Love to have an addendum two and a half years after the review it goes with.
The latest in the Bumblebee movie "concept art" Studio Series releases is another Mini-Con to fit inside Soundwave's chest. Technically two: this mold has been released twice, with the first allegedly being at the start of 2024, but believe me when I say that I have been scouring the pegs weekly since I learned it was being made, and the only dang "Core Class" things that have ever been there were the Rock Lords motorcycle and that crappy Cheetor with a blade sticking out of him.
It's one thing when Soundwave has cats or birds living inside his chest, but it gets weirder when it's little men. You can see the Generation 1 influences in this toy's design: the chest is angled, rather than flat, but the inset lines on the chest stand in for the decorations around the cassette tape holes in the old ones, and the head is exactly the kind of "square" we saw 40 years ago. Honoring the two guns that plugged into the robot's back back then, he's got a pair of unique little blasters that can either fit into his back separately or be combined into a single, larger gun - one that is presumably meant for Soundwave to use (like Ravage's missile was) because this robot doesn't have any hands, just big piledrivers that form his entire arm (at the expense of any wrist or elbow joints). The cool thing is, the articulation is good enough he can steadily squat down and bend over low enough to get the ends of those piledrivers down on the ground, ready to shake it to pieces.
To convert the robot, accordion up the arms, rotate them 90° and lift the arms up over the head. Flatten the feet, plug the two guns into the inside of the ankles, and fold the legs up and over. Congratulations, you've got yourself a thing!
Like Ravage, Rumble is designed to fit inside Soundwave's chest. Did you notice we hadn't mentioned any name for this figure until now? As we said, Hasbro has released this mold twice, as both Frenzy and Rumble. So the entire review can apply to both, but the fact the robot has piledrivers and not hands means it works better as Rumble than as Frenzy. Unfortunately, this week Hasbro wants you to believe Rumble is the blue one, and since the blue one is the one supposedly released back in January, we can only show you pictures of the red one being released now. Whether you think Frenzy is red and Rumble is blue, or if you have an opinion that's correct, one of these robots needed to have different arms, but that is more effort (read: "money") than Hasbro wants to put in. The way the piledrivers stack up at one end of the altmode do make it look more like an engine or battery or something than Ravage's indeterminate altmode looked like anything at all, so that's nice.
Fits inside Soundwave's chest a lot easier, too.
If I'd found I-don't-care-what-Hasbro-says-if-he's-blue-he's-Frenzy at any point, I'd likely have been just as happy with that figure as I am with this one. Heck, I might even have gotten both, despite (whichever one you think of as) Frenzy having the wrong arms. But the red and black makes a better contrast with Studio Series Soundwave than duo-tone blue did, so I'm glad this one was findable.
You said "the wrong the arms" in the final paragraph.