No, that is not a typo in the subject line as this latest two-pack from NECA Toys features the incomparable Bugman, defender of justice, and Electrozapper. Not versus, but an and. I don’t know why since a lot of these hero and villain two-packs from NECA have gone with a versus in the middle, but this time they chose not to. Whatever, it’s just a box. What’s inside the box is what matters most as we have two characters who many may not even remember from the old cartoon, but for me, I’ve been hoping for this set for a long time.
When I reflect back on the original cartoon series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I find I mostly remember the characters that also appeared in the toy line. A majority of the time I watched that show I think I just shut my brain off and stared at the TV like a zombie. When the show was over, I’d go play with my figures and if nothing I saw on TV made it into my roleplay then it faded away pretty quickly. Bugman, on the other hand, did not. He was not featured in the toyline at all which is a bit of a surprise because he has a very “toyetic” design. He’s basically the show’s version of Spider-Man, but with the body horror element of The Fly (he also transforms via anger, so toss in a dash of Hulk too). I think it’s that body horror part that made him memorable for me as the sounds his body made when his antennae popped out of his head and his mouth elongated into the pincers of an ant just stuck with me. They were kind of gross, a bit unsettling, but also cool?
It certainly made an impression, and I made sure to go rewatch the episode “Michaelangelo meets Bugman” before doing this review to re-familiarize myself with the character and his foil, Electrozapper. It’s actually a pretty entertaining episode of the show. Bugman is clearly a parody of many superheroes. To drive that point home, the show even got Dan Gilvezan to voice the character. Gilvezan was best know to kids of the era as the voice of Spider-Man himself on Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends. Meanwhile, Electrozapper is a fairly straight parody of Spider-Man’s villain Electro, but with some elements of The Shocker tossed-in too via the design of his gloves. He looks like a cheesy 60s comic book villain and was a suitable choice for the episode. In it, the two are characters in a comic book series Michelangelo enjoys, but the book was apparently based on real people or something (it’s not explained). It’s worth a look even if you, like me, mostly think of the old cartoon as pretty bad.
This two-pack comes way of Target once again and is currently showing up in stores in fairly substantial quantities. Most stores seem to be getting anywhere between 4 and 6 units, and for two obscure characters, those numbers are probably pretty healthy. In other words, I don’t think this one will be too hard to come by once the initial mad rush to get anything new dies down. And unlike some of the other recent releases, the price tag isn’t too bad at $55, pretty much the new standard for two-packs. That’s cheaper than some of the other two-packs we’ve received over the past year and these figures feature a lot of new sculpting and plenty of accessories.
We’ll talk Bugman first. He’s in his heroic form which means he looks like a bug…man. Sculpted by Josh Sutton, Bugman stands at around 6.75″ to the top of his head and a full 7″ to the top of his hair (and even taller if you factor in the antennae). His face is appropriately hideous with the elongated mandibles and giant, red, eyes. His hair is blond and streaked with brown which is quite similar to how it was shaded in the cartoon. His wings are new and painted a very light brown. He has his large, extra, legs poking out of his shoulders and the big, red, scorpion tail protruding from his back. He has a green bodysuit with his bug logo painted onto the chest. The toon shading NECA often relies upon is in place with a darker green on the rear of the figure. That’s the only shading though which is a bit odd. The boots and flesh bits lack the same approach. This one relies on the linework to help give it that “pop” and the linework in place is pretty clean.
Bugman looks the part, and he mostly looks pretty good. His bracers around his forearms feature spikes on them which may get warped in the package. The left arm on my figure is fine, but the right arm does have a bent, middle, spike. I’m guessing some hot water can cure that though. NECA also chose to paint them gray when they look pretty white to me in the show, but it’s a minor inaccuracy as far as I’m concerned. Visually, I only have one real issue with Bugman and it’s that bulbous tail coming off his back. It plays into the articulation, but I’ll just mention it now that I feel like it needs more range. It looks like it just pegs into the figure’s back so it really only swivels. I’m surprised it’s not a hinged peg to move it off of his back or even a ball peg would get a little more range. Instead, it’s kind of stuck against his back. You can move it off to the side, or have it dangle between his legs, and neither option is great.
