Premonition of a Premutation

Told you you wouldn't be able to guess what we were reviewing next. While the 2021 NECA TMNT SDCC exclusive set was based on a single, specific episode of the cartoon, the 2022 set was more... conceptual. The packaging still references the style of the old VHS cartons, but at no point in the series were all these characters shown as humans at the same time. Although Playmates did once consider making a non-mutated Baxter Stockman action figure, that obviously never happened, meaning this is the first time he's been done in plastic! (Diamond Select made a Minimate of him, but that was the 2012 version, not the 1987. And NECA did the Mirage Comics version, but not until two years after this set. So he's still groundbreaking!) Baxter didn't become a fly until midway through the first full season, at which point he went from a regular character to a semi-recurring one. That was a late decision, too: according to an Eastman and Laird interview in Comics Scene #5, when the initial five-part pilot was being written, the initial plan was to have Baxter become friends with the Turtles and be their "tech guy," and they'd all live in a big scientific complex. Eastman and Laird nixed that idea (reasoning that Donatello was already the tech guy, and that the Turtles didn't fit in a high-tech setting but something much grungier), but the idea for the base was reworked and eventually became Krang's Technodrome. Since the character is a major part of adaptations today, it's very easy to forget that he only ever appeared in one issue of the classic Mirage comic - that's why the cartoon felt okay changing him so much. When Eastman and Laird were creating the comic character, they did consider making him a white man, but that design had no influence on the cartoon, where he's got big, wild, Einstein hair, and little glasses that perch on the tip of his nose. Even with that hair, he's the shortest figure in this set. And yet he's the only one to get double-elbows! Double swivel/hinge elbows, in fact. He otherwise moves at the ankles, knees, thighs, hips, waist, wrists, shoulders, and head. If any of his molds are reused from the fly version, they're minimal at best - possibly the upper arms and legs, and the pelvis? At that point, it was probably easier to just redo everything than worry about matching such insignificant bits. The "cel-shaded" paint means the back of his coat is a pale blue, rather than white, but the black outlines for his wrinkles and the openings of his pockets look great. In addition to his standard fists, the figure can be given a pointing right hand, a clutching left hand, or a pair of hands for holding accessories. Well, not the single Mouser robot the set includes (reused from a 2022 multi-pack, it's a cartoon sculpt and articulated at the jaw, neck, hips, knees, and ankles), but definitely the Dustbuster-shaped "Sarnath-O-Meter" he used to track the fragments of the Eye of Sarnath, and the Heat-Seeking Turtlescope from "The Incredible Shrinking Turtles." From that same episode, he has the fishing net he used to scoop the Turtles out of the river, and the jar Shredder put them in after, with holes in the lid so they can breathe. Amazingly ["incredibly" --ed.], the lid of the jar opens, and you'll find the four Turtles inside there! They're really jammed in tight, so you may need to grab some tweezers to get them out, but they are a separate piece, make no mistake. Their paint is minimal - dark mustard yellow for their chests, black for their belts and kneepads, nothing for their masks - but the detail is all sculpted there, so you cuould probably ask one of your Warhammer 40K friends to paint them for you. You can also drop them into the bag of the net when they're not in their jar. Baxter Stockman may have stopped appearing as a human early on, but we saw human Splinter every day: he was in the opening credits! We've said this before, but if you grew up watching the Fred Wolf cartoon instead of reading the comics, then it was a surprise to you when the movie made Splinter an evolved rat rather than a newly-fuzzy human. That did allow the animated series to do flashbacks whenever they wanted, though; what was the comic going to do, show us him eating cheese and pooping indiscriminately? Splinter-- sorry, Hamato Yoshi is also surprisingly short, though not as much as Bexter - it's not that being turned into a rat gave him any help in the height department, but clearly it didn't deprive him of any, either. His baggy maroon shirt is a separate piece that sits over the torso, which unfortunately means that it just rests near the belt instead of actually being tucked into it, and thus we can see his skin whenever moving the waist balljoint. Plus, the pants have some of the worst paint we've ever seen on a modern action figure: they're gray, with thin black stripes tampographed on, and those stripes have no kind of consistent spacing or attempt to make them all line up over the joints. Like, a line will appear out of nowhere on the knee, aligned with a gap between two lines on the thigh, and then will disappear again at the shin. It'd be one thing if these were hand-painted, but they're not - a machine was designed to apply the paint like this, and it was designed wrong. One thing we know they absolutely got right from the animation is his head: it's shaped like a cube and had hair that's so shiny and black that they painted pure white highlight spots on it to show us the sheen. It looks a little silly, but it is how the cartoon did it, so don't blame NECA. His big square face does manage to look kind, thanks to a slight smile. He's got cheekbones to die for and triangular eyebrows, but it all works together to simulate the show. He gets alternate hands (fists, chopping, holding, a single relaxed