Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie Pin Set 🐢 12 Button-Up Pinback Buttons, Shredder, Splinter & the Thumbs Up

🎬 Who Was Really Inside the Suits in the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie? A 12-Piece Set of Original Movie Pins

Size: All 12 pins 1 1/2" ~ Stored in the dark at a steady 72°F. The backs vary: shiny metal, gray or white.

Twelve pins, twelve real pictures from the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, the one that started it all. Every one carries the green TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES® and THE MOVIE in red, and lined up together they walk you through the whole picture: the brothers, the rat who raised them, and the guy in the spiked silver helmet who wanted them gone. It's the cast of a movie, an inch and a half at a time.

Here's who you get. A close-up of Leonardo in his blue mask, looking right at you, and the warm orange-lit face known as Michelangelo, that grin just starting. Donatello leaning out the window of a red truck and reaching toward you. The Mad Turtle, red mask pulled tight and teeth bared. Two Turtles shoulder to shoulder in the Dangerous Duo, looking like they are about to get into trouble. Leonardo and Raphael side by side. Three Turtles together in a room with pictures hanging on the wall behind them. The whole gang huddled in the dark of their hideout. All four peeking up out of an open manhole, just their eyes and colored masks showing, with skyscrapers rising behind them. A Turtle in a brown fedora and a trench coat giving you a thumbs-up in front of the city at night. The Shredder, staring out of the dark. And Master Splinter himself, whiskers, sharp eyes and a dark robe.

The Thumbs Up is one of my favorite shots from the film. The idea that a six-foot turtle could pass for a regular guy in a hat and a coat is the whole joke, and it still makes me laugh. And on the group shot I could've sworn Leonardo was a big-headed baby staring right at me. Now I can't get it out of my head.

🐢 It Took Three People to Make One Turtle

The Turtles in this movie were suits, built by Jim Henson's Creature Shop in London in 18 weeks, and Henson said they were the most advanced creatures he had ever worked with. One person wore the suit, another did the voice, and a puppeteer worked the face by remote control. Donatello was Leif Tilden in the suit, Corey Feldman on the voice and David Rudman on the face, with Ernie Reyes Jr. doing Donnie's stunts. Leonardo was David Forman, Brian Tochi and Martin P. Robinson. Michelangelo was Michelan Sisti, Robbie Rist and Mak Wilson, and Sisti also shows up out of the suit as the Domino's Pizza delivery man. Raphael was the exception. Josh Pais both wore the suit and did the voice, and he turns up out of costume too, as a cab passenger who has a brief run-in with the masked Raphael.

The film's cast list calls Raphael the strong and angry member of the Turtles, so the Mad Turtle name fits him just right. Leonardo was the leader, the most mature of the four and the closest to Splinter. Donatello was the smart one. Michelangelo was the least mature and the fun-loving partier. Everybody had a favorite, and this way you don't have to pick.

⚔️ The Bad Guy and the Rat

Kevin Eastman got the idea for the Shredder's armor from big trapezoid-shaped cheese graters he pictured on a villain's arms, and it was Peter Laird who came up with the name. In the movie James Saito played him and David McCharen did his voice. Splinter started out, in the comics and the movie both, as the pet rat of a ninja named Hamato Yoshi in Japan, an unusually clever rat. After Yoshi was killed he ended up in the sewers of New York, where a canister of mutagenic ooze changed him and four baby turtles, and he named them and raised them as his sons. On screen he was performed and voiced by puppeteer Kevin Clash, the man behind Sesame Street's Elmo, with help from Rickey Boyd and Robert Tygner.

🎬 The Movie the Big Studios Passed On

Back in the mid-1980s, Roger Corman pitched Eastman and Laird a live-action movie that would have starred Sam Kinison, Gallagher, Bobcat Goldthwait and Billy Crystal as the Turtles, in green makeup. Thankfully, that is not the one that got made. The real one was produced by Golden Harvest and shot from July to September 1989 in North Carolina and New York City. Most of the big studios passed on it, and New Line Cinema, a small independent company back then, picked it up halfway through production. Steve Barron directed from a script by Todd W. Langen and Bobby Herbeck, with Judith Hoag as the reporter April O'Neil and Elias Koteas as the vigilante Casey Jones. Nobody would let a film crew into a real city sewer, so they scouted an abandoned Brooklyn subway line to stand in for the Turtles' lair.

It opened on March 30, 1990, and took in $202 million on a budget of about $13.5 million, the highest-grossing independent film up to that time. Pizza Hut put $20 million behind the promotion, so you couldn't order a pizza that spring without seeing a Turtle. It was one of Jim Henson's last projects before he died, shortly after the premiere. Look closely and you can spot a young Sam Rockwell as one of the Foot Clan thugs, and Kevin Eastman himself in a cameo as a garbage man.

📌 Read the Rim

The fine print runs around the rim: BUTTON-UP 2011 AUSTIN TROY, MI 48083, and ©1990 NORTHSHORE INVESTMENTS LIMITED/ MIRAGE STUDIOS. Mirage was Eastman and Laird's own company, and Northshore Investments was the UK company that held the copyright on the first two films. Button-Up was the button maker in Troy, Michigan, a Detroit suburb in Oakland County about 15 miles north of the city. Its trademark filings show it was in the button business well before the Turtles came along: in April 1984 it filed names for button lines called Comic Release, Rerun Review and Jammin', Rerun Review had been on its buttons since May 1983, and in 1987 it filed Mid-Life Madness! for gag lapel badges and key chains. By 1990 it was making licensed buttons for one of the biggest movies of the year. The pin-back button itself is an old American idea, first patented here in 1896, and a 1990 movie pin is built almost exactly the same way.

😂 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. They thought about Japanese names and went with Italian Renaissance artists instead, 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 and paid for the first printing with a tax refund and a loan from Eastman's uncle. All 3,000 copies sold in a few weeks. Playmates Toys took the license in 1987, an animated series came along to sell the figures, and about $1.1 billion worth of Turtles toys sold between 1988 and 1992. By 1990 there was a Turtle on just about everything a kid could own, buttons included.

🍕 Cowabunga

Pin them on a jean jacket, a backpack or a hat the way we did in 1990, or put all 12 in a shadow box with an old VHS copy of the movie. Each pin is drawn from my stack of that design, and like everything I have, they're kept in the dark at a steady 72°F and under 40% humidity. 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.