He's a dangerous, slavering beast who's a constant murderous threat to everyone around him - and now he's become a werewolf, too!
Full moon frights! You better be-werewolf!
Hear the howl of a turtle on the prowl!
Feast your eye on the beast with a sai!
Warning! The claws are out!
Witness the terrifying transformation!
There is some weapons-grade favoritism at play, here. How does Raphael, the Turtle of choice for kids who can't be left unsupervised with the neighborhood pets, get to be both Frankenstein and the Wolf Man? Leonardo doesn't even get to be a real character, just "the hunchback," but Johnny Psychopath gets to be two of the "Big Three" monsters all by himself? If he's also the one to get Draculated, we'll know for sure the fix is in.
In Playmates' 1993 TMNT/Universal Monsters crossover line, the Wolfman was, in fact, Leonardo. We can't even claim NECA did this
because they don't want to repeat what Playmates did, because they've already announced what the next figure is going to be, and it's Leonardo as the Creature from the Black Lagoon - the same thing he was in the second Monsters series, in 1994. Maybe the plan is just to go in the same order every time? First a Raphael, then a Leonardo, then a Michaelangelo, then a Donatello? We'll just have to keep tabs on them.
Tony Cipriano, who's sculpted several of these crossover figures (including FrankenRaph), is back again and finding a way to make a smooth/scaly reptile be furry instead. Seriously, even the shell gets a fuzzy texture! We'd expect it on the body, but the shell is a nice surprise.
There's a pentagram etched in back there, too, since that was the sign of the werewolf in the old movie. Like Larry Talbot, Raph is wearing blue pants and a green shirt, though because NECA didn't have to worry about the expense of covering a human actor in expensive prosthetic makeup, his clothes are much more ripped and shredded, with a massive hole on the right leg, another on the shoulder, and then a series of slashes all across the back, with one of them even wrapping around to his chest on the left side. Part of his stomach is exposed, and even his belt has big claw marks in it. He's been rough!
Raphael is a wild-eyed lunatic, and this toy pushes that even further.
He's Deadpooling pretty hard (one eye wide, one eye squinting), and the ties of his mask are longer than usual, with tattered ends. The fur on his head is thick, with big tufts coming off his cheeks and a few bits on top of his head creating the impression of ears. Clever! To really show off his wolfiness, the center part of the fur on his head is painted darker to form a big widow's peak. That's more "Werewolf of London" than "The Wolf Man," but it's a general trope today.
Like a few of the Turtles in this line, Raph gets an alternate head.
This one is tones down slightly, and honestly looks more like a Muppet than anything else. It took me a while to realize what it's supposed to be: this is him when he's first changing into a werewolf! (Or "byrdlingwolf," as long as we're sticking with Old English word origins.) So it's an intermediate step between the last head and a plain Turtle. His eyes are still orange, but his fangy underbite is smaller and the peak on his forehead is less pronounced.
He doesn't get much in the way of accessories, sadly.
You'll have to decide whether this or Donatello's "lots of extras, but they're uninspired" is better. If we don't count extra hands (which we don't; they're nice to get, but they're not "accessories" per se), then all he has are his sais and a bear trap. The trap is more cartoony than the one that came with the non-TMNT Wolf Man, but it does feature a real metal chain on one side. As before, his weapons have been designed to match his new, monstrous theme: the handle of one of them is a bone, but the other is capped by the silver head of Larry Talbot's cane.
In an effort to give this wolfman canine legs, they seem to have gotten a little overzealous with the articulation. Above the waist, it's all the regular NECA stuff: joints for the head, neck, shoulders, elbows,
and wrists. And waist. Even the legs start out normal enough, with balljointed hips, and double-hinged knees with an extra swivel at the top joint to allow the lower legs to turn. But moving down from there, they've done three joints when there should only be two: remember, a canine's back "foot" is actually just its toes; the "extra" bend in its leg is its equivalent of your heel. So the way Raphael is made, he has a swivel/hinge ankle, swivel/hinge toes, and also another extra hinge in the middle of the toes? It's... unusual. On the plus side, it does allow the toy to have a large footprint on the shelf and thus not have to try to balance like the Lon Chaney Jr. figure had to, but it's still weird.
When it comes to Universal Monsters, you've got your A-rank (Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man), B-rank (Mummy, Gill-man, Bride of Frankenstein, maybe the Invisible Man if you're being generous), and then everybody else. So it's kind of selfish that two-thirds of the major monsters are one Turtle. This is a decent design, making him more "wolfy" than the real movie makeup could, but still keeping enough visual cues to make it clear this is a movie mashup and not just some random case of lycanthropy.
-- 03/21/24
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