Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Sewer Exit Cartoon Pin 🐢 — Four-Turtle Group Pinback Button

Remember the TMNT Sewer Exit Pin? 🕳️ All Four Turtles Out of the Sewer, Cartoon Pin

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon pin with all four Turtles bursting up out of a manhole in their classic cartoon look: Raphael crouched with his sais on the left, one brother heaving the manhole cover up over his head, and Leonardo with his katana on the right, under the red TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA banner and the big green TURTLES® logo.

The back is a shiny steel shell with a pin. ®&© MIRAGE STUDIOS and BUTTON-UP are printed around the rim.

📺 The Cartoon Turtles

This button is from the cartoon side of Turtlemania, drawn the way kids knew the Turtles from the 1987 animated series that Playmates launched to sell its action figures: bright green, colored masks, and a big letter on every belt buckle so you could tell the brothers apart. The red TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA banner over big green TURTLES was the logo on the cartoon, the toys and the lunchboxes, and any kid in 1990 could draw it from memory.

🐢 How Four Turtles Started as a Joke

Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were two young comic artists sharing a place in Dover, New Hampshire, in 1983. One night that November, Eastman drew a masked turtle standing on its hind legs with nunchucks, just to make Laird laugh, and Laird wrote "teenage mutant" over it. The idea poked fun at the big comics of the day: the teenagers of the New Teen Titans, the mutants of the X-Men and the ninjas of Daredevil, with a little Howard the Duck thrown in. They thought about giving the turtles Japanese names and went with Italian Renaissance artists instead, Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo, which Laird said "felt just quirky enough to fit the concept." Even Splinter was a joke on Daredevil's teacher, Stick.

In March 1984 they started Mirage Studios in their home, paid for the first printing with a tax refund and a loan from Eastman's uncle, and ran an ad in the Comics Buyer's Guide. All 3,000 copies sold in a few weeks. In 1987 they licensed the Turtles to Playmates Toys, an animated series came along that same year to sell the figures, and it ran for almost a decade. About $1.1 billion worth of Turtles toys sold between 1988 and 1992, and by 1990 there was a Turtle on just about everything a kid could own, buttons included.

🕳️ Up Out of the Sewer

The Turtles lived in the sewers under New York City, so a manhole cover flying off and four green heads popping up was the classic way they showed up for a fight. Raphael's on the left of this one with his sai. He's named for Raphael, the Renaissance painter of The School of Athens, and in the cartoon he was the wisecracker; the theme song calls him "cool but rude."

The back of this button names its maker. BUTTON-UP was the Button-Up Company of Troy, Michigan, which made licensed pinbacks, and the ®&© MIRAGE STUDIOS line around the rim is Eastman and Laird's own company getting its credit, since Mirage owned the Turtles and licensed them out to everybody from Playmates to the button makers. That's how a joke drawing from a Dover, New Hampshire kitchen table ended up stamped around the edge of a pin like this one.

🍕 Cowabunga

Pin it on a jean jacket, a backpack or a hat the way we did in 1990, or frame it in a shadow box with the rest of your Turtles stuff. It's a perfect gift for anybody who grew up on the cartoon.