Vintage 1990 TMNT Michelangelo Pin 📌 Classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cartoon Art, Manhole Cover Pin-Back Button

Remember Michelangelo's TMNT Cartoon Pin? 🧡 Michelangelo with His Nunchucks, Cartoon Pin

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon pin with Michelangelo on sunny yellow, grinning under his orange mask, nunchucks raised in one hand and a manhole cover in the other, the M on his belt buckle, under the red TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA banner and green TURTLES® logo.

The back is white plastic with a pin and a molded diamond mark in the middle. The photo with three button backs and a quarter is there to show the size.

📺 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.

🐢 A Doodle That Got Out of Hand

It started as a gag between two roommates. In November 1983, in Dover, New Hampshire, Kevin Eastman sketched a turtle standing upright in a mask with a pair of nunchucks to crack up his friend Peter Laird, and Laird scribbled "teenage mutant" above it. The joke took aim at the hit comics of the moment, the teen heroes of the New Teen Titans, the mutants of the X-Men and the ninja clans of Daredevil, with a dash of Howard the Duck. Japanese names were on the table for a minute before they settled on four Italian Renaissance painters and sculptors, which Laird said "felt just quirky enough to fit the concept," and their rat sensei Splinter was a wink at Daredevil's teacher, Stick.

They set up Mirage Studios at home in March 1984, paid for the first print run with a tax refund and a loan from Eastman's uncle, and advertised it in the Comics Buyer's Guide; the 3,000 copies were gone within weeks. Playmates Toys took a license in 1987, a cartoon was made the same year to help sell the figures, and it stayed on the air for nearly ten years. Something like $1.1 billion in Turtles toys was sold from 1988 through 1992, and by 1990 you could find a Turtle on almost anything a kid owned, this button among them.

🧡 Michelangelo Is a Party Dude

He's named for Michelangelo Buonarroti, who carved the marble David and painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling flat on his back. Eastman and Laird's first comics actually spelled it "Michaelangelo." The 1987 cartoon gave him the orange mask and made him the fun one: "Michelangelo is a party dude," as the theme song says, pizza-crazy and the one who yelled "Cowabunga!" The word itself goes back to the 1950s Howdy Doody Show and then to California surfers before the Turtles made it theirs. Townsend Coleman voiced him on the cartoon, and in the 1990 movie Michelan Sisti wore the suit while Robbie Rist did the voice.

His nunchucks got him in trouble overseas. In Britain the show ran as Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, because "ninja" was thought too violent for children, and scenes of Michelangelo's nunchucks were cut, so for a while there he fought with a grappling hook instead. American kids got the nunchucks, and here they are on his button.

🍕 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 always picked the orange one.