Vintage Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie Pins 🐢 Raphael Leonardo 1990

Remember the 1990 TMNT Movie Pins? 🐢 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie Pin, Raphael and Leonardo, 1990

Size: 1 1/2"

These are the official pins from the original film in 1990, the very first of the Turtles movies. This one is a real color still from the film of two of the brothers side by side, Leonardo in his blue mask and Raphael in his red, with TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES in the green movie logo and THE MOVIE in red below them. Leonardo the leader and Raphael the hothead, right there shoulder to shoulder. On screen, Leonardo was David Forman inside the suit with Brian Tochi's voice, and Raphael was Josh Pais, who both wore the suit and did the voice. Pais even turns up out of costume, as a cab passenger who has a brief run-in with the masked Raphael.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES ® THE MOVIE
• Around the rim: BUTTON-UP 2011 AUSTIN TROY, MI 48083
• Around the rim: ©1990 NORTHSHORE INVESTMENTS LIMITED/MIRAGE STUDIOS

The backs vary: shiny metal, gray or white, each with a wire safety pin.

🎬 Turtlemania

The Turtles began in 1984 as a black-and-white indie comic by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird of Mirage Studios, and it was the live-action movie that turned them into a worldwide craze. Steve Barron directed it, New Line Cinema released it on March 30, 1990, and the Turtles themselves were Jim Henson's Creature Shop suits, with Kevin Clash, the puppeteer behind Sesame Street's Elmo, performing and voicing Splinter. It cost about $13.5 million and took in $202 million, the highest-grossing independent film up to that time. They shot most of it at the North Carolina Film Studios, with New York days in the summer of 1989, and since nobody would let a film crew into a real sewer, they scouted an abandoned Brooklyn subway line for the lair. Pizza Hut put $20 million behind the tie-in. The rim copyright goes to Northshore Investments, which held the copyright on the first two Turtles films, alongside Mirage Studios.

Fans, a little inside info: when I first listed these they were planning another CGI film for 2023, and sure enough, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem hit theaters that August.

📌 Button-Up of Troy, Michigan

The rim names the maker, Button-Up of Troy, Michigan, a pinback maker whose name also turns up on late-1980s Over the Hill birthday buttons. Button-Up had been selling novelty buttons since at least 1983 - that's the first-use date on its Rerun Review button trademark - and by 1990 it was at 2011 Austin in Troy, up in Oakland County, making the official buttons for the movie.

🏡 Display

It's a perfect gift for a 90s kid, a Turtles collector, or anybody who still says "Cowabunga!" Pin it on a jacket, a backpack or a cork board, or keep it in a shadow box with an old VHS copy of the movie.

The supply is finite - once these last Raphael and Leonardo movie pins are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire. Like everything I sell, they're stored in the dark at a steady 72°F and under 40% humidity.