Vintage TMNT Playmates Toys: General Traag and Baxter Stockman -Sick and Twisted Freaks

So I saved up several weeks of pocket money back around 1989.

I ride my crappy push bike over thirty minutes across town to the store, get to the aisle, pick up either Mike or Raph with the intention to buy a Turtle.

Only to notice two really cool looking figures next to the Turtles.

General Traag and Baxter Stockman.

I had not yet seen these characters in the cartoon, but the toys captivated me.

I put down the turtle, examines these grotesques lunatics, bought Traag right then and there and went back three weeks later and bought fly Baxter.

General Traag was a WRONG toy… but oh so right, on so many levels, to my monster loving kid brain.

I picked it up in a store called DEKA back when I lived in New Zealand and I could not put it down. I was nine years old and in love with some wonderful monsters. Is it any surprise at age 12 I would watch Cliver Barker’s Hellraiser and fall in love with even more deliciously wonderful monsters known as Cenobites.

The mean face, that snarl, that grizzled expression that reminds me of grumpy Gandfathers and world weary Veterans. That old school take no shit tough world war two era looking tough guy, that pre-pretty boy millennial mobile phone dialing internet bullshit world that didn’t exist back then.

I intended to buy the Turtles, from the cartoon – like a good little mutant consumer. They were the hero’s or some shit.

But when I picked up General Traag, I literally could not stop looking at it and I could not put it down. If you’re a collector – you’ve been there, you’ve had that same experience.

Leaping from someone’s deliriously depraved and demented mind, and right into your hands. Toys of legend. Toys of disgusting ingenuity.

General Traag, he’s a freakish hideous rock monster soldier dude. He looks a bit Ben Grimm, part Lee Marvin, but more Wild Bunch Ernest Borgnine with that stout frame than anything. Traag is kind of fat and stumpy, there’s weird bugs and shit crawling over him, some alive, some probably dead, or kept for later as snacks. He doesn’t look like the cartoon model and it’s a good thing – the cartoon model was very vanilla. The toy is all personality and detail.

Like the amazing Colossi in PlayStation2 game Shadow of the Colossus, he’s a living …THING, with other things living on him, part Geo-Dude part Super-Soldier-Rockman

His weapons look cool, my favourite being his combat knife. Place that knife in his hands and that grizzled look in his eyes tells you he can and will SKIN YOU ALIVE. I never got that impression from the cartoon version at all. He was just a generic guy. One look in the eyes of the toy however, and you know he’s been places and seen some shit you don’t even want to hear about let alone live through.

There are no shortages of Rock men in old Silver Age comics, and in the Wolf/Murakami TMNT cartoon, it was a shame that Playmates never made the generic Rock Soldier as a troop builder, leaving fans with only Traag to troop build with, who still works in that way, or as a solo character.

SSSHHHRREEDDDEERRRRRRRR!!!!!

Fly Baxter was so ugly, so weird looking. More gruesome and disgusting than the cartoon version, so deliciously specifically detailed with horrible horrible filthy details that belonged in a horror movie and not in a toy based on a kids cartoon.

So I HAD to buy it.

Scientist Baxter didn’t (and still doesn’t) do much for me. While an unfortunate example of potential covert racism in the Fred Wolf era cartoon the thing is I like is the silly fly version of Baxster more than any other. He was memorably incompetent in the show, and a fun boss fight in the Konami TMNT arcade games.

Mutant Fly Baxter was awesome. Great toy, amazing sculpt. Even more hideous and disgusting than General Traag. He has buzzed around again as a reissue toy (with odd minor changes such as smaller wings) and a lovely version made it into the Super 7 Ultimatessssss line.