Apr 7, 2022

Making up rules on fandom continuities... a TMNT Ultimates rant

 


As my TMNTU collection grows, I ended up with a Third Shredder... I repainted the second one in a 2012 inspired style. I was going for a Mirage inspired Shredder, but the metallic purple was closer to Secret of the Ooze than First movie. I gave him a black drybrush and it ended up looking closer to Nickelodeon's 2012 Shredder. I have 3 Shredders, How can I display them in a way that makes sense? Foot Soldiers are easy to justify because they are an Army Builder. 

 Official canon gives me nothing, since the Toyline is mostly based on the 87 cartoon, with a Splash of Mirage and other sources... or does it? Since Mirage elements are part of the canon, the possibility of Shredder clones is real. What we have to figure out is how to implement it. If we had an Oroku Saki (aka Mutatin Shredder figure) it would be a lot easier to implement the Clones. Or at least if we had a Super Shredder, we could have that option as well. I mean, that the Oroku Saki figure would be the real Shredder,who was horribly wounded in his first battle with the Turtles. Krang has him in a Dinension X Healing Pod and has created Shredder clones to keep the illusion that Shredder is fine. A similar idea could apply to the Super Shredder. While Krang tries to return the primal brute form of Super Shredder to a closer to normal version, various experimental formulas are applied to Saki's DNA and incubated as clones to see how they work. 

The 3 Shredders:
Toon inspired, Mirage/Nickelodeon hybrid, Playmates 87 inspired 

So, by using rules from previously existing continuities, I'm bending the canon to fit something I like that normally wouldn't work. 
This is a bit different from say, making other Channel 6 employees to liven up a Channel 6 newsroom display. (I may have something planned. Depends on how Vernon and Burne are made and if we get a Ravishing Reporter April.) This is closer to having both the Caucasian and African American Baxter Stockman coexisting.

For example: I keep mentioning Pizzaface as a Character that I want to see. In the Neftyverse Pizzaface is not going to be a Krang-level Mastermind. He will be a criminal nuisance to the Turtles and would've taken the whole Partly Human Partly Pizza after an attempt at self-immolation on a Retromutagen Ooze powered oven. He might look human, but his blood tastes like Pizza sauce, his pus tastes like garlic, his  muscles taste like ham, his fat like cheese, and don't ask for his bechamel sauce... ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) 

Basically he makes Pizzas using bits of himself, which he discovered after accidentally chopping his pinky and it went on a pizza. 
Once he discovered that the more of him they ate, the more like him they'd become and a macabre idea popped in his head:
Pizzaface can turn people into living pizza humans and get others to eat these humanoid pizzas and then the cannibals would become pizza themselves. He first tried with the homeless before moving on to wealthier targets.
With the Turtles ruining PF's original plan; he's turned his sights on the Turtles.

I went a bit dark, but surprisingly, I wasn't that far off from what was intended. The whole cannibalizing people was a nod to Donald Love (as we know, I'm going through the GTA Trilogy) and something similar was used on the Nickelodeon 2012 TMNT, where John DiMaggio played Pizza Face and was a living Pizza, who made Mini sentient pizzas that turned people into zombies before turning them into calzones to eat. I don't remember watching the full episode, but I remember the sentient pizzas.

I HAVE to go dark with him, because the idea of a crazy fat dude with a giant cleaver or a Pizza cutter as a peg leg poisoning pizzas at pizzerias randomly wouldn't go unnoticed. Assaulting dairy farns and adultering the milk for cheeses would require him to go upstate and seems a bit too far-fetched even for TMNT. Now his motivations are simple human nature: Greed, Revenge, Pride. In the Neftyverse, Pizzaface was a pizza chef, derided by a famous potty mouthed celebrity chef.... I  won't say his name, you doughnut! This drove the poor chef into madness, since his Italian Pride (the guy was born and raised in Brooklyn... has Italian family, but that's as Italian as he gets. No, this isn't a Tony Danza reference.) was wounded by a pompous Brit. Since his "authentic Italian Pizza" was insulted, The man who would become Pizzaface tried to perfect his process, which led to dealing with the Foot Clan to make Mutant Tomatoes for his pizza sauce. When his coup with homicidal fruit failed and was mocked for copying a B-Movie comedy from the 70s, the chef made a Retromutagen Ooze powered oven from a Crematory oven. 

The original plan was for him to make the best pizza ever by cooking pizzas in this oversized oven, with the Ooze mutating the pizza to become larger and tastier. The Turtles intervened, because of his reckless usage of the highly dangerous Retromutagen Ooze. During the struggle against the Turtles, he jumped into the oven as it was about to cook a pizza. The Turtles tried to turn off the oven and it exploded, leaving the mad Pizza Chef dead and buried by his own hand. Little did the Turtles know that he survived. Now he wants revenge on the famous Chef for ruining his life and the Turtles for ruining his earlier attempts at revenge. The whole cannibalizing people turned into pizza was to lure not G. Ramsay into tasting his new pizza and eventually eating him... 

In Pizzaface's case, my bending the rules doesn't involve toys, just backstory... for the Multiple Shredders, it involves TOYS and Backstory elements... if I were to get a second Pizzaface figure, sculpt a new mustache, paint his red shirt green... (obvious reference is obvious) now that would involve toys and story.

Many moons ago, I had a custom Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana coexisting with the NECA TMNT. I mention this because I HAVE made silly things with my displays... and that was back when Playmates cockblocked NECA and only allowed them to have the Turtles and April... no Shredder, no Splinter, no nothing... Now that the Turtles can get allies and enemies, I take my displays more seriously.
Sure, I can go super silly with the It Came from the Toy Chest reviews, but the actual displays tend to be more serious. For example: in a review, I can have Irma fuck everything to death, but in an actual display; she'd be one of the following:
-a Hostage
-an endangered civilian
(If I could find a 1:10 vehicle that could be turned into a Channel 6 Newsvan, she'd be in or around it.)

But you WON'T SEE HER in the middle of batttle, leading the charge and intentionally kicking ass. She's not a fighter, so she won't be in a fighting role. 

You see what I'm getting at? WHEN I bend the rules, I try to do it in a way that makes sense, even if it's seemingly contradictory... Also I'm shying away from the lazy Multiversal theory.
Do you strictly stick to the official canon or do you tweak it to make something more to your liking? Hell, maybe you take the bare minimum and screw the rules like a Kaiba...

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