Vintage 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Leatherhead Cartoon Pin 🐢 — Mutant Alligator Pinback Button

Remember Leatherhead From TMNT? 🐊 Leatherhead, the Ragin' Cajun Gator, on a Button

Size: 1 1/2"

Not a Turtle in sight on this one, and that's the fun of it. This is Leatherhead, the mutant alligator from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles world, standing tall on a bright orange 1 1/2-inch pinback with a big Bowie knife in his fist and a mouth full of teeth, one of them gold. That gold tooth tells you everything you need to know about his personality.

Look him over and he's dressed for the bayou: a beat-up red swamp hat with a ragged brim, spiky yellow eyebrows, a shaggy brown fur vest across his shoulders, a red cord and a brown belt knotted at the waist, torn blue jeans with green scales showing through a hole in the thigh, brown lace-up boots, and that long tail swinging out behind him. There isn't a word printed on the front, just the gator.

Turn one over and you'll find a tin-plated steel back with a straight locking pin that tucks under a little hooked catch. Tiny black type runs around the orange edge where the paper wraps onto the back, crediting MIRAGE STUDIOS, the studio that owned and licensed the Turtles, and BUTTON-UP, the Michigan company that made the button. These are all in mint condition. The last photo, a few button backs beside a quarter, is only there as a size guide.

🎨 Drawn the Way the Toy Looked

Here's the detail I love most. When Leatherhead joined the Playmates action figure line in 1989, his creator Ryan Brown redrew him for the toy, and that new look is the one on this button: the swamp hat, the furry vest, the beat-up jeans and the Bowie knife. The cartoon version that reached TV in November 1989 was dressed another way, in a yellow cargo vest and blue rubber waders instead of the fur. So this is Leatherhead the way kids met him in the toy aisle.

The figure's card billed him as the "Swamp Stompin', Ragin' Cajun Gator" and packed him with a Turtle Trap, a Swamp Gun and a Jumbo Gumbo Belt, all for about $3.99. The stats on the back of the card gave his birthplace as the Florida Neverglades, his height as 12 feet 4 inches, his weight as 871 pounds and his favorite food as Cajun-Spiced Turtle. He shipped in the 1989 wave with Ace Duck, Casey Jones, Genghis Frog, Metalhead, Usagi Yojimbo, Baxter Stockman, General Traag, Krang and the Rat King. By Brown's own account, Playmates asked him for a more detailed Leatherhead, and his new drawing borrowed partly from Ezekiel Tork, the Cajun swamp man in Marvel's Man-Thing comics.

🐊 Comic, Toy and Cartoon

Leatherhead was born in the comics. Ryan Brown created him for Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #6, which Mirage published in August 1988. In that telling he was an ordinary baby alligator who got loose from a pet store during a robbery, along with a few other little gators, and made his way down into the sewers, where a pair of Utroms found him and he was mutated. Before long he was tangling with a big-game hunter named Mr. Marlin. Brown has told convention crowds that he meant to kill Leatherhead off at the end of that story, sending him over into an underground gorge with the hunter, and that Peter Laird talked him out of it. Good call, Peter.

Brown himself was born in Lodi, Ohio, on May 2, 1962, finished at Norwayne High School in Creston, Ohio, in 1980, and was hired onto the Mirage staff by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in 1985. He designed a whole gang of the Turtles figures, Wingnut, Mondo Gecko, Ray Fillet and Scumbug among them, drew licensing art for a pile of Turtles products, and in 1992 created Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa for ABC.

The animated series gave Leatherhead his TV debut on November 3, 1989, in "Leatherhead: Terror of the Swamp," a Michael Reaves script where he terrorizes the Punk Frogs down in the Florida Everglades and throws in with the Shredder. Ten days later he was back in "Leatherhead Meets the Rat King," written by David Wise. The cartoon handed him a brand new origin, too: a wild swamp gator, a giant albino before the change, mutated when mutagen got into his swamp after Krang and the Shredder botched a mission. He came out green, Cajun and working for the Shredder, with "by gumbo" and "I guarantee" never far from his lips.

🎙️ The Voice, by Way of New Orleans

Jim Cummings voiced Leatherhead in most of his cartoon episodes, with Peter Renaday taking the part in "Night of the Rogues." Cummings was born in Youngstown, Ohio, on November 3, 1952, so that first Leatherhead episode aired on his 37th birthday. After high school he moved to New Orleans, where he designed and painted Mardi Gras floats, worked as a riverboat deck hand and drummed in a band, which is about as good a résumé as a man could bring to a Cajun gator. 1989 was a big year for him all around: it's also the year he became the voice of Tigger, a year after he started voicing Winnie the Pooh. Taz and Darkwing Duck were right around the corner.

