Y’know, I’m not really the biggest Ninja Turtles fan, though I like what I’ve seen of it just fine. For one thing, I didn’t watch the original cartoon growing up, and I’ve just seen clips here and there. Funny enough, I think the only Ninja Turtles show I watched regularly was The Next Mutation, a live-action series from the 90’s that was tied into Power Rangers through a big crossover event, and as I understand it, it’s a contested, controversial entry in the Turtles canon.
Either way, this was wild to witness as a kid.
On the cinematic side, I liked pretty much all of the movies I’ve seen (never watched Turtles in Time, or TMNT, though), and the latest film, Mutant Mayhem, was genuinely really excellent.
Seth Rogen casting a bunch of actual teenagers and letting them ad-lib turned out to be a stroke of genius.
And I’ve played a good deal of the recent retro beat-em-up, Shredder’s Revenge, a genuinely fun game that’s even better if you’ve got friends over to join you.
It just oozes charm (and ooze).
Really, it’s my wife, and one of my good friends, that are the Turtles people, so me picking up Party Wallop, the Ninja Turtles/Transformers collaboration, was more out of respect for them. An expensive bit of respect, too, considering he costs about the same as a Leader-class mainline figure, an example of how Collaborative figures can get a bit pricey. So, let’s see if he’s worth it.
Robot Mode
Politically neutral Turtle-bot.
I’ll lead off by just talking about Party Wallop’s main gimmick, before anything else, since it affects his whole presentation: You can remove the top of his robot-turtle-head…
AAAAAAAA
and swap it out for four additional bandanna-wearing head-halves to make him “become” any one of the four Ninja Turtles, or keep him as he’s packaged, as a neutral, non-bandanna’d turtle-bot. This is accompanied by a little dial you can turn on his belt buckle, switching it to have the first letter of each turtle’s name, or keeping it blank.
Here’s a fun game: Find the few times in these photos I forgot to switch the belt’s letter to match the head I put on him.
So, right off the bat, there’s five different guys this bot can be, and they’re kind of subtly encouraging you to buy at least four of him, so you can assemble the full Ninja Turtle cast.
Leaders meditate a lot.
My Turtles-loving friend was actually considering going in on four of them, but even he didn’t go through with it (I think?).
Dance Dance Mikey-lution.
It does kind of raise the question of who, or what Party Wallop is supposed to be. Me, I like to imagine he’s a Transtector, as depicted in the 1988 Transformers anime, Masterforce. Those Transtectors were lifeless Transformer bodies that a human (or Ninja Turtle) could fuse with, and pilot. So I like to think that the bandanna and belt that Party Wallop’s wearing depends on which brother’s in the driver’s seat.
“God On, dude!”
He’s become a bot of rage.
There’s also another big visual change you can decide on when it comes to his whole torso: You can leave the front of his alternate mode plugged into it, making him look more like a transforming Transformer, or unplug it to serve as a shield, exposing the more Ninja-Turtle-y chest (and belt).
After too much pizza.
Me, I like leaving it off. However you choose to display him, Party Wallop’s a bit short for his price, but incredibly wide in each direction. The guy’s stout.
I never saw (or played) Turtles in Time, so you can’t tell me this isn’t how it starts.
The funny thing is, he’s supposed to be a ninja, but the sculpt says samurai to me, largely because of how some of his altmode exterior has been folded over his shoulders and hips. And that’s sort of the big elephant (turtle?) in the room with this guy, he’s just lousy with parts of his vehicle mode hanging off him, including a huge backpack made up of different parts of the roof, and things like lasers and headlights poking out above it. But, honestly, I don’t hate it?
Death’s Head and Raph hate everyone, so it’s got nothing to do with all the altmode parts.
They obviously put work into making it all look good, and even his big backpack sort of works if you remember he’s a turtle, and so ought to have a big shell on his back. To skip ahead again, I think another reason I don’t mind is that they were careful to engineer him so that his van parts stay out of the way of his articulation.
The better to run freely with.
As for the rest of him, they basically took the default Ninja Turtle design, and put it through a “robot” filter, which means changing all of the round, curved shapes on him into straight lines, and harsh angles. It’s a delightful childish idea, like a kid drawing a “Ninja Turtle Robot” in a notebook. The headsculpt, in particular, is basically just a Ninja Turtle head, complete with the gritted teeth of the original action figures, but made out of boxes.
Schroedinger’s Ninja Turtle.
For colors, we’re operating in a very bright, cartoony space. He’s mostly cast in solid yellow and green, with some gray bits. I do feel like he’s got too much yellow, and not enough green, to read as normal Ninja Turtle Colors, but that’s down to the needs of his transformation. He doesn’t feel like he has a ton of paint on him in this mode, but he doesn’t really need it, with most of the deco being used on a slightly darker yellow chest, adding some more green and yellow where it’s needed, and some blue for his eyes, and white for his teeth. There’s also the extra color added when you swap around turtle bandannas, and belt buckles. The vibes of the deco are very “chunky kid’s toy,” which feels just right for the rest of him.
