| METALHEAD
PROJECT #193
CLASSIFICATION: KITBASH
BASE FIGURE: METALHEAD
MATERIALS USED: ACRYLIC PAINTS; HOBBY KNIFE
FIRST APPEARANCE: "THE MAKING OF METALHEAD" (TMNT)
"I am Metalhead.
I...crush...Turtles!"
Preamble: Metalhead was pretty much
a one-shot character who only existed to sell the action figure in his likeness.
He was originally created by Krang to beat the Turtles at their own
game, having been programmed with their brainwave patterns, but as with so
many other inventions, Donatello managed to get his hands on Metalhead and
reprogram him. Aside from a brief cameo in "Big Bug Blunder," in which
he was reduced to a glorified vacuum cleaner, this was the mechanical turtle'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. Also, I'd already done a lot
of TMNT kitbashes by this point, and I'd already covered most of the major
characters (or planned to), so I had started looking at the incidental
characters. After watching his introductory episode again, I'd noticed
that Metalhead, as he appears 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. I wanted a physical representation of the character from the
cartoon show, though. 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.
Construction: When I first thought
about doing this project, I'd only intended to slap a new coat of paint on
the toy and call it done. As I started drawing up a color model for
him, though, I was struck by some of the differences between the toy and
its animated counterpart. For one, the cartoon model is, 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 the 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 I carved 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, so that his green
color matches their skin and his brown color matches their turtle shells.
(What's interesting about his fourth season appearance is that the
front of his shell faithfully changed from brown to yellow, just as the other
Turtles spontaneously did.) Anyway, 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
animation studio that worked on "The Making of Metalhead" tended to color
the Turtles in much more sludgy colors than the other animation teams).
The finishing touches were 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.
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 skin, 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 animation studio that worked on "The Making of Metalhead" tended
to color the Turtles in much more sludgy colors than the other animation
teams). The finishing touches were 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.
Comments: Well, I think he looks
pretty good. Not as shiny as he used to be, perhaps, but definitely
a more cartoon accurate representation. (I noticed that they stayed
pretty close to his cartoon colors when they inserted him into the TMNT
IV: Turtles in Time Nintendo game as a boss at the end of the "Alleycat
Blues" level, so this project is 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. (I originally wrote
those words in 2001, and predicted the inevitable Turtles comeback in about
five years' time. I was right about the resurgence in TMNT
popularity, as it turns out, but no knockoffs yet. Sigh.) |
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