Japanese Soundblaster is a black redeco with a retooled head, released after Soundwave's supposed death in the Japanese continuity.
- Soundwave is one of very few 1984 Decepticons whose original mould has never needed a single deco change for legal reasons.
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ArchiveAll alt-modes
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