Custom Japanese Spider-man Ninders Marvel Legends toy

Out of all the toys that we have seen in the Marvel Legends collection we’ve so far only got one official Japanese Spider-man toy and it’s left me wanting more. The show to a lot of people has turned into a funny meme but having seen all 41 episodes and the movie (which was pretty much just another episode) I thought it deserved better, I wanted more Marvel Legends scale figures. It’s a really awesome show which I think has inspired a lot of comic stories and other series like Power Rangers since its release in the 70s.

The first was pretty obvious as all heroes need a villain I made a Marvel Legends Professor Monster he even has his throne now too since he spent most of the show sitting down.

I had so much fun making Professor Monster it wasn’t long before I wanted to make another character from the show. This time I decided on making a Ninder. They are the foot soldiers of the Iron Cross Army which always gang up on Spider-man in each episode.

Now looking at the design of them in the show they reminded me a lot of the Putty characters from Power Rangers, they are essentially the same characters. From looking around for a Marvel Legends figure that matches the design I wasn’t having a lot of luck so I needed another figure for the base.

With the Ninder being a very similar design to the actual Power Rangers I found a cheap Black Ranger from the Lightening series.  The scale is perfect, the costume is pretty much the same just with a different belt and helmet. The articulation on the Lightening Power Ranger toys is actually a bit better than a Marvel Legend so it makes the fight scenes easier to pose too.

To design the helmet it was a fairly basic 3d model which I put together using TinkerCad in a similar way to the Professor Monster parts. The belt was similar the the previous one I’d made too and just needed resizing to fit the new figure.

Now painting joints on these figures wasn’t too hard either, keeping to a basic grey I could use a really thin primer coat which didn’t scrape off too much around the joints and then the top coat was a bit of a darker grey to match the costumes in the show.

Overall I’m pretty happy with how this figure turned out, using the Power Rangers body was a great match and I think it was nice that these guys kind of evolved into the Power Rangers in one way through the different shows Toei produced over the years. The shows costumes might have even been the same design just in different colours.

Posted by Adi Mursec on May 25, 2025