TMNT Minimates Pt. 2 LCS & TRU
Last time we showed you a few of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Minimates that were blind bagged at K-Mart stores. Well now we’ve got the rest of the line that can be found at Comic Shops and Toys R Us!
To start off we have a Footbot from a K-Mart Blind Bag (I didn’t have all of his parts during the last review, but now he’s complete)
The Footbot is a Kraang robot dressed up as a Foot Soldier. He comes with four arms (The back two are attached to a waist piece with ball joints) each arm has an implement of destruction that can be swapped to any other minimate arm so if you were wanting to make a Marvel’s Grim Reaper custom, that sickle looking attachment would come in really handy.
The Footbot comes with a standard sword and two regular hands so you can make him a normal Foot Soldier if you wanted to.
This is the blind bag packaging for Local Comic Stores (LCS) You’ll notice it shows a Mutagen Michelangelo on the back, like we pointed out last time, that’s an error and the Comic Shops actually have a Mutagen Raphael as their exclusive. The other differences from the K-Mart blind bags are that the Kraang has now been replaced with April O’Neil and the Comic Shop TMNT Minimates don’t come with keychain attachments.
Sadly I don’t have a Muta Raph to show you, but we do have the regular release Raph from the LCS blind bags. Same basic body as the other Turtles. Raph’s Sais can fit in two small loops on his belt. Unlike the other three Turtles, the Sais can fall out fairly easily so you may want to store the weapons separately. I like the cracked shell detail by his shoulder, it’s a nice touch from the current show.
Toys R Us is not playing the blind bag game with these, they are sticking to the traditional blister carded two packs. TRU has an exclusive Mutagen Leo, but all of the regular figures are the same as what you will find at Comic Shops. Also, the TRU figures have the keychain accessories that K-Mart had. Unlike all of the other stores, TRU’s packaging has the typical backstory blurbs for each character on the back of the package. I was surprised to notice that Muta Leo has a different blurb than regular Leo does.
Mutagen Leo is the same as Muta Mikey. He’s the same shade of translucent green as Mikey is and his bandana is the only solid color piece. He’s got the battle mode eyes and a grimace on his face. These are nifty exclusives and I think it’ll look great once the whole team is assembled (Donatello has been mentioned as being in series 2 on DST’s Facebook page) These figures would look great on a light base of some sort.
Both Regular Leo and Muta Leo are packaged with the Foot Soldier
Leo has two sword scabbards glued to his back. The swords fit snugly in the sheaths so there’s not much of a chance of them falling out.
The Foot Soldier has the look of the Foot from the Nickelodeon cartoon down pat. The figure has all the same basic Minimate joints but due to the sleeves, the arms don’t have the full range of motion, this isn’t really that much of a problem though. Each Foot Soldier comes with 3 weapons, a Sword, a Dagger and a Kama. The nice thing about the Foot Soldiers is that they can store all three of their weapons. The Sword and Dagger both have sheaths while the Kama has a hole that can fit on the peg near the top of the Sword sheath.
April is packaged with Raphael at Toys R Us
April has the basic look of the character from the Nickelodeon cartoon and is a basic Minimate form.
April comes with her Tessen fan. The fan is made of clear plastic and one side has black paint on it to create the design.
Shredder is packaged with Donatello at Toys R Us
Shredder comes right out of the show with this look. Like the Turtles, Shredder’s feet are part of the sculpted lower leg. His hands can be removed but they are part of the blade gauntlets. The shoulder pads and cape are one piece as well.
Shredder’s helmet (The Kuro Kabuto) is removable and shows Shredder’s scarred face underneath. The head is detailed really well.
The Shredder figure came out very nice. The sculpted blades work well but since some of the blades are separate pieces glued to the shoulder pads and gauntlets, take a moment to look at them before you buy Shredder at TRU. I noticed one of them had gauntlet blades glued on a shoulder pad (probably a one off problem and not widespread) The cape is super simple reminiscent of early Marvel waves, but it works so well with this figure. The cape looks pretty natural in most every pose.
The last TRU two Pack is Mikey and the Footbot, but since I already picked up both of those figures from K-Mart I didn’t buy the TRU set.
In total, I really like all of the TMNT Minimates. There’s a nice blend of sculpted parts with regular Minimate parts and the character selection is building up full teams quickly. I can’t wait to see series two with Casey Jones, a whole new set of Turtles in new gear and some new bad guys (These were all mentioned by DST on their Facebook page)
