BLASTER PROJECT #468 CLASSIFICATION: QUICK FIX MATERIALS USED: HOBBY KNIFE, SUPER GLUE, MODEL PAINTS FIRST APPEARANCE: "DINOBOT ISLAND" PART 1 "Music—the universal language!" Problem:  Blaster was, as far as I was concerned, one of the coolest Transformers characters of 1985.  Not only did the Autobots finally have their own cassette player, but he was bigger and badder than Soundwave, who became his natural rival.  (They say that a  hero is measured in part by the villains he faces—well, Blaster must have been amazingly awesome to be able to go head-to-head with Soundwave.)  With that said, Blaster's cartoon animation model was a much more simplified version of the Hasbro toy, which was created with an ornate Batman-style mask, horns like radio antennas and audio receptors that looked like volume dials.  It was a cool robot head, and Marvel Comics even rejected the head design of the animation model in favor of (usually) drawing Blaster with a head that more closely resembled his toy, despite the fact that his traditional animation model appears in his TRANSFORMERS UNIVERSE profile.  (Even the Action Masters figure, which was supposedly a more cartoonized version of Blaster, copied the original toy's head design.)  Now, you guys know me.  I like the cartoon, and I buy the toys because I'm fond of the characters from the show, and therefore the toys should look like the characters they represent.  When they don't, that's when I go to work. Solution:  This was actually an impromptu project that I did in a couple of hours after my son was playing with my vintage Blaster and one of his antennas broke off.  It's always bothered me how fragile they were, so I thought it wouldn't be too tough to build new antennas that were more durable.  While I was at it, I decided to just completely redesign his head.  I didn't want to have to paint the helmet at all, so I limited myself to using only original Blaster parts, carving away at the original helmet to create the new face—a tricky prospect, given that the brittle plastic is over 25 years old by this point. This also involved taking the toy apart and looking for plastic I could cut out of the inside so I'd have new antennas that would be the exact same color of plastic as his helmet.  (I ended up getting rid of the plastic tabs that imposed an artificial limit on how wide Blaster's cassette door can open, which had the added benefit of allowing him to open his tape deck all the way.) This Page Created 2/19/2011 ©2011 Inspiration Studios Transformers® and Autobot Blaster™ are trademarks of Hasbro, Inc. We're gonna rock n' roll with a touch of soul.