Another Boxing Day is upon us and it’s an especially said one since 2024 is a leap year so we have to wait an extra day for Christmas 2024. However, it’s also the final Turtle Tuesday of 2023 so lets shell-lebrate with one last TMNT toy review before the ball drops on this one. March 2021 is when I got my hands on the NECA Quarter Scale Raphael from the animated series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Now, in December 2023, the quartet is complete as I have acquired Michelangelo, the last of the brothers to see release. Because the four turtles were essentially all the same in that old cartoon series, NECA’s action figures follow the same mold. Literally. As such, there won’t be a whole lot to dig into with Michelangelo here that we haven’t already covered, but there’s a few things unique to this figure to touch upon. Mostly though, if you have and enjoyed the prior three then you’ve probably already ordered or already have Michelangelo.
Michelangelo comes in the same Turtle Van style window box as the other three and will stand at nearly 15″ on whatever surface you choose to place him on. Just like the other figures, this mold is based on the 1:12 turtle figures first released in the Turtles in Disguise pack which have a more pronounced toon look to them based on the second season of the show and beyond, at least until the redesign that came late in the “Red Sky” seasons. There’s interchangeable expressions with the heads as each turtle came with happy eyes and angry eyes plus an assortment of mouth parts. For Mikey, he comes with the open-mouthed smile and the neutral, closed, mouth. If you have all four turtles, that means you now have two smiles, 3 open smiles, 3 neutral, and 2 yelling mouths. It’s kind of strange that we didn’t end up with four of anything so if you want all four turtles to look the same you’re out of luck, but there’s enough to have them all happy or angry at least.
Michelangelo looks basically the same as the others, just swap in orange for the other colors. He has the same belt as Raph which doesn’t feature any holsters for his weapons so you have to just sneak them in under his arms or something. The look for these figures is nice, though Michelangelo is a bit peculiar in that his skin tone is a slightly yellower green. You may not notice it out of the box, but once he’s with his brothers it’s apparent. It’s not a huge difference, but obviously it’s a difference that isn’t supposed to exist so someone screwed up somewhere. Either NECA approved a factory sample with this error color, or the factory messed it up when it went into production. How much it bothers one is going to vary. I don’t display my four turtles side-by-side so it’s not a big issue for me. I also don’t think the colors are so off that you can’t use the other mouth parts with Michelangelo. The hands look a little odder, but only if you place two different colored hands side-by-side. Nevertheless, if it sounds like something that will bother you then you could always wait and see if NECA does another run of these figures as it could be corrected then. Or maybe the newer releases for the other turtles currently on pre-order will look like this one.
I’m not going to drill down into the articulation again since it’s the same as the other three. I will say that for Michelangelo his joints all seem to work as well as they can. Leonardo and Raphael both had fused thigh joints for me that just won’t budge even after applying heat while my Donatello works well. Michelangelo appears to have a fairly liberal amount of lubrication in his joints so things are moving very well right out of the box. The heads are still a pain in the ass to work with and will likely require a heat source, but at least that’s something that can be worked with. The thighs work fine and even the forearm swivels which I don’t know if I noticed that with the other three (or if it was possible). The joints are still pretty tight as they need to be for such a heavy figure. The knees, in particular, were stubborn out of the box, but I got them moving without heating them up. Michelangelo is going to move probably better than his brothers, though the heft of the figure will still limit what you can do with him.
The main separator for these figures rest with the accessories. I already mentioned the head parts, but Mikey also comes with a set of gripping hands, pointing hands, and thumbs up hands. He’s basically only lacking the open palm hands. The gripping hands are exactly the same as before, so no vertical hinge and the fingers are spread further apart than usual since these are modeled after the sai-gripping hands intended for Raph. For those hands, Mikey has his nunchaku. Just like the 1:12 version, they’re done with painted plastic handles and real chain links connecting them. If you saw the solicitation images online or on the back of the box and got excited for how long the chain looks, you’ll be let down as the chain is much shorter on the final version. I count seven links while the figure on the box has basically double that. You could pry the links apart to create one, long, ‘chuk, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It means you won’t be able to do the under the arm pose on the box, so that’s a bummer.
Michelangelo’s other unique accessory is the Turtle Hook, the famous weapon that supplanted the nunchaku since some cultures had an issue with that particular weapon. The Turtle Hook is an up-scaled version of the same that came with some of the 1:12 releases over the years. It’s painted and sculpted well and the hooks are on a hinge so you can open them up. They sound ratcheted and since the hook is very thin it’s definitely a little scary, but so far so good. There’s a yellow string affixed to it with a white piece of plastic at the end which Michelangelo can sort of grip. I wouldn’t mind a longer rope, or if they had built in a means to wind the rope on this larger version, but it’s overall a fun addition. The only other unique accessory for Michelangelo is a paper one which features an image of Kala the Neutrino on it. Otherwise, he has two slices of pizza which can connect with the six other slices to form one, whole, pizza if you have all four turtles. He also has a Turtle-Com just like the other three and it’s still a cool accessory, just less special since we’ve seen it four times now.
Michelangelo is really just more of the same, and that’s fine! It’s a bit of a bummer that the skin tone is a little different, but otherwise this is the figure you probably expected. All of the stuff that is good about the past three is still good here, and the bad stuff is still bad, though with Mikey at least the articulation is better than some. And it’s just nice to have all four turtles now. I have one in each corner of a display shelf I have and that open spot where Mikey is now is finally occupied, even if the quadrant he’s in doesn’t feature turtle figures (they can’t all be turtles). This is all I need him to do, and all I really need of the quarter scale line so if NECA announces giant Foot Soldiers or Shredder you’ll have to read about them somewhere else. Now that giant-sized Krang they showed off at Comic Con…stay tuned, I guess.
You’ve read my thoughts on Michelangelo, now read what I had to say about his brothers:
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