We’re wrapping up this week of NECA Ninja Turtle goodness with one of my favorites, Casey Jones. This Target exclusive figure comes packed with a battle damaged Foot Soldier and a bunch of accessories. Goongala! Goongala! Let’s check it out!
The packaging is similar to the other Turtle sets, but I especially like the way the illustration of the damaged Foot Soldier fairly collapses into the corner. Great stuff.
Casey comes with grip hands, fists, a pointing right hand, a thumbs up left hand, his duffel bag, a sledgehammer, two bats, and two hockey sticks. The Foot Soldier comes with two blaster rifles, two ninja stars, a communicator, fists, chop hands, grip hands, and open hands.
The Foot Soldier accessories are pretty much the same as the ones that came with the April set, but this communicator has Rocksteady’s face. The star of the show here is really the slashed torso effect which is one of the cooler things I’ve seen in a while for army builders.
The figure is mostly re-use of the old Foot Soldier, but the new torso has a rip in the clothing that reveals a very detailed, very damaged robot spine that looks like it has been frozen in time mid-slice. The whole thing is held together by the red wire, which is actually a fairly strong metal wire. You can bend that red wire to allow more of a splitting effect because the wire wraps around through the torso and holds the pieces together well.
This is just a ton of fun for me as a photographer and an army building collector to play around with. The separating torso gag does make him a little taller, so I suppose if you didn’t care about the gag, you can add him to the back of a crowd scene.
Casey’s bag goes over his shoulder and is cast in a fairly flexible plastic and all the weapons can fit in there nice and tight. It helps to get them in there if you add the hammer first, followed by the sticks, then the bats.
The weapons have an appropriately cartoony feel to them that adds a lot of charm and all fit in the grip hands well.
The standard grip hands and fists are nice, but I absolutely love the point and thumb hand options. Adds so much variety to posing and personality to the figure over all. Great choice there. I found the thumb up hand works well for cradling the weapons too.
I’m in love with the sculpt on this one and really like how the shoulder strap functions. It’s a separate soft plastic piece that’s glued down on the right side, so the left arm is free to move. The articulation works well with:
- Ball and socket head and mid-torso
- Swivel waist, thighs, and biceps
- Swivel/hinge shoulders, hips, wrists, and ankles
- Double hinged knees and elbows
Scale is tricky for these animated characters, but I like where Casey sits relative to the Turtles and Shredder.
That wraps up our look at the latest animated NECA TMNT wave! Thanks again to NECA for these early samples.
