Vintage 1990 TMNT Shredder Pin 📌 Mirage Studios Licensed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Pin-Back Button, Cartoon Villain Art

Remember the Shredder? ⚔️ Vintage 1990 TMNT Pin, Mirage Studios Licensed

Size: 1 1/2"

⚔️ The Shredder, Cartoon Pin

Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon pin with the Shredder crouched and ready on coral red, in blue armor with bladed plates on his arms and legs, a purple cape spread behind him and his helmet and mask on.

The back is a shiny steel shell with a pin. Around the rim it reads ®&© MIRAGE STUDIOS and BUTTON-UP 2011 AUSTIN TROY MI 48083, the button maker in Troy, Michigan.

🐢 Shredder

Kevin Eastman got the idea for the Shredder's armor from big trapezoid-shaped cheese graters he pictured on a villain's arms, and Peter Laird came up with the name. He first showed up in the very first comic in 1984 as the alter ego of Oroku Saki, leader of the Foot Clan, and he has been the Turtles' archenemy ever since. In 2009 IGN ranked him the 39th-greatest comic book villain of all time.

📺 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.

🍕 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 thought the villain was the coolest one.