Soundwave Transformer Quotes

For example, we learned that on the toys they always design the vehicle first and then the robot. They design a vehicle then they break it apart. With us, because the robot is the actor and is what we see 90% of the time in the show we told them that we wanted to design the robot first and from there, break it apart and create a vehicle. Obviously we'll know things like Optimus is a truck, Soundwave's going to be some kind of jet, so we know what kind of vehicle it is but we have the robot dictate the shape of the vehicle. That was one of the new things we did on the show that was pretty interesting. -Jose Lopez

One of the first characters I looked at and thought "This guy's kind of different" was Soundwave, and talking to Jeff and Duane [Capizzi, Transformers Prime Head Writer] it was always "What is the character about?" They would say "He's always in the shadows, he never talks. He's very mysterious." I was like "Let's make him like a ninja." You've got this thing where the wings are the arms and when you look at them straight on they're really thin so it's like they kind of disappear but then when he moves then we can play around with the shapes. So it's that kind of stuff that we tried to figure out as we were designing the characters. -Jose Lopez

Soundwave at the beginning- he was one where they were like "The fans are going to kill you once they see this guy." Some stuff you take liberties, other stuff you think "This stuff is too important, we can't mess with it, we'll keep it the same way." Then you have the ultimate say, which is Hasbro. If they want something then straight away you have to do it, even if you think the fans are not going to go for it. -Jose Lopez

We made Soundwave very alien in terms of design details. We wanted to keep him mostly Cybertronian looking. There are no humanoid vehicle parts even though he scanned one. -Jose Lopez

He's the one that Hasbro had concern about, and said that we had to put something from the original version. There are elements around the head that were borrowed from G1 but that's about it." -Jose Lopez on Soundwave

One of the elements I wanted to keep was Laserbeak. He wasn't a cassette tape, but I wanted him to come out of Soundwave's body. -Jose Lopez