I got this adorable little babby (such babby, many smol) from Big Bad Toy Store today. Large shipping box, tiny retail box, even more tiny robot inside.

You've got to give Hasbro credit for sticking to their guns. As far as they've been concerned, Rumble is the red-and-black robot, and they've stuck to that story, almost without exception, since 1984. It's those dummies at Sunbow who got it wrong, dontcha know. Since this is Studio Series, though, with a focus on screen accuracy, Hasbro is relenting and allowing the name of the blue toy (well, purple) to match his identity in animation.

During Siege, we got two-packs of "Micromaster" c̶a̶s̶s̶e̶t̶t̶e̶ ̶t̶a̶p̶e̶s drone armor at the ten-dollar price point. Now we're at a point where we're just getting one cassette in a package at a time, like we're living in Japan or some nonsense, and the price point is even higher (about $12.99). Crazy sauce.

He does't come with a true cardboard backdrop like the larger Studio Series toys, but the backer to which he's attached is still illustrated. Specifically, it's a painting of the Autobot City sensor dish Blaster and Perceptor used to call Optimus Prime for help. "First we crack the shell, then we crack the nuts inside!" I love this kind of attention to detail.

So, Rumble stands at 2.25" tall in robot mode, so about a quarter-inch taller than the Siege version. He's a bit more correctly-proportioned than the Siege edition, with longer upper legs so he doesn't look quite as squat and stubby. Also, where the Siege Frenzy toy was colored like the 1984 release, in shades of dark blue with cornflower arms, this toy uses more animation-accurate shades, a nice lavender for the body and a lighter sky blue for the shoulders and upper legs. Lots of paint apps on this guy, which I think the previous Siege 2-pack budget wouldn't really allow for, but selling him as a single-pack allowed them to do him justice. I can't think of anything that needs to be painted that they didn't get.

He's articulated at the shoulders (ball joints), wrists (on a hinge, required for transformation), head (ball joint), hips (universal joint), and knees (ball joint), plus the toes can pivot (as required for the transformation). No waist swivel, and he has no working elbows, but at this scale I wouldn't really expect him to have a full complement of articulation. And, perhaps most importantly, unlike a lot of tiny toys (like most of the Mini-Cons from the Armada days), Rumble can be posed and manipulated without falling apart.

So he's got his thruster guns, which either fit onto his back or can peg onto either side of his forearm. His fists are much too tiny for peg-holes (the G1 toy had large clips that slid over his forearm, like Shrapnel or one of the Aerialbots). They're made of light grey plastic, the same as his little toes. He also has two piledriver arm extensions, similar in premise to the ones that came with the Masterpiece version. You fold up his little fists and stuff his forearms into the square-shaped gap in each pile driver to attach them. The pistons do not move, sadly, but he still looks really good wearing them. There are even little peg-holes on the outsides, if you want to do something crazy and stick his guns on them.

His transformation to tape mode is pretty similar to the Siege toy, with the biggest difference being that there's no swing-out peg this time to plug him into Soundwave for use as an armor panel. There's more painted detail, this time, with silver deco on the obverse side and some light blue painted stripes on top of that. It's a cartoon deco, without any of the toyetic "METAL POSITION" or "SIDE A" tampo-printing we often got on the G1 tapes.

The cassette mode is Siege-compatible, so it's roughly 1.5" by just over 1.0" and will fit inside Siege Soundwave, Netflix Soundwave, Kingdom Blaster, etc. Comically, the cassette hubs are in the wrong place, positioned too far up on the tape. The holes to plug in his guns are in the right spot, so I don't know why they didn't just make the gun-holes the cassette hubs. Well, it's a minor nitpick. By a show of hands, how many people actually have actual audio cassette tapes in their household nowadays...? (I still have all of mine. I got about halfway through digitizing them and got bored.. Some day, I'm sure...)

One of the things I love about Rumble here is what he *represents.* Theoretically, Hasbro could release any of the cassette characters as part of Studio Series, and keep the Core class going for quite some time. I would not hate to see Frenzy in this format, of course, but I think it would be great to get Laserbeak again (which means we might have a shot at Buzzsaw, who never got a Siege toy) or Ratbat or Steeljaw or Ramhorn. You might argue Buzzsaw doesn't belong in Studio Series since he did not appear in The Transformers: the Movie, but he did appear in the TV series, which was produced by an animation STUDIO, so...

Anyway, Rumble is great. He's the bomb. I love him. More like this, please, Hasbro. Thank you.

Zob (is a child of the 80's, so I love cassette tapes)