TMNT Minimates - it's official!

[youbastards]

Thanks Barry, those look great.

[cylonchaney]

On 7/3/2025 at 10:15 AM, Barry said:

I wouldn't even say there was a discussion about them, honestly.  I think it was more of a brief "that'd be cool if..."

That would be really cool if there was some concept art.  

[Barry]

Sorry, no art was created for any vehicles.  Not even a chicken-scratch sketch.

[minifigvig]

@Barry were the 3-finger “nightcrawler” hands/feet ever considered when you were designing turtle ‘mates?

looks like the ones from the 2012 animated series were the only ones with sculpted hands and feet.

[Barry]

I don’t really recall, but there’s no art that uses them.  This usually means they were not seriously considered, because it doesn’t take long to mock up a design with reused parts.  I feel that they’re too large though compared to the feet, and if they were considered there was probably concern about them holding the weapons properly.

[Onyx_6]

Does part of the argument against the sculpted head circle back around to the discussion about the space on a tool? The turtles, as I recall, still needed unique heads as the mask piece sits between two pieces of the head, right? Doing it the way it was done, though, means only 3 pieces are needed and can be reused for each turtle, as opposed to each of the 4 turtles needing their own head sculpt?

[Barry]

16 hours ago, Onyx_6 said:

Does part of the argument against the sculpted head circle back around to the discussion about the space on a tool? The turtles, as I recall, still needed unique heads as the mask piece sits between two pieces of the head, right? Doing it the way it was done, though, means only 3 pieces are needed and can be reused for each turtle, as opposed to each of the 4 turtles needing their own head sculpt?

This was indeed part of it.  By request, the bandanas were unique to each turtle in the 2012 cartoon line, but the heads could be shared.  Unique bandanas take up a lot less room because the entire piece is much smaller.  Then you could rerun the head and have more room for other parts.  We also had unique chest caps, but shared hands and feet.  I don't remember for sure, but I'd bet that all 4 original turtles fit in one tool without sculpted heads.  

Tooled parts fresh out of a tool look like a sprue from a plastic model kit.  The best way to look at it is if you took an empty sprue then tried to fit in all of the pieces like a jigsaw puzzle.  So, large pieces will take up more room depending on their orientation.