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"It's all so clear to me now... the Turtles are my friends!"--Metalhead, "The Making of Metalhead" (TMNT)
Metalhead was, for the most part, a one-shot character who only
existed to sell the toy in his likeness. He was originally created
by Krang to beat the Turtles at their own game after being programmed with
their bravewave patterns, but as with so many other inventions, Donatello
got ahold of Metalhead and reprogrammed him. Aside from a cameo in
"The Big Bug Blunder," though, this was Metalhead's only appearance in the
show.
Still, Metalhead was a cool-looking character, and it was a neat episode (if you could get past Shredder having the wrong voice) so the character stuck with me. Since I've been doing a lot of TMNT kitbashes lately and I've already covered most of the major characters (or plan to), I started looking at the incidental characters, and after watching his introductory episode again, I noticed that the Metalhead in the show doesn't really resemble the toy all that much.
Now, don't get me wrong. The Metalhead toy, as originally
produced, was beautiful. (I've always been a sucker for gold
chrome.) I have absolutely no complaints about it based on aesthetics
alone. However, I've got this compulsion about wanting physical
representations of the characters that match the cartoon
show. Besides, I'd already broken the forearm off and glued it
back in place a long time ago (hey, they tell you to pop it off in
the instructions...) so it's not like I was destroying a completely pristine
figure.
When I first thought about doing this project, I'd only intended to slap a new coat of paint on the toy. As I started drawing up a model sheet for him, I was struck by some of the differences between the cartoon model and the toy. For one, the cartoon model is, perhaps understandably, a lot less detailed. In the interest of making Metalhead as accurate as possible, I ended up slicing off a lot of the extra components with a hobby knife, filling up gaps with modeling putty as necessary. I still wasn't quite satisfied with him, until I realized the biggest difference between his two selves was his facial expression. To cut new eyes for him, I had to pry the top of his head from the bottom half (they were made as two separate pieces in order to insert his see-through "brain" that enables his glowing eyes feature) and carve away at the existing eye holes until they were sufficiently triangular in shape.
I noticed that the animators used the same colors for Metalhead
that they did for the Turtles themselves (the green of Metalhead's feet is
the same as Donatello's flesh, for example). I am planning on
repainting my original Turtles eventually, but since I didn't have enough
paint to do five toys at once and I wanted to get Metalhead finished before
then, I sort of fudged the colors a bit. (It's probably just as well,
since the animators who worked on "The Making of Metalhead" tended to color
the Turtles in much more sludgy colors than most of the other animation teams.)
The finishing touch was the detailing on his chest, which I created
by cutting some stickers to the right size and painting the individual squares
before sticking them all together.
Well, I think he looks pretty good. Not as shiny, perhaps,
but definitely a more accurate cartoon representation. (I noticed recently
that they stayed pretty closely to his cartoon colors when they inserted
him into the TMNT IV: Turtles in Time Nintendo game as a boss for
the "Alleycat Blues" level, so he's video game accurate, too.) He could
actually stand to be about 50% larger, but there's not much I can do about
that until Ninja Turtles hits it big with the retro crowd and the bootleg
companies start churning out oversized knockoffs. Should only take
five years or so. You'll see.
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This Page Created 1/28/2002
Uploaded: 2/22/2002
©2002 Inspiration Studios
