| DONATELLO
(UNDERCOVER)
PROJECT# 446 "Another rainy night, but who had time to worry about the weather? There was trouble in town—the city was under a reign of mob terror, and my three partners and I were the only ones who could stop it..." Preamble: In the original cartoon series, the Ninja Turtles lived in the city sewer system and were largely unknown to the general populace. This presented the interesting predicament of how a quartet of large, anthropomorphic reptiles were ever going to be able to operate on the city streets without causing mass panic. Their solution was to adopt disguises, and their first attempt (which would make regular appearances throughout the series) was a set of matching trench coats and fedorah hats. Playmates Toys did produce a series of Turtles in disguise in 1990, but—perhaps in the interest of avoiding too much uniformity on the store shelves—only Donatello appeared in his trademark trench coat as a toy called "Don, the Undercover Turtle," while the other Turtles got stuck with alternate costumes. (There was a later toy assortment that did feature all four Turtles, but the assortment was expensive for the manufacturers and significantly underproduced—and despite the real cloth outfits on the action figures, still wasn't quite in synch with the cartoon series.) Well, I managed to get four versions of Don, the Undercover Turtle in an eBay lot for the purposes of turning them into accurate versions of the Turtles as they appeared in the show in their undercover garb. The trick was to make the necessary changes to them—not just once, but four times in a row successively. Construction: The original version of Donatello was sculpted with some extra details like a ripped sleeve and a knife and microphone tucked into his coat, so I got rid of those. It's also kind of strange that he'd take the time to put on this disguise but then but his ninja armbands over the top of his trench coat, but maybe I just don't know that much about ninja fashion. In any event, I got rid of those, too. I also altered his kneepads to make them more like they appeared on TV, and did some work on the bottoms of his feet and built a new belt buckle. Finally, I wanted Donatello to be able to hold his bo staff with both hands, so I cut off one of his hands and reattached it so it was facing the other direction. Playmates Toys gave each of the Turtles a unique skin color, but in the cartoon they were all the same shade of green, so I gave him a new coat of paint to reflect this. (I painted all four undercover Turtles at the same time, so that I could use the same batch of paint for their skin and trench coats.) I armed him with a bo staff from one of the newer 2003 toys because this version was already correctly painted (I could have painted an older bo myself, but the factory paint sticks to the plastic better than my model paints and I didn't want it scraping off when I put the weapon in his hands). Comments: It's worth mentioning here that despite the fact that there was nothing inherently wrong with the toy, poor Don the Undercover Turtle was one of the worst pegwarmers from the entire TMNT toy line. (Not quite as bad as Tokka, mind you, but still.) I can't really figure out just what it was, either. Was it that he didn't come with a bo staff? Was it the fact that all his accessories were black, including a charred-looking slice of pizza? (Michaelangelo must have been in the kitchen that day.) Was it that his trench coat wasn't really disguising him very well and that you could still see the front of his shell? I sincerely, genuinely don't get it. |
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This Page Created: 2/18/2010
Last Updated: 7/8/2010
Page Content ©2010 Inspiration Studios
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles® is a
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What photomanipulation?
I don't know what you're talking about.
That's an actual screen shot from the cartoon show.
Now, stop making stuff up.
