Shredder wearing his armour, mask and helmet almost all the time?

[neatoman]

Originally Posted by MikeandRaph87

Neato, looking at the figure I cannot help, but wonder if instead of skin if it was originally supposed to be black to match the pants. Is there any other figure that looks nothing like the actual cartoon character?

There could be a lot of explainations for this. One possiblity is that, yes, he was meant to wear a skin tight top but that detail got lost somehow.

Another one is that the toy's design wasn't quite hammered out when they started production of the show, so Shredder ended up resembling an earlier design in the show.

What I think is the most likely explaination however, is that they're different takes on the comic design. The show actually takes fewer liberties with how Shredder originally looked, only really adding color and a cape. If you compare the show and the toy to the comic, you'll see that the cape is really the only deviation the show and toy share. The cape was proably meant to give the toy another accessory for kids to play with, and so it was a demand from Playmates that he needed to look more or less like the comic except a cape. I guess it went down something like this:

"Look, Freddie, we're gonna use that comic to base them toys on, ya' see? Just make 'em mo' or less look like da comic. Just pick da colors we want, put letters on they'se belts and put a cape on da cheese grater."