Rarities - Pre-Production T'Gin Zu

The 1993 vehicle assortment wasn't much.  Most of the entries were pretty bad.  And, the Ninja Force vehicles were among the worst.  As such, the drivers of those vehicles, T'Gin Zu and the Red Ninja are relatively hard to come by.  Few people collect them in earnest, though.  So, their scarcity is largely offset by lack of demand.

It is that disinterest in the figures that allows for oddities like the original paint job on T'Gin-Zu to slip by collector's eyes.  And, the fact that it's prominently displayed on the back of the 1993 Pile Driver box just shows how little of an impact a figure like T'Gin-Zu has on the collector zeitgeist.

Below, though, you see T'Gin-Zu's original paint job.  It is much more orange than the production figure.  It appears to be a straight re-use of the 1992 Stormshadow paint masks, just in orange in yellow.  And, frankly, it makes for a better figure.  This all orange version would have leaned into the neon-ness of the '90's and created a figure that would have found at least a few fans among the more accepting collectors who grew up in the '90's.  Instead, Hasbro kind of chickened out and gave us a more muted T'Gin-Zu offering.

As a bonus, the pre-production figure also appeared in the 1993 Toy Fair catalog.  The more you look at it, the more you realize it's a shame we didn't get this coloring.  The production T'Gin Zu isn't a figure anyone really prioritizes.  So, having him be even more outlandish would have made him more fun.  Maybe we'll get a factory custom that's like this.  It's out best hope for ever seeing an homage to this unproduced design.