CLASSIFICATION: KITBASH
BASE FIGURE: STREET FIGHTER VS. X-MEN JUGGERNAUT
PARTS USED: DEINOSUCHUS TOY (HEAD AND TAIL), LEATHERHEAD (HAT), TERMINATOR 2 FIGURE (ARMS), WWF STONE COLD KANE (JACKET)
MATERIALS USED: SUPER GLUE, ENAMEL PAINTS, ACRYLIC PAINTS
FIRST APPEARANCE: "LEATHERHEAD: TERROR OF THE SWAMPS" (TMNT)

"I be Leatherhead, and a Florida swamp 'gator go where he pleases!"

Preamble:  The original Leatherhead toy was probably one of the most disappointing figures out of the entire Ninja Turtles line.  (Back in the day, I skipped over him in favor of Genghis Frog, if that gives you any idea of how little I liked the toy.)  After I realized I'd missed out on a fairly major supporting character, I pined for him for a long time and finally got one second-hand.  Then, of course, I remembered all over again why I'd never bought him to begin with.  He's the shrimpiest TMNT action figure in history.  Heck, even Krang has got more going for him, once you take his bubble walker into account.

I'm guessing the designers at Playmates Toys had to make him that small because there was no other way to fit him into the standard package.  His design was pretty unconventional, and due to the length of his tail, he could barely fit inside the blister package as it was.  (That didn't stop them from making his photo larger than the other pictures in the cross-sell on the back of the toy packaging, of course.)  Problem is, this figure could not possibly be the 12-foot long, 800-pound mutant described in his biography card, let alone the Leatherhead from the cartoon show.  (This is the guy who could do push-ups with four mutant turtles and a reporter on his back, after all.)  I realized that if I ever wanted a true representation of the Leatherhead from the cartoon, I would need to build one of my own.

Construction:  The first step, of course, was to make myself a nice cartoon-based Leatherhead drawing to work from.  I discovered a couple of interesting things about his character design in the process.  For starters, the Louisiana fisherman who was hunting for him at the beginning of "Leatherhead: Terror of the Swamps" is wearing the exact same clothing that Leatherhead starts wearing after he gets mutated.  This strongly suggests to me that Leatherhead ate this guy.  Heh heh.  (Think about it.  He had to have at least touched a human for the mutagen to work, right?)  I don't think the way he's colored really makes sense, though.  It looks like he's wearing blue jeans (which is consistent with the original toy), but in the show, his boots are colored blue as well.  Furthermore, the part of his torso below his belt is colored purple, even though it's drawn like the rest of his underbelly.  So, basically, he wears pant legs, but no actual pants.  Weird.

My main priority when searching for a base figure was to give this guy some serious bulk; I wanted him to look larger and tougher than your average hero on the halfshell.  I settled on the Juggernaut toy from the Street Fighter vs. X-Men line.  The arms on this toy were actually a little too big, though, so I had to replace them with the arms from a Terminator 2 figure.  Unfortunately, the Terminator's arms didn't connect to the figure the same way that Juggernaut's did (Juggernaut had spring-loaded punching action, so he had a fairly complicated internal assembly), so I had to do a lot of cutting and swapping of parts, attaching the new knobs to the insides of his arms with a combination of screws and glue.

For the gator parts, I used a toy alligator (actually a prehistoric deinosuchus) made by Safari Limited.  I chopped off the head and tail, planning to graft them to the Juggernaut body.  This was the most time-consuming part of the project, since I wanted to get the parts to mate together exactly right.  I kept having to cut away at the gator parts, stop to see how the parts would fit, cut away at them some more, and test-fit them again.  The gator head is actually mounted on a whittled-down version of Juggernaut's head, so it still has the original range of motion (impeded only slightly by the gator's lower jaw).  For the tail, I sliced the plastic thin enough that I could actually wrap the whole piece from behind his back, between his legs, and around to his front.  The tail also serves nicely as a counterbalance since he's pretty top-heavy.

For the vest, I had originally tried using the trenchcoat from the Metal Gear Solid Liquid Snake toy that I'd previously decapitated for another project.  I chopped the bottom half of the coat off, cutting away at the arm openings to simulate a ripped effect.  The coat was actually way too small, though; even after cutting away at a lot of the musculature on his back, it didn't cover as much of his chest as I wanted.  (I reckon Leatherhead is much larger than that fisherman he got his duds from, so in a way this version would have been more accurate.  But still.)  In its place, I ended up using the leather jacket from a WWF Stone Cold Kane figure.  For the suspenders, I used a couple of plastic zip fasteners that I glued in place.  The hat is from the original Leatherhead toy (I had a spare head sitting around).

I had to shelve this project for a couple of months because I couldn't find any miniature lobsters to use for his crawfish clamps.  I ended up buying a baggie full of little Digimon toys that included two Ebidramon figurines, which are sufficiently lobster-esque.  I had to heavily modify them, cutting them down to just a fraction of their original size (and swapping the mismatched claws so they would match each other).  For the traps, I chopped the headdresses off some plastic Indian chiefs and attached them together with a combination of glue and paper clips (the latter of which also attaches them to the figure's belt).

Painting the toy proved difficult at first because my enamel paints reacted badly with the rubbery deinosuchus parts.  I had to go back and coat them with an acrylic primer before I could proceed.  Also, because the kitbashed figure was made from so many pieces, I had to start painting it before I assembled it.  (Once the tail was glued on, the body halves would be permanently stuck together.  Also, the crawfish clamps and traps are held on with paper clips from the inside of the figure, so I painted those before attaching them).

Comments:  I'm very pleased with the finished result.  The figure measures 5½" tall, a full two inches taller than the original toy at his highest point (and that's if he sits up and begs!).