NECA Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1/4 Scale Movie Donatello Review

Donatello, you’re a hard turtle to find, aren’t you? It appears that in the rush of the holiday season, if you blinked you may have missed your window of opportunity to pick this guy up. NECA’s quarter-scale 1990 movie version of Donatello is just about sold out everywhere! I can totally understand why, as well, since the figure is absolutely stunning to look at.

Accurate sculpt and proper paint applications are always important when trying to recreate a movie likeness. When you are dealing with a puppet, however, textures then come into play. Integrating the puppet texture into the action figure’s sculpt is one of many reasons that the Palisades Muppets is one of the most amazing toy lines ever made. The Donatello sculpt is already killer, and the sheepish grin is very specific to the character. Adding in that texture makes him look and feel like he just hopped right out of that movie. I could hear MC Hammer performing ‘This Is What We Do‘ in my head while cutting the twist ties. This may also have been because I was actually playing the soundtrack like a giant idiot child.

Donny comes packed with six different hands, a slice of pizza, tube of mutagen, and his bo staff. The selection of hands is fantastic as it leaves you with a ton of posing options. He has hands capable of holding his pizza slice as well as the mutagen canister. Donatello is able to hold his bo staff with both hands thanks to two of them being made specifically for it. When he isn’t holding the staff it can be stored on the back of his shell via two simple cloth ties attached to his harness.

Besides the appendages with function, there are also some fun ones like the thumbs up and waving hands. The hands are fairly easy to swap out, and the pegs that connect to the wrist are nice and thick so I wouldn’t expect any breakage. I’ve been swapping them out pretty frequently over the last two weeks, and everything still feels extremely sturdy.

I really don’t collect in this scale. I barely have the space to store all the 1:12 stuff I currently buy! I think that maybe the last quarter scale figure I purchased was an Aragorn from Lord of the Rings or Eric Draven from The Crow, and that was easily over a decade ago. NECA certainly has evolved as a company since then. Those old figures were for all intents and purposes statues. This guy is a gigantic fully articulated action figure. He’s heavy too! If he fell on my head from any reasonable height I’d probably be dead or at the least concussed. However, I don’t really need to worry about this because he stands up very well. Donatello appears to have a very solid center of gravity while his large feet keep him balanced and upright.

The articulation scheme on Donatello is very similar to what they use on their 7″ figures. Donny can get himself into some nice combat poses as well as some fun ones. The only real issue I’ve found with the figure is that the double elbows are slightly hampered by his elbow pads. I’ve tried moving them up the arm a bit, but no such luck. He still gets very good range of motion with them there, so I’m not overly concerned about coming up with any sort of “fix” to take full advantage of the double elbows.

Since I really don’t collect figures in this scale my original plan of attack was to hope these would eventually get shrunk down to 1:12 scale and then buy them. The more I saw of him, the more my resolve wavered. He was finally released and I bought him day one. I’ve been messing with him every day since. NECA has made the definitive 1990 movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle from the sculpt to the paint to the textures. It’s all there and it’s a sight to behold. If at some point NECA does shrink these down, I’m still in to complete the quarter scale set. There really is something to be said about the detail work that goes into a large scale figure like this.

I’d keep an eye on Amazon if you want to grab this guy. Entertainment Earth also has preorders for Donatello currently available that should ship this month. It also wouldn’t hurt to check out their Raphael preorder if you think this is a collection you may want to get into, he should release in February 2017.

[adsense]