RAPHAEL (UNDERCOVER) PROJECT# 449 CLASSIFICATION: REPAINT/CUSTOM BASE FIGURE: DON, THE UNDERCOVER TURTLE MATERIALS USED: HOBBY KNIFE, ENAMEL PAINTS FIRST APPEARANCE: "TURTLE TRACKS" "Oh, I feel so hardboiled in these trench coats!"  Preamble:  The four Turtles went through numerous costumes in their attempts to blend in with the general populace, with varying degrees of success, but their most enduring disguise was the classic trench coat and fedorah hat.  This specific disguise enjoyed sufficient longevity that it proved iconic enough to also be included in New Line Cinema's theatrical live-action adaptation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.  An interesting parallel of both the cartoon and the movie is that characters from both stories occasionally slipped into voice impressions of the real-life movie actors, and the characters they played, that served as the inspiration for their disguises in the first place.  In the early episode "The Catwoman from Channel 6," both Leonardo and Michaelangelo do impressions of Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, respectively, and Donatello spends almost the entire third-season episode "The Maltese Hamster" in character as a Sam Spade style detective.  Meanwhile, Michaelangelo takes his turn doing multiple impressions of movie actors in the 1990 live-action film, but unlike his cartoon counterpart, he does a pretty good Humphrey Bogart.  (Given that the Turtles are such insane television junkies, I guess it's not surprising that as soon as they put on the outfits, they start spouting quotes from the gangster film genre.) Construction:  This was the fourth time I'd modified this particular toy, so at this point I'd gotten really good at knowing exactly how and where to whittle away to produce the most effective results and make it look like the dagger and microphone and armbands were never there.  (That's not completely accurate, though, since I did jump around and not work on these four figures in any particular order.  I didn't want to end up playing favorites and do a better job on some of them than others.  I carved an initial into the bottom of each foot so I could distinguish them when it came time to paint their eyemasks, but before that time came I had no idea which one was which.)  I thought about doing something different with the face sculpt (like perhaps getting rid of the toothy grimace, because although this was an iconic expression in the comic book, the Turtles basically never showed their teeth in the cartoon) but in the end my desire for a more simple approach to this project won out.  After all, any modification that I made to one of these figures I had to make to the other three, so the assembly line style kitbashing started to get old after a while. Comments:  It's astounding what a difference a couple of weapons and some new colors can make.  When I first picked up the four extra Undercover Don toys to turn into the four Turtles, it was difficult for me to see them as any character other than Donatello.  (In retrospect, I guess I could have painted each of the toys in a different skin color like Playmates Toys used to do—Leonardo in an olive green, Raphael in a lime green, and so forth—but my intent here was to create cartoon versions of the Turtles in their trench coats, not to copy what the toy company had already done.) This Page Created: 2/18/2010 Last Updated: 7/8/2010 Page Content ©2010 Inspiration Studios Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles® is a trademark of Nickelodeon Looked kinda like a big turtle.  In a trench coat. ...You're going to LaGuardia, right?