| RAPHAEL
(SAILOR)
PROJECT# 481 "Three sailors? I've hit the naval jackpot!" Preamble: In the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon show, whenever the Turtles needed to venture forth from the sewers and into the city streets, they needed to wear some kind of disguise. Of course, "disguise" is a fairly subjective term, since they just went from looking like naked anthopomorphic reptiles to anthropomorphic reptiles wearing clothing, but that's a minor consideration. (One supposes that citizens of New York just don't pay very close attention to passers-by.) Trench coats and fedorah hats were their default attire of choice, but on at least one occasion, the Turtles dressed up in sailor suits. It must not have been their favorite get-up, since it turned out to be a short-lived proposition. Very short-lived, actually. They actually only spent about two minutes of screen time in their naval uniforms, but it's one of the things that makes the episode "Green With Jealousy" stand out, visually, from the rest of the many, many other episodes that were produced in 1989. Two years later, they even produced a toy called Midshipman Mike that may very well have been inspired by the episode in question. Michaelangelo was the only one to get the sailor treatment in action figure form, however. It took me a little while, but I finally collected four of them together in order to do my versions of the Turtles as they appear in this episode. Construction: Midshipman Mike was sculpted with a lot of extra details in an effort to make the action figure interesting—not just the fish friends perched on his shoulder (how do they breathe?) and the barnacles on his legs and back, but also the letter insignia on his hat, the anchor tattoo on his arm (shades of Popeye), the "USTF" rank insignia on his breast, etc. These helped to lend the toy an air of authencitiy, of sorts, but they didn't match the cartoon appearance of the Turtles so I got rid of them. I also bulked up the sailor hats, added a tie to the front of the outfits, and whittled away at the boots to change them into bare feet. I worked on all four Turtles at once, making the same physical changes to them four times in a row and then painting them all at once, allowing me to use the same specialliy-mixed batch of paint to get their skin tones to match each other. I wanted Raphael to actually be able to hold his weapons in a way that he could use them, something the original toy wasn't really sculpted to do, so I cut off Raphael's left arm at the elbow and reattached it so that his arm was straighter, enabling him to thrust his sai out in a more menacing pose. Comments: For some reason, I'd remembered the Turtles wearing these outfits on more than one occasion, so I was surprised to find during my research that "Green With Jealousy" remains the only episode in which they dress up this way. One supposes the existence of the Midshipman Mike action figure served to somehow validate the costume in my mind, thus lending it a credence it hadn't earned in the series—or perhaps the outfits simply stood out in my mind because it was so rare to see the Turtles disguise themselves in anything other than their regular fedorah hats and trench coats.
PORTRAIT OF MUTANT MARINER RAPH Batten down the hatches, bos'n—here comes Mutant Mariner Raph! It's not enough for the green teens to beat the fungus out of the Foot Clan on the ground and in the air—now it's time to sink their ships, too! Raphael is just the rip-roarin' reptile for the job. This salty-shelled sailor has got a pair of sturdy sea legs, and nothing makes him seasick except the sight of a fleet of Footskis on the port bow. Just feed him a pizza topped with freshly-caught trout, and Raph will be right as rain in no time! |
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This Page Created: 1/19/2011
Last Updated: 2/8/2012
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