Foot Bot

This is very innovative, or not at all, or yes very again. In the future of The Last Ronin, Shredder commanded legions of Synjas, or synthetic ninjas, advanced robots that did his bidding and policed the city. But before getting to that point, the Foot Clan had to start somewhere, which is why the flashback in issue #3 showed an elderly Baxter Stockman unleashing a horde of janky, unfinished androids called the Footbots. Which, yes, means this is a Last Ronin toy from before the Last Ronin was the last anything. The Last Ronin takes place in the future, but it's not clear what that's the future of. Like, yes, it's its own continuity, but that continuty has to be based on something, right? Take The Dark Knight Returns, the story that clearly inspired this one: that was its own continuity, but it it wasn't the future of Adam West, it wasn't the future of the Superfriends, it was the future of the comics. And while IDW (who publishes The Last Ronin) has a comic continuity, it doesn't feel like the future of the IDW comics, does it? So it seems likely The Last Ronin is the future of the original Mirage stories. If that's the case, then it helps to remember that these Footbots are replacing real live humans - for those of us who grew up on the cartoons, Foot Soldiers being robots is really nothing new. But to really drive the mechanical point home, the Footbot's face is hollow behind the "mouth" area, leaving an empty spot in a way a human could never achieve. The Footbot design honestly does seem to owe a lot to the 1988 Playmates Foot Soldier toy: the pointy shoulders, the drape around the neck, the lumpy spine, the shape of the armored plates on the forearms... it's all exaggerated, of course, but it feels the same as the old thing, like someone said "let's make that toy I played with as a child into something serious." It's even got the same colors: a purple head and shawl over a gray shirt. Okay, to really be a direct copy the pants would need to be blue, not black, but there are very, very strong parallels here you'd have to be willfully obtuse to deny. Sculptor May Thamtarana did a great job turning the comic art into a full sculpt. Of particular note are the neck and abdomen, where exposed robotics give us so many tiny, tiny details. In the comic, Casey Jones specifically compares them to Terminators, but no Endoskeleton has ever been this intricate! The exposed hoses on the knees seem like they'd be a weak point - you know, like how you can disable a police robot dog by pulling the battery from underneath or by hitting the motor lockout button from behind. If you then wrap the entire robot in aluminum foil and leave no openings, the cops won't be able to track its GPS and you can just throw it out in any dumpster. Bye-bye, waste of taxpayer dollars! Bye-bye, abuse of authority! Bye-bye! Have a fun ride in the garbage truck! Articulation is average, and therefore quite good: the robot has swivel/hinge ankles, swivels at the top of the shins just below the single-hinged knees, swivel thighs, balljointed hips, swivel waist, barbell chest, swivel/hinge wrists, swivel forearms, double-hinged elbows, swivel biceps, swivel/hinge shoulders, and a barbell head. The shoulders don't want to lift very far, thanks to the big spikes on top, and the chest was stiff at first and needed some work to get it moving, but now everything is great. It's a lot of fun movability. Most of the figure's accessories are alternate bodyparts. You can replace the fists with hands open to various degrees, from clutching tightly to folly flat. They only have two fingers and a thumb, presumably because it was good enough for the Turtles, it was good enough for their enemies. Like Megatron! There are a pair of extended forearms, for when you need to punch someone who's just slightly farther away than usual, and two extra heads: one that's just beat up and severed at the neck, the other that's absolutely caved in on one side, and is designed to fit on the sledgehammer that comes with NECA's Last Ronin Casey Jones figure. In related news, there's apparently a Last Ronin Casey Jones figure. Who knew! There are also a pair of katanas that fit into squares on his back. And, since the figure's head is mounted on barbell, you can pop the two complete ones off their respective necks, and swap them around for more visual variety if you build an army of them. According to the box, this is figure #10 in the line, which says they're not exactly releasing these in any kind of order. Or at least that they're not successfully getting them into stores. The Footbot is a cool design and a good toy, but it'd be nice if you could find one anywhere. -- 07/25/24