AUTOBOT REWIND

TRANSFORMERS: TITANS RETURN (HASBRO)

Soundwave’s not the only Transformer to get his own cassette boi sidekicks. He’s got the Decepticons covered, but over on the Autobot side, there’s Blaster, who gets his own selection of the little guys. In recent years, whenever one of the tapedecks and their cassettes showed up, you could be sure the other wasn’t far behind. For Titans Return, it was Blaster who was first out of the gate, and, by extension, so were his sidekicks. Among them was Rewind, who was, at the time, getting a bit of focus in the More Than Meets the Eye comics from IDW. That seemed like a pretty good justifiable for a figure, right?

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Autobot Rewind was part of the first Legends Class-scale assortment of Hasbro’s Titans Return line, which hit in 2016. Legends Class is roughly the same size as the modern Core Class, which certainly made this a larger than usual Rewind.  In robot mode, he stands about 3 1/2 inches tall and has 11 practical points of articulation.  Rewind debuted this mold, which would subsequently be tweaked and re-used for both Rumble and Frenzy.  Curiously, it was never used to make Rewind’s fellow Autobot cassette, Eject, despite the two classically sharing molds.  The design for this guy was based on Nick Roche’s design for Rewind in More Than Meets the Eye, which was a good focus for the character, so it made a lot of sense.  The difference between this guy and Frenzy is the head, which for Rewind has a plate over the mouth, which makes him all extra sleek and stuff.  That’s fun.  The mold is genuinely one of the best for this style of the cassettes, and just one of the best cassette bot molds in general.  His color work matches up with Rewind’s usual color scheme, and is pretty striking overall.  He’s packed with a small rifle, which works with one of his transformations.  As with all of the TR-era cassette bots, Rewind’s first alt-mode is a data pad, which is vaguely cassette looking, and gets some stickers to help with the overall effect.  He also gets a second alt-mode, which uses the rifle in order to turn Rewind into a tank.  It’s honestly a pretty effective one, and I really dig that they did the two alt-modes here.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

After getting the Greatest Hits Soundwave, I was really settled in on just one of each of the cassette molds.  Since I had Frenzy, I didn’t need to track down Rewind.  Or, at least I thought.  I then sat down and read through most of More Than Meets the Eye, since it’s rather Magnus heavy and all, and I grew to quite like Rewind’s portrayal.  So, when one was traded into All Time back in 2020 or so, I went ahead and grabbed him.  I do really like the mold, and it’s distinctly different enough from Frenzy to make it worthwhile to me to have both.

Thanks to my sponsors over at All Time Toys for setting me up with this figure to review.  If you’re looking for cool toys both old and new, please check out their website and their eBay storefront.