We might as well go into that articulation now. The tail just swivels all the way around. A bendy tail would have been neat, but it’s just solid plastic. His head is on a ball peg as is the base of the neck so he gets great range in basically all directions. This also allows him to look forward when in a flying pose, something a lot of figures struggle with. The shoulders are standard hinged ball-pegs, but the shoulder pads plus the leg things protruding from the shoulders limit what they can do. He can rotate his arm as long as it’s out to the side enough to clear the shoulder pad, but the antennae or whatever won’t let him raise his arms out to the side. Those leg-things can rotate, maybe a hinge would have helped, but would have hurt the aesthetics, I think. There is a biceps swivel and the double-jointed elbows will bend past 90 degrees.
In the torso, Bugman has a diaphragm joint that lets him rotate, tilt, and bend forward and back a bit. More forward than back, which is good. He also has a waist twist that works, but is a little unsightly once you rotate too far. The hips are the standard ball-socket hips and Bugman gets great range there. He can do full splits and kick forward past horizontal. He can’t really kick back because of the diaper piece, but I’ll take it. The thighs pivot a bit and the double-jointed knees go past 90 degrees without issue. The ankles are the typical hinge and rocker and they work fine. The wings are hinged ball-pegs so they rotate and move in and out. All of the joints are nice and tight, not stuck, but comfortably tight and secure. This torso, with the diaphragm joint added, has me dreaming of a Shredder 2.0 with the same.
For accessories, it can sometimes be hard to figure out with two-packs, but Bugman appears to have two plus the usual assortment of hands. And for hands, he has fists which come on him in the box, trigger hands, and gripping hands. His hands all appear to be reuse from Dirk Savage which might be why he gets trigger finger hands despite not using a gun. There’s also a lump of blue plastic that may confound a few, it certainly confused me, but it’s meant to be a lump of “Leestanite” which is his Kryptonite, if you couldn’t figure that out on your own. It looks exactly like it did in the show, so it’s not exciting, but suitable. He also has the leestanite coated chains that Michelangelo finds him in during the episode. It’s a plastic chain cast in transparent, green, plastic. It’s fine, though the chain in the show was gray. Maybe some wires got crossed or NECA just thought this was cooler. If so, I can’t disagree. It’s not an exciting array of accessories, but there’s not much else he could have. I suppose I would have preferred some style posed hands instead of trigger ones that will never see use. A flight stand would be cool too, but I don’t really like NECA’s flight stands so I suppose I don’t need another one of those.
And now for the villain, Electrozapper! Sculpted by Tomasz Rozejowski, Electrozapper stands at about 6.25″ to the top of his head and is featured in his show-accurate battery suit. This thing is goofy as hell and I love it. He’s got the emblem of a battery on his chest and then what look like D batteries strapped to his belt and biceps. It’s something I thought was funny as a kid that I kind of forgot about until I held this figure in my hands. He has a rather unique physique in the show and this figure captures that. His shoulders are just massive relative to his body which has a figure 8 shape to the torso. The legs are long and skinny and he’s got some pretty beefy arms as well. The look and shape of his head is dead-on with that almost beak-like mouth. If anything, I would have liked a little more size to his head as it’s pretty big in the show, but that’s a minor quibble on my part. I love the silly lightning bolts on his head.
Like Bugman, Electrozapper has a lot of new parts. I don’t see any obvious reuse with him except whatever is under the shirt. The shirt is a soft plastic overlay so there’s probably just a skeleton of sorts beneath it. It looks good, but will limit articulation. The paint is very clean on my figure and basically every inch of this guy is indeed painted. The linework is crisp and I’m very impressed with the yellow piping on the thigh high boots he’s rocking. Yellow can go bad when applied in such a fashion, but it’s done very well here. The toon shading is featured fairly prominently. The only surfaces not shaded is the flesh of his arms, the gray of his thighs, belt, and his gloves. They also didn’t bother to shade the yellow piping, which I think is fine. Really, the only thing I don’t care for is the cape. It’s a very plain, gray, cape. It at least features the ties in the front, but the texture and feel is cheap and not like most NECA capes. And after getting that really nice, wired, cape with Dark Turtle I was hoping that would be the standard for capes going forward, but this is probably the worst NECA cape I own.
