VERNON FENWICK PROJECT #485 CLASSIFICATION: KITBASH MATERIALS USED: HOBBY KNIFE, SUPER GLUE, FABRIC DYE, ACRYLIC PAINTS FIRST APPEARANCE: "TURTLE TRACKS" "April gets all the juicy assignments!  Burne will finally realize I'm just as good a reporter as she is...when I scoop her on that story!" Preamble:  Vernon Fenwick is many things—camera operator, editor, director, daytime talkshow host, egotist, and coward.  One thing he was not, it seems, was a character introduced into the show to sell an action figure.  In the amazing world of anthropomorphic mutated turtles and rhinoceroses and alligators and frogs, regular ol' human beings, understandably, just weren't as exciting.  (There's probably a reason we never got official toys of Don Turtelli or Zach the Fifth Turtle.)  The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon was, at least in part, a vehicle to sell merchandise, so it seems odd that a character who played a supporting role in just about every episode wasn't represented on the toy shelves in some fashion.  It was perhaps for this reason that Playmates Toys finally produced an action figure version called Toon Vernon several years down the road, finally working him into the Toon Turtles series in 1992.  The execution was arguably better than his contemporaries, Toon Irma and Toon Burne—at least he was in the right colors and didn't have splotches of food on his clothing—but there were still several details I disliked.   For starters, he was sculpted with a 35-millimeter film camera permanently embedded in his right hand.  It wasn't a removable accessory, as was traditionally the case with every single TMNT toy up to this point—how was he supposed to drive the news van or use the restroom or throttle Irma?  This might not have been that bad had this been an actual video camera, which would have been Vernon's preferred accessory of choice.  (He was a video camera operator, after all, not a photographer.)  The toy had some other minor issues, too, which I also took the opportunity to address. Construction:  I'd originally picked up Vernon on eBay some years ago with the eventual intent of kitbashing him, but I've grown rather fond of him so I hunted down a second one to modify.  Getting rid of his camera was easy enough, which involved some careful chopping away at the plastic until all that remained was his hand.  He also had some extraneous equipment sculpted onto his body, like the microphone attached to his hip and the walkie-talkie sticking out of his back pocket, so I got rid of that as well.  Careful carving at the existing plastic with my hobby knife allowed me to reshape the remaining plastic to match the rest of the sculpt.  Unfortunately, when I started adding Sculpey to the toy, it started to melt, so instead I crafted a new necktie out of good, old fashioned room-temperature plastic. This also allowed me to give him a necktie that actually hangs in three-dimensional space instead of being permanently plastered to his shirt.   Unlike Burne and Irma, Vernon had (surprisingly) been produced in more or less the correct colors, but due to the structural work I did, I had to touch up his paint job anyway.  I ended up repainting the entire toy instead of trying to mix up colors that would perfectly match the factory paint. I wanted to give Vernon an appropriate accessory, and a video camera seemed like the obvious move.  I used the accessory that came with the original toy (which in turn is an updated version of the camera that came with April O'Neil), but I rebuilt parts of it to make it more cartoon accurate, including adding a new telephoto lens and a carry handle.  In a moment of whimsy, I decided to add a lens cap covering the camera lens, a mistake Vernon himself made on at least one occasion (during the climax of "Leatherhead Meets the Rat King"). Comments:  It's worth mentioning here that Vernon had dark brown hair for the first two seasons of the show, until it inexplicably changed to black during the third season and beyond.  Obviously, there's a real-life explanation for this (all the color models for the characters were revised at this point, so this was either an oversight or a deliberate change) but I prefer the in-universe explanation that meeting the Turtles caused Vernon to go prematurely grey, so he began dying his hair in a desperate attempt to retain his fleeting youthful appearance. This Page Created 10/16/2010 Last Update: 2/24/2012 ©2012 Inspiration Studios Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles® is a trademark of Nickelodeon I don't want to be a zombie.  I need my sleep.