Turtles in clear plastic

I don't think I have posted this image before, but if I have, please excuse my faulty memory.

These figures have been resting on a bookshelf in our hallway for the last four or five years. They were given to me by one of the Playmates guys -- I am embarrassed to say I don't remember which one. I think it was when a couple of our usual Playmates contacts came out to Massachusetts for a creative head-banging session in the early days of the TMNT toy line based on the 4Kids 2K3 TV series.

They brought with them these "first shots" of the figures, molded in a clear plastic, and I remember being very taken with this look -- there is something cool about being able to see inside the joints and so forth. So they left these samples with me, to my delight. -- PL

A "Team Mirage" set of toys? Not quite...

I was poking around in the storage space under my old studio today (looking for stocking stuffers, if you must know), and came across these two curiosities. I remember finding both of these sets in the mid-1990's at a local Toys 'R' Us (the Mirage dudes and I used to go to toy stores a lot back in those days), and being amused by the fact that this toy company had taken a photo of our Team Mirage-sponsored AMA Superbike roadracer, Dale Quarterley, and used it prominently on the packaging of these sets of "racing" toys. I'm not sure where they got the photo, although I know for certain that we didn't supply it to them. Here's a photo of the large set...



... and one of the small set...



... and a close-up of the photo of Dale (at speed on his Kawasaki race bike) which they used on both packages.



We never had any contact with the company which did this, and I have often wondered how they chose Dale, out of all the possible motorcycle racers around at the time, to decorate their packaging. Although it isn't terribly easy to see in this photo, Dale's bike DOES have the Team Mirage logo on its bodywork, as well as the abstract TMNT face design, and during those days of Team Mirage we made no secret of the TMNT connection. I wonder if the people behind this packaging saw that and thought they might get some mileage for their toys out of that connection.

I suspect not, mostly because it's not THAT obvious. I would guess that they just thought the image of Dale on his bike was cool and colorful (right on both counts) and would help to catch a kid's eye in the toy aisles. I have no idea how well these sets sold, or if the photo of Dale was used on any other packaging. -- PL

Moving on

Ever since the first of the new TMNT toys based on the 2003 4Kids tv series started coming out, I've tacked them up on the walls of my office at Mirage (mostly just the figures, with a few veicles, accessories and playsets thrown in). I was inspired to do this by the example of Dan Berger, who had decorated his upstairs office with most (if not all) of the TMNT figures from the first wave. I had pretty much covered all of the available wall space a few years ago, and I had gotten used to having this kind of "wallpaper" of green in my office. Here's a view of one wall a couple of weeks ago:



But with the sale, and looking forward to a post-Turtles life, last week I thought it might be time to take the toys down and put them into storage. I hauled some boxes down to the office and started the process. It took me about three hours over the course of several days to get it done. I ran out of boxes near the end, so I have to bring some more down to pack everything up. Here's a view of the same wall as in the above photo, sans toys.



I will confess to a certain amount of melancholy in performing this task, even though I knew it had to be done. Although I had grown a little weary of the somewhat cluttered look of the walls in my office, they were cheerier than these now blank ones.

But with some spackle (to fill in the tack holes), a little sanding, and some fresh paint, things will look better. And maybe I'll be hanging some new artwork on these walls in the coming years. -- PL

Blast from the Past #199: Biker gorilla

This is another one of the sketches I did back in the late 1980's when Kevin and I were trying to come up with concepts to help Playmates flesh out the rapidly-expanding TMNT toy line.



This one was meant to be in keeping with the "mutant animal" approach which Playmates found so successful. -- PL

Blast from the Past #63 repost: Jumper and Crawler

Here are two more mutant animal characters from my sketchbook, drawn sometime in the late 1980's for possible inclusion in the TMNT action figure line. I like them both, but I really like the octopus thing -- I really wish Playmates had gone for that design! -- PL

Blast from the Past #62 repost: Evil Mutants

I drew these two wacked-out evil mutant animal characters sometime in the late 1980's as part of our continuing efforts to help Playmates extend its TMNT action figure line.



I have NO idea what possessed me to combine a lynx with cyborg elements and add football to the mix, but I think it could have made a cool figure.



"Oscar" the mutant snail guy was a character I hoped would get made -- there's just something about him I like (I think it's his elegant bilateral symmetry). But neither of these dudes made it onto the animated show or into plastic form. -- PL

Blast from the Past #61 repost: TMNT and Foot vehicle designs

Both of these were drawn by me, probably around 1988 or 1989, and were done as concepts for vehicles in the Playmates Toys TMNT line. The top drawing is of a TMNT helicopter, and one of its interesting features is the lineup of various "landing grippers" -- magnet, suction cup, and velcro -- that would attach to its landing skids. We had considered -- and I think I even did a sketch of it -- making these into accessories for the Turtle figures also, so that they could be stuck to many different surfaces.





