Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Battle Pose Cartoon Pin 🐢 — TMNT Classic Comic Art Pinback Button

Remember the TMNT Battle Pose Pin? 🥋 All Four Turtles in Battle Pose, Cartoon Pin

Size: 1 1/2"

Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon pin with all four Turtles in fighting stance on white under the red TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA banner and green TURTLES® logo: one leaping in at the top with his sais, Donatello with his bo staff on the left, Leonardo with his katanas in the middle and Michelangelo swinging his nunchucks on the right.

The back is white plastic with a pin and a molded diamond mark in the middle.

📺 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.

🥋 Four Brothers, Four Weapons

Every Turtle had his own weapon and his own job, and the cartoon's theme song handed them out in one breath: "Leonardo leads, Donatello does machines, Raphael is cool but rude, Michelangelo is a party dude." Leonardo has the katanas, Donatello the bo staff, Raphael the sai and Michelangelo the nunchucks, and all four are on this one button, which is why it was the pin to get if you couldn't pick a favorite.

Not everybody got the same Turtles. In Britain the show ran as Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, because "ninja" was considered too violent a word for children's TV, and Michelangelo's nunchucks were edited out of fight scenes. Their teacher was Splinter, a rat who had learned ninjutsu, and their reporter friend was April O'Neil. By 1990 there was a live-action movie as well, opening March 30 with suits from Jim Henson's Creature Shop.

🍕 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.