My Faves: Figure Collection TMNT Edition

I have a fairly big collection of loose figures from the 80s & 90s. I would like to share a few of my faves with you at this time and since I have deemed August 2019 "The Month of the Turtle", this is an all TMNT edition of My Faves!!! Here we go!

Nightwatcher Raphael (Playmates, 2006)

I really enjoyed the 2007 Imagi Productions TMNT movie! The cast was great and included Chris Evans, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Patrick Stewart. The animation was pretty good. The fight scene with Leo and Raph on top of the NYC buildings in the rain was a highlight for me. I also loved the way they were able to make this a standalone movie, but still tied it in to the original Ninja Turtles movie trilogy. Anyway, the Nightwatcher character was pretty cool and when I saw this figure at a second hand store for less than a dollar, I immediately made it part of my collection. Yes, he is missing his helmet, but Raph is still a cool piece in any collection! 

Krang Mini-Vynl (Funko, 2014)

The look of these figures is pretty cool. They look cartoony, but that is the charm of this series from Funko. I picked up 4 or 5 of these blind boxes at Barnes and Noble for around $2 each. They were in their discount bin and I couldn't pass up that deal. Usually I don't like buying blind boxes, but for that price it was worth the gamble for these sweet TMNT figures. In addition to Krang I got Casey Jones, Michelangelo and April. 

Venus De Milo (Playmates, 1997)

First off, I have to say that I absolutely do not care for the TMNT: Next Mutation series from Saban. It looks cheaply made, the stories are weak and the dialogue is extremely dated. That being said, I thought the idea of adding a new Turtle to the family was a cool idea. The way it was done was pretty awful though. This can be done well as we have recently seen with the mutation to Jennika in the latest issues of the IDW Ninja Turtles comic, it just wasn't done well in this series.

Donatello LEGO Key-chain (LEGO, 2013) 

I went crazy when I heard that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were going to have their own LEGO sets! I loved LEGO as a kid and I still love them today. It was like a mash-up of two great things coming together to form one awesome toy! The first items I saw released were these TMNT keychains and so I bought my favorite Turtle Donatello when we were in the LEGO store while on vacation in Orlando, FL. I bought a few of the smaller sets and put them together with my kids. We had fun working together, but like most of our other sets they are now broken apart and in buckets with hundreds of other LEGOs waiting to be built again!

Tokka & Rahzar (Playmates, 1991)

The first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie is one of my all time favorite flicks, but I would have to rank Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze a little higher. TMNT 2 was a little bit closer in tone to the cartoons I knew and loved, Vanilla Ice gave us "Ninja Rap" and it introduced us to 2 new mutant menaces, Tokka & Rahzar! These guys were freakin' AWESOME, but as a kid I always wondered why they didn't use Bebop and Rocksteady? It was years later that I found out it had to do something with the licensing rights of those characters. That turned out okay in the end though as we all grew to love these vicious, muscle bound, BABIES!!! I bought the Tokka action figure right off the rack in 1991, but Rahzar had to wait a few decades before I added him to my collection. I found him in a loose figure bargain bin at a vintage toy store for around $1.50! On a side note: Did we ever figure out which one was the ugly one?