Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cartoon Pin Set 🐢 11 Pinback Buttons, Leatherhead, Shredder, Splinter & the Logo

📺 Who Gave Each Ninja Turtle His Own Color? An 11-Piece Set of Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Cartoon Pins

Size: All 11 pins 1 1/2" ~ New old stock, unused. The backs vary: shiny steel, or white or cream plastic.

Eleven pins from the cartoon side of Turtlemania, drawn the way kids knew the Turtles from the animated series: bright green, colored masks, and a big letter on every belt buckle so you could tell the brothers apart. No rubber suits here. Just the Saturday morning crew on grounds so loud you can read them from across the room.

Here's the lineup. All four Turtles in fighting stance on white, the Battle Pose, sais and bo staff and katanas and nunchucks all going at once. All four again on white coming up out of the sewer, Raphael crouched with his sai, Leonardo's katana held out, and the logo resting on a wooden staff held overhead. Leonardo on yellow. Donatello on orange-red with his bo staff up over his head in both fists. Michelangelo on sunny yellow, nunchucks in one hand and a manhole cover in the other. Two different Raphaels, one on sky blue with a sai in each hand and one on royal blue springing straight off the button at you, knees up. Master Splinter on bright red in his purple robe, feet wrapped in bandages. The Shredder crouched on coral red in blue armor and a purple cape. Leatherhead the mutant gator on orange, with not a Turtle in sight. And the classic logo all by itself on royal blue, the one any kid in 1990 could draw from memory.

🎨 The Answer Is Peter Laird

In Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's first comics, all four brothers wore red masks. When the cartoon came along, Laird gave each Turtle his own color. Leo went blue, Donnie purple, Mikey orange, and Raphael was the one who kept the red, the only brother still wearing his first color. The show gave them belts with the first letters of their names too, and there they are on these buttons, the R, the D and the M. There's a favorite bit of Turtles lore about those original all-red bandanas: the story goes that the brothers were raised as assassins with one bloody job to do, and red was the color of it.

That cartoon began the week of December 28, 1987 as a five-part syndicated miniseries, because Playmates Toys was still unsure about four mutant turtles and wanted a TV deal in place before its first figures hit stores the next summer. Fred Wolf Films produced it, and Toei Animation animated the first three seasons. The full series got rolling on October 1, 1988, was running every day on more than 125 stations by 1990, and kept going until November 2, 1996: ten seasons and 193 episodes. It's the show that gave the Turtles their love of pizza, their catchphrases and their separate personalities.

🎵 Leonardo Leads, Donatello Does Machines

The theme song handed out the jobs in one breath: "Leonardo leads, Donatello does machines, Raphael is cool but rude, Michelangelo is a party dude." It was a rush job. Chuck Lorre and Dennis C. Brown had a $2,000 budget and 48 hours to record and produce it, with James Mandell singing lead, and the story goes, as Lorre tells it, that the two of them only got the job after members of the band The Turtles backed out.

Cam Clarke voiced Leonardo through the whole original run and Barry Gordon was Donatello. Townsend Coleman was Michelangelo, who got "Cowabunga" in December 1987 when writer David Wise reached for it, a word that goes back to Chief Thunderthud on The Howdy Doody Show. Rob Paulsen, born in Detroit and raised in Grand Blanc, Michigan, gave Raphael his voice for nine seasons. Peter Renaday voiced Splinter for most of the run, and the Shredder was James Avery, the same actor who played Uncle Phil on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

🐀 The Teacher, the Tyrant and the Gator

The cartoon told Splinter's story its own way. On the show he and Hamato Yoshi were the same person, a martial arts teacher framed by his rival Oroku Saki and thrown out of Japan's Foot Clan, who ended up in the New York sewers where the mutagen turned him into a rat and four pet turtles into his sons. He named them after the Renaissance painters he loved. Most of the buttons in this line show the four Turtles, so Splinter is the one collectors go hunting for when they're finishing a character set.

Eastman got the Shredder's armor from big trapezoid-shaped cheese graters he pictured on a villain's arms, and the Foot Clan he runs was another joke: Daredevil had a ninja gang called the Hand, so the Turtles got the Foot.

Then there's my favorite detail in the whole set. Leatherhead's button shows him the way Ryan Brown redrew him for the 1989 Playmates figure: swamp hat, shaggy fur vest, torn blue jeans, a Bowie knife and one gold tooth. The figure's card billed him as the "Swamp Stompin', Ragin' Cajun Gator," born in the Florida Neverglades, 12 feet 4 inches tall, 871 pounds, favorite food Cajun-Spiced Turtle. He reached TV on November 3, 1989, on the 37th birthday of his voice, Jim Cummings, who had once painted Mardi Gras floats and worked as a riverboat deck hand in New Orleans. And behind him sits New York's favorite urban legend. On February 9, 1935, teenagers shoveling snow on East 123rd Street, led by 16-year-old Salvatore Condulucci, lassoed an eight-foot, 125-pound alligator out of a manhole.

🕳️ Two Manholes and a Registered Trademark

The Turtles lived under the street, so a manhole was the classic way they showed up for a fight, and it turns up on Michelangelo's pin and the Sewer Exit pin both. Dover, New Hampshire has not forgotten. In November 2023, for the Turtles' 40th birthday and the city's 400th, Dover unveiled a state historical marker and a Turtles manhole cover outside the house where Eastman and Laird made that first comic, crowd-funded at $13,000 from more than 200 donors. Eastman came home for the day: "This is home to us. This is where they were created."

That little ® after TURTLES has a story of its own. The banner-over-TURTLES logo was filed in the United States on July 21, 1988 and registered in April 1989, with its first use given as December 28, 1987 for the television series. British kids never saw the word NINJA on it. When the cartoon reached BBC1 in January 1990 it was Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, because "ninja" was thought too violent for children, and Michelangelo's nunchucks were cut and replaced with a grappling hook.

📌 Who Pressed Them

Turn the steel-backed ones over and the rim reads ®&© MIRAGE STUDIOS and BUTTON-UP 2011 AUSTIN TROY MI 48083. The 2011 is the street number on Austin, not a year. Button-Up was a Detroit-area shop that had been at it a while, with a licensed Jimi Hendrix button from 1983 carrying a Warren, Michigan address, and the Busy Beaver Button Museum in Chicago has its Culture Club, Billy Idol, California Raisins and New Kids on the Block buttons. The white and cream plastic backs carry a small molded mark in the middle instead. Button-Up's Turtles went out to the stores on counter displays, and one from 1989 held 39 of them on a single stand. The story in collecting circles is that Kevin Eastman kept one of those displays himself.

🍕 Cowabunga

Pin them on a jean jacket, a backpack or a hat the way we did in 1990, or put all 11 in a shadow box beside a vintage comic or action figure. Each pin is drawn from my stack of that design. There is no new press run coming. When the last of these are hanging in collections and galleries, they will be very hard to track down for sale.