The Raph persona is trying hard to lose his children’s toy image.
His build quality is good, but strange. It’s kind of hard to explain, or quantify, but he doesn’t “feel” like a normal Hasbro/Takara Transformer. Something about his materials, the way his joints feel, all of it’s kind of different. If you told me, sight unseen, this was actually a Playmates Ninja Turtle product, instead of a Transformer, I’d believe you. As it stands, I guess he was just designed and engineered by a different team than usual, and it shows. But not in a bad way, really, just a different way.
“So, you say you’re powered by a turtle? That might explain why you feel so different from us.”
Party Wallop’s made out of big, solid bricks of plastic, so there’s some real weight to him when you pick him up. All his joints are really tight, and in an even more impressive twist, he has no problems standing up, or even doing a one-footed kick, despite his big backpack of stuff. His only hinky part is that backpack, though. It’s supposed to plug in beneath his neck, but it’s an unstable connection, which frequently comes out of place.
This happens pretty consistently.
It’s not the worst problem, because the backpack is on a fairly tight friction joint, but it’s a black eye on an otherwise pristine slate of engineering. For articulation, he’s got everything you’d expect from a modern mainline Legacy figure: Ankle tilts, swivel knees, thigh swivels, universal hips, a waist twist, a neck swivel, universal shoulders and elbows, and best of all, wrist swivels, which are especially important when you’re using swords, and other melee weapons. And, as mentioned before, the designers made sure these joints are all unbothered by all the altmode parts, unless you’re like, twisting the waist over 90 degrees, or something extreme like that. There’s extra joints to rotate the panels on his shoulders, and the two hip-skirts that he has are on rods that can extend and contract, again, to keep them out of the way.
The better to swordfight with! Which brings me to….
Next up: The accessories and features, and boy is there a ton of them. We’ve already been over the five swappable turtle heads, and the five rotating belt buckles, but on top of that, he’s got melee weapons based on each Turtle’s loadout, all cast in solid gray.
Having failed to take over the Maximals, Dinobot goes for a group he thinks will be easier to usurp control of.
First, you’ve got two katanas for Leonardo, and two sais for Raphael, both pretty standard.
POV; You’re about to get stabbed.
See? Told you.
Next, you have two nunchuks for Michealangelo, which are, impressively, multi-part assemblies connected by a working chain.
Just imagine the technique.
I like picking him up and shaking him, to get them to spin.
They’re good for confounding his opponents.
Finally, there’s an unfolding quarterstaff for Donatello, and it’s the only one of these weapons that lets me down.
“Did they give me the lamest weapon *again*?”
Basically, it’s oddly short and stumpy for what it’s supposed to be, and can’t even really be held in both hands very well. It reads to me more like a long baton, or truncheon. In fact, I prefer to pair it up with his big shield, like he’s using riot gear.
*WHAP* “You stop that.”
Speaking of the shield, you can mount it on a 5-millimeter port on either forearm, for some defense.
He’s making some sick beats from hitting that shield.
Here’s another feature that sounds kind of boring, but is actually really interesting to me: He comes with this giant pile of accessories, and they designed him so that everything he has can store on him somewhere. The four Turtle heads that you’re not using go inside his backpack, and his quarterstaff folds up and goes underneath them, with dedicated panels that flip over it to keep it stashed away.
Let’s not examine the implications of him having a backpack of scalps.
Meanwhile, his katanas peg onto the sides of his backpack. Around front, each nunchuck clips in beneath his shoulder armor….
They’re basically emergency fidget spinners.
and finally, his sais plug into his hip panels.
I Imagine these see the most use, since they’re right at his hips.
I really appreciate this, because it means he can keep his accessories on him, instead of me throwing them into a bag. That being said, the engineering here isn’t perfect. Most of his accessories stay in securely, but his katanas and sais do like to pop out and fall off when I pose him, just enough to be irritating. And you don’t have many options to stash his shield, it either needs to become his chest, or stay deployed on one of his arms, when I’d have liked some other place to keep it, like on his backpack or something. Still, the whole setup’s impressively ambitious, even if it’s got a few issues.
“Pizza is the right of all sentient beings, dude!”
Speaking of the shield, his last feature’s just a fun extra: You can pop a green circle off the front of it, to reveal a little personal pan pizza. It’s in a green pan, but it’s sculpted and painted realistically, with pepperoni as the only topping. He can’t really interact with it, but the fact that they made sure he came with pizza is just…the icing on the cake? Nah, the cheese on the pie.
It turned out to be the key to ending the war.
Transformation
The transformation, unfortunately, is something of a low point for the figure. You see, he’s a shellformer (and yes, everyone’s made a turtle joke about that already). By shellformer, I mean he’s the kind of transformer where you’re wadding the robot up in the middle, and fitting the pieces of his vehicle mode together outside of it, like the opposite of cracking an egg. On the positive side, everything on him, including the shell parts themselves, are big, which makes them easier to work with. But, on the negative side, getting everything to snap together can be tricky, and often requires the robot parts inside of him to be in precise positions, otherwise things won’t line up.