Electrozapper isn’t as well-articulated as Bugman, but he’s pretty much par for the course with this line. The head is on a double-ball peg and he can look up, down, rotate, and gets some nice tilt. The shoulders are ball-hinged and he can raise his arms out to the side to a horizontal position and rotate. The biceps swivel and the double-jointed elbows can sneak past 90 degrees. The gloves do rotate and the wrists swivel and hinge. In the torso, I can’t seem to find anything in the diaphragm, though the overlay probably would render anything there moot anyway. The waist feels like a ball peg so he can rotate and tilt and bend forward and back a bit. The ball-socket hips can nearly achieve a full split, but kicking forward they tend to go off to the side. There’s some twist at the thigh, and the double-jointed knees are fine. The ankle hinge is really nice though as his foot can go all the way back and forward quite a bit with a solid ankle rocker.
It’s a pretty standard assortment of articulation on Electrozapper and I think it’s fine for the figure. The only omissions for me are the wired cape and no diaphragm joint. After seeing NECA more open to that approach with the likes of Dirk Savage and this guy’s box-mate, it’s a bit of a bummer to see a step back here. Especially because his shape lends itself well to such a joint and the only complication is the chest logo, but oh well. If someone were to make a custom, wired, cape for this guy I’d have to seriously consider it as he’d likely be a homerun with such a simple addition.
Articulation may be ho-hum, but Electrozapper absolutely brings it when it comes to the accessories. He has a secondary head with an angry, open-mouthed expression which I think is much more appropriate than the neutral one he comes equipped with. It’s so much more appropriate to me that I don’t know why they bothered with the neutral one. For hands, Elextrozapper has a set of fists, pointing hands, open hands, and gripping hands. Two of those hands have peg holes in the rings he wears on his fingers: the open left hand and the right fist. They can accept his effect parts which are really neat. They’re done in a semi-transparent pink, plastic. He has a small, blast, effect which I believe is to simulate his hand glowing. It’s for the open hand and slots onto it with ease. The long, lightning bolt effect clips into the fist and looks great. I absolutely love this type of effect. There’s a skinny lightning bolt which clips onto the pointing fingers and that looks great too. Lastly, he he has two orbs with crackling lightning on them that peg onto the index fingers as well. I suppose you could also slot them onto the fingers of the open hands if you wanted, or have him palm them. I kind of wish the hole for the finger was on the bottom though, or at least in both places. Instead it’s on the back so they look best when he’s pointing his finger forward as opposed to up.
These effect parts really make the figure for me. It’s wonderful to get a figure like this where there’s almost too much to do. I like all of these, so which do I actually display?! It makes Electrozapper a very fun figure to just mess around with because you can keep changing things up. I almost wish we had more! I would have scrapped that neutral head to just double-up on the two lightning bolt effects. I may have even traded the gripping hands for the same because I’m always going to have him posed with the effects, what need of gripping hands do I have? As is, it’s still a great spread and much better than some recent releases from NECA so I’m pretty happy with what we have here.
The Bugman and Electrozapper two-pack is low key one of the strongest two-packs in the line. It’s up there with the likes of Antrax and Scumbug and the Groundchuck and Dirtbag set. I really like how these guys turned out. Bugman is pretty much spot-on with the show and looks great. The only gripe I really had with him is the tail articulation. Electrozapper is right there with him and the only thing really bugging me about him is the cheap looking cape. It’s a shame that cape prevents this set from being an all-timer, but it’s still damn good and I think anyone who gets it will have a lot of fun with it. Perhaps best of all, the price feels right so while I haven’t been crazy about the price creep with other TMNT releases from NECA, at least we still have sets like this one that just leave us feeling pretty damn good about it when all is said and done.
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