| GENERAL
TRAAG
PROJECT #194 "Excellent work, Traag! I'm going to pin a medal on you, as soon as I get a pair of hands!" Preamble: If Krang had never been banished to Earth and teamed up with Shredder, I think General Traag would have been Krang's second in command. No, he wasn't especially clever, and there was no evidence he was an effective military strategist. Traag basically had two things going for him. For one, he was made of rock, so he was basically indestructible. Second, he was profoundly loyal to Krang (something Shredder was not), so this may have resulted in Traag earning Krang's trust and allowing him to rise through the ranks, becoming a general almost by default. Well, I guess Playmates Toys decided that Traag, as he appeared in the cartoon show, just wasn't visually interesting enough to cast an accurate toy in his likeness. They took the same approach they did with the Rat King and other TMNT figures of the same era, upping the "gross-out" factor by several notches. They added more colors to Traag's toy incarnation, but they also covered him with all sorts of creepy-crawly nasty things. There was a snake winding around his leg, a spider crawling up his arm, a scorpion perched on his shoulder, a gecko embedded in his back, and more. He also had several of what could either have been bullet holes with blood pouring out, or (and this is a bit more likely) miniature volcano pores oozing molten lava. In any event, the guy was just gross-looking, and Traag is far too cool to be saddled with a toy that lame. Construction: First, I drew up a color model for Traag to work from. It seems that he's colored somewhat differently in the pilot mini-series than he is in subsequent episodes (minor stuff, mostly, like the color of his belt and his rank insignia), so I went with his original appearance. Next, it was time to chop off all those offending parasites. Since I wanted to retain the same rough-hewn look that the rest of the figure had, I carefully tried to match up the "fault lines" on his body so that it looked like part of the natural sculpt. I also did some work to his left boot, which had his little rocky toes poking out of a hole in the boot. Probably the most drastic change I made was to his face, chopping away to give him his chiseled features from the television series, and carving out a new mouth for him. I also cut his helmet off, using Sculpey to smooth out the top surface (which had originally been segmented like a turtle shell) before reattaching it lower on his face, so that it covered his forehead. In the show, Traag is equipped with a gun holster to carry his puny little gun, so I borrowed the holster from a Power Rangers figure and drilled a hole in Traag's hip to hold the holster. I kept the knobby end intact on the holster peg, so that keeps it in place but it still swivels around. I think the gun is from a Lara Croft action figure, though I could be wrong about that. Traag's paint job proved somewhat challenging. His design is one of the few cartoon models I've seen that's true to life, in that the shadows and highlights on his body change position depending on what angle we're looking at him from. How does one reproduce this with a three-dimensional toy? The trick, then, was to mimic the animators' style of coloring. I laid down an orangey-brown base coat first, then went back after that dried and added the dark brown shading and light brown highlights. The only part of the toy that I didn't paint over was the rank insignia on his chest. (I also retained the squashed turtle under his boot, since I thought it was cute and figured it would be fun to paint it, since it hadn't been originally.) Comments: At some point I need to get another General Traag toy and try to build Granitor, the other Stone Warrior who helps him chase down the Neutrinos in "Hot Rodding Teenagers from Dimension X." |
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This Page Created: 2/1/2002
Last Updated: 10/6/2007
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