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TMNT Punk Frog Repaints

"As Splinter has done with the Turtles, I have named them after personal heroes of my own: Attila the Frog, Genghis Frog, Rasputin the Mad Frog, and Napoleon Bonafrog!"--Shredder, "Invasion of the Punk Frogs" (TMNT)

After the punk frogs made their debut in the Ninja Turtles cartoon, Playmates Toys released an action figure in the likeness of Genghis Frog in 1989.  Napoleon didn't get a toy named after him until the following year, but it was absolutely hideous and bore little or no resemblance to him.  Clearly, this oversight needed correcting, so I went hunting on eBay for a set of four Genghis Frog figures (I already owned one, but I wanted to keep my original one unaltered).  I got a nice deal on them (the seller also threw in the Ninja Action Michaelangelo toy, which I'd missed after they pulled it from the case assortment) and went to work.  (That's Napoleon on the left.)

The first step was to draw up character models for the frogs, whom I'd never learned to be able to tell apart until now.  It turns out that there are only two designs between the four of them; the patterns on their shirts simply swapped colors.  Unlike the cartoon versions of the Turtles, each frog has a different skin tone.  Not surprisingly, this varied slightly from show to show, so I ended up researching the three episodes they prominently appeared in (the aforementioned plus "Leatherhead: Terror of the Swamps" and "Napoleon Bonafrog: Colossus of the Swamps," the latter of which I suspect was written to sell the toy version of Napoleon) just to be sure I got 'em right.  The only major difference I noticed is that Rasputin (pictured, on the right) doesn't always wear his quiver.

The original Genghis toy was fairly accurate to his cartoon appearance, but his skin tone and colors of his outfit were wrong.  Two of the frogs wear spotted shirts while the other two wear striped shirts, so I had to get rid of the existing clouds and lightning bolts molded on the shirts before I replaced them with new patterns.  After tossing other ideas around, I realized the best way to create the spots and stripes for the shirts was to sculpt raised impressions by carving away at the surrounding plastic.  Obviously, this was much easier to do for the arms (made from soft vinyl) than their bodies (made out of hard styrene), so I ended up scoring fairly deep grooves in the plastic instead.  (Meet the new Genghis, on your left.)

The only other changes I made were to cut off their anklets (which they didn't wear in the show), cut away the extra strands for their necklaces, and replace Napoleon and Rasputin's triangular-shaped pendants (which I think were actually intended to be slices of pizza) with circular ones (taken from the wrist guards of the Usagi Yojimbo toy, which I'm also doing some work on).  I also discovered that one of the frogs couldn't stand up properly because he was actually wearing two right legs (I bought these sight unseen), so I chopped it in half where the pants leg met the thigh in order to more properly orient it.  I reattached it with glue and paper clips.  (This one ended up becoming Attila, since he's the least interesting of the frogs, having received zero characterization, and I didn't much mind if he was the "defective" one.  That's him on the right.)

The original Genghis toy came with soda pop grenades among other accessories (the main reason I bought the figure in the first place was so my Rat King figure could use them) but since the frogs used different weapons in the cartoon, I dug through my Turtles box to see if I could find some more suitable accessories for them to borrow.  Napoleon carries a whip, so I gave him the one that came with the Wacky Action Sword Slicin' Leonardo.  Atilla uses a chain mace, but the only weapon I had that would work was the blowfish mace that came with Mona Lisa (recycled from Storage Shell Raphael).  Rasputin uses a bow and arrow and wears a quiver, so I let him use the accessories that came with Movie Star Splinter (the fact that it matches his shirt nicely is entirely coincidental).  Finally, Genghis wields an axe in the cartoon, so I lent him a weapon that I think came with Coil Force Michaelangelo (recycled from Panda Khan; it gets hard to keep track of all these recycled parts after a while).  Actually, I don't think it's too far fetched to imagine that Playmates would have done something similar, considering they recycled Toon Raph four times in a row to make the four Undercover Turtles.

©2001 Inspiration Studios
This Page Created 7/4/2001
Uploaded: 9/6/2001