The joy of a good bootleg is hard to deny. I went to New Jersey ToyCon and met up with Retro Slacker and we both found some rad bootlegs. He left with a Mexican My Pet Monster bootleg and I came away with a Misfits / Darth Vader knock off and a repaint of a Baxter Stockman. The weirder the toy, the more I love it.
The Crimson Vader is a collaboration between eddiekes and ressinblood. It was initially made available at DesignerCon 2021, although I’m not sure about this specific version. Misfits and Star Wars? It was an instant grab. Both the figure itself and the packaging are nice pieces of art.
The ICKY x HOLO Toxic Tortuga makes the available information online about Crimson Vader look like the Library of Congress. The only information I have about this is that there’s someone selling an Ace Duck on eBay. If the eBay listing eventually sells for $100, I made out like a bandit with mine for only five bucks.
Not all bootlegs are art pieces or melted candle versions of something actually released. In 2014, I ordered NECA Mirage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles figures off eBay. While NECA’s never made these figures with multi-colored bandanas, my set has multi-colored bandanas. There’s been multiple generations of these figures, some with varying quality. One of my favorite moments at New York Comic Con in 2023 was seeing a wildly overpriced set of these.
A few months ago, I stumbled on a listing on AliExpress for something truly bizarre. They looked like Playmates toys but they were based on NECA designs. Two of them were 3.75″ scale figures of the Universal Monster turtles and the other two were The Last Ronin designs. Donatello as the Invisible Man, Leonardo as the Hunchback, and the Armored and Unarmored Last Ronins. I can’t explain why the Invisible Man Donatello comes with a pair of nunchucks, but that only makes it b better. They weren’t shipping to the United States initially, but the moment I saw a listing that shipped to me, I had to have them.
I have so many questions about these figures, starting with “How did they come to be?” They’re NECA’s designs in a scale that doesn’t exist and in such low quality. There’s basically no articulation, despite the appearance of them having the appearance of elbow and knee joints.
I gotta be honest, I love this knockoff Donatello as the Invisible Man. It has a certain Burger King Kids Club in the 90s vibe. The mold is rough, the knees don’t bend, he has the wrong weapon, he can barely hold the wrong weapon, and it doesn’t matter cause he still looks rad.
In terms of having background o these figures, there’s basically nothing out there about them. You’ll find people on Reddit and YouTube who ordered them, just like me, talking about them, just like me. Donatello as The Invisible Man photographs well and is my favorite of the bunch.
In the future I’ll have to run down all of the known bootlegs in my action figure library. I know I have at least three full sets of the four Turtles. I wish there were more of these kinds of knockoffs being made. They’re so fun. Have you found others? I wanna know! Message me on Threads, Instagram, or Bluesky.
