San Diego Comic-Con is almost here and we’ve got an early look at one of NECA’s exclusives with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Premonition of a Premutation set. Let’s take a look!
The set comes in a beautiful box with lovely illustrations and photography that shows of the characters well. The box has an opening flap in front that reveals a big window and great art depicting the Technodrome. The insert is so nice, I’m pulling it out and saving it to use for photo backdrops. Do we think there are some future figure hints in there?
The set comes with four figures (Baxter Stockman, Hamato Yoshi, Bebop, and Rocksteady) and a ton of accessories including:
- A mouser
- Two tracking devices
- Four sets of extra hands
- Four baby turtles and a bowl
- Miniaturized Turtles and a jar for them
- Net
- Staff, bat, club, crowbar and chain weapons
- Boombox
- Two spray-paint cans
All four figures come with a set of fists and grip hands. Hamato Yoshi has specialized grip hands to hold his bo staff, one relaxed left hand and some chop hands. Baxter has an additional pointing right hand and splayed-finger left hand while Bebop and Rocksteady have a set of splayed-finger hands.
Baxter has a couple of tracking doohickeys from his episodes including the diamond shaped Sarnathometer that was used to track down pieces of “The Eye of Sarnath” in season 2. The blue device was used to track down the miniaturized Turtles in the episode “The Incredible Shrinking Turtles”. Both devices look really slick and have a ton of detail and sharp paint work.
The tiny turtles can fit in their jar with removeable lid (with air holes!) or the net, but they look sculpted to be banging on the inside of the jar. They are so tiny that the paint detail isn’t 100% in close up shots, but it looks really nice at regular eye distance. The net is all plastic and has a very flexible net section.
Baxter comes with one mouser and it’s identical to the ones we got in the mouser set, as you would expect. I’m all for getting more of these great little guys.
I was surprised that the four tiny turtles have a little shell detain on their teeny tiny little shells. They all can fit in the bowl, but I had to use some tweezers to get them all in there upright. The staff is fairly thin, so Yoshi has some tight grip hands for it.
Bebop and Rocksteady come with a nice selection of weapons that they used in their debut episode including a bat, a club, a crowbar, and a chain. The weapons have that perfect cartoon feel to them in the sculpting except the chain is a real metal chain. They also get a boom box and spraypaint to help them get up to no good. Bebop’s left grip hand seems designed to hold the can and Rocksteady can grab it, you just need to warm up his hand a bit to get it in there.
Baxter’s look changes a lot over his appearances in the show, sometimes from frame to frame and I think they did a good job capturing the look of the more fed-up, aggravated baxter from later on in his pre-mutation run. This is a figure I would have loved to get an alternate head with a smile or a more frightened face since Baxter was a pretty emotive character. I especially like how his small frame matches up well with the fly version we got a while back, but there is a lot less re-used here than I would have guessed.
We don’t see Hamato Yoshi much in the show, but he’s iconic from the opening and the origin and I think they absolutely nailed the look while allowing for decent movement in his baggy costume. He does feel a little on the short side to me, especially next to Shredder, but he’s also a guy who is usually on screen alone, so I’m not sure how big he ought to be.
I love how the face and the combination of that huge Dracula collar and massive purple mohawk on premutation Bebop works as a 3D figure. Somehow it feels even cooler to me in this format.
Rocksteady seems a bit on the short side, but it really matches up with how you first see him with the gang. The pugnacious expression on his face is fantastic too.
The articulation is pretty similar across all four figures except Baxter has double elbows while the other three get swivel/hinge and Hamato Yoshi is the only one with a calf swivel. Bebop also has an additional ball joint where the neck attaches to the body. The figures have:
- Swivel/hinge shoulders, elbows (except Baxter), wrists, hips, and ankles
- Ball and socket head, mid-torso, and neck (Bebop only)
- Double hinged knees and elbows (Baxter only)
- Thigh swivels
Paint is really solid and continues the line style of emphasizing details with sharp black lines. I especially like the highlight on Hamato Yoshi’s hair. He must put a lot of product in there to get it to shine like that.
Overall, I enjoyed the heck out of this set. The original handful of episodes are burned into my brain, so I really appreciate getting these one-off versions of our main characters. I also have a soft spot for premutation Baxter and his run of episodes as Shredder’s hapless lackey and the figure is so fun that he ended up being my favorite of the set.
This killer box set already went up for pre-order and will be available at the NECA booth this week at SDCC. Thanks again to NECA to sending the set along!
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Source: Fwoosh