🌆 The Sewer Gator Legend

Leatherhead's comic-book origin is one of New York's favorite urban legends come to life. The story goes that tourists brought baby alligators home from Florida souvenir shops, raised them at home, and flushed them when they got too big, until the sewers under the city were crawling with them. Robert Daley's 1959 book The World Beneath the City tells of a sewer worker coming face to face with a large albino alligator, and it's hard not to think of him when the cartoon makes Leatherhead a giant albino before his mutation.

And at least one was real. On February 9, 1935, a bunch of teenagers shoveling snow on East 123rd Street in East Harlem, led by 16-year-old Salvatore Condulucci, lassoed an eight-foot, 125-pound alligator out of a manhole. The New York Times ran it the next day under the headline "Alligator Found in Uptown Sewer," and the police figured it had fallen off a steamer coming up from the Everglades. February 9 is marked as Alligators in the Sewers Day to this day.

🏭 Button-Up of Troy, Michigan

This button was made by the Button-Up Company of Troy, Michigan, a Michigan corporation that filed its articles of incorporation on April 24, 1980. Button-Up pressed licensed buttons for some of the biggest names going, from the California Raisins, Culture Club, Billy Idol, Howard Jones, New Kids on the Block and the Toronto Blue Jays to The Simpsons. A sister firm, Button-Up Graphics, Ltd., went by the name Premier Graphics until 1986. The office sat on Austin in Troy until a change of office in December 1991, and later buttons give a Northwood address in the same town.

Button-Up's Turtles buttons are 1 1/2 inches with a locking pin, and their rim lines run a trademark and copyright mark, then MIRAGE STUDIOS, then BUTTON-UP and the Troy address, with the Mirage credit ahead of the maker's name just as it is here. Button-Up's button for the 1990 movie adds a New Line Cinema credit in the middle of that line. This one credits Mirage alone, which suits a character the film never used: Leatherhead isn't in the 1990 movie at all. So this button comes from the comics, toys and cartoon side of Turtlemania, right around 1990.

The story in collecting circles is that Kevin Eastman himself kept a complete 1989 Button-Up counter standee of Turtles buttons, 39 of them on one display, in his own collection. Button-Up's Turtles line went out to the stores on counter displays like that one.

Troy itself is an Oakland County city, incorporated in 1955, with 72,884 people in 1990, and it was home to Kmart's headquarters until Kmart bought Sears in 2005.

🐢 Where the Turtles Came From

In 1983 Peter Laird invited Kevin Eastman to move in with him in Dover, New Hampshire. That November, Eastman drew a masked turtle standing on its hind legs with nunchucks just to make Laird laugh, and Laird added the words "teenage mutant." The idea poked fun at the big comics of the day: the teenagers of the New Teen Titans, the mutants of the X-Men, the ninjas of Daredevil, with a dash of Howard the Duck. They thought about giving the turtles Japanese names and went with the Italian Renaissance artists instead, Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael and Michelangelo, which Laird said "felt just quirky enough to fit the concept," and Splinter was a wink at Daredevil's teacher, Stick.

In March 1984 the two founded Mirage Studios in their home, paid for the first printing with a tax refund and a loan from Eastman's uncle, and advertised in the Comics Buyer's Guide. That first issue was an oversized, magazine-style comic in black and white on cheap newsprint, and all 3,000 copies sold in a few weeks. Mirage moved to Sharon, Connecticut, from 1984 to 1986 and then to Northampton, Massachusetts, with a staff of artists that grew to include Steve Lavigne, Ryan Brown, Jim Lawson and Michael Dooney.

In 1987 Eastman and Laird licensed the characters to Playmates Toys, and the figures were promoted with an animated series from Fred Wolf Films that began as a five-part miniseries the week of December 28, 1987, ran as a full series from October 1, 1988, and kept going until November 2, 1996. By 1990 it was on more than 125 television stations every day. On March 30, 1990 New Line Cinema opened the live-action movie, its Turtle costumes built by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and the film earned more than $200 million worldwide, a record for an independent film at the time. About $1.1 billion worth of Turtles toys sold between 1988 and 1992, the third best-selling toy figures ever at the time, and a Turtle, or a gator, turned up on just about everything a kid could own. In October 2009 Viacom bought most of the Turtles rights, and Mirage was dissolved in 2021.

📺 Leatherhead After 1990

The old gator never really went away. He was a boss in Konami's Turtles in Time, in the arcades in 1991 and on the Super NES in 1992, and in The Manhattan Project on the NES, The Hyperstone Heist and Battle Nexus in 2004. Archie's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures comic made him a human from the Florida swamps, Jess Harley, turned into a gator, who later ran with the Mighty Mutanimals. In the 2003 cartoon he was an exotic pet flushed into the sewers, the 2012 series made him a founding Mighty Mutanimal, and in 2023's Mutant Mayhem Leatherhead came back as a she, voiced by Rose Byrne.

📌 Pin It On

Put one on a jean jacket, a backpack or a ball cap the way we all did back then, or set it in a shadow box beside your Turtles figures. It's a great gift for the fan who always rooted for the gator.