TMNT Mega Bloks Review, Part Six - 2016 Advent Calendar

Friday, July 8, 2016 9:57 AM
DisneyDan

TMNT Mega Bloks LEGO Toy Merchandise Review Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TMNT Mega Bloks Advent Calendar

Hello everyone,

It's Christmas in July! Ok, so not quite, but I do have for you a detailed review of the brand new Nickelodeon series TMNT Advent Calendar from Mega Bloks.

Released somewhat early, the advent calendar is a new venture in the world of TMNT toys. Sure, we've seen the good old fashioned chocolate ones for years now, but having one of the two major construction toy brands take the plunge and make an advent calendar is pretty cool.

The set contains 158 pieces, including three minifigures. The set retails for around $29.99 plus sales tax, and you can currently purchase it on Amazon.com, here.

First of all, let's take a look around the outside of the box.

I really love the box design. I like that they actually went to the effort of producing specific Christmas artwork for this set.

I really didn't want to destroy the box yet as I do like the pictures on it, and of course, come Christmas time I may decide that I want to use it as a proper advent calendar (even though I already opened it up for this review, I did put it all back again after).

When I removed the tray from the inside, this is what I saw:

I noticed that the inside of each door has instructions of how to put the mini sets together. Since I wasn't opening the doors yet, I took these sideways photos on my phone, peering into the box!

Each mini set comes bagged up, with the day number printed on the bag. Behind door one was the Leonardo minifigure, pictured below.

So, from there I proceeded to open each bag up. I must admit, I was amused by most of the contents. Some things are a little lame, but for the most part it's a really fun product.

One really neat thing that Mega Bloks did with this set was the inclusion of a more generic turtle body, and then supply four different face masks. This enabled them to keep the cost down (minifigures typically bump up the cost quite a lot in any Mega Bloks and LEGO set), but still provide you with "four" different characters! I also really love that they gave them a Christmas sweater. You'll also notice that each of the additional face masks comes with a colour coordinated Christmas themed pizza!

As well as the Christmas sweater turtle(s), Casey Jones has festive red gloves and a red hockey stick, and Shredder has a festive green belt (both characters' colours are definitely different in the other Nick series sets they appear in - I checked to be sure).

The set also was put together in some sort of logical order, too. When I opened up each day it occurred to me that as I revealed the next figure, the following doors would be associated with that character. After Leo was the Leo pizza, his katanas, and his Space Heroes comic. After the Donnie mask there was his chemistry set, his bow staff and some mutagen. The theme carries on like that for the other two turtles and even Casey, who comes after the Mikey skateboard, which could effectively be used for him, too (he's even pictured on the box riding it).

For the purposes of demonstration, after each of the additional pizza/mask days, I took a photo of the turtle wearing that colour, however, as I said above you only get one turtle minifigure, not four.

I would give this set five out of five. Despite some of the more useless things included, such as the green fuzzy lamp things, and the really tiny mutagen canisters, it is a great product. I love the variant minifigures, and the Christmas pizza is a really neat touch.