Toy Review: Tiger Claw / Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Playmates)

For quite some time I have been collecting toys based around the TMNT but for the most part I've only been getting complete sets of four of the Turtles themselves.    In that sense it is funny because if I happen upon some older figures somewhere, second hand, I do try to seek them out at a reasonable price.     I basically got to asking myself one day why I spend so much time with the older TMNT villains (and anyone outside of the Turtles themselves for that matter) yet I don't give the new ~everyone else~ the light of day.

Then my son and I watched the episode of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", the Nickelodeon series, with the Dream Beavers and found out online that toys would be coming out for them.    That was it.    That was the last straw and I had to have some TMNT toys that were not just the Turtles themselves and, no, I didn't need all of them just the ones I thought were cool.   (It also didn't help matters that my son constantly had the Turtles fighting each other.   I figured he needed some others to have them fight)

And so my first actual character came from Target (where they had just been marked down to $8.99 each) and it is the most excellent Tiger Claw.   As a character, Tiger Claw is billed as being an assassin and bounty hunter.   Though he probably has some sort of alliegance to bad guys I like to think of him as being rogue, an outlaw and above any sort of real side choosing.   Oh yeah, and he also has an eye patch.

When I got Tiger Claw out of the package I was rather pleased with him, and so was my son, as he comes with two guns and holsters for them both.    But then when I started looking at him more closely I realized that the strap which holds his eye patch on is only painted in the front (The back of his head is entirely orange).    I wondered what kind of deal Playmates was pulling here, but to be fair it took me the car ride home to notice it.

As I looked at the packaging and google searched for prototype images I realized that a lot of Tiger Claw's details were left off in the mass production of him.   His feet and arms should have had white spots and his nails should have been painted black both on his hands and feet.    His holsters, along with their straps, also should be a color that makes them more distinct from blending into his pants as well.

I'm not certain at this time whether or not I want to go through and touch up the missing paint spots on Tiger Claw or not, but I see these flaws only as a collector and not as a child or someone less than half my age who would buy these toys to play with.   The fact that I didn't notice them right away really says something because I do tend to notice things right away especially when it comes to faults in toys.

The prototype could be considered an A+ version of this figure and I would have loved to see the proper paint applied all around but due to mass production and budget issues I can understand why Playmates had to cut some corners.     Even without the added details this is still a pretty high ranking figure, somewhere between a B+ and A- for me because I just like him so much and the flaws don't really bother me.    Though I will most likely at least paint his eye patch strap and then maybe his fingernails as well.