I built Lego’s new Transformers Soundwave and it’s the ultimate 1980s toy mash-up

I’m a child of the ’80s, an era of home micros, dodgy cassette tapes and cracking toys. For years, my bedroom floor was a minefield of Star Wars figures and ships – and then He-Man characters that looked like they’d got way too friendly with anabolic steroids. Then one day in a local toy shop, I stumbled across something new: Transformers.

Robots that turned into cars and jets? Pure catnip to pre-teen me. Alas, my pocket money didn’t transform into a bigger pile of coins, and so I started with Mini-Autobot Gears, whose entire transformation amounted to flipping a truck upright and unfolding limbs. Still, it felt like magic. And one Christmas later, I’d graduated to Optimus Prime. Although he, sadly, later fell foul of a childhood argument and lost a leg.

Play

But my true favourite was never ‘Autobot dad’ anyway – it was Soundwave. Perhaps foreshadowing my career as a journalist, I loved how the Decepticon communications officer turned into a microcassette recorder – albeit one with tapes that turned into minions. (None of my real-world tapes ever did that, annoyingly.)

Alas, I no longer have my 1980s toys, because 1990s me was an idiot and sold them all. But I did recently find myself holding a box featuring Soundwave and the Lego logo. With Lego being my other childhood obsession, my inner child exploded with glee. Twice.

Bricking it

Opening the box tempered that joy. Inside was an instruction manual hefty enough to do serious damage if dropped on a foot, along with 12 bags. Some of which had more bags inside. Bagception. In all, I had 1505 pieces to get through – and only two free evenings to build before writing this piece.

Fortunately, Lego eases you in gently. Instead of Soundwave proper, you start with a mini version, in a nod to his mass-shifting transformation trick. Next come the minions. Laserbeak first: a robot condor that’s less ‘robot in disguise’ and more ‘metal nightmare’. He’s not fooling anyone if he lands in your garden. But he’s perfect, resembling and transforming just like the original toy. Ravage (a robot jaguar)… less so. Still, he’s as good as you can hope for at this scale.

Next: Lego Soundwave himself. I quickly built his torso and repeatedly pressed the play button to trigger the sound brick that plays Soundwave’s cool vocoded tones from the cartoon. “Laserbeak, report!” “Ravage, eject!” Although not “Why am I just a torso? What’s going on?” And the cassette door works. Press the button, it opens, and you can pop a minion inside. Just, you know, transform it first. Amazing.

Sound construction

Admittedly, by evening two and bag 11, I was tired, deliriously constructing robot feet while chuckling about how Lego Soundwave and I would “refuse to be de-feet-ed”. This is the kind of thing massive Lego sets can do to you.

Fully assembled, though, Soundwave is glorious. At 33cm tall, he’d tower over the original toy and even loom over Takara’s fancy Masterpiece figures. And yes, he transforms. Not with the elegant simplicity of the 1980s toy – partly because the process is more complex, and also because bits sometimes fall off. (Lego!) But that boxy tape deck is spot on. Just don’t peek around back, because it’s… untidy.

But honestly? That doesn’t matter. The robot mode looks first-rate. The build is ingenious. And Lego has fused two of my childhood obsessions into one. If 10-year-old me could see this, his tiny brain would explode.

Admittedly, at $190/£160, Lego Soundwave is even less like pocket money fodder than those Transformers I couldn’t afford in the 1980s. But it’s comparable to Masterpiece editions, yet with more presence and the thrill of transforming a giant pile of plastic bricks into a 1980s icon. And unlike my poor old Optimus, if someone yanks off a leg, I can snap it back on in seconds.

Disclosure: Lego provided a Soundwave sample for this column. I would have bought one anyway as soon as I could have got away with doing so.

• Now read: Transformers at 40: four decades of giant stompy robots in disguise