POP! 8-bit – Raphael

Picking your favourite Ninja Turtle is like picking your favourite child – that is, people will judge you for it, but you should definitely know who it is in case you’re ever in a Sophie’s Choice situation. Who's mine? Well, as you may have guessed by the title and picture, Raphael is my favourite of the TMNT.

As a kid, I spent many hours at my friend Rohan’s place playing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for the NES. If you have never played it, rest assured that it is a thoroughly frustrating experience. While not of the same difficulty as Battletoads, the game is still routinely unfair to the player – a deadly combination of the developers thinking they were making a game to suck quarters and flat-out bad design.

That said, we did have a lot of fun with it; we were too young to realise that some games were simply poorly made and we were both Turtle-obsessed. It had a cool soundtrack too! So when Funko announced that they were making the Turtles as part of their 8-Bit line, I thought I’d pick up Raph here as a tribute to those more innocent days.

Raph has a nice chunky feel. Though made up of more individual pieces than the average regular POP, the 8-bit figures have a real heft to them, and don’t feel quite as delicate as some of the newer POPs doing the rounds. While not an exact match for the look of the game, the style is great, too – it feels like a callback to the vinyl art toys that Funko was aping when it first came out with the POP line. I could see a few people who aren’t necessarily fans of the POP look picking this figure up.  

There’s not a lot of paint; most of the figure is simply cast in the appropriate colours. The only real paint is around the mouth and on his sais. It’s a little sloppy, but taken as a whole I’m quite happy with it.

In a world where there are literally hundreds of Turtles figures available, this isn’t particularly essential, but it is an amusing novelty. In my case, it’s a purchase driven out of a misplaced sense of nostalgia. Now if only it also glowed in the dark...