Well that arrived quickly!
Krang has taken over the Shredder's body, and the Turtles are about to be puréed!
The Archie comics may have looked like the cartoon, but the characters definitely weren't the same. Like, Archie's version of Shredder was never an angry buffoon, and remained an actual threat to the Turtles every time he showed up (his final appearance in the series proper was in issue #44). He was so effective other villains would even come to him for help when they wanted to fight the Turtles, though obviously none to the extent that Krang did!
Remember when NECA did a Battle-Damaged Shredder and it was just the 2008 mold with a few new pieces? Well, despite this design being based on the cartoon, it's an entirely new Tomasz Rozejowski/Kushwara Studios sculpt! He's broader and chunkier, with more details in the muscles (despite not having bare skin) and armored plates that are both a different shape and have larger blades. So even if you have several NECA Shredders already, you don't have this one.
His helmet is larger, too, wrapping around the sides of his head more and coming down lower beneath the chin. The colors are wrong, though:
we can accept using light blue instead of grat to create shadows, as well as the black semi-circle on his forehead; those are both nods to the comicbook coloring; but at no point in the story is his facemask anything other than the same silver as the rest of his helmet, and it's certainly not the same dark blue as the rest of his suit! It did appear that way in the first few issues of the series, but that was corrected within the first year. So we're sorry, Geoff Trapp and Mike Puzzo, but this just straight up does not look right. Ya picked the wrong paint this time.
Articulation is basically as good as always.
Shredder has a barbell head, swivel/hinge shoulders, swivel biceps, double-hinged elbows, swivel forearms, swivel/hinge wrists, a balljointed chest, balljoint hips, double-hinged knees, swivel shins, and swivel/hinge ankles. In the past, there also would have been some sort of thigh joint, but that's not the worst joint we've seen companies cut back on lately. His cape is softgoods, so it doesn't get in the way of the movement, and is stitched in a drawn manner at the neck, so it will stay out of the way of his shoulder pads. The loincloth is still PVC, though, so that's not quite as flexible.
The set includes four pairs of hands:
fists, open, or holding, plus a second set of fists that also have the claws on the back of the hands instead of being bare. The gripping hands allow him to wield the jagged naginata he pulled out of nowhere when he realized the Turtles were sneaking up on him in his lair. Before that fight he was working on his bonsai tree (because this comic came out after The Karate Kid movies, which introduced the concept to Americans), which this set also includes; no clippers for him to work on it with, though.
The big draw of the set, however, is Krang. We just got a Krang as a pack-in with Bellybomb, but this one is better: in TMNT Adventures #24, Krang escapes his exile on the toxic waste dump planet Morbus, and comes to Earth to reunite with Shredder - literally! He attaches himself to Shredder's head, taking control of his body and intends to make the partnership permanent. To re-create that, this Krang is hollow underneath and can pop onto the figure's neck joint!
None of this Krang's sculpt is shared with
the previous version. Any of the previous versions. (Comicbook Krang looked too different from Cartoon Krang for there to be any viable re-use, anyway.) He has a different expression on his face, with teeth showing on both sides of his mouth, and his tentacle arms are in different positions. He's already on Shredder's neck in the package, so anyone browsing the pegs at Walmart will know immediately about that play feature, and not just assume he's a solid piece like the previous one.
The cardboard backdrop behind the figure in the packaging is the same art of Morbus that came with Bellybomb and Slash, which isn't a great choice: Krang took over Shredder's body on Earth, and was removed before the fight even left the underground lab they were in; why are we seeing an alien planet? At the very least,
we should have gotten the same sewer scene Mondo Gecko had, and even that would be pushing it. On the plus side, the logo for the figure is very cool: it's Sharedder's name in big block letters, but Krang is oozing subtly over the top. Hey, if we call out bad graphic design when it happens, we gotta call out the good stuff, too. The character illustrations on the box are by Ken Mitchroney, as they usually are, even though he wasn't the artist anymore by the time this storyarc happened - it was the debut of Chris Allan, who would go on to become "the" Archie Turtle artist over the years.
It's cool that this figure gives us both Shredder and Krang at once, but it still could have done more and still stayed true to the comic. We see Shredder without his mask on, we see Shredder without his helmet on... it really would have been neat if they'd done a full human head with pieces that allowed you to swap his helmet and hair, for both looks, and done the mask part as a separate piece that could be fit into the sides of the helmet or not as you saw fit. That way they also could have made a second mask piece that wasn't the incorrect color! Like, yeah, this is an imaginary pipe dream with no budget concerns, but that truly would have been an "ultimate" Shredder.
-- 03/06/25
Do you like the colored or colorless mask better? Tell us on our message board, the Loafing Lounge.
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