| IRMA
PROJECT #486 "So, how about tomorrow night, you great, big hunk of man, you? Oh, okay. Well, how about next week? Next year?" Preamble: Irma wasn't introduced until 1988, the second season of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but she quickly became a regular character on the show—serving as secretary at Channel Six News, best friend to April O'Neil, and head-over-heels admirer of Donatello. She embodied geek chic—she was Jeanette Miller doing Janine Melnitz's job. Aside from April, though, all the employees at Channel Six were essentially supporting characters, and despite appearing in nearly every episode, they weren't there to advertise any existing toys. They were just window dressing, characters for April to talk to when she wasn't off adventuring through the sewers. Well, it took four years, but Playmates Toys finally produced action figure versions of the news crew as part of the Toon Turtles assortment. Despite being marketed as likenesses straight from the cartoon—theoretically addressing, finally, the huge disparity between the action figures and the animated versions that existed since day one—Irma was anything but accurate. For some reason the decision was made to turn her even geekier than she already was, saddling her with a mismatched multi-colored outfit, a sweater tied around her waist, a big, pink wad of chewing gum stuck to her shirt, and quite inexplicably, a hiking backpack. (I'm not sure if this was done in an attempt to make her costume more interesting, or some kind of engineering consideration because her body would be too small without all the extra equipment. April's body is pretty skinny, though, and she wasn't saddled down with extra junk, so in Irma's case I expect it was just done to try to tart her up a bit.) Anyway, I've always wanted to come up with a better version of Irma that looked more like she did on TV, since her longevity as a character on the show was what led to her action figure being produced in the first place. Construction: I already had an Irma figure, but I wanted to keep an unmodified version in my collection, so I had to track down a second one on eBay. She was missing all her accessories, including her glasses, but those would be easy enough to rebuild. The first thing I had to do was cut away at the backpack and the sweater that was permanently wrapped around her waist. Removing the pack and sweater left visible holes where I'd cut the plastic away, though, so I had to cover up the gaps with pieces of plastic and then smooth out the gaps with Sculpey. The sweater also served to hide her swivel waist joint, and with that gone the joint was really conspicuous, so I covered that up as well. I also rebuilt her lower body, since she didn't really have legs to speak of—just feet sprouting from the bottom of her skirt like roots from a tree stump. After hollowing out the bottom of her skirt, I used a pair of legs from a broken April O'Neil toy, cut them down to size, and attached Irma's feet to those instead. (She lost two more points of articulation in the process since her feet no longer swivel, but they weren't really useful joints since they had to be in a specific pose in order for her to stand up in the first place.) I built her new glasses from a piece of clear plastic that I cut to the right size and then painted around the outside edges, leaving the inside alone to serve as the lenses. Despite making all these physical changes, the main issue I wanted to address was Irma's hideous color scheme. I repainted the entire toy, making sure to match it as closely as possible to her animation colors. (I used many, many layers of paint on her body and legs in order to smooth out the rough edges and hide the structural work I did.) Comments: Irma's last name was never provided in dialogue during any episode of the original TMNT cartoon. However, when "The Big Cufflink Caper!" aired during prime time on ABC as a family viewing experiment, her name apparently appears in the voice credits as Irma Langinstein. I have not seen this for myself, so I'm somewhat reluctant to accept this as a fact until I've had a chance to independently substantiate it. Call me bitter and jaded, but I've seen far too many instances of rumors spreading through the Internet until they become "facts" simply by merit of widespread distribution. Will somebody please show me a screen shot of the voice credits? I'd very much like to see it for myself. |
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This Page Created 10/16/2010
Last Update: 2/18/2012
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CHANNEL SIX PLEASE HOLD
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