The Troop Carrier was intended as a vehicle for the evil Foot Clan to use (I think that's a proto-Bebop at the controls). I think I was inspired by the cool design of the APC in the movie ALIENS. -- PL

Blast from the Past #59 repost: "The Unknown"

(Note -- alert palblog readers [really, are there any other kind?!) will notice that I am skipping a reposting of the original BftP #58. This was the one about the Will Vinton "Claymation" Turtles, something I accidentally duplicated already in one of my early palblog posts. -- PL)

I did these sketches back in -- I think -- 1988 or 1989. Playmates was looking for ideas to expand the TMNT action figure line, and I thought this guy -- who I was calling "The Unknown" -- would make a cool villain. Basically, the idea was that he was the result of a failed experiment to combine two species in one mutant. Because the procedure only partly worked, The Unknown had to keep most of his internal organs inside a protective artificial shell. I thought it would be neat to have a toy with guts and eyeballs and stuff that would be floating around inside a clear helmet. Playmates actually made a spiffy figure based on this idea, and I think they ended up calling him "Mutagen Man". (The top drawing is my first version, the bottom my second.)





As for which two types of creatures were used in the creation of this miserable mutant, I'm pretty sure I intended his left side to be some kind of primate like a gorilla or orangutan, but his right side... hmm... looks like a giant insect of some type. I guess that must have come from some other nefarious experiment with the mutagen. -- PL

Blast from the Past #51 repost: Bulldog Mutant

As previously glimpsed in Blast#49 piloting the Exoskeleton, this is the bulldog mutant (who was never given a name, as far as I can recall) which Kevin and I worked up for Playmates when they were looking for ideas for animal mutants to be the Shredder's minions in the first year of the toy line.





I know I penciled the top drawing, and I'm pretty sure I penciled the bottom one too, which Kevin inked. It's too bad this character never made it to the toy shelves -- I think he would have been very cool! -- PL

Blast from the Past #49 repost: Exoskeleton concept for bad guys

In my first year of trying to come up with toy designs for the Playmates TMNT toy line, I drew this sketch for a mechanical exoskeleton, one of several designs for vehicles to be used by villains in the TMNT universe. (I'm not sure why I started to ink it and then stopped.) In this case, it was to be used by one of the Shredder's animal mutants -- the bulldog mutant dude piloting this rig was one of several mutant animal characters we sketched up for Playmates (this guy never made it to toy shelves, though). I have a better drawing or two of him around someplace -- maybe I'll post those sometime.



Anyway, I really hoped Playmates would make this toy -- basically because I wanted to play with it! But as I recall, we were told it was to expensive to produce, and it was shelved. Ironically, several years later Playmates produced an extensive -- and very cool -- line of toys which were almost all exoskeleton vehicles, for a property called EXO-SQUAD. I guess timing IS everything. -- PL

P.S. What's the old saying -- "All things come to he who waits"? Playmates eventually produced some nifty "Turtleized" exoskeleton-type vehicles for the Turtles in 2005 -- the "M.E.C.H. Wrekkers" line. -- PL

Blast from the Past #48 repost: Fugitoid action figure concepts

Back in 1988 or 1989, I did these drawings of the Fugitoid in the hopes that Playmates would do an action figure version of him... which they eventually did, and it was nice, but not quite what I was hoping for. Note below the somewhat desperate hyping ("think of the play value!"), and the comment about vacuum metalizing. (This is the process by which plastic is given a metallic-looking coating... I'm not entirely sure if there is any real metal involved in this process, but the end result is a very cool shiny chrome effect.)



My pathetic pleading for vacuum metalizing of various TMNT figures (especially the Shredder) was kind of a running joke between me and my friend Karl Aaronian, when he was product manager of the original TMNT toyline at Playmates. When Playmates first did the TMNT toys, they had no idea how they would sell and were understandably cautious with expensive processes like vacuum metalizing... but I still bugged them to do the Shredder's armor in this shiny metallic technique, as opposed to the somewhat drab painted armor on the first Shredder figures. Eventually, they did, and it looked cool.

Anyway, my idea here was to enhance the "play value" (toymakers' jargon!) of a Fugitoid action figure by giving it a variety of removable/replaceable multi-function limbs. Cool, huh?



Fast-forwarding more than a decade later, Playmates did another Fugitoid figure to go along with the new Turtle toys based on the 4Kids TV show. This one was much closer in design to the original comic book character. (Note: The text in the image above was written in 2003 in reference to this new Fugitoid figure Playmates was developing, but the artwork was from the late 1980's.) Sadly, it was still not vacuum metalized. I guess you can't have everything. -- PL