left), and a wooden walking stick he can use as a bo in times of need. The coolest inclusion, though, is a glass bowl and four baby turtles. Separate turtles, not molded together in a lump like the four in the jar. They're green, with brown shells and black eyes, and though you may need tweezers to make sure they're all standing upright inside their fishbowl, they're still a great inclusion - after all, this is a pre-mutation set, so having the pre-mutant turtles just makes sense! I learned this set existed when reviewing the BST AXN Bebop, and as we pointed out back then, Playmates made a human Bebop in 1992. They apparently got a little confused during production, because while that figure did a decent job of sculpting the animation model (at least as good a job as most of the figures back then), they decided to make him white instead of black. Whoops! Obviously NECA's not going to make that same mistake. Bebop is the tallest figure in this set, even without needing to take his mohawk into account. Since this is the first-ever human Bebop who doesn't need to do double-duty as his mutant form, it's also the first one that has the appropriately skinny physique. He's skinny enough that he can actually close his vest, which his later version can never do. He's wearing a white shirt beneath it with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and while the zippers on his chest are painted, they don't quite fill their outlines. Bebop (or "Genealdo," since the IDW comics have revealed his human name)has a sour look on his face, a Dreamworks eyebrow, and apparently wore his weird slit-style glasses even before getting mutated. One thing he didn't have, though? A little ponytail at the base of his mohawk. As a human, his hair just ends in a flat spot, suggesting the ponytail is part of his mutation? Maybe it's supposed to represent a pig's tail, since his butt doesn't have one? It'll always be easy to tell Bebop's hands apart from everyone else's in this set, since the rest of them are all pale guys. Since Bebop and Rocksteady are basically a matched set, it's hard to determine which of the accessories belong to which of them. But they only appear in the first episode long enough to threaten April O'Neil, and during that time we see Bebop use a crowbar, a baseball bat, and a length of chain - all things that are included here. We're back to the short kings for Rocksteady ["Maxence" --ed.], because he's barely any larger than Yoshi was. He's a dumpy little schlub, overweight enough that he's even been sculpted with lumps on the back of his neck. It's not quite a pack of hot dogs, but it's close. Actually, that bodytype raises an interesting question: was Maxence an actual military guy, or was he just a wannabe military guy? You know, the Gravy Seals. Meal Team Six. Delta Forks. The Green Buffets. Cosplaytriots. The 101st Chairborne. The Q Cucks Klan. Yeehawdists. Y'all Qaeda. Vanilla Isis. When the police won't take you and you're too scared to join the military, there's always make-believe! Max is the only figure in this set that gave me any trouble with the articulation. He has swivel/hinge elbows, like most of the others, but the swivel peg on his right arm, the piece that goes up into the bicep, is loose on mine - like, to the point that I could just pull it out of the socket with no effort, if I wanted. It doesn't stop the hinge part from working, and it doesn't fall out on its own, but it's not secure. I tried heating the joint up and seeing if it would push in farther and pop into place, but no go: that's just the way he is. Still, I'd rather have this as a problem than have something break. Just like with Bebop, Playmates made a Mutatin' version of Rocksteady in 1992. And while his didn't change his ethnicity, it did give him green hair for some reason. All the rest of the figure was fairly normal, but the hair was green. Odd. Maxence's clothes changed quite a bit when he became a rhino: as a human, he wears a tan vest over a yellow T-shirt and has camo pants, while as a mutant he lost teh vest and the shirt became a tank top. He's got the usual toon-style outlines detailing his sculpt, and the fact they thought to do his hair, to make the blond locks better stand out from his pink skin, was a smart choice. One amusing thing with the paint is his elbows. To give him some detail, they've painted wrinkles on his elbows. Clever, right? Sure, but they've painted them on the sculpted elbows, where the arm pokes out a little bit in the back. Which makes sense, except that "elbow the sculpt" doesn't line up with "elbow the joint," so when you bend the arm the painted elbow is now nowhere near the bend on his arm, it's just some weird squiggles under the forearm. The "thug" accessories we didn't mention above with Bebop include the improvised wooden club Rocksteady used in episode 1, plus a pair of spray paint cans either of the goons can use, and a boom box some random citizen walked across the screen with, but is presumably included for general "street punk" purposes. You have to wildly stretch Rocksteady's hands open if you want him to hold them. Obviously you can give any of the stuff to either henchman, so what they use is ultimately your call. The Catwoman From Channel 6 set showed up on the shelves at Target, but Premonition of a Pre-Mutation didn't, so I never got it. But NECA's recent badly handled sale made me think of it again, and so I went looking to see what secondary market prices were like. The set sold for $150 when it was new, but I got it for less than that (shipping included). Hot dang! Bebop was the major draw for me, but the other characters all turned out great as well. Honestly, now that I have the set, I'm mostly mad at myself for all the times I saw the other gang members and passed on them. -- 08/20/26