Basically, he spends most of the transformation looking like this.
More than once, I’ve had to undo the transformation, and go back a few steps, to fiddle with a part, before doing a big panel-massage to get everything to line up. To be clear, this isn’t as complicated or tricky as, say, a Studio Series car-bot…
Studio Series Hot Rod provides a good example of what I mean.
….it’s totally doable, it’s just kind if difficult, and a real barrier to enjoying the whole figure. In terms of how his accessories are handled, you can leave the turtle heads, staff, nunchucks, and shield-chest in place during the transformation, but you remove the sais and katanas, and place them in new positions beneath the vehicle mode.
Hopefully, the cops don’t look under the van.
It can be kind of tricky getting the katanas to plug in at first, but after owning Mr. Wallop for awhile, they seem to have been broken in.
Vehicle Mode
If you see smoke coming out of this van, they’re just baking pizza inside.
Party Wallop changes into the Turtles’ vehicle of choice from the original animated series, the Party Wagon (or Turtle Van, accounts differ on the name). Me, I mostly know it from the Shredder’s Revenge game, where you’d drive it around the world map.
Like so.
It’s a kind of silly, cartoony vehicle, a big yellow van with a huge spoiler in the back, a turtle-shell roof, and a scowling mouth sculpted in the front. Plus, he’s got a bunch of techie stuff on the roof, including a couple of lasers.
Those can’t be street-legal.
It suits the bright, toyish vibes of the rest of the package, I think, in addition to being very animation-accurate, from what I can tell from screengrabs.
Looks right to me!
It sort of has the vibes of one of those banged-up VW vans, even if it’s not actually banged up, or VW-ish.
He feels like he’d hang out with these radical racers.
It’s also a very large vehicle, bigger than most Voyager-class Transformers, again justifying the Leader-class pricepoint. It’s a bit too small for my 4-inch action figures, but it kind of passes the squint test.
“Does this make us cool?” “Depends on what year it is.”
Too bad I don’t have any Ninja Turtles in that scale, just my wife’s NECA ones.
“I’m sposda fit into that?!?”
For colors, the yellow is really on display in this mode, with most of the green being relegated to the roof. The sides of the vehicle are oddly plain and uncolored, but again, that’s what it looked like on the show. There’s a big patch of gray on the roof that’s only there because of a transformation joint, which is *not* what it looked like on the show, but it’s the only obvious innacuracy. There’s generally a lot more deco visible in this mode, including painted blue windows…
The 5-millimeter tabs make me read it as a face.
…multiple shades of green on the roof, red head and taillights (including whatever’s going on with the stuff on the roof), and a front with white teeth curled into a scowl, extra white headlights, bits of silver here and there, and a little Ninja Turtles logo tampographed onto the green circular thingie on the front. Outside of the plain sides of the van, it’s very detailed-looking, and that includes the black wheels with painted silver hubcaps.
Van Bros.
As much as it’s tough and complicated to get his vehicle mode to peg together during transformation, once you actually get him together, everything is really solid, and the whole vehicle really feels like a singular, dense brick of plastic, in a really pleasant, almost G1 Transformer way. The only bit of instability is those swords stashed on the bottom, which can fall out, but they get more stable every day.
Scale? What’s that?
In terms of features, the overloaded robot mode stole all the thunder, so there’s a lot less going on here. He rolls well on his plastic tires, with a lot of ground clearance. Uptop, those laser cannon-looking things are on swivels that let them raise from forward, to skyward. They’re also exactly the right size to accept blast effects on their ends.
*Definitely* not street-legal.
You can also twist the lights on either side of the van’s roof up and down. And finally, you can still pop the circular thing on the van’s front, to reveal that personal pan pizza. Maybe the engine keeps it warm?
“Think this is, like, safe to eat, Pete?” “I’m exactly broke enough not to care, Miles.”
Overall
There’s a lot going on with Party Wallop, and that’s a good thing. Some Transformers Collaboratives are definitely overpriced, but this is one time where that doesn’t feel like the case.
“Kid, I ain’t your master.”
He costs as much as a Leader-class mainline Transformer, and there’s a Leader-class figure’s worth of stuff here, so he’s worth it, unless you just think Leader-class figures are overpriced in general (which is a valid point, too). Beyond the question of value, though, this is just a fun figure, with a real sense of creativity behind it. Whoever made this may not have been the usual HasTak team, but they were obviously having fun with the premise, and made a really complete turtle-robot experience. He just radiates good vibes, man.
With cheetah-ride-giving action!
The only real problem I have is his annoyingly shellformer-y transformation, but both of his actual modes make up for that, to me. I’m not even a huge Turtles fan, and I like the guy, and I can recommend him if you’re both a Turtles and Transformers liker. Just maybe don’t buy four of them.
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